Last month I put my Alaska Air Skymiles to work and took myself on such a nice little va-K-K. It took me away from my important duties as appreciator of new records, but I came very close to seeing Bauhaus play at a castle in Berlin. In the end my plane wasn’t gonna land in time but how cool would that have been… I did go to the super delighful Nòt Film Festival in Italy and I got to do karaoke to my favorite song of summer longing, “Per un’ora d’amore,” ©1976, Matia Bazar. “For an hour of love I would even sell my heart” goes the refrain, and I’ve spent the last 46 years wondering what that means, but I can definitely relate. I did actually get an hour of love in — I was only in Berlin for three days and a lovely date with a cute Spanish dude materialized quite effortlessly. In L.A. unless you’re providing a dick pic and up for right now (which I don’t and I’m not) you mostly get no love.
But it’s Back to School time now and I’ve got important shit to share.
Soft and feathery and pretty impossible to classify, Apricot Angel by Flung rarely raises its voice; it’s a gently luxurious place to hang out. Oaklandian Kashika Kollaikal is partial to skittering, shuffling percussion and brightly textured beds of synth. She bends her vocals into unusual forms with pitch shifting effects; sometimes I get a sense of a deconstructed, half-forgotten Michael Jackson. On “Swelling” she brings to mind OMD at their most experimental, circa Dazzle Ships, or Oneohtrix Point Never. “Nest” has the triumphant tone of a Celine Dion power ballad taken apart and reassembled by funky cyborgs. There’s an overall sense of joy and freedom, but there are also poignant moments, like in the words of “Hands and a Carpet” — “Get it get it get it get it on your own / Thinking of some wintry heart and famous feeling / Easy and free, Indigo stars in an orange ceiling / Thinking of some long ago show and now you’re reeling / Fluttering through sparkly things when you’re just not healing.”
Wombo are a new band from Kentucky, but their sound is more like late ‘70s West Sussex, with a lovely balance of sweet, sour, salty and bitter, Sydney Chadwick’s angelic tones like clotted cream melting into a scone of spiky funky angsty post punk guitar. How’s that for a tortured metaphor? What I mean is they sound a bit like the Cure. “The water in your hand, I’d drink it but it’s cold / Not all of your words have to go through me like wine / If I listen too long I’d be lost all the time,” opines Chadwick on “Below the House.” Cameron Lowe is quite the guitar god, whether spraying around early 4AD vibes in textured spark showers or stepping up for a gnarly bluesy solo.
To quote Diana Vreeland, I loathe nostalgia, but if I was gonna pick an all time favorite band it would be between Stereolab and My Bloody Valentine. Tim and Laetitia’s early, Krautrock- and Velvet Underground-influenced stuff goes straight to the heart, exploding into faith and joy, and makes me want to go out and love and fight for what’s true and right. Back in ‘97 when they came out with the Dots and Loops album it was kind of like Dylan going electric: you had to respect them for finding a totally new direction — the whole tropicalia-flavored avant-pop experimentation is for sure what kept them relevant for the next 12 years — but it was also kind of heartbreaking. I do love their later stuff, but that love skews toward admiration more than passion.
I’ve seen them on every US tour, starting in 1993 (Kennel Club in San Francisco) most often with my bestie Christien. We went to Primavera Sound in Barcelona in 2019 to see them on their first tour since their hiatus in 2009, and as thrilling as it was, they kind of downplayed what I consider their strongest work. Anyway, we headed down to San Diego this month for the Observatory show and it started off inauspiciously with “Supah Jaianto” off of Not Music — pretty random considering their incredible discography — but then they took off into the farfisa stratosphere with “Low-Fi” and its la-la-las and ba-dum-bums and the French language imagery of a golden-haired child that appears and disappears. “C’est là qu’il a apparu (ba dum, bum) / C’est là qu’il a disparu (ba dum, bum).”
