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sweetdreamsjeff · 4 months

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Jeff Buckley Revisited

by Simeon FlickMarch 2023

Remember me, but oh, forget my fate. ––Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”

When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River tributary of the Mississippi on May 29, 1997, just as his band was arriving at the Memphis airport to start helping him finally nail down the long-awaited and already agonized-over second album, music lost not only one of its most singular and revolutionary of raw talents, but also the most mythologized—even during his lifetime—since Kurt Cobain’s death just three years prior. Buckley bore the boon and bane of being the scion of an also semi-famous and ill-fated folk/jazz/soul singer named Tim, and spent his entire life and career—following a single week-long reunion just before Tim’s 1975 death from an accidental heroin overdose—futilely trying to distance himself from the wayward father he never knew apart from the music of nine mostly half-baked studio albums. That an ever-growing number of people, the majority having discovered Jeff’s music post-mortem, feel they know the son better than he or anyone else knew his father, and still feel his loss as acutely as one would a dear family member, is a testament to the unparalleled emotional conveyance and lasting legacy of Jeff’s music despite having released only one official studio album during his lifetime (1994’s hauntingly gorgeous, seamlessly diverse Grace, which has found a home on innumerable “Greatest” lists and has been declared a personal favorite by many of his idols). Jeff Buckley’s influence lives on in the burgeoning underground cult of posthumous acolytes, and in the hyper-emotive, falsetto- and vibrato-laden, multi-octave vocal histrionics of so many subsequent singers, which only seem to come off as pale and obvious allusions that smack more of imitation than assimilation, much less embodiment, and we may never see his like again.

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Jeff Buckley entered the world during a meteor shower on the evening of November 17, 1966, the son of an already absent father and a mother, Mary Guibert, who at 18 wasn’t much more than a child herself. Like Cobain, who would arrive only three months later, Jeff had a typical Gen X childhood, replete with divorce, paternal estrangement and maternal domination, often violently reinforced alienation from his formative peers and unstable itinerancy (Mary dragged him through virtually every backwater town in California for all too short stints before he finally put his foot down in Anaheim, where both parents had grown up, and where extended family awaited). The sole refuge, besides the brief but stabilizing presence of the occasional father figure like stepdad Ron Moorhead, was the music men like him turned Jeff onto: Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and countless others who would seemingly become part of his DNA. Music became his north star, his raison d’être, and when things went wrong, which was all too often (Jeff had to be a rock for flighty mother Mary, taking on too many of her responsibilities too young), he would escape into it for hours.

This would compound once he took up the guitar. Like many children of musicians do, in order to carve out a distinct musical identity (and to maintain a healthy generation gap), Jeff—or Scotty, as he was known by his middle name then––gravitated towards Gen-X’s chosen instrument: the electric guitar, to the exclusion of his mother’s classical piano and his father’s acoustic guitar and vocalizations. Aside from the occasional lead vocal in a high school cover band, mostly for the high-ranged prog-rock and new wave classics none of his other bandmates could pull off, he considered himself just a guitar player in the ’80s. But not just any player; with Al DiMeola as one of many paragons, Jeff threw himself headlong into the world of virtuosic technique, teaching himself complicated licks by ear as he worked diligently to master not just the instrument but music itself.

This trajectory was maintained after his 1984 high school graduation with a stint at the derided Los Angeles organization, MIT (Musician’s Institute of Technology), with its many specialized subsidiaries, including GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology), where Jeff continued his musical edification. After obtaining his virtually useless professional certificate from GIT but with his gun-slinging reputation solidified a year later, he gigged in various area bands and worked as a studio rat, arranging and recording demos for other aspiring artists. But the lead vocalist in him remained as of yet dormant.

y the late ’80s it was already soul-crushingly evident that Los Angeles was a dead-end cesspool of intolerable immersion in other people’s music, and that a drastic change was required to sweep away the bad influences and external white noise to finally get him in touch with his own muse. New York City beckoned—just as it had to Tim in the ’60s—as a locus were people could become the epitome of themselves, get as weird as they wanted, and be unconditionally accepted or ignored as merely part of the scenery, and reach their full, rewarded potential in whatever their chosen field. Jeff tested the waters for a few months in 1990, but his money and options ran out, and he reluctantly returned to Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until April 26, 1991, when he performed as part of the Hal Willner-curated Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute show at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church that he was able to lay the groundwork for a permanent relocation, having garnered the interest of several music industry types offering tangible professional succor, not to mention his first real girlfriend. That night marked the beginning of Jeff’s mythology-building not only as an artist in his own right, but also as an inextricable extension of his father’s legacy; many of the concert’s attendees were blown away not just by Jeff’s supposedly similar voice and delivery, but also by his physical resemblance (apparently there were some eerie backlit cheekbone shadows cast against the church hall walls that heightened the drama).

That there was so much defensiveness and/or mandated avoidance in so many subsequent interviews seems very bite-the-hand-that-feeds, but everyone has to break free from their parents at some point; that it often requires the assistance of those selfsame parents is a frustratingly ironic aspect of adulthood most of us have to face and embrace. Jeff simply had the misfortune of doing it in a highly scrutinized industry with zero—or even negative—expectations or tolerance of rock star progeny. He was also not only abandoned by his father, to whose funeral he was not even invited, but also projected on by Tim-obsessed fans and former love interests expecting the son to deliver on the father’s failed promise(s).

Jeff set up shop, and with the assistance of a demo tape of original songs he had recorded while still languishing in Los Angeles (courtesy of father Tim’s old manager, Herb Cohen), and a threadbare press kit (the only news clipping being a photocopied review of the Tim memorial show), he began beating the Manhattan pavement to drum up gigs and busk on the streets.

As of yet, short on original material, he leaned on sophisticated covers that resonated with his emphatically empathic and emotive spirit as he wall-pasta’d in search of a unique artistic identity. Songs by more recently assimilated influences like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and Leonard Cohen stood side by side with pitch-perfect deep-cut gems by Van Morrison and the beloved Zeppelin, with all-inclusive guitar arrangements that cast his different-every-time performances in full-blown Technicolor. His self-accompaniment on electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic form usually favored by the often excessively earnest—if not outright cheesy—solo folk artists of the past (including early-phase Tim), differentiated him from obsolete traditions, and it also broadcast the implicit message that this lone performer would eventually have a band behind him.

But the comprehensive guitar skill was just a tripod for the potent weapon his voice was becoming.

It’s difficult for most laypeople to differentiate between learned technique and natural timbre. Jeff didn’t inherit his father’s vocal gift; his was high-ranged and effeminate instead, with a thick palate and some huskiness occasionally muddying up his tone production. But what he did with it despite or because of the confines of those “limitations” is absolutely astounding. Instead of self-consciously diluting his delivery, he threw the book at it, almost as a diversionary tactic, like a magician smoke-and-mirror distracting his audience from an otherwise debunkable prestige move. With his uncanny imitative abilities and concomitant penchant for self-pedagogy, he adopted a rapid vibrato in accordance with essential influences (Simone, Piaf, Garland, and even father Tim, as was his undeniable birthright), nicked tricky classical and R&B trills and phrasing, turned his angelic upper register into a strength by frequently, often breathily leaning into his falsetto, incorporated various operatic (chromatic glissandos) and jazz (scatting) effects, learned how to push a full chest voice into his higher register like Robert Plant (and Tim) and to raggedly scream like Cobain and others of his generation. He ran sustain drills as he traveled across the city in cabs or on foot, drawing out his notes as long as possible to hone his deftly rationed breath support (just try holding out along with the 25-second E4 at the end of Grace’s “Hallelujah”). Tim had set the bar high for the younger Buckley, and Jeff rose mightily to the challenge, developing a comprehensive technique that kept pace with his guitar mastery, which had been pared down to unassailable jazz progressions and Hendrixian blues tropes and, like Cobain, would feature downplayed––if any––solos for the duration. If Jeff’s musical continuo was a haunted house, his voice had become the ghost that lingered within it.

(There’s something more compelling about the resulting output of singer/songwriters who start out exclusively as instrumentalists; it makes for more effective and meaningful musical accompaniment and better structured songs, and they tend to work more diligently and eruditely at mastering vocal technique. Tim leaned almost exclusively on his phenomenal voice, and insufficient thought was given to structure and harmony in his songs, and the lyrics were by turns predominantly unremarkable or unwieldy, the main drawback of being able to sing the phonebook. The resulting chord changes and accompaniment were more limited, derivative, yet ironically more obtrusive. Jeff had harnessed hooks, vivid and compelling lyrical imagery, and upper harmony into underlying works that left room for everything important, but especially the vocals. Thus, Jeff managed to achieve with one album what Tim failed to do in nine; he produced a timeless classic.)

Jeff’s most crucial influence––his self-declared Elvis––was the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Qawwali singing introduced Jeff not only to its mystical eastern harmony, which was a subtle but unmistakable undercurrent in his guitar parts and his music in general, but also to a highly freeing ilk of vocal improvisation he would use to sparing but profound effect in his live performances, most notably in his wordless vocal warm-ups for things like “Mojo Pin” and “Dream Brother,” and in the way he would subtly tweak the songs’ melodies from show to show.

With all of this gelling within and beginning to burst out of him, Jeff flogged his wares at many a Manhattan venue, but he would find his symbiotic Shangri La at Sin-é, a hole-in-the-wall café run by a fellow man of Irish descent, ex-pat Shane Doyle. Jeff crystalized into the self-accompanying male diva he had been striving to become there at Sin-é and found a home away from home not only on the small stage, where he reveled in an unparalleled, as-of-yet anonymous freedom within the material, but also behind the counter, where he could often be found washing dishes.

This is where Jeff’s buzz began to build, thanks to his Monday night residency, the impression he had made on the industry folk at Tim’s memorial concert (including several Columbia employees who started showing up on the regular), and the steadily growing crowds comprised predominantly of young women. As word of mouth spread and audiences began to overflow onto the sidewalk, the higher-ups at several major labels started circling to investigate the fresh blood in the water. A hilarious bidding war ensued, with record company execs actually trying to make table reservations at the tiny walk-in café, and the street’s curbs clogging with limousines. Jeff would end up signing with Columbia, a Sony subsidiary that was home to many of his heroes, and that made all the right overtures and promises to this hot young talent who was desperately intent on accomplishing the impossible feat of using and defeating the music industry from the inside, as opposed to being consumed by it like his father had been.

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Jeff’s “million dollar” deal––consisting of a $100,000 advance, a higher than normal royalty rate, and a three-album guarantee––was unusual for a solo artist of that time, considering there were scant few original songs, no band, and no official demo tape to speak of (the L.A. recordings, which Jeff in his humorously nihilistic cups had dubbed The Babylon Dungeon Sessions, technically fulfilled the applicable criteria but weren’t aurally suitable). Columbia knew they had a hot property on their hands, the Gen-X manifestation of a Dylan or Springsteen-esque heritage artist, and Jeff made sure they knew, mostly through intentional late arrivals to countless business meetings. But because his talents spanned so deep and wide, everyone was initially at a loss as to what form his recorded output should take. What the hell do you do with an artist that has the chops and versatility to go in any direction??

The logical first step was to try and capture the solo version of Jeff on tape and issue it as a soft introduction. Live At Sin-é was culled from two performances recorded during the summer of 1993 and released on November 23 as a perfunctory, slightly disappointing four-song EP consisting of two originals (“Mojo Pin,” and “Eternal Life,” both of which would get definitive, full-band versions on Grace), and two covers (a rhapsodically incendiary rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and a transcendent reading of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,” complete with a fingerpicked merry-go-round guitar waltz for the French-sung refrain).

