indie sleaze's greatest hits never f*cked
New music from LCD Soundsystem, Björk, purpl, Salem Hilal, Hugo XL and...Jagged Edge???
Hello! I’m back from my short break, more ready than ever to find you the finest tracks in the land across the entire internet. No big essay this week - just straight to the songs.
But as first and as always, the Good Links of the week:
Perfect Sound For Never - Geoff Edgers follows analog purists, digital evangelists and people getting shafted by jazz reprints for the Washington Post, with interactive quizzes to see if you can tell what’s a “good” recording or not.
Time To Make The (Last) Donuts (of the Night) - Friend and critic Larry Fitzmaurice outlines how he listens to everything for his blog. I do not work nearly this hard, I’m sorry to admit - but love the idea of tiered yearly playlists to keep things fresh.
For the hardware and athlesiure crowd - friend of the newsletter Salem Hilal released his excellent record Bite on kshack last week, and if you’re looking for some defter than your average techno, this one’s for you
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 #54
LCD Soundsystem - New Body Rhumba
LCD Soundsystem never really fucked. Amidst the “is this a real thing?” Indie Sleaze aesthetic comeback, it’s rarely addressed that one of the marquee acts of the era wasn’t really interested in meeting anyone in the bathroom. LCD’s strengths always were about music about music, music about cities, music about finding the afterparty - it was rarely, if ever, about getting laid. As much as the general horniness of the era is now celebrated, LCD (and TVOTR, the Strokes, and the White Stripes, for that matter) rarely made music that was explicitly looking to bone. Which makes the lyrical focus of “New Body Rhumba” somewhat surprising - over nervous guitars and a gritty stomp, James Murphy is worried about his body getting next to other bodies - “Yeah I need a new body/ I need a nobody/ I can't shake sleeping alone” While “New LCD Soundsystem music from Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation” might be beyond parody for some, the slightly goofy context actually seems to give Murphy more room to get loose than a comeback record or Big Single. Like “Yr City’s A Sucker,” this is another offhand track that seems to ditch a press narrative for something slinky, funky, and yes, even a little sexy.
Björk - Victimhood
The simple CR-78 beat recalling “In The Air Tonight” opens “Victimhood,” one of the centerpiece tracks of Bjork’s mycology-themed new album Fossora, and it provides a simple anchor for the track to grow and sprawl in unexpected directions. Discordant horns and vocals spread like errant lichen, the song’s pulse turns to a heaving lurch, and throbbing kicks sound like they’re trying to burst through your headphones as Björk’s lone voice grows into a cut-and-paste choir around a desperate refrain — “I sacrificed myself to save us.”
dvsn feat. Jagged Edge - What’s Up
Jagged Edge?!?! On a full-on late 90s power R&B ballad? It takes the entire length of the song to build up to a properly Jermaine Dupri-sized chorus, but the song’s slight deflection of a traditional structure gives a smart set of moves worth a repeat. Could I have used a big modulation before the last chorus? Yes. A giant-sized bridge? Absolutely. But this song is a delight and I just want a full album of this collaboration ASAP.
Hugo XL - Gone Today, Here Tomorrow
An unreasonably perfect, swinging drum loop is at the center of this song from Paris-based DJ Hugo XL, found on Sean Keating’s Bandcamp Best Dance Singles of August/September. The track’s arrangement balances burbling synth bass and ethereal pads and swirls, but it’s the bouncing kick and perfectly reverbed claps that drive the song. The amount of stank face this must have conjured in the studio, oh my.
purpl - why’d you ghost me up?
“Why’d you ghost me” pulled me in with an addictively simple verse melody and slow-mo freestyle pocket. There’s a sing-song charm that lets the track’s clean, simple lines add up to more than the sum of their parts, like the airy hi hat drop or the lurching synth that bubbles up near the end of the track. The chorus may just the song’s title over and over again, but I have a feeling like me, you’ll be humming it to yourself all day.
THROWBACK CORNER
Sparks - Tryouts For The Human Race
This track is all I could listen to on vacation, staring out of train windows. Beyond the song’s perfect art house Moroder bounce, something about the deeply silly multi-tracked chorus and Ron Mael’s defiantly weird synth leads kept me coming back. The whole album is an incredibly prescient combination of arthouse weirdness and synth bounce - it so perfectly predicts all of New Wave in 1979.
And that’s all for this week, folks! Please subscribe if you’d like these opinions straight in your inbox. See you next week!