What seemed like a harmless little crush on “Selling Sunset” eventually turned into a full on obsession. I didn’t take it the least bit seriously at first, but as the story unfolds over multiple seasons it takes on a sort of Shakespearian dimension, with at its core a good vs. evil battle for the crown of alpha female at the Oppenheimer Group, between sunny, down-to-earth Creshell and evil/so-much-fun mean girl Christine, with shifting alliances, boy problems, secrets and lies, shady Davina, vendettas consummated in the media — all of it played out against the dazzling, blinged-out yet oddly sterile real estate of the Hollywood Hills.
GT Ultra by Guerilla Toss was one of my favorite amped-up, surreal and trippy guitarish electro thrash indie pop rock albums of 2017 and of all time. I bought the vinyl, with its fabulous sheet of acid tabs cover art. They’re back with a new one called Famously Alive that’s all extreme, radiant acidy positivity. Hidden away on track 8, with relatively low Spotify plays, is “I Got Spirit,” my 2022 anthem to the joy of being alive. 2022 by way of 1977 Orange County high school pep rally actually, if I can forget for a moment how much contempt my teenage self had for pep rallies. “Crashing and never lastin’ / Pushing forever, shovin’, rusting, and never lovin’ / Take her, but never give her, killer, can you deliver? / Swinger, are you a hitter? / I don’t care if I don’t have it / I don’t need it, I got spirit.”
The Toss also put out a new single that apparently is inspired by Neu! (although to be honest it just sounds like Guerilla Toss, which is not a bad thing). It’s also quite rousing and anthemic; a good one to put on if you find yourself determined to do great things.
I don’t know too much about Swedish House Mafia — they seem like the type of DJs that fly by private jet to Ibiza and Berlin and Tokyo and Goa, in between re-mixing Beyoncé, to come on at 3 am and keep our mollied-up children gyrating under lights, hands in the air. “Heaven Takes You Home,” with Connie Constance on vocals, is a perfect distillation of clubby joy; it feels like an open and shut justification for being young and taking drugs and it also kind of makes drugs unnecessary: “When heaven takes you home / And you’re untouchable / Tell ‘em how you backflip through tragic / Show ‘em how the struggle made magic made magic made magic made magic…” And my favorite line — “I don’t wanna see the end of the world without you.”
In the 80s and early 90s the one place no cool music seemed to come from was France (well, aside from Jean-Michel Jarre to be fair). The only French-language new wave hit was “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” and even that one was from Belgium. But then Daft Punk happened, soon followed by Air and Cassius. I was a devout practitioner of that scene, and I have zero memory of it being called “French Touch,” but when Philippe Zdar died last year everyone and their aunt Bernadette was throwing the term around so I don’t know, I’m probably wrong, and I hate being wrong. In any case, one of the touchstones of 90s French house music was the stratosphere-tickling single “Music Sounds Better with You” by Stardust, which my research shows was actually Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and DJ Alan Braxe, with Benjamin Diamond on vocals. Which brings me at last to my point — that Alan Braxe has a splendid new EP out with his cousin DJ Falcon (they cleverly call themselves Braxe & Falcon). The title track “Step by Step,” which features Panda Bear, is like a great lost packed-stadium boy band panty-drencher; “Creative Source” is all Cassius-esque trancey-sampley positive vibes, with a perfectly curated snippet of spoken word, possibly a black woman preacher from the 60s: “The people come together. Makes you feel good. Ain’t no fighting, no destroying, just the music — that moves your heart.” There’s something so simple and profound about “Love Me,” three minutes of those two words repeated like an affirmation — punctuated with an occasional “oh!” — against a rising keyboard riff that expresses shivers of hope.
Naima Bock’s debut Giant Palm floats into your consciousness on a cloud of folky melancholy, then folds itself into strange and colorful origamis, expressing the aftermath of some devastating trauma, and the humbled resilience of what’s been left behind. “Every Morning” opens with a call and response between a chorus of male voices and Naima: “Hello, darling / Yes, I’m mourning / Are you crying? / Every morning / Is it for them? / So it is / But you left them / So be it.” On the title track she sings “Under trees we’ll walk, through boring fields of Kent / As unexpressed emotions erupt shadows on my face / Falling to the dirt, there’s no point in denying / That minds will block the light that shines through leaves into our eyes.”