In Columbia’s posthumous ambition to exploit remaining vault caches to continue paying down Jeff’s sizable debt to the label, the original release’s felonious dearth was rectified with 2003’s Legacy Edition, a two-disc, one DVD set that was a much more complete representation of Jeff not just as an artist during that pre-fame period, but as a person. Along with scads more songs from the same shows, the expanded set includes between-song banter that manages to do what his scant, more visceral studio work couldn’t: put his pronouncedly nerdy, madcap, sometimes salacious sense of humor on full display.

Meanwhile, Jeff had also begun working toward his only completed studio LP. Sony had brought him in to record the lion’s share of his repertoire in February of ’93 as a way to gently kick off the A&R cataloguing and selection process for the album (these were later released as part of the 2016 compilation You And I), and recording sessions were scheduled for September at Bearsville Studios, which was located near Woodstock in upstate New York. The only problem––and it was a big one––was that he didn’t have a band. Like so many other aspects of Jeff’s career, this got rectified at the last possible moment; he met and connected with bassist Mick Grondahl first, then drummer Matt Johnson less than a month out from the initial recording dates.

A tall, dark, and handsome Dane, Grondahl had an ideal combination of low-key receptiveness and musical adventurousness that allowed him to be the perfect on- and offstage wingman: he was interesting in an unobtrusive way. Johnson was a wet-eared Texan who had the ideal balance of power and precision (a slight and diminutive presence, Johnson’s physicality was bolstered by his construction day job) and the breadth of taste and experience to match the extreme dynamic variations of Jeff’s sonic palette (Johnson could crush it like Bonzo or play pindrop-soft like a seasoned jazz pro––whatever the music required).

Columbia was less than pleased that Jeff had recruited a rhythm section with virtually no stage or studio experience, but he would eventually be proven right in his selection of introverted, lump-of-clay rookies that doubled as a gang of friends who could hang with him in every sense, especially through all the spontaneous twists and turns he threw at them. This was one of many battles he would actually win for the better against Sony, though he would initially come off as the loser (it took a few months for the band to get up to speed on the Grace repertoire, because they rarely if ever played the album’s songs during rehearsals or soundchecks, preferring to fill that time with “jamming,” since they needed to build an intuitive rapport. They also knew they would be playing the same emotionally demanding songs night after night for the next year or two).

The trio began work on Grace at Bearsville Studios, which had been pre-rigged with several different recording environments to spontaneously capture whatever came out of Jeff and his band in any permutation and style, whether it was solo, low-key jazz combo or full-on rock group. Andy Wallace, who had dialed in the mixes for Nirvana’s Nevermind, wore the coproducing and engineering hats for these sessions, along with providing a regimented lens through which to focus and refract Jeff’s chaotic genius. Recording proceeded slowly and steadily, without too much fanfare, but then, again at the last minute there was an explosion of prodigious productivity. Among other developments, German vibraphone prodigy Karl Berger was in town, and with the assistance of a local quartet, he and Jeff co-arranged string parts for “Grace,” “Last Goodbye,” and “Eternal Life.”

The eleventh-hour burst of creativity suddenly began transforming Jeff’s modest debut into something more akin to the fully produced masterpiece that usually doesn’t happen until later in a discography. More studio time was booked for intensive overdubbing of additional layers, which pushed costs beyond the initial budget, and though Columbia held Jeff in high esteem and generally handled him with kid gloves (full artistic control was implicit), the majority of expenses went into his recoupable fund, which had to be paid down by Jeff through album sale royalties. Though Grace would eventually prove itself beyond worthy of the investment, this was one of the first major manifestations of Jeff’s Sony-sourced headache that would plague him for the duration.

Grace, which was finally released on August 23, 1994, tends to vex the neophyte at first blush. There’s so much to unpack, the resulting bottleneck can be off-putting. Only through repeated listens will it reward those who “wait in the fire,” as the title track has it. Once that rote assimilation has inured you to Jeff’s eccentric voice and anachronistically innovative affectations, and Grace has dilated your emotional receptivity wider than you ever thought possible, you will tend to listen obsessively for a while before you realize you need to take a break so your strung-out, wrung-out heart can snap back to normal. You will probably only be able to listen to it every once in a while thereafter, as the lachrymose music makes demands of your psyche that require exceptional equanimity to withstand (the irony is that while Grace might help you grieve a breakup or death, listening to its ten tracks can also exhume that grief long past the time you have worked through it). The fact that Jeff is no longer here but still sounds undeniably alive in the speakers, and that the making of this album led to insurmountable expectations for a satisfactory follow-up that added to his pre-death stress, only augments the album’s haunting intensity.

The sonic progeny of Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dowland, Jeff comes off as the wide-amplitude, tragic-romantic, card-carrying Scorpio that he was, irresistibly obsessed with love and death, singing often of the moon and rain (and yet also of burning and fire), and bedroom-as-sanctuary-and-wellspring, and a melancholic, nearly heart-rending yearning for absent lovers past and present. All of this can’t help but feed into his steadily growing mythology, not to mention strike he’s-all-alone-and-vulnerable-go-save-him reverberations of longing through the heartstrings of every heterosexual female within earshot, while also getting straight men of all walks gratefully as in touch with their feminine side as he was. In the age of grunge––which force-fed emotion through intimidating volume and distortion––Grace was an anomaly, delivering a wider range of feeling through a listener’s induced surrender to its heightened peaks and valleys, with Jeff’s by turns angelic and demonic voice keeping pace, and, unlike Cobain, with absolutely no irony to lean on, hide behind, or use as disclaimer.

“Mojo Pin” is the perfect overture for an audiophile quality album with such wide yet still somehow cohesive style and dynamic oscillations, with softly looping guitar harmonics fading in, followed by a wordless melody delicately sung over a fingerpicked folk/jazz guitar pattern. The music rollercoasters from there, with dramatic stops featuring vocal melismas that proceed into straight 4/4 time, finally crescendoing in a loud, climactic buildup, and a ragged scream from Jeff that tapers seamlessly back into the jazz feel.

The first stanzas tell us so much about the author:

I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm This body will never be safe from harm Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal Touch my skin to keep me whole

Oh, if only you’d come back to me If you laid at my side I wouldn’t need no mojo pin To keep me satisfied

Here we find a vividly lovelorn artist who tends to compose from the subconscious (as with many of his original songs, “Mojo Pin” was inspired by a dream he had had) has already begun confronting his mortality, equates love with addiction like so many troubadours before him (“mojo pin” is a euphemism for a shot of heroin, which, inspired in part by his father, Jeff used for a short time during the tour in support of Grace), and feels hopelessly separated from it all, with a heightened sense of longing that can’t help but garner the listener’s sympathies.

The title track picks up the thread in more ways than one; along with “Mojo Pin” it is the second of two pre-Sony songwriting collaborations with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—as part of his short-lived Gods and Monsters project (that’s Lucas’s guitar-noodle wizardry on both). And with lines like “Oh, drink a bit of wine––we both might go tomorrow,” it ups the mortality-as-enabler-and-aphrodisiac ante.

With its churning 6/8 groove, and with Jeff starting the song in typical fashion––toward the bottom of his discernable vocal range (D3), “Grace” culminates cathartically on a sustained, heavily vibrato’d, full-chest E5 bad-assedly blasting from his manic larynx and also marks the first of several ominous allusions to being harmed by water (“…And I feel them drown my name…”).

“Last Goodbye” was supposed to be the big first single. It even got an MTV video treatment (just look at his dour expression as he and the exhausted band take a precious day off from a European tour to do this exorbitantly expensive production of a compromised artistic concept in a despised medium), but with no real chorus to speak of, its chart success was modest at best. A Delta blues slide glides across an open-tuned electric 12-string guitar before dropping into a mid-tempo dance groove and a lyric full of bittersweet memories of a failed relationship with an older woman in L.A.

Not only was Jeff a bit shorthanded when it came to filling an entire 52-minute album with originals, but it also would have been a shame not to round out the running order with some well-chosen and interpreted covers in emulation of the intimate immediacy of Jeff’s Sin-é days. The first of these appearing on Grace is “Lilac Wine,” a torch-song standard written by James Shelton and adopted by Nina Simone. Jeff gives the distant-lover-as-intoxicant lyrics the hyper-emotive treatment, with perfectly sustained vibrato on the drawn-out notes and with his voice occasionally breaking into a heartrending sob, especially on the line, “…Isn’t that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?”

“Lilac Wine” is a significant indication of the barely fathomable depth of Jeff’s––and by extension, the band’s––versatility and their ability to do exactly right by the artist and repertoire (it’s difficult, in that sense, to listen to any of Tim’s records without taking umbrage with the musicians in the various band incarnations smothering Tim’s voice and stepping all over his 12-string guitar with their ego-fulfilling and poorly––if at all––thought-out parts).

“So Real” represents not only the successful search for a second guitarist, but also a tenacious battle fought and won against Columbia for the very soul of the album.

Michael Tighe, a mutual friend of Jeff and his ex Rebecca Moore (the one he had met and fallen in love with at the Tim tribute, and whom “Grace”s lyrics supposedly feature) joined the band on second guitar after most of the work on the album had been completed, and he brought an intriguing set of chord changes with him. When it came time to record B-sides and possible non-album singles (a cover of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, which, to Sony’s consternation would often stretch out to 15 or 20 minutes in concert, was also laid down), Tighe’s progressions, which were inordinately sophisticated considering he hadn’t been playing guitar for very long, were dusted off, tracked with engineer Cliff Norrell, and Jeff did the lead vocal in one take after a last-minute walk to finish the lyric.

Distinguished by the verses’ seamless changes in meter (back and forth from duple to triple time), its by-now standard mélange of tragic-romantic imagery in the lyrics (“I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” and the foreboding “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under…”), another wildly climactic E5 at the end, and a massive chorus hook, the song fit Jeff’s MO––accessible innovation and wide-amplitude expression––perfectly.

So much so that it quickly shed its B-side status and usurped a coveted spot on the record from another, highly contested original: The excessively personal and harsh “Forget Her,” which in retrospect would have been the sole manifestation of irony on the album. Jeff was justifiably dissatisfied with this disingenuously caustic 12/8 blues-pop dirge waltz he had allegedly penned about the aforementioned, hapless Moore, upon whom the lyric displaced Jeff’s own culpability for the relationship’s dissolution. But the label was head over heels with it, as the song’s melodramatic, Michael Bolton-esque chorus made it the one and only potential crossover smash in their minds. Columbia exec Don Ienner, who was essentially Jeff’s boss, tried everything short of bribery to futilely sweet-talk Jeff into keeping it on the album, which, in itself, was a tangible reason for Jeff to dig in, though he also feared that the slightly smarmy song would be a one-way ticket to One-Hit-Wonder-ville. As it turned out, “So Real”s chorus was hookier anyway, enough to warrant its own video treatment, though its subsequent commercial impact was also negligible.

A plaintive sigh kicks off what is now widely regarded as the definitive recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the second cover of the album, performed solo and glued together from multiple takes into a solemn paean to the ecstatic pain of long-term relationships. Inspired by John Cale’s 1991 reading, Jeff sticks to the ultra-romantic verses that find love and suffering linked in paradox, and the guitar tone and reverb augment the song’s church hymn vibe, almost as though it was recorded at a service or funeral. If you’ve heard this recording or noticed it in myriad movies and TV shows and haven’t cried at least once, you’re not human.

