the top of the chart, the base of the mountain
weyes blood, glorilla, 504 aquatic, YUNGMORPHEUS, the clouds
I recently saw two completely different visions of what songs can mean to people and how they’re made — one from Tom Breihan’s excellent book on Billboard and a lecture with Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum.
I’ve long loved Breihan’s The Number Ones column for Stereogum, as he documented – and rated – every #1 song in the Billboard chart’s history. His new book of the same name looks at the scope of pop music over the course of twenty singles, from 1958 to the present. The book’s POV is particularly strong as it tackles the late 70s to the early 90s, with a convincing argument for Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love” as the critical turning point for modern R&B and pop in 1990. Because he focuses on the hits, he misses some of the weird WTFs that make his column such a joy to read – Crazy Town, “One Week” and “Baby Got Back” immediately come to mind – but his book makes a Ken Burns-level argument that the scope and tradition of pop is as rich and important to American culture as blues or jazz.
The craftsmen and businesspeople who shaped mass culture, and created music that defied boundaries and demanded our attention, are never denigrated for their ambition - instead Breihan shows how timing, luck, and melody can add up to scale the top of the pops.
On the other hand, music outside the popular imagination is just as important. Maybe it’s just about creating space for a moment and trying to peel back the layers around us, if only for a second.
I spent the last four weeks listening to Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum talk about songwriting via the School of Song - from finding the idea to producing it. Elverum has been making some of my all-time favorite records for just over twenty years, so getting to listen to him talk about how he finds cracks within existence to open up huge questions about life, death, and the world was a delight.
One of the most striking things he talked through was that the mundane and the sublime were two sides of the same coin - you can’t really point into space and ask “what does it all mean” unless you’re grounded in the dumb reality we all share. It was a bit thrilling to learn how writing about our specific, silly little lives gives us all the power we need to ask the biggest questions inside us. It was a powerful microscopic look at what the inside of a great song can look like, compared to the massive machinery of culture described in The Number Ones.
Anyways, Phil also launched a newsletter, and he has a good one about the legacy of The Glow Pt. 2, a record that you should listen to today if you never have before.
No Good Links this week for the holiday, but you should check out Catskill-via-Brooklyn artist Liam Singer’s new Substack.
As always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter.
UNSKIPPABLES #61
Weyes Blood - Grapevine
This record absolutely knocked me out. Weyes Blood’s 5th album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow has the same “Los Angeles As A Time Machine” glow as Elliott Smith’s L.A. records (or Father John Misty’s whole catalog), but with its own powerful 2AM dashboard glow and depth. The sounds and heartache of the last fifty years of West Coast pop swirl across album’s ten songs, most powerfully in the album’s opening three numbers. I could pick almost any song on the record, but “Grapevine” wins thanks to this amazing couplet:
Emotional cowboy
With no hat and no boots
He stayed up all night
Trying to beat up the moon
504 Aquatic - Lemon
Another stellar release from kshack records, 504 Aquatic’s new record Divine -C is described as “5 tangy and effervescent mid-90s liquid snacks” and it doesn’t disappoint. The “mid 90s” reference is more an emotional space than sonic one, as the EP’s driving, minimal tracks share the same just-beyond-the-curve optimism as the best of the Chemical Brothers, while staying distinctly in a tight, modular color set. The tension between the tracks’ compositional discipline and flashes of technicolor joy make it one of my favorite electronic records of the year.
Glorilla - Unh Unh
Her single with Cardi B “Tomorrow 2” might be getting all the spins, but the EP cuts of GloRilla’s Anyways, Life’s Great… are where I spent my time hanging out while listening to her record this week. Her slippery sense of time and use of unexpected phrase endings make her verses fun to follow, and the record’s gritty drums and insistent piano give it an early 00’s mixtape ferocity that I found extremely compelling.
YUNGMORPHEUS - Distant Place
I found YUNGMORPHEUS’ latest EP on the Bandcamp homepage, and the opening sample of “Distant Place” immediately grabbed me. The song mostly rides on Wurlitzer-and-break pocket, and YUNGMORPHEUS’s rhymes are crouched and nimble - but the gleaming strings of the sample surge on the edges like afternoon sun trying to break through the clouds.
The Clouds - No, You Can’t Take Them
The Clouds’ self-titled album, originally released in 2003, is getting a full vinyl reissue thanks to DFA Records. Made in Alabama by then artist-in-residence Stuart Hyatt, the Clouds’ record is made up of stories, songs and voices from the city Stuart was visiting - most notably on “No, You Can’t Take Them,” where people list the things they can’t take into heaven. The story behind the LP is a delight, and almost as joyous as the song, a James Murphy-recommended DJ set ender.
THROWBACK CORNER
Antelope - Wandering Ghost
Thanks to the Black Eyes 20th anniversary show announcement, I thought of this record, a low-key favorite late Dischord release of mine. It’s a minimalist kraut-funk record from a few DC scene vets (El Guapo, Vertebrates) that’s surprisingly insistent and nagging for how starkly bone-dry it is. I still think about this drum part all the time.
That’s all for this week, folks. Please subscribe if you’d like these opinions straight in your inbox. See you next week!