OK it’s a bright and shiny new year and I should really let it go but can we just talk about how, like, it could be any random day between Halloween and New Year’s and you’re feeling crappy and you just wanna pick up a few cold remedies at CVS, but you inevitably get assaulted with a jazzed-up version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” with showboating, Mariah-style vocals in which a syllable gets stretched into an multi-octave mini-suite of medieval torture? Christmas songs do help the economy by guilting us into buying lots of stuff but otherwise are a very bad thing and there really needs to be a movement with its own hashtag to address this social ill. That said… I somehow came across a couple that I kinda love. There’s this sweet thing from Rosie Thomas and my boyfriend Sufjan Stevens…
And OK — I’m probably the last homosexual in the Western hemisphere to discover this one, but it’s just so absurd and it makes me stupid happy.
In any case, this is supposed to be a blog about very serious musical matters so let’s get back to the source of all that is indie rock. I guess I imagined the Velvet Underground just emerged fully formed from the scariest, artiest, crumbling heroin den in New York City, but a compilation of early Lou Reed recordings just came out, going all the way back to the late ‘50s, and it turns out he actually started as a folkie. It’s a little mind-bending to hear his iconic speak-singing over intricate, John Fahey-esque finger-picking. The record actually starts off with a doo-wop song, the title track, a nicely scratchy demo. There’s also a hesitant and intimate fragment of “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” and a tender, dripping with disappointed sweetness take on Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
And since we’re talking about olden times, I went on a few deep dives whilst the flow of new releases waned at the end of the year. My favorite favorite 60s girl band is the Shangri-Las, who had their moment and then evaporated as bands do. How hot is this pic?
But it turns out lead singer Mary Weiss re-emerged in 2007 with a solo album. Hearing her unique cadence again made me realize how seminal an artist she has been — it’s no secret that the Ramones and Blondie were inspired by girl groups, but it struck me how much she in particular gave those bands the basis of their sound.
It’s taken me a minute to warm up to the new Röyksopp, Profound Mysteries III. They had announced their retirement in 2014, but then ended up releasing three albums just this year. They claimed they weren’t returning to the traditional album format because they released some (very cool) artifacts artwork by an artist named Jonathan Zawada in tandem with their new music, but, you know, bottom line they recorded songs that are certainly songs and released them in batches of 12 or so… anyway I adore the boys so why do I need to call them out? “Just Wanted to Know,” featuring Astrid S, bubbles along in an elegant mid-tempo, nicely underplaying feelings of loss and abandonment. “The Night” is even more cryptic, with Allison Goldfrapp streaking tears across a cinematic sky: “Moon / Ride / Slide / Silver when they fall.”
The show-stopper is “Speed King,” a monster 80s sci-fi action movie soundtrack that takes five minutes just to warm up, then unleashes a Wagnerian chorus over a hot, throbbing beat and soars into a noirish heaven/hell: “Are you really gonna die? / You’re caught up in the sex games / I’ll be running with the speed king / I saw the twinkle in your eyes / Are we really going down? / You’re running with the speed king / It’s impossible to break you / You caught a glimpse of his star.”
Do you guys remember vapourwave? Hard to believe it’s been a decade since its heyday. It was all about reclaiming the post-human detritus of global consumer culture, drawing on mall music, industrial video soundtracks and the like, and assembling it into disturbingly cheerful, brightly colored, highly artificial compositions. It was hugely popular with the brainy young things over at Tiny Mix Tapes. Death’s Dynamic Shroud have their roots in that silicon soil, but beneath the sounds of whirring hard drives and shiny washes of digital faux-emotion there are pleading, chopped and autotuned vocals. The result is highly theatrical, like giant robots trying to be A-ha. “You were waiting on hеr still / Light left, light left me / You wеre right where the story ends / Oh, where the story ends,” they repeat on “Light Left the Garden,” before elucidating in the bridge that “When I talked to you / If you asked me to / I would’ve killed the president / If you didn’t trust the government / When I came to you / The words had all run through / So it doesn’t make much sense / To moan about in future tense.”
These days you’ve got waves upon waves of female singer-songwriters vying for your attention, but Sophie Jamieson’s rich contralto and sparse arrangements have a particular magnetic power and gravitas. Her Choosing album is chock full of emotionally complex bonbons, and “Sink” is particularly swoony with its plinking piano that gradually distorts into something a bit sickly as our Soph pleads to her whisky, “I just need you to rock me to sleep / I don’t need you to sink me.”
I’ve been combing through other people’s best-of-2022 lists, seeing if I can round up a few strange pleasures that evaded me, and ooh, I came across a trippy, bejewelled bit of heaven by Palestinian producer Julmud. The album is called Tuqoos, which means “Ritual” in Arabic, and it serves up a luxurious range of melodic and unmelodic textures, from chilled out trip-hop cadences to harsh rapping — and rapping in Arabic is seriously the coolest thing in my world since rapping in French.
And there’s even harsher pleasure to be had from a collaboration between Tunisian rapper Cheb Terro and Berlin-based Japanese DJ Die Soon, a deliciously doom-laden, grinding affair. Terro passed away shortly after recording the album but the vocals he left behind are full of snarling, playful life.
And finally, OK, I don’t mean to be a crazy-maker — I know I told you I don’t do jazz, but here I am getting off on French Canadian Eric Chenaux, who likes to noodle about for ages, wafting free-form dreamy vocals across sleepy landscapes without a trace of verse chorus verse. His Say Laura album feels like spending a long, warm autumn afternoon stoned on an empty beach. His lyrics on “Hello, How? and Hey” float through you like ectoplasm: “You counted backwards so I don’t / All I leave alone is some back way back way back way so late / Heads bow low and show me the love in my cries / Oh, shall I / You sound as candlelight…”