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” is a classic swinging blues adagio, perhaps the best known and most covered original on the album. Water and death are linked once again (“Looking out the door, I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners / Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water…”), and then Jeff abruptly breaks that train of thought to do right by Moore in recognizing his role in their breakup (“…Maybe I’m too young / To keep good love from going wrong”). Again, his vocal starts low and builds to another E5 at the end. In the hands of another artist, all of this would have sounded forced and over the top, but somehow Jeff was able to make it work. That’s his genius/madness; he himself was fully dilated and committed in a way that wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but damn, did it make for visceral listening.

“Corpus Christi Carol” reaches even further back than 1950’s “Lilac Wine” and completely blows the listener away with its expectation-defying display of musical depth. He becomes a bona fide classical singer here, exhibiting total immersion in the anonymous 16th-century lyric that the aptly named English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated into 1933’s Choral Variations for Mixed Voices (“A Boy Was Born”), Op. 3, finally arriving at Jeff’s adolescent ears through the version for high voice recorded by Janet Baker in 1967. Jeff completely inhabits the allegory of a bedridden, Christ-like knight endlessly bleeding, witnessed by love and the purity of his cause, with the empathic delicacy that was already his trademark. The stark arrangement for electric guitar and scant overdubs is superbly matched by the lamenting vocal, which ends on a ghostly, falsetto’d E5 that is utterly cathartic in its climactic glory.

Jeff wanted to make an album that compelled rock fans to forget about Zeppelin II, and “Eternal Life” delivers on the heavier side of that promise. Written during his time in L.A., the creepy intro stops on a dime before a bludgeoning, yet highly danceable groove drops in and a reactive lyric confronts applicable listeners to wake up and smell the mortal coffee:

Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red-glitter coffin, man––just need one last nail While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names…

Racist everyman, what have you done? Man, you made a killer of your unborn son Oh, crown my fear your king at the point of a gun All I want to do is love everyone…

There’s no time for hatred––only questions What is love, where is happiness What is alive, where is peace? When will I find the strength to bring me release?

With distorted bass as well as guitar alongside complementary strings and a killer groove featuring a highly effective, accelerating hi-hat pattern from Johnson on the verses, the song successfully proselytizes for universally incontestable causes, and reinforces Jeff’s projected mythology as a doomed soul whose seemingly relished fate awaits him sooner rather than later.

“Dream Brother” may be the last song on the album, but it was the very first idea Jeff and the band had worked up together. At the risk of overusing the word, and just like the album as a whole, it is haunting from start to finish, with a droney, string-cranking intro giving way to an eastern-inflected guitar motif. Jeff’s more static but no less sublime vocal melody goes beyond complementary; it builds tension by hanging on or around the fifth for most of the verse stanzas before resolving to the tonic on the last note of the phrase. Grondahl’s bass line, as with all his work on the album, is a sublime treat; here we find him working his way through the exotic Phrygian mode, recasting the guitar parts into a harmonically complex, emotionally compelling accompaniment that perfectly underpins the vocal.

The song features another penned-and-sung-at-the-last-possible-minute lyric, the chorus of which admonishes dear L.A. friend Chris Dowd (of Fishbone) not to abandon his new family like Tim had Jeff and Mary: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old / Don’t be like the one who left behind his name / ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine / And nobody ever came.” Grace’s only allusion to Jeff’s father builds in intensity to an instrumental bridge with wordless Qawwali wailings that are utterly bone chilling in their echoing-into-eternity saturation. The album’s final line puts an ominous capstone on the pyramid of the untimely-death-by-water preoccupation: “Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over…”

PART TWO

From ’94 to ’96, both solo and with the band, Jeff Buckley toured the world and elsewhere. Those two years were highly transformative; he met and/or was lauded by so many of his personal heroes (including Zeppelin’s Page and Plant, Paul and Linda McCartney, U2’s Bono and The Edge, David Bowie, and he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, who had covered Tim’s “Song to the Siren” [for aural proof of the romance, go to YouTube and check out their unfinished, embarrassingly smitten PDA duet on “All Flowers in Time”]), picked up an all but unshakeable smoking habit as a late-blooming extension of delayed formative-year rebellion and as a temporary, self-harming relief from the stresses of touring and just-shy-of-A-list fame (he managed to make People magazine’s 50 most beautiful list in May of ’95, which mostly appalled him, and also had an eye-opening night out with Courtney Love), turned down numerous primetime opportunities—SNL, Letterman, and acting roles and commercial placements—in favor of “underground” platforms like MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and was constantly at odds with his record label.

Australia and France embraced him like a returning hero, with the latter country’s Académie Charles Cros presenting Jeff with the rarely-awarded-to-an-American Grand Prix International Du Disque in honor of Grace on April 13, 1995 (two live shows, the second representing a career peak, were recorded during a French leg of the tour and later released as 1995’s Live at the Bataclan EP and 2001’s Live à l’Olympia).

The tank ran dry on March 1, 1996, which marked not only the final date of a hastily booked Australian/New Zealand tour to capitalize on Jeff’s surging popularity there and subsequently the last in official support of Grace, but also the final show with percussionist Matt Johnson, who had reached his hard limit with the band leader’s exacerbated lifestyle excesses and reckless behavior, not to mention Jeff’s escalating hazing of him.

Drummerless and exhausted, a different Jeff Buckley returned to a different New York. Though it suited his dysfunctionally nomadic, reactively noncommittal spirit, touring is not conducive to one’s mental or physical well-being nor is any level of fame, which is unfortunately what moves the units at the cost of anonymous normalcy. As a result, Jeff could no longer frequent any of his old haunts without being recognized and approached by strangers who thought they knew and deserved a piece of him beyond his timeless music. But then even his friends couldn’t help but feel jilted in their wanting a less ephemeral friendship with him, as he made them feel like the undeniably corroborated center of the universe when he was around, having given of himself interpersonally as completely and unadvisedly as he did in his music.

With inchoate fame now cutting him off from his usual decompression options, Jeff couldn’t recharge his psychic batteries. That coupled with the fact that Columbia and the press had been persistently hounding him regarding a follow-up to Grace piled even more pressure on the stress heap, further hampering his creative process and making The Big Apple taste more of the cyanide within the seeds than the once novel fruit of clandestine self-discovery.

There’s an industry saying: a recording artist has their entire life to make the first album and six months to make the second. Already no stranger to writer’s block under normal circumstances (he was inherently a better interpreter than a composer and understandably loath to commit to locked-in versions of anything), Jeff found himself hitting the creative wall in the midst of his increasingly stifling paradigm. The new songs were coming, albeit more slowly than everyone preferred, and in a different, more current vein than Grace. Having kept an ever-vigilant ear to the cultural ground, Jeff had met the Grifters and the Dambuilders while on tour, gaining a new love interest—Joan Wasser, to whom he related early on that he was going to die young—from the latter band and befriended Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think, and their contemporary alternative rock vibes ignited a light bulb over Jeff’s head, giving him the inspiration to pursue a rawer sound, much as Cobain had for Nevermind’s 1993 follow-up—In Utero.

It wasn’t necessarily Sony’s cup of tea. Though the label was by no means dead-set on putting out Son of Grace, they were a bit befuddled by the significant shift in musical mores away from the classic heritage artist sound toward the aural marriage of the Smiths and Soundgarden evident in the newer material. His sagacious selection of classic solo repertoire, and Grace by extension, had gotten Jeff’s foot in the door, as their sophisticated old-school values were arguably a premeditated affectation on Jeff’s part to woo the industry’s boho Boomer gatekeepers into signing and unconditionally supporting him. Now that he was more or less ensconced on the inside, and having gained more than a little leverage from all the hard work of the past year and a half, Jeff wanted to change things up to reflect more of what he’d been listening to and writing as an artist of his own generation. Though jumping high through Jeff’s hoops was by now second nature, Columbia was nevertheless befuddled.

This vexation next manifested as bewilderment over the choice of legendary Television alum Tom Verlaine (RIP) to aid and abet his alt-rock vision as the inexperienced coproducer for the second album. No one at Sony thought Verlaine was the right man for the job; they would just as soon have gone with Andy Wallace again rather than someone who, as with Grondahl, Johnson, and Tighe, didn’t have a track record to speak of. Whether or not Jeff’s choice was ill informed was irrelevant; it became his new crusade against the label, a pyrrhic war waged solely on the principle of getting his way even if it ended up biting him in the ass.

Columbia green-lit some bet-hedging recording with Verlaine to humor Jeff, but also to surreptitiously gather leverage as a failed, debt-enlarging investment, as the odds were slim that he could pull another rabbit out of his hat within the limited, impossible-for-Jeff parameters. Two brief as they were dissatisfying sessions occurred at various New York studios in 1996 and then a third at Memphis’s Easley McCain studios with Johnson’s permanent replacement, Parker Kindred, in early 1997. Jeff had become interested in recording at Easley through Grifters guitarist and Memphis resident Dave Shouse, and in relocating to that hallowed town for its legendary status in the history of blues and rock ‘n roll, and yet also as an escape from the lost anonymity, label pressure, and detrimental distractions of New York.

Jeff began striving for—and was at least able to temporarily reclaim—some semblance of a normal life in Memphis; he settled in at 91 Rembert Street, where he could often be found lying in the overgrown grass of his front yard, staked out all the good local restaurants, got a Sin-é-reminiscent Monday night residency at a downtown venue called Barrister’s, proposed marriage to Joan Wasser, and spent time with local friends who didn’t treat him like a rock star. At the time of his death, and as this evidence indicates, Jeff was trying to settle down, but he also felt ready to finally nail the landing on the second album, which he earnestly hoped would not only eclipse Grace but would frighten people as well. He was also noticeably uneasy.

The iteration of what was going to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk that came out almost too soon in May of 1998, not the barely attainable one Jeff would have overworked himself to complete had he lived, is the version the label should have agreed to put out had he been willing and able to play the long game. Though disc 2, with the exception of “Haven’t You Heard” and the cover of “Satisfied Mind,” is mainly for diehards (it contains sloppily recorded and produced home recordings that only hint at greatness, as well as superfluous original mixes of select disc 1 material), the ten Verlaine tracks are nothing to scoff at. In fact, the minimally but still excellently arranged and produced songs not only sound surprisingly finished, but would have also found Jeff paving the way for the future of alternative rock/pop in a manner that was more in touch with the times but still rang true to Jeff’s old-school tragic-romantic sophistication. Hindsight finds these recordings nothing to be ashamed of, the natural, expectation-managing and yet still promise-fulfilling continuation of Jeff’s artistic journey, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—agree with that assessment (the tracks probably could have used just a little more tightening up… At the very least, and as it stands, disc 1 of My Sweetheart the Drunk could have been a highly respectable and acceptable “sophomore flop”). Jeff would have had to ease up on the malignant perfectionism had he lived, and in that light it both does and doesn’t seem strange that he continued massaging these recordings—with additional overdubs and polishing occurring at Easley after the band’s return to New York—despite his clearly declared intention to abandon what he had already recorded, concede defeat regarding Verlaine (who urged Jeff to erase the tapes), and start from scratch with Andy Wallace.

