My mouth is open and I can't sing
Mix 9: De-capitalized pop, indie songwriter soup, and *business trance*, with forays into ambiguous melodies and "what?! rap"
March is still roaring in like a…Lion Babe? We had snow flurries this week before it switched over to 70 degree weather, very distasteful. It barely feels like the year has started, and I am still in search of a few heartsongs—the kind of stuff that skyrockets to the top of whatever lists are forming in my head. This might be the latest I’ve ever gone in a year without listening to any albums or having any tentative frontrunners for songs of the year.
Nothing on this mix changes that: it’s a dance music sandwich this week, with a suite of baile funk, dembow, and amapiano(&b?)/afrotech songs surrounded by moody semi-pop on one side and rough-around-the-edges indie on the other. The heavy hitters this week all got tucked away toward the end, in a stretch that includes Mdou Moctar, Mannequin Pussy, Bat for Lashes, and Julia Holter. (For the record, I do like plenty of music that other people like, but other people liking something seems to have very little correlation to whether I like it.)
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8
MIX 9: MY MOUTH IS OPEN AND I CAN’T SING
1. Lion Babe: Prototype
Spotify has been serving me up decent LION BABE content since 2014, when the duo was an early adopter of the extremely irritating all-caps stylized artist name format, which means we are a full decade into me feeling like pop music is constantly spamming me.1 They’re one of those acts that breaks through once every couple of years with a stray song, like catching an algorithmic eclipse.
2. Olivia Ruiz: La fièvre
The name and voice rang a bell immediately, but I needed to check the Singles Jukebox archive to (re)discover that Olivia Ruiz is the French singer who sang “Elle Panique,” a song I crammed onto any mix I could between 2009 and 2012. (As far as I can tell, her early material isn’t available on streaming in the US.)
3. Maria Blaya: Aunq Duela
Spanish artist puts her vocals through a hyperpop filter and then floats them over soft flamenco handclaps. How could I say no?
4. J. Balvin, Jowell & Randy, De La Ghetto: Triple S
What sort of tunefulness gets me to pay attention to a J. Balvin song every dozen or so times out? I can’t figure it out, and I feel like words alone may not be sufficient to explore what’s going on — I’ve been toying with creating some Video Content about melody and other formal elements of songs I like, based on a provocative Mark Sinker review of Kacey Musgraves over on the Singles Jukebox:
Not sure if I’ve ever gone on about this here, but a thing I’d love to read or to be directed toward is a deep comparative study of melody within different genres, the shapes and turns and cadences that evoke this milieu, versus the others usual to that one. The key phrase here seems to me highly untypical of the kinds of tuneline you’d expect to find in country, and not just because it’s drenched in big indie echo (plus whispered). What exactly is building up these expectations? I need someone with a YouTube channel and audio examples alongside the staves and dots and sharps and flats – even just an overhead projector and a long pointy stick. They can prove I’m very wrong if they like! (Maybe I am!)
He’s right about this (it is in fact the reason I dislike the song, which he gave a [9]) and I gestured toward it in my Taylor Swift modal rap essay as “amorphous modal songwriting,” though I don’t know that I’d identify the wider melodic trend as the same as rap’s modal fad, just similar in spirit.
That modal rap essay now has the distinction of uniting both the Gaylor and “critical fandom” Swiftly Neutral subreddits, a feat I may need to include in the marketing pitch of my 33 1/3 proposal. Dogs and cats! Living together!
5. Empress Of: Preciosa
I don’t remember any Empress Of material in Spanish (apparently her debut EP back in 2013 was bilingual), but it really works for me, especially after translating the lyrics for this week’s title, which are…uh, wet.
6. Virginie B: Madone
This is the second appearance of Montreal artist Virginie B on my mixes, who sounds nothing like her appearance from last year. This time out there’s a vaguely J-pop feel, though during the blindfold taste test portion of my mix-making I had no idea where in the world (literally) this song might have come from.
7. Rico Nasty, Boys Noize: Arintintin
Crystal Leww (who has a great new newsletter about CLUBS) informs me that according to DJ FINGERBLAST (see, there are still plenty of ways to earn your all-caps), European sellout “business techno” is now turning into business trance, the perfect phrase to describe this bloodlessly lizard-brained dance novelty from Boys Noize and Rico Nasty. I am not the best chronicler to determine its role in the neo-trance ecoystem — for that you’ll need to consult Will Adams.
