Apparently I missed out on the many pleasures of Goat back in the teens, but they’re from the far north of Sweden, they have a tasty origin story involving Swedish Voodoo practices that nobody seems to believe, and they’re committed to absorbing influences from across the world (notably North African desert blues) and time (70s funk and prog). Their new one Oh Death is a thing of beauty that goes down quite easy, shifting from folky and pastoral to hard rocking a la Led Zeppelin, with lovely, shouty female vocals that remind me of Kate and Cindy from the B52s.
More Eaze is a ridiculously prolific artist working in the autotune plus strange and swirling prettiness space in which Organ Tapes won over my fickle heart. She’s got a new song called “Your Call” that contrasts swelling banks of love and sadness with quick scribbles of Eastern European animation soundtrack toy piano. I wish I could share some lyrics — I just can’t find or parse them, but the song is silly joy waking up in a bed of comfy melancholy.
KXLU is easy to take for granted, always there churning out completely unreliable selections that range from terrible to amazing to boring to what the fuck to cool as fuck to droning on for ages and then suddenly playing some blindingly great song from like 1991 that I had completely forgotten. Typical air-break banter from their DJs goes something like “oh, uh, so that was uh a song by um, ooooh, I forgot to write it down, wait, oh right it was the Persephone Lint with a song called Angela Merkel Dish Rack, and uh yeah, I’ve been pretty um I mean not exactly obsessed but I think they’re just uh, pretty sick? Anyway, I’ll probably post my whole playlist like.. I mean last week my roommate came home with like seven hamsters and we still need to get a cage for them so I totally forgot to post it so uh sorry about that…”
Aaanyway, the king of KXLU back in the teens was Bennett — he put on a super fun show every Thursday morning with cool and quirky interviews and asides but above all incredible playlists that spanned all genres but specialized in late 70s and 80s arty rock, electro-pop and disco. A few years ago Bennett was suddenly banished to a shared, late night slot in what seemed like some kind of internal political plot at the station, and soon after he kind of peaced out, doing the occasional set on NTS radio. But suddenly a few weeks ago he was back on Thursday mornings, such a mitzvah! He actually interviewed Elvira for his Halloween show.
He’s already turning me on to some amazing stuff. “Electric Chair” by Chrome, from 2014, is super fun rusty scrapey new wave horror that references Devo and the Suburban Lawns, with lyrics that surely have Lux Interior smiling down from heaven: “I have electric chair / I want to electrify you / I have electric chair / I want to crucify you / I have electric clamps / I have a basement wall / I have a million amps / I’m on protocall.”
And ooh he played the French band Martin Dupont (delightfully obscure — I don’t remember them at all and they don’t even have a Wikipedia page) — a truly delicious slice of propulsive, gothy eightiesness called “I Met the Beast”: “I met the beast from the end of the century / With it’s Fu Manchu mustache / Barbie dolls whispering in the lagoon / Physically sick every time they kiss / Sleep is a luxury they don’t need…”
And yet romance is not dead, in fact Nick Hakim, already established as the smoochiest lovenubbin in Brooklyn, just put out a pheromone-soaked new one called COMETA, which means kite, on which he is gloriously, stupidly in love. The fork completely missed the point, as it is wont to do, panning it because it doesn’t have intelligent enough lyrics. Do they, like, hate love? Do you sound smart when you’re cooing boo-boos to your new boo? I don’t. Actually I’m not even gonna transcribe the words because they’re beside the point — our Nick captures the floaty, druggy high of new romance with growls and yelps and silky, smoky layers of oceanic whipped cream custard post-RnB.
Kenny Beats hangs out in a similarly soft and melty space on his LOUIE album, but he throws in some ribs for her pleasure — he brings in Slowthai to rap on “Family Tree” for some lovely nihilism: “I said, fuck your mom, fuck your sister / Fuck your fuckin’ sperm donor of a father / I’ll shoot your daddy up in the club, backstab / I want a Brazilian brum ting / And I got insufficient funds, I’m secretly livin’ on rent / I give my partner all the coin, she said, You’re better off dead.”
But if you’re in the mood for some art-damaged, ecstasy through pain, caterwauling dayglo blood punk, which I know I usually am, you gotta check out London’s Shake Chain. Singer Kate Mahony careens across delicious frenzies, shrieking and gurgling — she’s an icon in the making, her goddess scream up there with Kat Bjelland and Yoko Ono. Their debut album Snake Chain came out on my birthday and there’s not an ounce of fat on it; it’s non-stop inventive and drags you through a messy, orgiastic dungeon of fun much like the Cramps did.
So anyway yeah, I had myself a little Scorpio birthday and made a little 5-hour playlist of new stuff and favorites through the years, going all the way back to “Cinnamon Cinder” by the Pastel Six, from when I was learning to walk.