Let's have fun, let's forget about these wounds
2023 Mix 2 [Originally posted Jan 25, 2023]
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Wow, that was quick! (Don't worry, pace will be slower moving forward, I had a backlog to get through.)
So far this year I'm hearing more music that I like, and the overall quality even in the stuff I dislike seems better -- tempos are up, styles I dislike are down. So let's forget about these wounds and have fun!
Here’s the full playlist on Spotify.
MIX 2: LET’S HAVE FUN, LET’S FORGET ABOUT THESE WOUNDS
1. Deerhoof: Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story.
The lead track from the new Deerhoof suggests the band will continue its streak of never releasing a bad album -- this one was recorded in two weeks in a "real" recording studio (whatever that means) and Satomi Matsuzaki sings in Japanese. There's something else going on with the vocals I can't quite put my finger on, there's a prettiness to them that seems less distanced (both in the mix and figuratively, seems more intimate). My sons adore Milk Man, can't wait to play them this one.
2. En Attendant Ana: Same Old Story
Yeah yeah, we have Stereolab at home. I like Spotify's generic brand alternatives, sue me.
3. Everything But the Girl: Nothing Left to Lose
I'm not the biggest EBtG fan but this song is exactly what I think of when I try to imagine what EBtG sounds like without singing "Missing" or "Wrong" -- a perfect replacement level EBtG song.
4. Caixa Cubo & Zé Leônidas: Sábado
I have two separate Brazilian lists, one that's all funk and one that's mostly world music stuff bordering on Putumayo -- which to be totally clear, I am often a sucker for. I think this came from the second list, but if I can get some decent Cuban jazz in a 2:22 dose I'll take it.
5. Klossmajor: Det er mo bare kødd
Light Norwegian indie pop. See above comment about generic brand alternatives.
6. Julia Jean-Baptiste: Je continue à danser
Light French indie pop. See above comment about above comment about generic brand alternatives.
7. Teksti-TV 666: Kuukauden myyjä
From their PR: "Is there such a thing as too many guitarists in a band? Finland's Teksti-TV 666 think not." They call themselves "kraut-punk" and I'd give them partial credit at best for both sides of that hyphen, but when it rocks it rocks. I guess they must have exactly the right number of guitarists: from what I can tell, it could be as few as three or as many as six.
8. Young Fathers: Rice
I've always been interested in Young Fathers, despite my wariness of anything that wins a Mercury Prize or lands six songs on the Trainspotting sequel soundtrack. But they're good and I dig the cracked singalong vibe. I'd forgotten they were Scottish until the spoken-word breakdown in the middle.
9. Francis Tuan: Pan Zupka
Was curious about what sounded like the "East Asian riff" quote in the opening and later in the song. Seems satirical: Tuan is a Polish-Vietnamese artist who says that the lyrics are drawn from real things he's heard in Poland, which makes me wish I knew what he was saying.
10. Rasmus Gozzi & FRÖKEN SNUSK: AKUTEN
My guess is that the words to this song are filthy -- Amy Diamond as a Garbage Pail Kid (second Amy Diamond reference in two weeks? Yes, expect more). Gozzi is a Swedish producer who has been trolling the Swedish charts for a few years with song titles like "Fuck Off in Die" and "Ride Me like a Dala Horse" (which went to #1 on the Sverigetopplistan chart and is extremely annoying). FRÖKEN SNUSK is modeled after Spring Breakers (though isn't as good as when Thai pop artist Wonderframe modeled herself after Spring Breakers).
11. TWICE: MOONLIGHT SUNRISE
This song is close to being perfect (enjoy the "it's I need you o'clock right now" line, which if you're not paying attention may scan...a little differently). Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote about its roots in Atlanta Bass for NPR. My only problem with it?
12. Pháo & Sterry: Kìa Bóng Dáng Ai
I stopped doing the Spotify deep dives in 2022, and when I came back I could hear that Vietnam had stepped its New Music Friday game up considerably, following what seems like an escalated build-up of its own pop industry over the past few years. This is a medium-good lite disco track from a Vietnamese idol show that easily made the list. For stronger mead try Joshua Minsoo Kim (again!) on Hoàng Thùy Linh in Pitchfork. The TikTok teens are speeding her up! She has arrived.
13. Adhisty Zara: Sahabat Angin
Sugar guitar teenrock from Indonesia included on the OST to something called Virgo and the Sparklings. Glad somewhere in the world someone is still packaging music like this on children's soundtracks!
14. Mega Shinnosuke: SONiC
A more modern pop-punk pastiche than "Sahabat Angin," this time from Japan. Shinnosuke follows the bedroom Youtuber to higher production value pipeline -- I like the polished stuff better.
15. ana kennedy: sylvia plath
Spotify will often throw you a random indie act drawn from some unknown, endless well of aspiring talent and usually you can hear why they're still aspiring, but occasionally you get one that works. (You can usually follow leads to figure out how they got onto Spotify in the first place, and, some mild A&R shadiness notwithstanding, the main story seems to be that millions of people make music and several thousand of them end up on Spotify's algorithm treadmill.) I like how hyperpop has mellowed so quickly, it felt like it was running too hot to really go anywhere. What's the opposite of hustle? I respect the settle.