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk has plenty of wide-amplitude thrills (“Vancouver,” which started life as an instrumental break on the Grace tour, now featured a soaring vocal that found him suddenly clued in to the detriments of giving too much of himself: “I need to be alone / To heal this bleeding stone…”), lots of tragic-romantic flair (the beautiful, minimally orchestrated ballads “Morning Theft” and “Opened Once,” the swinging caveat “Witches Rave,” and the macabre, “Come as You Are”-ish “Nightmares by the Sea” are by turns self-castigating and wary), more struggle over suitable repertoire (Jeff harbored hypocritical paranoia that the set-apart, slinky R&B slow-jam, “Everybody Here Wants You�� would be chosen as a single against his wishes [it was], even though the song is an instant classic, and the album could have done without the cover of the Nymphs’ “Yard of Blonde Girls,” though he didn’t trust Columbia to agree), two Qawwali nods (the mantra jam “New Year’s Prayer”, and the utterly harrowing “You And I”), and plenty of fodder for precognition-of-untimely-death speculators (“Stay with me under these waves tonight / Be free for once in your life tonight…” from “Nightmares By The Sea”, and “Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild…” from the goosebump-evincing “You And I”).

**************

Recording contracts have always been a Faustian bargain for the artist, especially at the onset, when it is weighted heavily in the card-holding label’s favor. Art and commerce often meet in the cultural-industrial ring as irreconcilable spouses who stay together for the kids, with the artist wanting to make a unique, challenging, and hopefully timeless statement for theirs and successive generations, and the label needing to make a profit, not lose their shirt, or just break even. The latter often requires innocuous music that has been dumbed down or otherwise compromised for mass consumption, usually the antithesis of the former. The artist, though, according to the standard contract they signed, is legally beholden to the label, which owns the master recordings and the right to exploit them until such a time, often years or even decades down the road, when the artist has gained enough cachet through account-balancing sales and accumulated cultural pertinence to renegotiate the contract into a more equitable form that befits their too-hard-earned stature. As with life in general, and back when labels were still labels, one had to play a patient, penitent, somewhat circumspect long game, with eyes intent on the future prize in order to succeed as a recording and touring artist, and to eventually win out over the label.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, now in or on the cusp of their 80s respectively, managed to successfully undergo and even control their fame-reconciling heritage artist transformations and break through to the other side. Jeff Buckley, who realized too late and too far out to sea that he had given up essential access to a normal life, and whose DNA and hardship-forged personality was geared for fleeting, heightened moments of impulsive escape and unrealistic levels of emotional outpouring during which there was no tomorrow, did not. After an itinerant childhood in a chaotic, single-parent household, neither of which allowed him any bonded, bolstering long-term friendships or gave him the necessary emotional support to instill enough confidence to enable him to pace, self-nurture, and recharge as an adult, Jeff was predestined for burnout. Add to this the looming legacy of his father’s similarly self-inflicted and untimely doom, the demoralizing fiscal and creative debt to—and incongruent association with—a major label, and pervasive generational nihilism, and you have the recipe for a death by misadventure.

The world generally eats pure-heart-on-sleeve empaths like Jeff Buckley for breakfast, and just like house-always-wins Vegas casinos, record labels are particularly good at exploiting, devouring, and then remorselessly shitting out their charges no matter how vigilant the artist may have been to the contrary. In Jeff and Columbia’s case, it’s difficult to pick a winner; dying got him out of both having to deliver on a second album and pay off his way-in-the-red recoupable, but his absence-generated popularity and Sony’s dogged determination to monetize ample vault caches in the aftermath may have balanced the ledger by now anyway. Either way you slice it, and for what it’s worth, the artist is gone, and Columbia is a tawdry shadow of its former self, but Jeff’s timeless music remains.

Trying to imagine how Jeff would have navigated the post-5/29/97 waters is not challenging, considering the comprehensive changes already in motion that would herald not only the end of his generation’s all-too-brief moment in the sun, but also the beginning of the end of the record industry as he had known it. Jeff probably would have seen Sony’s support slowly dwindle, becoming even more isolated until his contract came up for renewal and he was then most likely dropped from the label, as its various employee archetypes, which were industry-wide revolving doors, would have inevitably jumped ship for higher positions elsewhere. This exodus would have severed nurtured—and nurturing—connections, leaving Jeff in the hands of green, bottom-line-focused reps that had had nothing to do with scouting or signing him and were subsequently less inclined to offer the kind of largesse and preferential treatment to which he had been accustomed.

A new generation was also coming of age, one that sought shallower, more effervescent thrills to match their innate, well-nurtured ebullience. Soundgarden, Jeff’s now fellow-in-untimely-death friend Chris Cornell’s band, which was the first of the Seattle grunge era to sign to a major label, broke up almost on cue that year. Groups like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, and solo artists like Brittney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Christina Aguilera were prepared to replace grunge’s locked-up engine in the zeitgeist car, with already emergent, transitionally mellower sounds from the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, Phish, Spin Doctors, and Hootie and the Blowfish having paved the way. Autotune was introduced that year, with computer-based digital recording having begun its ascendant journey to becoming the analog-supplanting, music-devaluing standard.

Within a decade, for better and worse, the industry as Jeff knew it would no longer exist, nor would the focus on organically profound music on which he had been brought up and of which he had become a part. With no plan B (he endearingly applied for what would have been a meagerly if at all remunerated position at the Memphis zoo’s butterfly exhibit), Jeff would have been hard-pressed to maintain a subsistent income—let alone pay down his debt to Columbia—inside or outside the new, less tolerant manifestation of the industry, which would have scoffed derisively and dismissively at his to-date album sales. And he probably would have recoiled from the rising popularity of bubblegum pop and nü-metal buffoonery in disgust.

Kurt Cobain once said he wished he had paced himself better, played more of a long game by holding back some of Nevermind’s material for subsequent albums, and a general feeling persists that Jeff had similarly neglected any thought of the future by putting everything he had into Grace, and there wasn’t enough left to create something new to match its grandeur, at least not within his unsustainable paradigm. It seems as though he was done, that his music’s true moment in the sun could only begin after he had disappeared somehow. Amassing cachet would have to rely on his premature-demise-as-career-move absence, the removal of his chronic perfectionism that allowed Sony to put out whatever was in the vaults without his opposition (albeit in full, duly diligent cooperation with next-of-kin trustee, supposed legacy preserver / promoter, and posthumous stage mother Mary), and amassing fin de siècle malaise that would find solace in Grace. But Jeff’s death feels wrong as well, redolent of the same sense of tragedy as JFK’s assassination, as if we had truly lost one of the good ones, and the subsequent sensation of all hope for a fair and just future having been annihilated in a flash, regardless of whether or not either of them actually deserved that idolization.

The grief-sourced application of culpability gets complicated when someone who has deeply affected strangers and loved ones alike is directly responsible for their own death, but it can’t exactly be called a suicide. And though we have plenty of lyrical and anecdotal evidence that could easily be construed as self-fulfilling prophecy (like Cobain, Jeff had consistently and insistently telegraphed his denouement), it is otherwise difficult to substantiate rumors that Jeff had been dreaming of his demise just weeks—if not longer—beforehand. But as with the cinematic portrayal of Mozart obsessively composing what would become his own requiem in Amadeus, if someone persistently gives thought and voice to fatal intent, walks that fine line long enough, the border between this world and the next will begin to blur and smudge until it finally wears thin enough for one to cross over without even noticing. Freud may have said it best: “Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

Unlike influencee Rufus Wainwright, whose songs are also emotive but restrained in comparison, Jeff never developed the necessary filters to mitigate the harmful aspects of his heightened sensitivity and permeability, preferring instead to empty his emotional ballast onstage night after night to the adulation of interchangeable, undemanding strangers (though some of them often clamored annoyingly for renditions of Tim’s songs), as if each show were his last (which he had hypocritically accused Tim of in a 1993 interview). In all of Jeff’s 30 years, he had never learned the kind of self-love that would awaken and bolster the basic long-term survival instincts to enable him to throw off the chains of his deeply ingrained fatalism. With his pallid, fey appearance, alluring gender-balanced charisma, heart-rending empathy, unregulated outflow of emotional energy, and foolhardily unshielded vulnerability, he seemed to many as though he was marked for an early end no matter what evasive action he might’ve taken.

Though Jeff had been exhibiting unstable, borderline bipolar behavior in the weeks prior to his drowning, he didn’t consciously intend to die that night (a nearby witness apparently heard a single cry for help), but his willful ignorance of the dangers of his impulsive and fatalistic nature and the whimsical flouting of the perils of his immediate surroundings would be the co-conspirators of his mortal undoing.

Fully clothed at twilight, Jeff waded backward into a notoriously dangerous river despite a lifetime aversion to water—and in denial of all the overt signals his subconscious and conscious had sent him. Doing the recently learned backstroke to the braggadocio boom-box strains of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in a roiling river all but universally avoided for its severe, passing-boat-generated undercurrents was supposed to be a spontaneous trip to and from the edge to take his mind off of life’s untenable pressures for a short while. But instead, and to his torch-carrying fans’, friends’, and family’s ongoing bereavement, it lasted forever.

**************

England’s annual Meltdown Festival consists of a series of concerts given over several days by contemporary artists and is curated by a celebrity participant with an ear toward the high-minded performance of unconventional repertoire. Jeff was invited by 1995’s chosen Master of Ceremonies—Elvis Costello—to take part on July 1, which serendipitously coincided with that year’s European tour in support of Grace, though it was inconveniently sandwiched between concert dates across the channel.

Along with collaborations in mixed ensembles comprised of co-billed artists, Jeff did a four-song solo set that featured the apropos “Corpus Christi Carol” (the song that had originally piqued Costello’s interest), Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman,” and “Grace.”

He began with an absolutely devastating rendition of “Dido’s Lament,” which Costello had personally requested from the setting of Dido and Aeneas by 16th century British composer Henry Purcell. Jeff was indistinguishable from a fully trained, operatic countertenor as he delivered the moribund lines with innate familiarity:

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me On thy bosom let me rest More I would, but Death invades me Death is now a welcome guest

When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me, but oh, forget my fate

Costello came out after the last of the four songs and accompanying ovation had died down and following some gracious comments recognizing the young artist’s overflowing docket, he essentially summed up Jeff’s contribution—and the debt of gratitude music owes him—with his closing salutation that now stands as a fitting epitaph:

“He gave everything. Thanks, Jeff.”

#jeff buckley #jeffbuckley #simeon flick #san diego troubadour #march 2023

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thesinglesjukebox · 3 months

Text

SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR - "MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR" (2001) (2024)

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23 years on and this groove's still got some life in it...