But my biggest July romance is with Welsh singer-songwriter Gwenno — another one who’s been flitting around the edges of my field of vision for years, but I guess I got her mixed up with positive plus size pop superstar Lizzo (who, just to fuck with me, also released a new album this month). Gwenno‘s sound is adventurous and arty indie with notes of krautrock, and on her new album Tresor she sings in the mysterious Cornish language, which pretty much went extinct in the 18th century and then got revived, which, as a big linguistics nerd, I find pretty fascinating. On opening track “An Stevel Nowydh” she invites you in for a cuppa, then launches right into the Existential: “A yw’r gwacter ystyr yn rhan anochel o fod yn fyw?” Which in case you didn’t know translates to “Is the total lack of meaning an inevitable part of being?” “Ardamm” is a kind of spoken word invocation — it sounds sexy but is it addressing a hesitant lover or a prophet? “Pes eur vynta gortos? (How many hours will you wait?) / Pes byldhen? (How many years?) / A vyth kansvlydhen arall? (Will there be another century?) / Peur vynta dos? (When will you come?) / Peur vynta ow hlywes? (When will you hear me?) / Pes eur bys vynta ow honvedhes? (How many hours until you understand me?)”
So… I heard about Squid Game a while back and it sounded like more maximum-sensationalism pablum for the desensitized masses, but I took a look at the trailer and got seduced by the fabulous production design enough to check it out. It turned out to be great — rich, layered characters, thoughful writing, ridiculously stylish. The violence isn’t gory or sadistic; it’s there to make a point. It’s definitely in the same fantastical orbit as Bong Joon Ho and Chanwook Park, and it also reminds me of Kubrick. Ultimately it’s about the madness and real human cost of living in a one percenters’ world, but even that is handled with layers and nuance — the deep state running the games has its own bizarre sense of morality and surprising vulnerabilities.
I’ve been going on and on about Aldous Harding, but meanwhile another shiny New Zealand apple has bobbed to the surface of my barrel: Ben Woods is a slow-burn crooner in the tradition of Tindersticks and Arab Strap, a bruised butterfly boy draping himself languidly over the microphone against the indifferent, twinkling lights of the city. On his new one Dispeller he has a penchant for swathing himself in layers of distortion and chattering atonality. “Wearing Divine,” a duet with Lucy Hunter, is a exchange of darkly humorous, overly authentic wedding vows. “Sugar cup,” sings Ben, “I need you wholly, please just stitch me up / I cannot feel my breathing or my luck / Please just hold me up in time.” Lucy responds, “Little thing / I wouldn’t think to wear only one ring / But you know there’s got to be a price for things / How will I know you’re all mine?”
Anybody remember Autre Ne Veut from the early teens?
His first, self-titled album was pure bliss, but by the time he came to LA (on a Troubadour dream ticket with Majical Cloudz) he had put out a so-so second album, and he didn’t play a single song from the first one! And Majical Cloudz did the same!! That kind of thing has truly been the bane of my existence. I went to see Galaxie 500 at Bogart’s in Long Beach in 1990, swooning over pale-blue-eyed Dean Wareham who truly looked and sounded like an angel of lovesex, and three songs in Kramer came out and proceeded to wank stupid guitar solos all over their delicate and pristine oeuvre for the rest of the show. Then a year later I saw them in San Francisco and they only played their boring third album, withholding from me the sweet rapture of Today and On Fire. Just heartbreaking. Anyway anyway, there’s a new soft boy in town, likely making magic all alone on a laptop in a one-room apartment. His name is Dylan Moon (in case you dig poety names), and on his Option Explore album he harkens back to the heady days of early Autre Ne Veut with his propulsive beats and mildly psychedelic 80s-inflected keyboards, his vocals tendrils of hope poking through expanses of tender melancholia. Do I detect notes of chillwave? I feel like young Dylan’s just a few bpms away from serving Washed Out / Neon Indian realness. Such a mitzvah that his record is coming out at the peak of summer. His lyrics evoke the heyday of twee, with a soupçon of Syd Barret-esque toddler on peyote dream logic, as on “10 Apples”: “Find me on your time, dear / I stretch the empty days / Dribbling down halls as last sunlight hits armchairs […] I’m dreaming often, dear / Ten apples on the wall / Count and you appear, swan / My nice new rattle.”
LA band Goon have a new album of stately, brocaded guitar rock called Green Evening and I’m trying to think who exactly they remind me of? Maybe Moody Blues meets Smashing Pumpkins? They’re fully classic in form, but man do these motherfuckers have tunes, and their lyrics probe and thrust into my every dank emotional hole, overflowing with nourishing goodness. “Emily Says” builds to a soaring climax: “and though I know in my heart it’s right / feeling like hurting myself tonight / nobody’s candle is burning bright / the wind inside the blades of grass will unbind it / alone, arrow, along and retry / well I’ve been to the mountain high / and melting up into open sky / you are the voice and the reason why.”