The show followed a bumpy template of yeah not bad stuff alternating with songs that saved my life (“U.H.F.-MFP”, “Mountain,” “Harmonium”). They wrapped up the main set with a devastating one-two of “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” off my favorite album ever Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements, and “Super Electric” — “Some never see the bones at all / Some never see the flesh at all / Some never see the flesh at all / Oh never never flesh at all / To explain / I was meant to exorcise his pain / I was meant to exorcise…”
A few days later I got a chance to see Grace Ives at the Moroccan downtown with my friend Scenery who has the best taste in just everything and her friend Aaron, a charming mushroom luminary. It was just Grace and her backing tracks up there, but I don’t know when I’ve seen someone so completely confident in front of an audience. She owned the small stage, made theater out of drinking water and playing with a malfunctioning mic, and bantered with us about her love for Lime scooters, calling us “L.A.” like we were collectively her new best friend. She’s moved on from her nerdy girl-next-door look: she seems like she’s being groomed for pop stardom with her red fishnet tights and bold couture mini-dress; her hair was a curly golden cascade and her plus-size body had sexy pilates curves. She broke the high-energy song and dance and gesticulating just once, for an unreasonably gorgeous, ethereal, processed-vocal take on her best song, “On the Ground.” Aaron compared it to Laurie Anderson.
What else what else? I’m digging the baroque hip-hop stylings of Zambian, Botswanan, temporarily Australian Sampa the Great. On Bona, my favorite track on new one As Above, So Below, she gets into a strutting flow — “Please don’t fuck up the karma / My black, my shit, my gucci, my armour / My people my honour / Don’t vex I flex with the best” — but pitches the chorus in moody minor chords, creating a vibe of confident melancholy.
Her signature song “Energy,” from 2018, is a down-tempo, lyrically spectacular celebration of femaleness: “Give a couple crowns to the women who had bore us / Taught us, focus, love and support us / Magical, umbilical my universe is radical / Introduce the nation to embracing what is factual / Feminine energy almost mathematical.”
UTO make what I like to think of as French pop, although it’s way too untamed and imaginative to bother the top 40. Pitchfork lazily compares them to “Portishead’s flinty trip-hop.” Does the fork, like, apply a random adjective generator to their stories? I mean Portishead are the actual canon of trip hop, not a particular take on the genre that needs to be qualified, plus what about them is any more or less “flinty” than any other band in the history of bands? How about “the Bible’s flinty take on Christianity?”
ANY-way, UTO’s charming debut Touch the Lock is perhaps trip and not at all hop — Neysa Mae and Emile explore dark emotions with a light touch, ranging from light and fizzy to mournful and dreamy. On the intoxicating “Souvent Parfois” they get into the madness of being apart from your boo, with imagery of a dark forest delivered in a kind of nursery rhyme cadence. “La nuit fait mal et je la bois (The night hurts and I drink it) / J’entends des voix, soit toi, soit moi (I hear voices, maybe you or maybe me) / Dans la baignoire je parle tout bas (In the bathtub I speak quietly) / A toi de voir ces forêts noires (Up to you to see these black forests) / Toi sûr de toi, moi la bête noire (You so sure of yourself, me the black beast) / Qui chante tout bas du fond des bois (Who sings low from the bottom of the woods) / Au fond c’est moi toutes ces fois (Deep down it’s me all these times) / Les sombres lois de notre histoire qui nous séparent a chaque fois (The dark laws of our history that separate us every time).”
Fuck, I’m running out of time but I seriously need to tell you about Ellen Arkbro and Johan Graden and their triumphantly slow, slowcore album I get along without your very well. These guys make Low sound like Dan Deacon. Wisps of melody whisper in from time to time, wafting across a soupy bath of alpha state woodwinds and piano. Discomforting lullabies. It’s as if My Bloody Valentine pushed their sleep-deprivation experiments to the brink of catatonia.
OK and a few quickies, just because you’re worth it. Viennese Sofie Royer has been multiplying my chills with her little pop masterpieces — check out the St. Etienne-acious “Baker Miller Pink” off her new album, and the yummy moody “Cheerleader – Club Mix” with Speckman.
And I’ve been super obsessed with this A-ha-reminiscent, soaring electro falsetto swirl from Canada’s own Kizis (actually from last year):
And how can I forget Au Suisse, neo-disco veteran Morgan Geist’s new project; the internet thinks they sound ’80s, but they take me back to the heady 2004-2009 prime of Junior Boys… Music for riding the subway, feeling wistful but looking cool.