Yo La Tengo
“Sugarcube”
I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One (1997)
“Whatever you want from me / Whatever you want I’ll do / Try to squeeze a drop of blood from a sugar cube”
What an oddly layered song. Kaplan’s guitar and McNew’s farfisa hum along neck and neck, forming a single-headed fuzz machine that doesn’t really scan like either instrument. Hubley’s harmonies, though lower in pitch than Kaplan’s lead, can float at or above the same volume. It’s as if YLT are taking Kaplan’s muted mewl as their starting point, erasing the peaks and valleys of any individual sound and following their democratic ethos out to its last stop. You always hear three people here—perhaps the proverbial hearts beating as one?—because the band don’t allow you to do otherwise.
Those lyrics, though. A sugar cube seems to stand for something different on each line it appears. The refrain (quoted above) positions itself as some kind of impressive romantic feat, but it’s such an unusual metaphor that you’re never totally convinced Kaplan’s just blowing emotive smoke. The song itself is like a sugar cube—compact, simplistically sweet, occasionally fragile—so maybe trying to squeeze a drop of blood out of it means trying to find something visceral within what are presumed to be the ‘shallow’ constrains of guitar-poppy love songs. That sounds like a Yo La Tengo sort of idea, doesn’t it?
Notice how the unnamed beloved is just about the only thing in the song that doesn’t get directly compared to a sugar cube. S/he’s “sweeter than a drop of blood on a sugar cube,” and Kaplan says he himself crumbles like a sugar cube, but it’s never ‘you are like a sugar cube because you’re sweet and I like you.’ The line about being sweeter than a drop of blood might be the most important one in the whole song because it marks out the separation of ‘sweet’ and ‘real.’ The sugar cube makes the drop of blood sweet in the same way that the pop song can make the real love seem sweeter than it ought to. Maybe that accounts for Kaplan’s deliriousness in trying so hard to do the opposite. You can’t squeeze blood from a sugar cube, the song concludes, but you can mix them together and try to get the best of both.
Source: Spotify
Daughn Gibson - All Hell
“I saw him, underneath the neon lights of a corner bar, crying like a child. So I asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘I’m just an old man in a young girl’s world…’”
Daughn Gibson delivers that little bit of theatrical scene-setting in his commanding baritone half way through All Hell, drawling the words in imitation of the old country musicians whose songs he samples to build his own. It’s a helpful encapsulation of what’s happening on this record, especially since without a hint of two we might be tempted to see Gibson’s music as homage or graverobbery. At his darkest—and this is a deceptively dark album—he sounds a lot like late-70s/early-80s Scott Walker, crossing from MOR and pop into the shadowy world of art rock. “The Day You Were Born” sounds like Leonard Cohen teaming up with Bill Callahan to cover Nick Drake, while “Rain on a Highway” finds Gibson incorporating a touch of Roy Orbison warble. When he flexes the hard edges of his voice, as he does in that above narration, it booms like Johnny Cash. All of this to say: Daughn Gibson bears a clear resemblance to several other traditionally deep, manful singers.
What Gibson doesn’t do, though, is linger behind his influences as some set of playlistable Spotify recommendations. Or, rather, he simply treats them as means instead of ends. Construction matters a lot on All Hell, since the perceived chasm between the dusty, raggedy country songs Gibson samples and the modern way he puts them together—slicing, looping, pitching up and down—is so wide. His methods allow him to investigate some established storytelling tropes about down-and-out anti-heroes littering the rank corners of a thousand stale dives (“Ray,” “Bad Guys”) while pitting them against the unstoppably sleek, plastic futures we all seem destined for. Notice how “Lookin’ Back on ‘99” nudges bits of gritty noir rock toward something resembling European techno, or how “Tiffany Lou”s lament pivots on a warped, glitchy chorus and sputtering drums.
The way I hear it, what’s at stake on All Hell is a handful of notions about traditional masculinity. Gibson puts it bluntly on “A Young Girl’s World,” but it’s all over every sound on this album. It’s not as simple as undercutting patriarchy or sympathizing with the truck-driving types who have less and less to offer the world, either. He’s looking for emotional intersections, commonalities that might let the symbolically old and new coexist without demolishing or corrupting each other. The cover image shows Gibson—his facial stubble somewhere between runway and highway—buttoning up a frayed plaid shirt in a multi-angled mirror as if he were expecting a fashion choice (or anti-fashion, if you wish) to transform him into the kind of man neither he nor the characters in his songs can really afford to be anymore. Remember, he’s not the old man in the young girl’s world, he’s the young man trying to make sense of both, and in the process he’s made one of the year’s most engaging, dramatic, and replayable albums.