[7.11]

Thomas Inskeep: Sophie Ellis-Bextor should've been the next Kylie — and for a couple years, almost was. Her 2001 debut album Read My Lips spun off a trio of top 3 singles in the UK, including this one, which has over time become her true classic. Dua Lipa's entire career was birthed in this single, the dictionary definition of ebullient dance-pop. (It's fitting that Lipa's "Houdini" is currently the most-played song on UK radio as this single is re-ascendant.) SEB has never gone anywhere: she's still making music, touring (based on her 2022 Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Kitchen Disco (Live at the London Palladium), she still sounds great), and is now a DJ on BBC Radio 2. She just didn't become the massive pop star she deserved to be. Now, thanks to its placement in a climactic scene in Saltburn, her greatest single is getting its flowers, climbing back up to #2 in the UK (so far — my fingers are crossed it can make it that final notch higher). "Dancefloor" still sounds fresh, certainly fresher than the glut of '90s-sampling dance-pop dominating the UK charts. This single sparkles, SEB giving a knowing wink as she sings, especially on the line "gonna burn this goddamn house right down." She knows what she's doing here: making magic. [10]

Edward Okulicz: I bought this on single back in 2002, which tells you something (other than that I am old): it was an irresistible bit of sparkly disco radio pop back in the day. Move it forward or backwards a few years and it might have been an indie rock song for someone else, a filter house record, or (gulp) a Ronan Keating record. Fortunately that never occurred, and it's a delight to see a classic gain new fans from age groups and territories that didn't get it on saturation rotation. Part of it's the solid song by Gregg Alexander, who at his best was a master craftsman of a much-maligned form. Another part of it's the much nimbler, slinky production compared to the rest of his soft-rock oeuvre. And a very, very large part of it is the Debbie-Harry-but-English pose of Ellis-Bextor, too cool to do anything but be filmed dancing from the waist up while she stomps her heel into your eardrums. "Murder" really has everything — a catchy chorus, the tinniest guitar solo ever, hooks that fall as much off the words as the melody — and so is perfect for every occasion, even a movie I am never, ever going to see. [10]

Alfred Soto: Like the Pet Shop Boys' "Rent," waaayyyy too good for Saltburn — perhaps Emerald Fennell thought their incandescence would rub off on her as if it were glitter. Part of a vanished climate of French house-inspired crossover pop like Kylie Minogue's "Love at First Sight," Sophie Ellis-Bextor presages Katy B's regular-person anonymity: she surveys the strings and rhythm guitar licks like a party hostess keeping an eye on the band while sipping her prosecco. [8]

Alex Clifton: I haven't seen Saltburn and frankly have no interest in it, but this film has led to the Sophie Ellis-Bextor renaissance which is a net good for society. "Murder on the Dancefloor" is just brilliantly composed and produced; it feels as fresh today as it did twenty years ago. There are so many thrilling little moments from Ellis-Bextor's vocal delivery: the way her voice curves into "about your kiiiiiind," the little rasp in "there may be others," the little trill of "dancefloor" in the bridge. I feel so biased writing this review because I've literally been listening to this song since I was a kid, but I'm so jazzed about "Murder" finally receiving the love it deserves. [10]

Ian Mathers: How can you not love pop music when it'll randomly do things like this, suddenly giving us a song to review from before the earliest days of the Jukebox, that is here purely because of its use in a movie that I have not seen but am informed was probably picked on the basis of Ellis-Bextor's plot arc in the music video. And if I'm not willing to go to bat for it quite as hard as I would for "Running Up That Hill," I did love "Murder on the Dancefloor" in 2001 and it still sounds great now. I don't find myself having any reaction more complicated than happiness at hearing it again and that particular joy of people liking something you like. [8]

Nortey Dowuona: If you told me this came out in 2021 and Emerald Fennell asked Sophie to use it in her movie set in 2001 because it was just that on point in depicting the time, I would agree. Then after taking out my phone, I'd be punched in the face and meekly give up my phone. Then, after watching you sprint into a nightclub, I'd immediately thank goodness you didn't ask for the passcode and run like hell for the closest subway. I am three stops from home before I remember this did not actually come out in 2021; there are other Sophie Ellis-Bextor songs and jailbreaking is a thing now. [10]

Leah Isobel: RIP Mark Fisher. You would've written a hell of a blog post about Saltburn. [7]

Mark Sinker: Necessary digression 1: heraldry as a science in Europe is roughly 900 years old, a bright and stylised easy-read guide, highly rule-bound and policed, to class and land and title — which is to say to material history (its jargon-field is still mostly words not otherwise used in the UK since the 14th century; even property law is less lousy with extinct Norman French terms). And like many very aged things, it has necessarily also passed through phases and fashions, as technologies of display arrive and depart. In fact the first inkling I had that I wasn’t going to get on with Saltburn was the typeface chosen for the title on-screen at the outset. It’s a font with a fairly specific ill-set ungainliness to it: it wants to have the weight of "pleasingly and weirdly old; not how we do things now," but it might just as well be some off-the-peg super-modern studio confection — or even (though I slightly doubt this) something custom-fashioned purely for the film. There’s no discernible care to the choice. Necessary digression 2: back in the late '70s when Peter Saville was busily and insouciantly borrowing from this or that actual-real document or design, of such-and-such era, part of the point was the severity of the decontextualisation — except there was a rigour to the carelessness. The item was being supplied with an iconicity (the very word) pulling you in towards whatever the item was that Factory Records was then placing on the market. The surface glamour of the original was to be funneled through in such a way that its weight amplified only the new relationship. In fact (in its stylised easy-read way) Saville’s work was ruthlessly the opposite of heraldry, so very good at managing the ambient melancholy that suffuses the wider Factory moment; all the blocks and counterspells necessary to conjure here beyond the end of creative time as the context for the music to have presence. Anyway, long story short (lol) Saltburn – which would love to believe it has accessed the aura, for example, of the cover of New Order’s Technique — is attempting to juggle the same double burden. It wants to conjure a play between the decontextualised pull of 24-hour-party-people hedonism and the real ineluctable unremovable weight of actual history and actual class and actual land and actual title. Except for its story to work it needs both dimensions (hedonism and weight; heraldry and careless scribble) to register, as Saville absolutely didn’t. No block, no counterspells, nothing to dampen the disturbances — so when poor old Sophie EB’s voice and poise are scalpeled out of their 20-year-old chart context and abruptly c/p-ed into whichever late-stage scene it is, well, here they are, as a clumsy synopsis (calculation, side-eye, dancing, death) the structure really shouldn’t require, in a role the song is the wrong mood (a faintly gauche trifle, a chirpy hustle) to deliver. The movie never works out where it gets its deep reveal from, or what shape its politics are (if politics is even a useful word here). Ill-set ungainliness all over again: the carelessness floods back into the borrowed adornment, and breaks it in pieces. I don’t even love this song that much but I hate how it gets what value it has so gracelessly driven out of it. [2]

Jacob Satter: At the risk of killing the groove, this is a pretty boring choice for a manufactured revival track. Call me back when the kids discover "It's In Our Hands." [4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I'm glad everyone's having fun here but the more I try to enjoy this — either on its own terms or as an icon of nostalgia — I get nothing. Unremarkable in any year. [4]

Lauren Gilbert: It was a [10] in 2001, it's still a [10] now. [10]

Katherine St. Asaph: The thing about it being 2024 is that in the intervening 20-plus years since "Murder on the Dancefloor" came out, approximately ninety million more disco-revival tracks came out. Some of them are by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, even. And so many of those tracks are smooth where this is stiff, magisterial where this is timid (and not in a winsome Katy B kind of way; Katy got better arrangements), charged where this is inert and just generally unmurderous. It's actually startling how inessential this sounds by comparison. [3]

Oliver Maier: Even as a youth, before my brain was burdened with indulgent critical vocabulary, I felt like this song just didn't work. I can't pin down whether "Murder" is knowingly a little chintzy (dare I say camp?) or if it's just cheap tat trying sincerely to sound boutique. Benefit of the doubt granted or not, Ellis-Bextor sounds like she's doing karaoke off the sofa. [4]

Michael Hong: When Ellis-Bextor pauses, it's easy, like a quick and graceful end to a conversation rather than the expectant response to her more spirited word choice. She's committed to this casualness, easily slipping away at the hint of a faux pas, which makes the occasional lingering word more charming. "About your kind," she sings, as if looking you up and down, wondering if she's got it wrong this time; the word "others" is trailed as if she's daring you to eliminate the competition. In that way, "you better not kill the groove," delivered with such nonchalance, becomes a fervid instruction. [7]

Will Adams: It's cute, Sophie is ever-charming, but there's real problem when you've got songs in your catalog with titles like "Bittersweet" and "Heartbreak Make Me a Dancer" that offer way more palpable drama than the one with the word "Murder." [5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Every other line is threatening here. “Stay another song,” “Don’t think you’ll get away,” “You better not kill the groove.” Sophie Ellis-Bextor isn’t demanding fear, though. That’s what makes “Murder on the Dancefloor” so irresistible: she sounds like a friend, albeit one who’s deathly serious about having a good time. When you hear her, you believe it can be this good for you too. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: Wow. They were allowed to make these slick disco-pop reimaginings with actual guitar solos back then? We must retvrn. [8]

Tara Hillegeist: It feels like a time capsule from another era in pop music entirely, because it is. There was a time when Ellis-Bextor's stately, imperial, nigh-inhuman precision of a delivery felt like nothing so much as the edifice within which pop star royalty could be crowned, particularly in the world of UK pop; it's still hard, even now, to deny the simple pleasures of someone who knows what her job is and then executes it flawlessly. But it's been over two decades since this song originally bowed, and it must be said that it was the impact of songs like, yes, "Murder" itself that raised pop music's skill floor high enough that such icy professionalism now feels like the most tiresome part of it — Dua Lipa does this regularly, after all, and with equal anonymity. No, what saves it, and ensures the song remains nothing so much as a delightful diversion (conditions of its resurgence be damned, I say), are the sampled whoops that come in beneath the guitar solo; notwithstanding that such a slice of controlled disco can credit itself with having a guitar solo to begin with, but the canned hype is such a stupendously goofy touch. It humanizes the song instantly, stripping the archness of its artifice aside to reveal the awkward smile underneath. The moment passes, of course. But the smile lingers. [7]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: I've been waiting 20+ years for an opportunity to issue a dissertation on the songwriting genius of Gregg Alexander and by god am I ready. Though it's hard to imagine it in a different form, "Murder on the Dancefloor" was apparently a cast-off single for Alexander's New Radicals debut, replaced by the equally glorious "You Get What You Give" — like, imagine being such a talented songwriter that you can just cast off a song like this, knowing you've got an equally great one to replace it with! "Murder on the Dancefloor" is just perfection in Ellis-Bextor's hands, with a galaxy of terrific choices in its production to go along with the amazing melodic structure. I still can't help but burst out laughing at the initial vocal hit in the intro on occasion, a perfect, delicately harmonized coo of "Murder!," cutting through the disco instrumental setup occurring all around. It's as great a moment of pop songwriting as I'm aware of — setting the expectation of the song's vibe from the outset. Ellis-Bextor's lyrics are outstanding, cleverly arch but not too shiny, in the thick of it yet also gliding past suavely. The song is incredibly detailed, a carefully calibrated piece — it lopes by with a relaxed stride rather than a reckless dash, a well-tailored Savile Row suit as opposed to an H&M tunic, cut to the millimeter. Yet it's also very clearly of the disco, built for singing along, difficult to avoid dancing to when it comes on. It turns on its heel at moments' notice, with layers of melody playing off each other throughout. Matt Rowe's efforts in production also deserve notice — this song sounds great, so distinctive that it is still eminently listenable 23 years on. I honestly have not a single thing to criticize about "Murder on the Dancefloor," and it's been a long time that I've considered it to be one of the truly great pop songs of my lifetime. It feels like incredibly just desserts to see it garnering so much praise now. [10]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#sophie ellis-bextor #saltburn #music #pop #pop music #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

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thomasberglund9 · 1 year

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Lines from the tune Road song by Wes Montgomery in this guitar lick.

