You know I always strive to bring you the very latest in musical refinement and excellence, but in one of my walkabouts I came across “Chancellor,” a lovely bit of shrugging rumination recorded way back in 2001 by Gord Downie, the late lead singer of The Tragically Hip. It’s a. a great tune, and b. framed as a fragmented, right-brain letter to a vampire with whom Gord… well it’s complicated. It’s got a Belle and Sebastian tone of droll resignation: “In the softer hours he’s there / Sitting talking in the voice of your mother / About leaving one good party for another / And the night of a thousand missteps / And the loss that made him dogged / Or it could have been the doggedness / That caused the loss in the first place I guess…”
If you know me at all you know that Momentary Presence by Gift was one of my most adored albums of ’22. There was a cute little tune on it, second from last, called “Pinkhouse Secret Rave,” that didn’t make a huge impression at the time, but now Psymon Spine, an electronic pop outfit from Brooklyn, have remixed it into some kind of ecstatic funky fireworks that I guarantee will take control of your booty and teach.
Once all that has been accomplished you might want to check out
la Psymon’s joyous 2021 album Charismatic Megafauna and play “Jumprope” out by the pool for your naked friends.
Ooh yeah I am seriously excited about this new band La Sécurité out of Montreal. Apparently they’re a “supergroup,” but you know, it ain’t the Travelling Wilburys, they’ve just played in other Montreal bands. Anyway, on Stay Safe they bring the zombies of ’80s new wave back to life and take them to a party where everyone’s kind of insecure but playing it cool, doing jerky dance moves. The Waitresses and Missing Persons come to mind. They sing in French sometimes, which pairs well with the clipped guitar parts and retro-angsty vibe. “N’attends pas que les choses se déclenchent / Pour retrouver le bon sens / Fais attention à ton cœur / C’est un petit moteur…” they postulate. It translates as “Don’t wait for things to explode / To go back to common sense / Pay attention to your heart / It’s a little motor…”
Somehow Blonde Redhead didn’t blip on my radar when they emerged in the mid-’90s. Maybe I got them mixed up with 4 Non Blondes? And to think twin brothers Simone and Amedeo are paisans. Anyway, my research reveals that they spent 20 years making rather excellent, spiky/grungy, melodic/amelodic rock music before Barragán lit up my world in 2014. I was involved with slash obsessed with a guy who was a big fan, and the song “Dripping” was an uncanny distillation of how I felt as he pulled his radiant self away from me: “Collect this song in the glowing light of May / For I found the one no one knows, no one knows / In your eyes and in your mind I see change, it’s a shame / Close your eyes, stalling the walk / You’re alive, it’s the same / I saw you dripping sunlight / I saw you dripping moonlight…” Love how Amedeo pronounces it “dreeping.”
They haven’t had an album out since then, but they’ve re-released some early stuff and now suddenly a new song has appeared called “Snowman,” quite sweet and lovelorn — it kind of hits the spot and digs into a part of my consciousness I don’t always acknowledge: “Don’t you go, don’t you go and get out of line / Don’t you wish to be seen? / Don’t you wish of what you could find? / Have you seen, have you heard of a love that has no crime?” The ‘head as I call them have a whole new album coming out in the fall, called Sit Down to Dinner, inspired by Joan Didion’s account of watching her husband die at the dinner table.
So every Monday through Friday I make make the same breakfast, which is a little bit elaborate: a one-egg omelette with sautéed onion, serrano pepper and arugula; Guatemalan-style puréed black beans spiced with epazote; toasted Roan Mills bread with olive oil; black tea with a splash of milk; grapefruit juice. How posh! And I have a little ritual I do beforehand — I scour a handful of sites that review new records and make myself a Spotify playlist of new stuff to sample. Then as I’m cooking and eating I skip, like, or listen without comment to each song, and by the end of the week I have a batch of exciting new music in my “Liked Songs” queue.
So I remember playing “La Japonaise” by Izumi Suzuki last week and kinda thinking what the hell is this — I mean it’s basically opera, not a genre that typically finds its way into my moist and willing cochleae — but then yeah, I got seduced by its chorus and started feeling like wow, this is actually pretty gay and I think it looks and feels good on me. I surprised myself. So now I’m finding out — mind blown — it’s a cover of a Freddy Mercury composition that he performed with Spanish soprano Monserrat Caballé as part of an album commissioned for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. How random! But also the thing is I’m super baffled about how it came to my attention; this version came out in 2019 and there are no recent reviews of Izumi Suzuki anywhere and in fact she’s not, like, very well known or anything, plus there’s a famous writer who has the same name which makes googling problematic.
But I know you don’t come here to read about my problems; I don’t mean to trigger you or make you feel unsafe — I like to think of slowgraffitti as a space of healing, a sort of digital moshpit of guided self-acceptance and recovery. And in that spirit I took on a little paid gig to drive a friend of a friend’s beloved 1995 Geo Prizm up to Turlock, a five-hour drive that took a little longer as most things do. The car ran like a champ but the challenge was I could only play CDs, no iPhone-friendly technology available. So it was actually a fun thing that I wouldn’t choose to do, and I made sure to bring some stuff that isn’t on Spotify. We started off with Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, which I now realize I might have bought by mistake; it’s her first album, from 2004, and it’s got a nice disturbing contrast between her sweetly screechy little mouse girl vocals and her ethereal harp (exacerbated by the Geo’s maximum treble sound system), but her last one, Divers, is the one that really gives me those important quivers in my loins. Joanna is a hardcore Spotify boycotter by the way. In any case I sat through it like a good little freak folk music scholar — I mean it is a good album — without skipping forward much. But here’s my favorite one from Divers:
I soon moved on to Miranda July’s The Binet-Simon Test, always a joy to be disturbed by. It’s a collection from 1998 of theater of pain / performance art pieces in which, roughly speaking, highly polished media personalities inflict surreal physical and emotional pain onto confused innocents. Miranda got me quite a ways into the greater Bakersfield area.
