restoring a mixtape by vibes alone
plus the week's best from marie davidson, billy woods and more
Hi all! Sorry for the delay caused by an overwhelming number of mid-week drops and uhhh all the fascism.
Lately, I’ve been obsessing over recreating a burned CD mixtape I had in high school from memory. It was a Belle & Sebastian primer from (of course) a girl I was dating, who was shocked I had never heard the band. For some reason I’ve enjoyed trying to recreate the tracklist and order, digging back into how it felt to discover a band that felt like a secret. It’s a silly exercise, but it’s been like re-hand stitching a homemade garment, trying to recreate small and personal choices that weren’t designed to be replicated. You can listen to it here, but it absolutely sounded better on hand-decorated CD-R.
Heyyyyy how about some Good Links?
Electro-Economix – Daniel Taub talked to Electro-Harmonix founder Mike Matthews about the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the cost of your favorite fuzzboxes
Authenticity is a trap but this is also bad and racist – there’s a German YouTuber using AI to create images of fake 90’s Detroit techno artists to release his own tunes.
MFA-I – What this Guardian headline about OpenAI’s creative writing model misses is that the prose it generated sucks shit hella bad. You can’t LLM your way to having taste I guess!
On to the best of the week. As always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter. Enjoy!
Marie Davidson – Push Me Fuckhead
I was initially slow to check out Marie Davidson’s solo LP from the conceptual headline – a dance album about data surveillance? I mean, fine. However, I’m glad to admit I was wrong not to dive in, because City of Clowns is funnier, messier, and way way more fun than the album’s premise would lead you to believe. This is mostly thanks to the unmistakable sonics of Soulwax, who helped produce the record alongside Davidson and her Essaie Pas bandmate Pierre Guerineau. Soulwax have a way of manipulating stereo sonics so it feels like you’re stuck a room with a physically impossible geometry (compliment!), while delivering one incredible bozo-strength bassline after another. “Push Me Fuckhead” has my favorite bounce on the record, but the first half of City of Clowns is unmissable, your opinions on the surveillance state aside.
Billy Woods – Misery
Billy Woods is back, announcing a new album GOLLIWOG with the Kenny Segal-produced “Misery.” Woods’ Maps made a huge mark on 2023 best-of lists – mine included – and “Misery” carries over his unpredictable rhymes and taste for negative space over a menacing loop from Segal.
fish narc – my ceiling
Spot-on late 90s-influenced indie rock from the Seattle producer Fish Narc. I found this via Sam Hockley-Smith’s excellent (if intermittent) newsletter Gross Life, where he highlighted FN’s carrying of the PNW indie torch. The rest of Fish Narc’s new LP leans a little more Modest Mouse/emo-adjacent, but “My Ceiling” has stronger Eric’s Trip vibes in its ramshackle, easygoing groove.
Franc Moody – Bloodlines
Franc Moody’s debut LP Chewing The Fat reminds me of the best of peak Metronomy – there’s just slightly less music than you’d expect at every turn, resulting in uneasy arrangements that wobbly like just-off tripods. “Bloodlines” is smart enough to embrace a full-band backbeat drop at the 1:29 mark, but the song still showcases the duo’s impressive ability to feel like they’re somehow still one step ahead of you even on the 15th listen.
Lady Gaga – Perfect Celebrity
A full-blown Gaga revival is absolutely a recession indicator in my book, but I have to say that as an elder Millennial, MAYHEM absolutely hits the spot. “Garden of Eden” may be the most Gaga-by-numbers with the major 6th chorus move, but “Perfect Celebrity” also has the hooks-on-hooks approach to stuffing the track with memorable parts. Rich Juzwiak also continued his streak of A+ pop reviews for Pitchfork with his take on the record, which is just a bonus part of the album’s hype cycle.
throwback
Curtiss Maldoon – Sepheryn
I really hate it when a “Did you know that…” TikTok format gets me with some shit I 100% did not know, but that’s why I now know that Madonna’s “Ray of Light” actually borrows heavily from Curtiss Maldoon’s 1971 “Sepheryn.” Madge’s version extracts all of the paisley wonder from the melody, minus some of the maroon post-psych heaviness, but it’s still incredible hearing the verse in almost complete form in this dirge-like ballad.