Listening Journal: Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls
It’s hard to make soul music sound fresh. Perhaps there are one too many gold-cased 20-disc Time Life compilations in the world. Or maybe there’s just something in the stylistic DNA that tends to make it feel comforting and a little nostalgic. Bloody and visceral, too, but forgiving in ways rock ‘n roll rarely is. With that said, everyone getting excited over Alabama Shakes should really consider giving Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings another shot. Brittany Howard’s voice doesn’t play super nice with the muffly analog sound of these recordings. She sings with such heavy, spastic inflections that some of the detail actually gets lost, turning emotive songs into something resembling a tantrum. Like late-career Jack White (with whom they share a stage) and late-career Black Keys (with whom they undoubtedly share a fan base), Alabama Shakes’ sound doesn’t scan as ‘modern hybrid’ so much as ‘grab-bag of “classic” stuff.’ They’re clearly not art school weirdos and shouldn’t be held to those expectations, but I can’t help asking if the world really needs another record like this. Or, rather, if a record like this deserves the massive audience it’ll surely have. Hey, like what you like and who am I to begrudge people their taste and enthusiasm—I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Listening Journal: Rimar - Closer
Turns out chillwave’s smuggled beach margarita can still pack a solid punch when it’s, y’know, about something. Rimar has his own intriguing voice, though, so maybe I’m selling it short. He strikes a great balance between the intensity of his musical atmospheres—this is a record unflinching in its sense of hot, breathy intimacy—and the grounded sensibility of hip-hop beats. The nods to Quiet Storm soul don’t hurt either. In fact, you might call this an underground weirdo’s update on that particular branch of the adult contemporary tree, a sound that understands the language-of-the-heart promises of Sade and Smokey Robinson but takes the liberty of abstracting them much further from common language. Now we get samples and sentence fragments—“Only remember the future,” “We promised to never leave each other,” “I will stay…”—that make sideways sense uttered in the heat of a moment. Stretching out sound and space allows slivers of dark, childish psychedelia to show through, but it’s in the service of the grown-up vulnerability of love. Keep an eye on this guy.
(listen)
Listening Journal: The Shins - Port of Morrow
Y’know, under-production hasn’t been a problem for The Shins’ since they were called Flake Music. I wouldn’t mind all the bells and whistles here—hell, I probably wouldn’t even notice ‘em—if there wasn’t this odd sense of deference in the whole affair. All the glassy guitars, synth whooshes, extra percussion, bleeps and bloops, they hit your ears first. This isn’t an issue of misdirected purism. I’m not grousing about some abstract notion of “the song” being overshadowed by extra sounds, I just sense that the very ornamental arrangements have subdued or perhaps taken the place of that certain springiness The Shins used to have. Even “Simple Song,” a great single on its own, flattens out a bit in these environs and few other tracks attempt to match its charisma. Maybe Mercer’s just mellowing out as he ages, but I hear an inversion here: a lack of joy in making music compensated for by making more of it.
(listen)
Beach House - “Myth”
“Myth” opens, like many a Beach House song, with the measured tap of a chintzy drum machine. Tss-tss-TONG-tss-tss-tss-TONG—that hollow metallic noise programmed into Victoria Legrand’s keyboard sounds like the lazy bell of a buoy muffled by humid, salty air. Beach House devotees might recognize it from as far back as “House on the Hill,” on their debut album. It’s an auditory nod to the band’s name that recalls the early days when that name was also a mission statement, a framework for the imagery they were cultivating at the time.
See, since the release of Teen Dream in 2010, it’s been easy to forget where Beach House started. That album represented a conscious, forceful attempt to open up their sound and engage their audience as showmen. Songs were percussive and vertiginous (“Zebra,” “Norway”) or they were doe-eyed and regal (“Walk in the Park,” “Take Care”), all sounding as if the band were wide awake for the first time ever. On stage, Alex Scally finally got up out of his chair and Legrand flung her hair around and did high kicks behind her console. Those airy harmonies that punctuated “Norway” summed it up perfectly: this was a flushed, romantic version of the band in place of a florid, narcoleptic one.
The amazing thing about Beach House is that they’ve never sunk too deeply into themselves to see the bigger picture. “Myth,” if nothing else, is a reminder of that. When compared to Teen Dream, it can sound retracted and aloof, since it doesn’t position its epic sweep as an end in itself. This is a song that constantly works its way toward a peak but never allows itself to arrive there in the four minutes allotted. The muted tom-tom beat and Legrand’s descending arpeggios contain more than a hint of the smoky Fleetwood Mac vibe Beach House have waded into before, but they’re set off by Scally’s glassy, stadium-sized guitar (which proved to be a crucial element in Teen Dream’s arsenal). The end result is a track that hybridizes Beach House’s career moves to date, gliding over a gorgeous, sophisticated melody and reaching out to the listener without sacrificing its intensely personal effect.
