It took me a minute to get into Loma‘s new one, How Will I Live Without a Body? I can usually give a listen to a couple of the tracks that have the most plays on Spotify and know whether I’m gonna dig an album, and I gave it a pass. But the other day I literally ran out of new stuff to preview, and I thought I’d re-create my old gag of playing five CDs on shuffle on my multi-CD player, and shuffled it on a Spotify playlist alongside the new ones from Brijean, Storefront Church, Asher White and Homeshake and they all turned out to have deep benches of velvety deep cuts. If I’m honest I had the new Moby in the mix too, which is, you know, I don’t know. I do love the track serpentwithfeet sings on.
Anyway, Loma contains Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater, one of the most sensational sensations of my personal aughts, and once I dug into the deep cuts HWILWAB turned out to be rich with the hypnotic melodic magic Meiburg is known for, plus collaboratrix Emily Cross‘s southwestern desert honey vocals. And third band member Dan Duszynski. Opener “Please, Come In” sets the tone on an album that’s in a sense a long plea to let go and connect: “All time / Flies like / One foot / In front / Some time / Stays close by / Stays within / Find trust / In flight / Once let / Free said / Please once / My friend / I said / Please come in.”
Brijean serve up a total thongs and daiquiris on a white sand beach vibe. They’re kind of the quintessential summer band, and it’s easy to dismiss them as being on the lite side. I also had the feeling they had peaked on their magnificent 2021 album Feelings. But they’re back to chill my every summer beverage with the extremely excellent Macro album. “Rollercoaster” goes down so easy, like Stereolab on Indica: “Life’s just a rental / Experimental / I know you’re sentimental / Come on, ride the waves, the highs and lows…” coos Brijean Murphy, before layering in a bit of darkness: “And lows and lows and lows and lows…”
Ink and Oil, the new Storefront Church, is the stylistic antithesis of all that — a collection of massive, crushing, monumental treatises, with tunes you can hum in the shower. Lukas Frank, in the tradition of Sufjan Stevens and Jeff Buckley, is living proof that God is unfair — he’s both unreasonably talented and stunningly handsome. He charges out of the gate with the heady sprawl of “The High Room“: “All the walls are grated with tiny office spaces / Dim, fluorescent faces mill about their stalls / Stairs kick out beneath me, into watery air / I’m reaching, but I don’t seem to be going anywhere / Come out of the night, wild and without mind / Like headlights headed south on the northbound side / They speak in visions, they are my guides / And their decision is love, love, love…” Things only build from there, abetted by a full orchestra no less. Scott Walker comes to mind. This is an Important Album, and a delicious 12-course musical delirium.
My parents were pretty groovy in their day. My dad was a big Sinatra fan, and they had a nice little record collection that I started exploring at age 7, after outgrowing my Mary Poppins and Jungle Book soundtracks. I remember swooning along to Dean Martin‘s swoony “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” and parsing “Second Hand Rose” off My Name Is Barbra 2. “…from Se-cond A-ve-nuuuuue… New?” They had Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter, featuring the much beloved sex song “Let’s Do It” with the immortal line “even educated fleas do it.” It loses its nerve at the end, going “Let’s do it / let’s fall in love!” There was a compilation called That’s What I Call Rhythm & Blues which seems to have been scrubbed from the collective memory, but I’m quite sure I remember Otis and I did some “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” Hard to imagine now, but my mom was a Joan Baez fan; I remember her explaining to me the lyrics of gothic infanticide ditty “Down by the Greenwood Side.” Funny how of all the big counterculture stars of the ’60s Joan is rarely mentioned. I took a little Joan plunge the other night and came up with her astonishing soprano on “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which got me digging around for the original, which turns out to be by The McPeake Family of Belfast, and is equally gorgeous (they call it “Will Ye Go Lassis, Go“).
Like a lot of indie circa 2024, Asher White‘s Home Constellation Society feels like it grew in ’70s soft rock soil, but it’s been grafted and espaliered and topiaried into striking new forms. “Downstate Prairie” is delightfully jarring with its thrash metal elements and vaguely Broadway structure; it gives me pissed off gay midwestern teenager vibes (though I don’t know if Asher has ever been one): “O your shirt so worn / the moths make shapes in stitches / like those rows of corn that flank the ditches / so run where the taps run warm
in cold view / hungry for a storm to tell you off / no more borrowing the collar and the trouser and the boot!”
And on “Capital Cowboy” Asher delivers everything I miss about Belle and Sebastian (more on them later) in their melancholy, arched-brow prime: “old enough to know that crap / i don’t look good in the photographs / but at home / i’m marilyn monroe / time won’t take another path / just like it said in my zodiac / so then i’m thrown / there’s someone on the phone / and he rides in cheap blue leather and he knows hey hey hey / that our lives will keep getting better and slow hey hey hey…”
Avid readers will recall that last month I rhapsodized about the glories of late lamented 80s gay bar The One Way, and it inspired me to work on a mixtape of current music that channels that dark menergy. Perhaps the artist that best captures the vibe is Solpara, a Lebanese-American Brooklynite, whose debut album Melancholy Sabotage is out on Other People, Nicolas Jaar‘s label (come to think of it, Jaar is another one of those ridiculously beautiful, ridiculously talented monsters). “Measures” is gothy industrial dance with church bells on it (bells are the most reliable way to get slowgraffitti’s attention) and puts me in mind of Fini Tribe and their glorious 1988 masterpiece “Detestimony.”
John Belushi smashing Stephen Bishop‘s guitar in Animal House was a watershed moment for people like me, a beautiful rejection of the soft and the gentle. The lyrics to Bishop‘s song were “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone / I gave my love a chicken that had no bones” hahaha.
Punk and new wave were the music of m-m-m-my generation, at least for my particular demographic, and for a decade or two “soft” was just not on the menu except maybe ironically. When Belle and Sebastian came out with If You’re Being Sinister there was a fair amount of hype in the British music press, and I picked up the CD at my beloved Mod Lang in Berkeley. When I got home and put it on it totally scrambled my brain — surely I can’t be enjoying something so straightforwardly girly and sensitive? It was literally changing me the same way Never Mind the Bollocks did all those years before.
Chris Cohen is the latest in a long lineage of soft boys that have captured my ear-heart since that watershed moment, and he’s duking it out (or perhaps skipping through verdant fields of daisies) with Dylan Moon for softest boy in my summer 2024 playlist. “Up and down you climb / soon you’ll leave us far behind” he intones on “Sunever.” “Tree of wintergreen / Won’t you tell me what you’ve seen / Birch bark heal a wound / back in one piece soon / Now as childhood ends / Take a message to my friend…”
Wow, you guys are such good eaters! You want dessert? Of course there’s dessert. Here’s a little pop something from British cutey Pixey. See you soon! Meet me at the place where the vain kids go!