Pdf files with and without notations at Patreon, link below.

https://www.patreon.com/thomasberglund

#jazz guitar #jazz lick #guitar licks #wes montgomery #road song #guitar lessons #jazz guitar lick #guitar #jazz #jazz standard

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tylomusic18 · 1 year

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Warming up with some Charlie Parker

Tune: 'No Problem'

#music live performance fusionjazz jazz guitar licks guitarlicks #music love hiphop rap art musician artist musica instagood singer instagram dj follow rock like dance guitar s

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guitarguitarworld · 1 year

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3 alternate picking jazz fusion guitar licks

3 Mid Tempo Acoustic jazz fusion licks

CLICK SUBSCRIBE! 3 alternate picking jazz fusion guitar licks Please watch video above for detailed analysis: Hi Guys, Today we have 3 mid tempo 130-150 Bpm alternate picking jazz fusion cadence guitar lines. They all employ the same principles of barring, a bit of scale and arpeggio. This first line starts on an “Upstroke” alternate picking on the up beat. This in turn will let us start on…

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#3 licks #alternate #arpeggios #Examples #explained #fast tempo #fusion #guitar #how to #improvisation #jazz #lesson #melodic minor #picking #scales #speed

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littlemissthunderstorms · 7 months

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grinder smile, gasp

sub car era alex x fem reader

definitely one of the dirtiest things i’ve written. sub alex enthusiasts arise!!! enjoooy!

———

you immediately felt soothed as you walked into your home. it was dark outside, the incandescent glow of scattered lamps and dim lights bringing a peaceful atmosphere. the faint sound of jazz drifted from the living room, making you smile.

you quickly shut the door behind you, shivering as a gust of cool autumn air entered the house upon the door closing. you knew your cheeks and nose were sure to be pink and rosy due to the nip the crisp air had.

setting your bag down and kicking off your boots, you quietly made your way to the living room. you carefully peeked through the doorframe to find alex sitting in his sleek chair in the corner, reading. his soft brown hair looked slightly messy and fluffy, the way you adored. his face was knitted in concentration, his white t shirt hugging his arms in a way that made your stomach swirl.

you checked the time on your watch. 11:30. you were unaware how late it was by the time you left work. was he up waiting for you? you felt a bit bad, knowing it was hard for him to go to sleep early without you there, but at the same time it was an adorable gesture.

the boys attention quickly redirected to you as you entered the room, his face melting into adoration as he saw you. you smiled at him, walking over to his chair. “hey.” you cooed, leaning down to press a tender kiss to his lips. alex kissed you back, cupping your cheek in his palm, finger tips entangled in your hair. you leaned into his touch, his hand warm against your cold face.

you looked down at alex, his honeyed eyes gazing lovingly up at you. “i missed you.” he mumbled. you brushed a stray hair out of his eyes, slowly running your fingers through his soft hair, a slight blush peaking through his cheeks. “i missed you too. m’ sorry i came home so late.”

“you’re perfectly fine.” he shook his head, putting a bookmark in his book. you nodded, eyes twinkling for him. once alex rid of his book, his hands found their way to your hips, guiding you to sit on his lap.

you followed his guide, thighs against his as you straddled him. alex wrapped his arm around your waist, stroking your hair soothingly as you nestled your face into the crook of his neck, breathing him in. he smelled devine, like musk and fresh laundry. you smiled, smelling the vanilla perfume that lingered from him wearing the shirt of his you had worn to bed the other night.

you leaned back, cupping his face in both of your hands as you kissed him languidly. his warm lips moved in tandem with yours, guitar string callused fingers coming up to grasp your jaw. the kiss was meant to be wholesome and sweet, but you couldn’t resist. you slid your tongue past his parted lips, sliding it against his own in a teasing manner. you slowly separated your lips from his, grazing your teeth against his plump lower lip as you did so.

the boy looked back at you, eyes glossed over, kneading your waist with one hand, a sign that he was eager for more. you moved one hand to scratch lightly at his scalp with your nails, making his eyes flutter shut momentarily. his lips parted and you took the chance, leaning forward to press your wet lips against his once more, licking into his mouth. alex gasped ever so slightly into your mouth, driving you wild.

you grinded your hips into his softly, eager to hear those pretty noises he made for you. you were surprised to feel his erection through his thin pajama pants, all you’d done is give him a couple kisses. just as you’d predicted, alex was needy, moaning into your mouth as you moved your hips against his.

you stilled your movements, his hand grasping your thigh as you pulled away from his lips, licking the strand of saliva that connected you two. you gazed at your boyfriend, his face was all flushed, lips parted and hair tousled. your hand traveled down to his neck, softly toying with his gold chain. you ran your other hand down his forearm, entangling your fingers in his once you reached his hand.

“you’re so pretty baby.” you cooed, watching how his chest rose and fell as he panted. leaning back, you shrugged your jacket off, discarding it somewhere on the floor behind you. alex gulped, you had an effect on him and he knew you were aware.

you felt his erection pressing against your thin tights from where your skirt rode up. alex’s hips lightly bucked up into yours, eager to relieve some of the ache. you lifted your hips, elicited a frustrated groan out of him. “shhh shh baby boy. don’t worry i’ll take care of you kay?” he squeezed his eyes shut, head falling back against the chair as he nodded.

“hey, hey. look at me alexander.” you grasped his jaw, making sure his gaze met yours. “what do you want hm? want me to ride you?” alex moaned at the thought, urgently nodding. “use your words.” you demanded. “you want mommy to ride you in this chair?” alex bit his lip, eyelids fluttering as need consumed him. he cleared his throat. “yes. please.” he stuttered, hands sliding up and down your sides in anticipation.

“atta boy.” you kissed his cheek. “m’ gonna ride you so good kay? you’ve had a long week, you deserve it.” you started to get up from his lap, his hands gripping your waist tighter, trying to keep you with him. “relax.” you grinned. “i just need to take my skirt and tights off, you take those pants off for me okay hon?”

alex quickly complied, sliding his pajama pants down his thighs and kicking them off onto the floor. once you were only in your t shirt and underwear you crawled into his lap again, squeezing his thighs with your own.

his gaze traveled down to your white underwear that adorned a dainty pale pink bow at the top. your core was already slick with arousal, seeping through your panties. alex would do anything to be at eye level with that bow right now, to pull those panties down your thighs and nudge his nose into your clit as his tounge melted against your heat, eating you out with a passion that made his head spin. however, he knew that you had different plans for now, and he was equally eager for what you had in store. he’d have to save that for the morning.

alex toyed with the hem of your shirt, looking up at you with pleading eyes. you nodded, allowing alex to throw your shirt onto the pile of all the other discarded garments. alex leaned forward, pressing kisses to the tops of your breasts that your bra pushed up.

you smiled, running your hand down his chest and then pushing back so that his back met the back of the chair. you trailed your hand down, pulling his aching length out of his boxers. alex gasped, the feeling of the cool metal of your rings on his sensitive cock making his eyes roll back. you ran your thumb across his tip, collecting his precum. with your other hand, you slid your panties to the side and aligned yourself with him.

alex’s fingers grasped your thighs and waist, already panting just staring at your dripping cunt. he was beyond desperate for you, doing everything to focus on his self control. slowly, you slid yourself down on him, taking a deep breath to calm the slight burn. it always took you a second to adjust to his size, but the burn soon turned into white hot pleasure. alex whimpered softly, hips writhing because of the way you took him so well, the way you felt so wet and hot and perfect around him.

you slowly rolled your hips, leaning forward to press your forehead to alex’s, feeling his soft breath against your mouth, watching the way his eyes squeezed shut momentarily. you lifted your hips, adjusting again as you sunk back down, the action causing alex to press his lips into the side of your face, nose nudging into your cheek.

you cupped his face as you continued your movements, leaning him back to admire the way he looked at you with those soft honey eyes. wisps of messy brown hair stuck out and clung to his forehead. he looked so adorable for you, whimpering and whining as you rode him.

you leaned forward, capturing his parted lips in yours, whispering against his mouth. “i know, you’re such a good boy. m’ gonna make you cum okay?” alex moaned into your mouth in response, hands gripping your thighs and waist. you sped up, grasping the collar of his shirt as you bounced on his lap, your thighs and hips meeting his every time you sunk down.

“fuck-“ you whimpered, his cock reaching spots that you weren’t even aware of. you rolled and bounced your hips in rhythm with his. “such a sweet boy, letting mommy ride you after she’s had a long day.” you panted, moaning and gasping as his tip hit your g-spot so perfectly.

alex loved the way you dirty talked him when you were in control, he loved the way it made his cock throb inside you, only increasing the volume of your moans. the boy squeezed his eyes shut, head falling back. “f-fuck momma i- im- m’ bout to cum.”

you felt your own release nearing, savoring the way the pressure built up in your lower stomach. “cum with me baby. that’s it.” your vision blurred as you came, the intensity overwhelming. you buried your face in the crook of his neck as he fucked you through it, gasping and whimpering when he came.

alex rubbed your back softly, panting as he came down. you leaned up, wiping tears from the boy’s cheeks and kissing his lips softly. “you’re fucking amazing.” he sighed, wincing as he pulled out of you. you smiled, lightly running your fingers through his hair. alex’s eyelids fluttered and closed, exhaustion consuming him.

you leaned forward, pressing feather light kisses to his cheeks and nose. “wanna get some sleep love?” you whispered, running your hand up and down his arm. the boy nodded, eyes swirling with sleepiness and adoration. you kissed him once more and reached to turn off the lamp that was by the chair, the moonlight sparkling more noticeably through the curtains in the dark.

“cmon, let’s get some rest”

———

#alex turner #arctic monkeys #alex turner x reader #humbug #alex turner fluff #alex turner one shot #suck it and see #tlsp #alex turner smut #thecaralex #the car era

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flowerboycaleb · 2 months

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february was a really good month for music!!! i enjoyed so many projects from both artists i've loved for a long time and some i haven't enjoyed in the past at all. there were a few disappointing ones too, one album in particular spawning some of the most irritating discourse in a long time, but i'm trying to look at the positives!! here are my thoughts on some of the most notable projects that dropped this month!!! to check out my thoughts on some of the songs that dropped this month click here!!! also feel free to follow me on rate your music and twitter <3

What Now - Brittany Howard

🥇 ALBUM OF THE MONTH

◇ genre: psychedelic soul

When Brittany Howard dropped her first solo record, Jaime, back in 2019, I was absolutely obsessed with it. The shift from the blues rock-centric sound of her other work to the world of psychedelic soul worked extremely well. However, as with most new music I was obsessed with during that time, it feels like it was so long ago. I think the pandemic made me sort of forget a lot of these albums I once loved. For some subconscious reason, I don't revisit many of the new records I loved from late 2019 to early 2020. Jaime was unfortunately one of them. When I heard this new album was on the way, I was excited and listened to like one of the singles, but nothing more. When I finally sat down to listen to What Now, it felt like meeting up with an old friend and hitting it off almost immediately.