8. Raffaella: Polly Pocket
My friend Kate shares the first song that I’ll bet gets rejected from the Lena Dunham Polly Pocket movie, by a bedroom-popper whose background spanned New York and LA before she landed in Minneapolis. She’s doing the annoying multi-EP rollout with a project called Live Raff Love, on which she never alights on a particular style, though tends more toward contemporary indie’s alt soup than on this song (in Christgau parlance, the EP is a ✄ “Millennial”).
9. En Attendant Ana: Magical Lies
When I snagged an En Attendant Ana song early last year (full review: “Yeah yeah, we have Stereolab at home.”) little did I know that by year’s end they would have the sort cred that got them to the B-side semi-finals in People’s Pop 2023 competition! (Not sure if BBC Radio 6 is responsible, though it often is in the People’s Pop year-ends — I may need to add the Radio 6 weekly playlist to my landscape scan.)
10. Merry Lamb Lamb, Miso Extra, Aimei媚: Better
This was an automated playlist suggestion, the first of the year. Miso Extra has appeared on a previous mix; here she joins forces with Merry Lamb Lamb and Aimei媚, the former two Hong Kong-born and London-based, for something that sounds like if Juan Maclean tried to…well, get featured on my automated playlist suggestions.
11. Megabaile Do Areias, Missiatto: Mito Louco
12. Dj Caio Vieira, Mc Jacaré, Dj Alan Melo: Um Cara da Noite
Two big dumb baile funk tracks, one stomping over an already well-trodden “Heads Will Roll” remix (did Nia Archives really beat a funk artist in a contest of dancefloor defacement?) and the other making the Scatman feel right at home.
13. Jey One, Mestizo Is Back: Tarun Tarun
14. Kreizy K, Yaisel LM: Itoleo
15. Lomiiel: Un Volao
Three dembow tracks cumulatively clocking in at under six minutes. Jey One might be the best post-Angel Dior dembow artist I’ve heard. The short song lengths and bigger swings into left field with vocals are making a broader survey of dembow a pleasure so far.
16. Mxshi Mo, Skream: Imali Yami
17. Nora Toure: Dede
And finally, two South African (or -inspired) tracks, one a driving, if not particularly distinguished, Afrotech song that stood out, and the other another iteration of piano&b via the New Music Friday Norway, from a Togolese-Norwegian artist.
18. Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice
Haven’t checked in on Mdou Moctar since 2020, but this one’s the scorching lead single from their upcoming album.
19. Mannequin Pussy: OK? OK! OK? OK!
And speaking of scorchers, I’ve heard a bunch of Mannequin Pussy tracks without thinking they were earning their band name, and this is the first time I thought they were at least putting in the effort. They sort of fall between two stools noise-wise: wilder than most indie and tamer than most hardcore.
20. Nicole Torrealba: Odd…
This Spanish artist offers a speak-sing quasi-rap over a light funk loop with quiet storm sax. It’s the second track from 2024 (after Kim Gordon’s “BYE BYE”) potentially eligible for my What?! Rap playlist of rap-or-is-it? by artists usually known for their singing. I couldn’t tell you exactly what “What?! Rap” is, and already the playlists’ boundaries are maybe too blurry, but the gist is hearing people (usually — but I don’t think by definition — women) coming up with a spoken-word delivery without obvious precedent that ignores, botches, or clumsily trips over vocal rhythms established by rap music.
21. Bat for Lashes: The Dream of Delphi
22. Julia Holter: Evening Mood
The requisite indie cool-down! Bat for Lashes crawls past its five and a half minutes (I could have listened to three more dembow songs!) but Julia Holter sounds like she’s having a fun stretching out what, if you squint, sounds almost like a lost Steely Dan composition to six and a half minutes.
23. DJ Nigga Fox: Má Rotina
And meanwhile something slower and moodier than I’m used to from Príncipe. I’d like to eventually sit down and figure out what’s going on in these batida rhythms, which always sound like they’re rushing and loping along at the same time, a telltale teeter-totter.
***
Until next time, I hope you will use appropriately conservative capitalization protocols in your band names and song titles; it makes my job easier.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title translated from Empress Of’s “Preciosa” (“Mi boca está abierta y no pa' cantar”)
I’ve made an executive decision to de-capitalize and re-capitalize annoyingly stylized words this year except in some circumstances (e.g. consistent usage among artists and their fanbase) where I think it would be more confusing not to stylize. Apologies to Ariana Grande’s annoying lower-case titles, which, aside from last week’s remix, probably won’t be appearing again anyway if my first impression of her album is any indication.