Congrats, you made it to dinky disco season
Lee Fields! Doss! Jubilee! Cole Swindell! Danny Brown!
Ahhh yes the end of August heading into September…the time of endless OOOs, last-minute trips, new school supplies and freaking out that the year is ending already.
Or, for your consideration: Dinky Disco Season.
Dinky disco is dance music that never breaks into being a full-on banger, an erudite and slimmed-down dance offering built for rooftops, texting people hoping there’s a Labor Day thing you can crash, and trying to pretend you’re still working even though you’re upstate.
It’s not quite yacht rock - that would be Too Slow To Disco - and it’s not post-punk - that’s Disco Not Disco - but it borrows stylistically from both. It’s a little more chord-y than a big dance number, and there are sharp weird elbows that a true dancefloor thriller would never throw.
Don’t believe me that it’s for you in these last few weeks of summer? Well, try on this DINKY DISCO 101 playlist and you be the judge. Shout out to friend of the newsletter Nathan Reese for the assist on many of these gems.
On to this week’s Good Links
RIP Q Lazzarus - The “Goodbye Horses” singer died in July at 61, and my friend Mona wrote about finding Q’s masters and getting the song reissued before her death.
Barbie’s Ibiza Beach Mansion - Someone found a banger instrumental track from a Barbie PC game
And now, 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.
UNSKIPPABLES #50
Lee Fields - Sentimental Fool
Fields dropped the organ-led title track from his upcoming LP last week, his first for Daptone. A pitch-perfect instrumental is par for the course from Daptone - label head Gabriel Roth produced the album - but the thrilling backing vocals are the true treat of the simmering soul track.
Doss - Strawberry (Singin’ Club Mix)
Doss released one of my favorite EPs of last year, the dreamy “4 New Hit Songs,” and she just dropped a “Singin’ Club Remix” of the EP’s most shoegaze-y offering, stretching the song’s searching atmospherics over a rubbery bounce. If the initial release found new life in buzzing shoegaze, this flips the big beat optimism of Orbital for 2022.
Jubilee - wrong number
The b-side to Jubilee’s new single “sunscreen,” “wrong number” charmed me with its buzzing, playful bassline and chirping electronics. Equal parts Miami bass groove and UK bass shimmy, the track is propulsive and physical, balancing the insistent bassline with a shifting, restless sense of fun.
Danny Brown - Winter
Danny Brown went ahead and dropped a new track on his SoundCloud with no fanfare this weekend — one he produced, no less. The song is notable primarily for how much he raps his ass off, but Brown’s sepia-toned loops give the song a molasses lurch not too far off from the songs on 2019’s uknowhatimsayin¿. I’d take a whole album of this, but if this is all we get this year, it’s still a gift.
Cole Swindell - She Had Me At Heads Carolina
Okay this is a bit more “new to me” than strictly “new” since it initially dropped in April, but as a fan of intertextuality and karaoke, this one had to get a writeup. “She Had Me At Heads Carolina” is about a guy who finds love at a karaoke bar where a girl sings Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina Tails California,” while musically borrowing heavily from the original in the chorus. The song is infused with pure, crystalline Nashville brightness, and the whole concept is charming if a little heavyhanded. Why hasn’t there been an alt-rock version of this where someone falls in love with a guy who knows all the words to “Get What You Give”??
THROWBACK CORNER
Yukihiro Takahashi - Extra-Ordinary
Though better known as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the drummer for the Sadistic Mika Band, Yukihiro Takahashi has an extensive solo catalog - 36 records!! - and his 1981 solo offering Neuromantic is filled with cool as hell new wave/post punk. “Extraordinary” wouldn’t be out of place on Bowie’s Scary Monsters or a Peter Gabriel solo record, complete with frizzled guitar solo, garish synth pads and neurotic double-tracked vocals. (h/t Joe Tirabassi for sharing this yesterday)
And that’s all for this week, folks! Please subscribe if you’d like these opinions straight in your inbox. See you next week!