Interstate 5, as it cuts through the orchards and vineyards of the Central Valley, is infested with rapacious white Dodge Rams which will fully tail-gate you, even if you’re doing well over the 70 mph speed limit, until you pull over and let them pass, so I had to be mindful of all that as I grooved to Tim Presley’s mighty lysergic new-wave breakup album The Wink (released in 2016, right as I was enjoying a painful breakup of my own). I might have sung along to its centerpiece, the weirdo tearjerker “Morris” — “make the most of it / when you tell me that I’m ugly / don’t ever put me on the moon again / don’t ever see the moon again…”
As we closed in on Fresno I threw on the heart-swelling cinematic magnificence of Compassion by Forest Swords, from 2017 (apparently an era of buying CDs for me) and I had to play “Arms Out” twice because it expanded my being, and the Geo Prizm’s, beyond the size of the known universe.
But the highest peak of pleasure was delivered by the Coterie CD by Levitation — the early-90s British band headed by “Bonkers” Terry Bickers that sort of bridged the big-rock-emotions gap between the Chameleons and Radiohead. I found my normally supercilious self scream-singing along to “Smile”: “…the experience is here / Sigh / If you find time / I pick up all the pieces that I love / lying around / I cast them to the wind yeah / There is no sound…”
Levitation are not on Spotify, nor are Scott 4, who kept the party going all the way to Turlock with the pretty and poetic sing ‘em around the apocalyptic campfire songs on their Works Project LP from ‘99, so darkly life-changing and so wrongly obscure. “I’ve been dreaming catastrophes / burning skies boiling seas / fire raining down on trees / sparks killing from TVs / momma dad mum to be / and the kids drowned at sea / citizens ill at ease / because of the smoking breeze…”
OK so my editors are gonna be furious at me for taking such long detours into musty corners of the ‘90s and the teens. There are so many new releases to be filleted, lightly grilled and served with a Bernaise of tarragon-scented prose… Coi Leray is getting slaughtered by the hip hop cognoscenti for lifting great big chunks of old songs for her backing tracks, but she keeps things simple and summery, with Fortune 500 confidence in the front and a big bad girl party in the back, and all around really. It’s called FUN people, and in fact she’s racking up kajillions of plays. “Took him for a test drive, left him on the lot / Time is money so I spent it on a watch … Came a long way from rag to riches / Five-star bitch, yeah, I taste so delicious / Let him lick the plate, yeah, I make him do the dishes / Now he on news talk ‘cause a bitch went missin’…”
Brian Eno has been just everywhere lately, and on Secret Life, a new collaboration with Fred again.., normally a rather throbby, dancey kind of guy, our Brian lets his ambient roots show as Fred with dots conjures up melted slabs of oogey emotion through processed samples and next level production work. If you want to enjoy the ‘fork at their worst, please hate-read their sniffy, know-it-all review which spends hundreds of words belaboring how much they are very opposed to Fred’s sampling which has apparently, shockingly, been DONE! BE! FORE! Or just wander through the deliciously barren landscapes of “I Saw You.”
These days I try to be philosophical and take the long view of human ignorance, greed, corruption, violence etc. They know not what they do and all that. But nothing pisses me off more than artists getting silenced. Young Thug is arguably one of the most important artists of our times, and he has been locked up on RICO charges essentially for writing lyrics from the point of view of gangsters and drug dealers. It’s so fucking outrageous and a real tragedy for art. In a sense it’s the contemporary equivalent to Oscar Wilde getting thrown into Reading Gaol. Anyway, Thug has somehow managed to put out a new album, Business Is Business, which was maybe for the most part written before he got arrested as it doesn’t seem to reference prison or court charges that much. Just hearing the unique power and vulnerability of his voice, with its crème brûlée crackled surface, does me good.
Phoenix were probably the least of the many pleasures of the so-called French Touch era; they never kidnapped all my girliest emotions like Air, nor did they enslave me to the boogie like Cassius and Daft Punk; they were cool and drinkable, a nice glass of white wine. But this new Braxe & Falcon remix of “Winter Solstice” (from last year’s Alpha Zulu), while very much in their style, kicks things up a notch. Its striking lyrics are interpreted with nicely timed shifts into falsetto. “A restricted area / Shaped like a Petunia / Thank God you know your ways … But I will stay / If you’re detained / With you / I’ll wash my hands / Until it rains / Through you.”
Remember Dirty Projectors? “Stillness Is the Move” was the song of the year back in ‘09, particularly if you lived in a Manhattan apartment where everything is white, or if you were me. A big part of the attraction was the whoops and swinging harmonies of the female singers, one of whom was Angel Deradoorian, who has since moved on and traveled in the highest echelons of indie, even dating one of those Animal Collective dudes. Now she has teamed up with Russian designer/electronic musician/all around cool human Kate NV, and they call themselves Decisive Pink, referencing the Wassily Kandinsky painting of course. That storied canvas is mostly yellow incidentally, but that’s neither here nor there; Kate and Angel’s Ticket to Fame album is full of unusual angles and blips and bloops and washes of surprising texture; it’s arty synth-pop I suppose, and it has one of the highest banger-to-filler ratios of anything I’ve heard in 2023. Let’s listen to “Haffmilch Holiday” together, shall we?
Another marvelous moment of time spent with Paul Sbrizzi’s mind and magical melodies…
Aww thanks so much Kelly!!