The opener "Earth Sign" shook me to my core on my first listen. It's spacey, slow-building, but when Howard emphatically sings that third "out thereeee" in the third verse it acts like a call to arms for the drums to come booming in. Such a cool moment moment. The next track "I Don't" is one of the more straightforward psychedelic soul cuts on the album and it's so gorgeous. I can't get enough of it. The title track picks up the pace a bit and is almost funk rock. I adore Howard's fuzzy guitar on this song. It's probably also a good time to mention how the rest of the musicians on this project do an amazing job. "Another Day" and "Prove It to You" are really interesting detours into a more dance direction. They simultaneously sound out of place while also fitting right in. I would love to hear these sounds be explored further on future albums. The album's home stretch kicks off with "Samson" which might be Howard's most intimate moment from a musical standpoint. Very bare guitar parts, organ, and some saxophones peppered in. Stunningly beautiful. She immediately fires back up for "Patience" which features some of my favorite instrumentation across the whole record. Mixing together those funky basslines and guitar licks before shifting into some sweeping keyboards on the later half of the track. "Every Color in Blue" is a phenomenal final note. Again, mixing together some subtle jazz instrumentation with Howard's awe-inspiring vocals. You just have to hear this. I've listened to this album a ton since it dropped. I'm still uncovering new things I didn't appreciate on the last listen. Please don't let this album fly under your radar!!

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

SCRAPYARD - Quadeca

◇ genres: art pop, experimental hip hop, electronic

I'll be honest, I didn't know who Quadeca was before his last album I Didn't Mean to Haunt You. I learned after the fact that he was a YouTuber and that many were shocked he had made an album that good. The quality for "YouTuber music" is nearly in the dirt, but that record kind of pushed Quadeca out of the label of "YouTuber music." I enjoyed the album a good bit, although I found him to be a bit overhyped by many following its release. I don't know if that's where my lack of knowledge on Quadeca comes into play, but it's just how I felt. Then comes SCRAPYARD and I'm forced to eat the biggest crow ever. This new mixtape from Quadeca has him showcasing his range as not just a producer, but a rapper, lyricist, and multi-instrumentalist as well. Opener "Dustcutter" is an emo-rap track with elements of art pop mixed in and it's amazing. His exasperated, frantic delivery at various points throughout the track creates this very anxious tension that feels almost palpable. The next track, "A la carte" with brakence, picks up the pace a bit and the two work very well together. "Pretty Privilege" veers heavily into the art pop and it's so great. Hits pretty close to home as someone who has struggled with body image issues and Quadeca handles these themes in a tactful way. "Easier" shows another switch-up as he delves into some folktronica. He shows so much more depth as an artist here and to think this is the "scrapyard." One of the more no-frills hip hop tracks here is "Guess Who?" and it's a fun listen. The final three tracks are extremely poignant and offer some of the most intimate moments on the record. "U Tried That Thing Where Ur Human" reminds me a bit of a Xiu Xiu track except a bit less ... Xiu Xiu. "Guide Dog" is a really emotional indie folk cut and one that grows on me over reoccurring listens. "Texas Blue" is the most I've enjoyed a Kevin Abstract feature since like high school. Quadeca and Abstract have an incredible chemistry here. It really feels like the perfect way to end this project. Quadeca, I'm sorry for thinking you were overhyped. This SCRAPYARD mixtape is exceptional and I can't wait to hear what you do next.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Where we've been, Where we go from here - Friko

◇ genre: indie rock

Many reviewers have drawn a clear line of influence from Where we've been, Where we go from here and indie rock of the 2000s. Those reviewers would be absolutely correct too. If you told me this was an indie rock staple of that era with a Pitchfork Best New Music review to its name, I might believe you. However, this is a band's debut album in the year 2024. One of the most exciting in recent memory, made even more so by Friko being relatively unknown before this project. It's like it appeared out of thin air. Randomly here's one of the most polished indie rock albums in a while that puts a modern twist on an old formula. An old formula that I have a soft spot for, for better or for worse. Even by the opener, "Where We've Been," I knew this album was something special, at least for me. Vocalist and guitarist Niko Kapetan absolutely steals the show here. His voice is shaky, but effortlessly melodic. "Crimson to Chrome" has one of the most memorable choruses I've heard in a minute, it's been stuck in my head for days. Drummer Bailey Minzenberger really kills it here too. The energy keeps up on the next track "Crashing Through." Those first three tracks alone are a hell of a statement for a debut record. "Chemical" veers into the post-punk and shows the band's range very well. Even when the band get a bit quieter like on "Until I'm With You Again," there's still just this ... energy to it all. Friko sound so confident here, like they know they're gonna be a big name in the genre in a very short time. I hope I'm right about that because this album is amazing. I was a bit floored by how much I enjoyed this. Incredibly excited to see what Friko have in store for us next.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

PHASOR - Helado Negro

◇ genres: indietronica, neo-psychedelia

Similarly to Brittany Howard, Roberto Carlos Lange's music has escaped me over the last few years. I enjoyed his 2019 album This Is How You Smile, but I just kind of lost track of him. However, I saw his new album PHASOR getting some buzz and I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did! It's a gorgeous album full of sweet, borderline ambient songs. "I Just Want to Wake Up With You" is such a simple song, but it's so enjoyable. The repetition of the chorus never feels irritating because the production and instrumentation are so nice. It almost feels like you're swimming and the little synth flourishes remind me of early electronic music from the 70's. The whole album is full of stuff like that too. It's such an easy listen. Each song just breezes past you so gently. It doesn't demand your attention, but if you decide to give it some you will be rewarded. "Out There" sounds so cool and more complex than some of the other songs here while not losing the subtlety of the album. "Best For You and Me" is similar in this aspect too with its driving piano chords and fuzzy synths bubbling up underneath Lange's soft vocals. The most raucous track here is the opener "LFO (Lupe Finds Olivieros)" which is a cool mix of indie rock with the rest of the album's spacey synth work. This album has really grown on me over multiple listens. It's so easy to throw on whenever. It fits nearly every mood and doesn't overstay its welcome at all. It's also reminded me to go back and revisit more of his work from the past!

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She - Chelsea Wolfe

◇ genres: darkwave, post-industrial

Chelsea Wolfe is a name that sounded vaguely familiar to me before I listened to her new record She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, but I'm pretty sure I've never heard any of her stuff before this. Upon listening, I have a strong desire to dive into her back catalog. This album is excellently produced and wonderfully written. These songs are dark and often chilling. Both due to Wolfe's unique vocals and the production. You're thrown right into it with "Whispers In The Echo Chamber" as Wolfe sings about seeing things "beyond reality" and the dark synths really accentuate that feeling. The song eventually builds into a big industrial burst with a ripping guitar part towards the end of the track. I loved the range presented here and it's present across the whole album. Wolfe shines in both the softer moments and the louder moments. "House of Self-Undoing" is more straight-forward industrial rock. Even amidst the wild drums and guitars, Wolfe's vocals stand out. The lyricism here strikes a nice balance between substance and style. The majority of the tracks here have at least one lyric that is razor sharp despite the ethereal vocals. "The Liminal" is a really great trip-hop cut and an unexpected, but welcome change of pace after the slow-burning "Tunnel Lights." As was "Eyes Like Nightshade" which blends elements from dance music into this dark world Wolfe is creating. It's such an easy album to get sucked into. Even with the sonic shifts, these songs immerse you in their weird world. The album ends with one of its most fiery moments, "Dusk," as Wolfe aptly sings "and I will go through the fire" as the heavy industrial guitars and drums almost drown her out. I really loved this album. Wolfe managed to balance both the chaos and relative tranquility on the album just by her performance alone. Really need to listen to more of her stuff!

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

All Life Long - Kali Malone

◇ genres: drone, holy minimalism

My first introduction to Kali Malone's work was through her 2022 album Living Torch. A really interesting two part, 33-minute drone piece that had a really dark atmosphere to it. Her last album, Does Spring Hide Its Joy, was way more expansive at three hours. I had to listen to it over multiple days. It played on a lot of the themes of the previous, except grander. This new album is trimmed down a bit, but it has some of her strongest material. Opening the album with the choral "Passage Through the Spheres" is a very interesting choice. It doesn't really sound like much of the album musically, but it sets the tone very well. All Life Long sounds like the album art suggests. Everything feels cold. Maybe not the standing the snow kind of cold, but a really strong, uncomfortable chill. The title track, split into versions both for organ and voice, is a big highlight here. Malone's plodding organ on the former feels like you're stepping into somewhere you shouldn't be. It sounds haunted. "No Sun to Burn (for Brass)" lightens the mood just a bit and is a really striking minimalist composition. "Prisoned on Watery Shore" is a mellow drone cut and it keeps you hooked the whole time. Just by the first four tracks Malone has taken us down so many avenues and flexed her range as a composer. I love the dark droney synths and little organ flourishes on "Fastened Maze." I do like when Malone works with a brass quintet and the choirs, but they really shine with the drone stuff. She's so good at creating distinct atmospheres in each of her compositions. All Life Long might be my favorite project of Malone's yet. The majority of the songs here are really well composed and evoked some kind of reaction from me. Not sure if I would recommend starting with it if you're new to Malone's work, I would say Living Torch is still the best entry point, but definitely give this a listen after.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Prelude to Ecstasy - The Last Dinner Party

◇ genre: indie rock, glam rock, pop rock

I mentioned this in my singles & songs post from last month, but I have been loving the singles leading up to this album. Even if the entire debut from the London glam rock band didn't live up to the hype those songs gave me, I would still be pretty satisfied. Luckily, Prelude to Ecstasy is a really good debut. The band dives into themes of gender, generational trauma, and toxic relationships accompanied by some catchy, cathartic songwriting. The best example of this is the band's biggest hit thus far, "Nothing Matters." I touched on it briefly in the aforementioned post from last month, but I just adore that song. One of the most well-crafted rock songs of the decade so far. That chorus sticks with you for days. I wish I could be a bit contrarian and say that the biggest hit isn't the best song, but I just can't here. That isn't to say the rest of the material here is weak, far from it, this album is loaded with great songs. "Burn Alive" veers into a more post-punk sound which fits the band so well. The lyrics discuss turning pain into art and lead vocalist Abigail Morris has defined it as the band's "mission statement." Very strong start to the record. I wrote about how great "Caesar on a TV Screen" was last month, but I enjoyed it even more in the context of the album. "Sinner" is another great example of the band's glam rock sound. It sounds so classic, but not in the extra-derivative Greta Van Fleet way. They use these sounds from the past and put their own spin on it. All in all, this is a very strong debut album. Occasionally the band can drift into the generic, but those moments are few and far between. They're even more forgivable when you compare them to what other new stuff is playing on your local alternative station. I'll definitely take it over any son of Mumford.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Loss of Life - MGMT

◇ genre: neo-psychedelia

Nearly 6 years removed from their stellar previous album, Little Dark Age, MGMT have finally returned with Loss of Life. An album that sees them leaning away from the synth-heavy sound of the previous in favor of a more organic sound. Guitars and the occasional piano are usually the driving force behind these songs. The psychedelia present through all of their work is also here which is to be expected. The album opens with "Loss of Life Pt. 2," which features some of the most electronic instrumentation across the whole record and a lot of it would be reprised for the closing title track. Lead single "Mother Nature" follows it and it really was the perfect choice for a lead single. It introduces this "era" of the band perfectly. More organic instrumentation, more mature lyrics, while still having those hooks that really stick with you. I think this is one of the best songs the band have ever made and while a lot of the songs following don't reach those heights, plenty come very close. "People In The Streets" follows the same formula as that song, but way more mellow. I love the bass on this track, it's so prevalent in the mix. The next track "Bubblegum Dog" is almost glam rock and they pull off that sound pretty well. The lyrics feel like a meditation on the creative process and moving forward. Interesting themes that I'm interested in hearing from them at this stage in their career. A lot of the songs here, as good as most of them are, just leave me wanting a little bit more. I often found myself wanting the band to take a few more risks and get a bit wilder on the musical front. I feel like you could've explored these more mature themes while also getting a bit crazier with it. As this album dropped only last week, I don't feel like my opinions on it are fully formed. Maybe I'll enjoy it more over more listens as the year rolls on. For the most part, Loss of Life is a really good return for the band and an interesting release in their discography.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Still - Erika de Casier