Legrand is rarely transparent with (or about) her words, but without a full lyric sheet “Myth” scans breakup-ish to me. A line like “What comes after this momentary bliss?” would seem generally suited to pure rhetoric in a pop song, but she answers herself right away: “The consequence of what you do to me.” Her uncertainty doesn’t stem from what happens next—she knows there will always be fallout and that word “consequence” suggests she’s not looking forward to it—but, in perhaps a semi-artful dodge, on what words to use. “Help me to name it,” goes the song’s shard of a refrain, as if she’s expecting to stumble upon an insight by thinking out loud. In my mind, “Myth” turns out to be a piece of self-counseling where Legrand grapples with what happens when you “build yourself a myth,” and arrives at as level-headed a conclusion as she can muster. “Can’t keep hanging on to what was dead and gone,” she sings, the music’s wounded austerity pointing to that familiar introspective moment where she knows it before she feels it.
The Dutchess and The Duke - “Out of Time”
I’d sort of forgotten about this band (they split up to little fanfare in 2010), but they put out a couple of neat, perversely enjoyable albums during their short run. I say perversely because The Dutchess and The Duke were the type of songwriters who dealt exclusively in sharp, personal despair. Rebecca Raber once wrote that their music was about exorcising demons, which is a spot-on summation of the bleakness that covers their work. Jesse Lortz doesn’t use the kind of colorful language that, say, Ryan Kattner/Honus Honus from Man Man does, but both have this way of turning confessional brokenness into something destructive and self-immolating. You can find yourself alternately squirming in your seat and drifting toward cloudy pessimism while listening in large part because of their staunch refusal to turn away from sad, awful things. In the case of The Dutchess and The Duke, though, I’m not convinced that’s all there is to it. For one thing, the duo clearly had a fetish for the moodier side of early rock in the Stones/Kinks vein (first album She’s the Dutchess, He’s The Duke), later incorporating a hefty dose of Roy Orbison/Lee Hazelwood drama (Sunrise / Sunset), and given the generally-held historical heft of those influences, it’s a hard sound to take at face value. Were Lortz and Kimberly Morrison uncovering the raw-nerve sides of their idols or were they using these loaded 60s sounds to give heft to what might otherwise be bleary and overly-emotive confessionals? Or maybe it even grows out of Lortz’s semi-rootsy diction, demanding a sound to match his country/rhythm & blues delivery so we’re not distracted by any post-modern fusion?
“Ain’t you sick of hearing things are gonna work out? / Ain’t you sick of hearing things are gonna be alright? / Well somebody lie-ie-ied,” goes one particularly affecting refrain on “Out of Time,” a standout from their debut. It doesn’t look like much on paper, which is why I keep looking to TDaTD’s period sound for clues to its significance. The tinniness of that lead guitar—the one that sounds half harpsichord—is a pretty clear marker of the mid-60s vibe they’re going for. The way the chorus shifts from major to minor mode, too, is a well-acknowledged songwriting trick, a way of wringing extra poignance out of a chord progression by not allowing it to resolve—not allowing things to “work out”—in conventional terms. Radiohead pull the same modal trick all the time, though the effect is markedly different when it’s coming from lo-fi punk lifers as opposed to high-minded Oxfordians. In fact, garage-punk terms are probably the best way to contextualize TDaTD, since even though the instrumentation is spare and acoustic, there’s little trace of stereotypical indie-folk’s sanguine, floral ‘aw-shucks’-ness. They have more in common here with The Black Lips than Sufjan Stevens, in other words. You can hear it in the light snarl of Lortz’s words and voice: like most punks, the intensity of his emotions often exceeds his ability to articulate them.
When he does hit on detailed images, though, they can be devastating. A wide indictment mid way through “Out of Time” like “Everybody talks a lot of pretty stories / but when they talk you know they don’t even look you in the eye” turns immediately toward a grisly scene: “You’re lying naked on the bathroom floor now / Another day and you don’t bother keeping score now / He’s getting vicious as he’s walking through the door now / Don’t you know you’re running out of time.” The song appears to address someone trapped/forced into prostitution, but it’s unclear whether or not it’s Lortz’s mother, the primary ghost haunting She’s The Dutchess, He’s The Duke. He starts by framing her as the source of his own hopelessness—“I remember when I was just a baby, somebody told me everything was alright / It was my mother right before she drove me crazy”—and addresses her directly elsewhere on the album (particularly on “Mary”), but the switch from 1st/3rd person on the first verse to 2nd person on the rest of “Time” clouds our sense of perspective. Not every woman Lortz sings about is his mom, but the childhood scars she inflicted cast a long shadow over his worldview and his subsequent relationships. Though it’s unlikely she’s the one lying naked on the bathroom floor, Lortz can’t seem to help drawing the connection. His bewildered empathy and implicit kinship (they’re both sick of being told everything will work out) suggests that, if she, the “you,” can be saved, then so can he. The line from which the song takes its title, “Don’t you know you’re running out of time,” lingers on the last few seconds, with Lortz and Morrison’s voices unaccompanied and the guitars still unresolved, perhaps as an illustration of just how close they are to the end of their ropes.
