the year's best bridge & robot honky tonk
the best of the week ft. bullion, jessica pratt, operator music band, le poodle, and claire rousay
Hi! Sorry to miss you all last week. I have no excuses!
I’ve been thinking a lot about Chappell Roan. I’m late to her music a bit, but I’ve been blown away by the bridge on her latest single “Good Luck Babe.” The song’s refrain is good, though not as gobsmackingly addictive as the singles off of last year’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, but “Good Luck Babe’s” bridge is such a killer switch-up that twice I thought I had skipped into a different track. Like all truly great bridges, it’s an incredible escalation, but makes the final chorus even sweeter when it returns. If I’ve been texting you about this song a lot, I’m sorry. You know who you are.
Anyway,s turns out there are some pretty good links out there!
Ian Cohen went to Cindy Lee in San Diego to see if hype is still real, confirms Pat Flegel is a ripping guitarist
Nico Jaar dropped five hours of new music on Bandcamp.
It’s not necessarily music, but John Roy on Andy Daly’s 2006 Comedy Death Ray bit is worth a read, and definitely a listen if you, like me, had never heard it.
Someone uploaded video they had of Big Thief performing in the park in 2014, and the vibes/outfits are extremely Obama-era indiedom, but they had the sauce even then!
With that, on to this week’s tracks. As always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter. Enjoy!
Bullion ft. Charlotte Adigéry – World_train
I really love the paisley-tinged intimacy of the entirety of Bullion’s new LP Affection, but it’s the Kling Klang honky tonk of “World_train” that stopped me to put it on repeat. There are many cool guests on the record – Panda Bear, Carly Rae Jepsen – but Bullion deftly uses their voices as textures, as opposed to dropping big guest verses, always using them to flesh out Affection’s plain-voiced, lightly balearic, yet never retro, synthpop. Charlotte Adigéry’s turn on “World_train” works similarly, her voice intertwined with the track’s strange yet effective twangy violin lines as it splits the difference between motorik and line dance boogie.
Jessica Pratt – The Last Year
I mean how could you not love this? Much has been made of Pratt’s new singles using a band for the first time, but “The Last Year” is just her, a guitar, some piano and what would be a ridiculous amount of plate reverb for any other singer. Perfect.
Le Poodle – Unexpected Expectations
An incredibly sleek machine of a song that finds a synth pop banger blooming out of a blurry lo-fi ballad, like a mechanical butterfly emerging from a fingerpicked chrysalis. It’s as impressive as it is catchy, living up to the song’s title with a festival-sized beat drop at the halfway mark that somehow feels inevitable and logical, even as it rises out of the first half’s dank DIY intimacy.
Operator Music Band – Screwhead
I’ve still been bumping OMB’s Dara Hirsch’s solo record “Okay” all the time, so I wasn’t quite prepped for how hard their Four Singles EP would go. “Screwhead” is the big winner for me, though I still love “As It Goes,” previewed earlier this year. Every squelch has the right level of burpiness, every drop is crispy but not too deep in the hardware techno red.
claire rousay – head
Midwest emo meets fractured Auto-Tune balladry for a record that’s regularly unsettling but spectacularly unique. I could only take this record in small doses – underneath the creativity is real loneliness – but “head” and “it could be anything” are stunning songs that are as effective as they are strange.
throwback
Tommy McCook & The Supersonics – Ride De Dub
For those in NYC, yesterday’s 85 degree afternoon was a reminder that dub weather is imminent, so get your selects right! My go-to is a playlist of Anthology of Dub, a 1977 list of the best dub according to a UK teenager named Snoopy. He knew, he knows. Get yr tracks right before it’s shorts weather!