◇ genre: contemporary r&b

Erika de Casier had been on my radar for years, but I never got around to listening to any of her albums in full. I was inspired to listen to her new album due to her incredible single from last month, "Lucky." A really sleek, atmospheric drum and bass cut with a killer hook and production that still wows me even after multiple listens. It's probably still my favorite track on the album, but that's not to say there aren't other amazing tracks on Still. The reggaetón undertones of "Home Alone" were a very welcome surprise. "ice" is has a very funky bassline and a nice feature from They Hate Change. "Believe It" has a subtle bit of trip-hop thrown in and some of my favorite hooks on the whole record. The album's sounds are deceptively eclectic as de Casier blends them together so well. The incredible production across Still can sometimes be to its detriment. On a few tracks, the production feels let down by some weak songwriting. Not bad by any means, but I just wish there was a bit more of an edge to them. de Casier is a very good pop songwriter and pretty much every track has a good hook, chorus, etc., but it doesn't leave much of an impact beyond that. "Ex-Girlfriend" and "Twice" are examples of this. Really nice beats, but I feel like they never reach the heights they have the potential to. Even with those gripes, Still is a really well-crafted record and there is no shortage of great stuff here.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Other Rooms - Adriaan de Roover

◇ genres: ambient, electroacoustic

I don't know much about Adriaan de Roover at all. I found this album on the front page of Bandcamp and decided to check it out because the genres looked appealing. Sometimes you need a good ambient album and Other Rooms is a satisfying listen. There are some gorgeous ambient soundscapes on this project with some glitchy moments peppered in. In fact, the album starts off with one of those moments. "Yet" has these prickly, glitchy synths throughout, yet an almost eerie wave of noise accompanies them. It creates a really cool dynamic. If you're just looking for some good ol' ambient, check out the tracks "Homebound" and "Dank U." My favorite piece here is the title track. It features some nice ambient synth-work alongside these distant choir-like vocals and some chilling piano chords thrown in. The backend of the tracks turns to something far more sinister with one of the most outwardly unsettling dark warbles. There always feels like there's something underneath a lot of the songs. I just wish it was a bit more fleshed out. At just under 30-minutes in length, I feel like there was a bit more to explore. Still definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a good ambient album with a decent amount of depth to dive into.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud (not available) YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Club Shy - Shygirl

◇ genres: house, dance-pop

There's not really much to say about this new Shygirl EP except that it's a really strong, concise collection of house and dance-pop tracks. A bit of a detour from the sound of her previous album Nymph, but it works so well. She works with a ton of different producers here and it's incredible how cohesive it all sounds. Every track hits and there's very rarely a dull moment. "4eva" and "thicc" are probably the biggest highlights here for me. I'm a total, anti-social geek that doesn't go to clubs, but those songs make me want to. If you need a quick collection of thumping club songs, look no further.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Unwired Detour - Asian Glow

◇ genres: noise pop, indietronica

I've listened to a decent amount of Asian Glow's work over the last few years. They've been involved in some pretty interesting projects throughout the decade so far both on their own and with other noisy/shoegaze artists such as Weatherday and Parannoul. They played bass on the latter's After the Night live album which was one of my favorites last year. However, it seems as though the Asian Glow project is coming to an end with Unwired Detour. They announced on their Bandcamp that this would be the "last album [they'll] ever release for Asian Glow." It doesn't feel like your typical "final album" though, at least to me. I'm sure it has a lot more personal significance for the artist, but this just sounds like an extremely promising album from a young artist and one that could be a stepping stone to much greater heights.

The album features some really good noise pop/indietronica tracks with some having more of a rock edge than others. "Ashes" is one of my favorite cuts here because of that rock edge. It also feels like one of the more lively tracks here from a production standpoint. I feel the same way about "Kuroitamago #2" and "Faucet." This album is at its best when they cut loose a bit. A lot of these songs are really good, but the production feels like a big barrier preventing them from reaching that next level. Like on the opener "Down in the sink" which is just begging to be free from the Wall of Sound production style. I still think on the whole this project is worth checking out. I also am excited to hear whatever comes next from the artist formerly known as Asian Glow.

listen here: Apple Music (not available) Spotify (not available) Bandcamp SoundCloud (not available) YouTube (not available) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

2093 - Yeat

◇ genres: industrial hip hop, experimental hip hop, trap

I haven't really been crazy about a lot of Yeat's music, but 2093 is probably his strongest album to date. There are so many really cool ideas here and there are some awesome moments here from a production standpoint. However, it would be even better if it were reigned in and shortened by maybe even 20 minutes. He commits to the concept of 2093 and being in the future, but that kinda wears thin when multiple songs hammer that concept home over and over again. On the whole it can be a very tiresome listen made somewhat worthwhile due to a large number of highlights. "Morë" and "U Should Know" are my two favorite tracks on the album if just for the beats alone. They sound so cool and the former dives into the industrial hip hop sound really well. Yeat's bars are pretty nice for the most part, he's not my favorite rapper and often he never surpasses the "this is fine" territory, but he works within these songs very well. I'll always be a sucker for reoccurring lyrical themes across an album. Lil Wayne locked in for his verse on "Lyfestylë" which makes it another standout. I really had a difficult time getting into the later half of the album, but the penultimate track "If We Being Rëal" brought me back into it. There is a really, really solid album within 2093. If you took the cream of the crop and maybe saved the rest for a deluxe edition, you would be absolutely golden.

listen here: Apple Music Spotify Bandcamp (not available) SoundCloud YouTube ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TANGK - IDLES

◇ genre: art rock, post-punk

IDLES decided to switch things up going into their fifth studio album, partially stepping away from the raucous energy of their previous work in favor of something softer, less aggressive. They enlist the help of Nigel Godrich and frequent collaborator Kenny Beats for the bulk of production duties here. Godrich especially has heaps of experience in the art rock world mainly through his production work on every Radiohead studio album besides Pablo Honey. The production really is one of the standout things about TANGK, unfortunately I don't really know if IDLES is the best at making the most of it. This isn't a bad album by any means and I do warm up to it bit by bit after every listen, but I can't help but feel like a lot of this is underwhelming. I'm all for bands expanding their sound and trying different things, but I feel like IDLES lose a good bit of their charm by going into this direction. The best moments on the album are the ones reminiscent of the wild energy of their previous work. Especially "Dancers", a collab with LCD Soundsystem and a track that somehow flew under my radar last year. That swinging chorus rules so hard. "Hall & Oates" is another massive highlight for a lot of the same reasons. "Gift Horse" is awesome too and shows the band kinda leaning further towards dance-punk.

IDLES really thrive with that rough around the edges sound. Not all of their forays away from it are bad, in fact, none of them are really. Many just feel kinda boring.

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Drop 7 - Little Simz

◇ genres: UK hip hop, electronic dance music

It breaks my heart to write this, but Drop 7 was underwhelming. Little Simz is one of my favorite artists going today and her last three studio albums are absolutely incredible. Her 2021 album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert was my favorite album of that year and I would give it a very prestigious 10/10 score!! I was so hyped for this EP once she started teasing it on social media. The snippets showed her venturing into some more electronic production and I was intrigued. Unfortunately, those experiments don't really come together to make a great EP. There are some really good moments though. The opener "Mood Swings" is great and shows her feeling right at home with this style. The next track "Fever" is also one of the better cuts here, but it highlights a big issue I have with this project. Her typical incredible flows and lyricism aren't really present here across this EP. Most of the time her bars feel like an afterthought and oftentimes there isn't much else to carry the tracks on any other front besides that. One of the only exceptions is "SOS" which is a nice tribal house track that makes me want to dive into the genre more. I'm trying not to be too harsh on this EP because it's obvious she uses the Drop EPs to experiment and test out ideas, but Drop 7 left a lot to be desired. I don't think this journey into electronic/house music is a bad idea, but I just hope it can be fleshed out properly on her next full-length project.

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Vultures 1 - Kanye West & Ty Dolla $ign

◇ genres: pop rap, trap, alternative r&b

It feels pointless to dive into Kanye's weird, antisemitic antics over the last year or so. He obviously doesn't care and his ardent supporters don't either. "Separate the art from the artist!" they cry meanwhile said artist is making light of his antics in the art itself. Thus making it impossible to separate it from him. So that begs the question ... why do people still cling to him? Does the man who just a few months ago uttered the phrase "Jesus Christ, Hitler, Ye — third party, sponsor that" still make good music? Maybe if the beats go hard enough you can forgive and forget as he boasts about still being "the king" despite his vile antics? Unfortunately for the Kanye fans, this might be his worst album to date. No longer can they use the shield of "but he still makes good music!" I've tried to write about how I feel about this album over and over again, but it's so frustrating. Pretty much every song has a fair amount of bullshit thrown in which makes the whole thing unenjoyable. "Stars" is a decent opener until Kanye says "Keep a few Jews on the staff now" as if it somehow absolves him of his past remarks. "Keys to My Life" has a cool beat, but Kanye's verses are some of the weakest of his career. "Talking" probably has the least amount of bullshit and it can be a bit touching at times. "Back to Me" ranks among the worst things Kanye's ever touched. Everything about it irritates me, I don't even enjoy the Freddie Gibbs feature. The same can be said about "Hoodrat." "Do It" isn't offensively bad, but it bores me to tears. "Burn" is just pathetic as Kanye tries to get a quick nostalgia pop because the beat and his flow are sort of reminiscent of The College Dropout era, y'know when he made good music. "Fuk Sumn" and "Carnival" are the most enjoyable tracks here, but I can't see myself ever really going back to them. The title track isn't good and is proof Kanye has lost pretty much all of his sauce. The last two tracks, "Problematic" and "King," are embarrassing. The former where Kanye refers to his current wife as a "reference" to his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and the latter where he says he's "still the king!" despite people rightfully calling out his behavior. These over-the-top egotistical bars would at least be a little bit forgivable if the songs were any good, but they aren't. I almost forgot to mention this is a collab with Ty Dolla $ign and while he has some decent moments (his verse on "Talking" is a genuine highlight), as he says on the track "Paid," he's "just here to get paid." Vultures 1 has to be one of the worst albums by an artist of Kanye West's standing. Someone responsible for making some of the most influential music of the last two decades having a fall from grace this hard and fast would be sad if he weren't such a massive piece of shit. My apologies for going in on this album, but if you know me you will know that I used to be a massive fan of this man's music. I own like half of his discography on vinyl and I stuck with him through so much bullshit. I'm catching up on my Kanye hate after many years of being a delusional dickrider of his. He's making it easy too, not just with his antisemitism, but with this bad record too.

listen here: don't, listen to something good instead ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Slut Pop Miami - Kim Petras

◇ genres: dance-pop, house, electropop

I really am rooting for Kim Petras. I thought she was making some cool stuff near the end of the 2010s, but I just haven't been able to get into anything she's dropped lately. Especially these Slut Pop projects. It was already uncomfortable how often Petras collaborated with alleged sexual abuser Dr. Luke, but releasing a bunch of hypersexual bangers produced by him is just very uncomfortable and tone deaf on many different levels.

listen here: don't, listen to Club Shy for ur house and dance-pop fix this month ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ thanks for reading <3

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