16. Morgan Noise: Further
British artist currently opening occasionally for Porridge Radio, the latter a recent People's Pop find.
17. Sole Inspiration: Life [c. 1968]
One of the many arbitrary rereleases that show up in my weekly lists, from a San Antonio label from the 1960s. Sounds like it was recorded underwater. There's a sludgy feel to it that I like, gets to psychedelia from left field. Discogs has scant information; Youtube calls it "Chicano loner psych-soul from TX" -- I'll take their word for it.
18. Questbeatz, Soukey, & Chico Chicago: Ice Cold
Switzerland's answer to PinkPantheress confirms I like every single iteration of the sound. I'm glad that people are finding a way to salvage all those old drum n bass breaks...maybe there's hope Beanie Babies will be worth something again. Don't manipulate your grandmother for her Beanie Baby collection, kids!
19. Chiara Grispo: CASSIOPEA
Former reality competition child star and the voice Moana in Italy breaks out of her Disney past (I guess? Do they do that in Italy?) with a pretty ballad that wouldn't be out of place...over the credits of a different Disney movie. I dig the harmonies.
20. Nacho Mendez: Una Mañana [1975]
A release from the Mexican artist's 1975 album 3x2+1. Why this song and no others from that album? You'd have to ask Numero Group, who seem to be behind so many of these baffling one-off archival releases that make their way to Spotify weekly playlists (including the Sole Inspiration one above).
21. FAZZ: 迎春花 Ying Chun Hua
A tasteful update of the Chinese New Year classic by Chang Loo. Led me to a reliable Mandarin Spotify lists updated weekly, hooray! My son informs me that it is the Year of the Black Rabbit, so we get an extra month. Fingers crossed it's one of the good ones.
22. Renata Neves & Philippe Powell: Esse Nós
Nepo baby jazz from Baden Powell's son Phillipe. Fulfills the fiddle quota for the mix (there's a gnarly one up there on the Finnish rock track, too).
23. Mr. JazziQ x EeQue x Guluva: Nazoke (Akana zol) (feat. Jandas & Zan'Ten) [2022]
Two amapiano tracks to close things out. I've been underwhelmed with the avalanche of amapiano I've heard in the past few years after falling in love with the sound in 2020. I keep feeling like I'm intruding in the middle of a party and don't understand how to join in the dance. But now and then a standalone track gets its hooks in, and there's something about the synth hook and percussion accents on "Nazoke" that gives it a live jam quality. This is practically the opposite of what I love about other amapiano, whose more synthesized sounds approximate something close and warm without fully moving into the realm of the acoustic (my standard-bearer in the genre is still Semi Tee's 2020 LP release I'm Only Tweenty One, which I don't think exists in a physical copy, but I went ahead and made a CD of it, album art and everything).
Amapiano builds on a deceptively simple template: the foundation is almost always a shaker playing sixteenth notes at about 112 BPM (though the accent of the pattern can vary, the shaker is usually steady and omnipresent), and each song then layers in its own palette of sounds and voices, everything in percussive service of the groove. That standardized base and consistent tempo lets you click different songs together like LEGOs, though amapiano is also known for relatively long song lengths -- at under six minutes these are both medium-short.
Amapiano is in some ways the flipside of Brazilian funk, which isolates strange rhythms and sounds and timbres and ideas and forces you to reckon with what the fuck they're doing in relation to each other in sequence -- it's Eisensteinian montage. By contrast amapiano is more like pointillism: you're not thinking closely about any single point, and from a distance everything takes on a dreamy texture that it would lose if you inspected too closely.
Amapiano artists will often take warm acoustic percussion and pretty, playful vocals -- all of them bringing a soft swing feel, somewhere between dancing and swaying -- and pit them directly against much harder four-on-the-floor house elements (synth blares, jagged squelchy bass hits) put off at a seeming distance, like the distant echo of a car alarm going off way down the street that happens to be in the same key as the song you're listening to in your headphones. The palettes artists use and the way they layer everything in vary from song to song and artist to artist, but because the foundation is so similar across the songs, changes in the genre over time can be subtle enough that it almost feels like you're watching evolution at the individual genetic mutation level.
24. TOSS x Felo Le Tee: Ncbeleka [2022]
And there are tons of cool vocals in amapiano, hard posturing and playful posing becoming indistinguishable (as they are on this song -- or, if not indistinguishable, a kind of multiple perspective game where you can see it both ways) as it all washes out in the sound bath along with everything else. And heck, sometimes you get a no-foolin' xylophone, too, not even the thing most people think is a xylophone but is actually a glockenspiel. Or you get a synth that sounds like a vuvuzela. Why not?
Anyway, after skipping a ton of amapiano tracks, I was surprised to find this one immediately after the previous one, arranged alphabetically in a raw list that numbers about 1,500 songs per week. Must mean something, right? Like how my wife keeps seeing foxes everywhere. What's up with that?
Stay foxy!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from TOSS x Felo Le Tee - "Ncbeleka" ("s'yo ncebeleka / as'khohlwe ngezi londa")