AN OVERVIEW ON PHENOMENAL NATURE
It’s been a while since I put together a playlist because my wife and I recently moved and it’s taken up most of our free time. We love our new place but it’s been emotionally draining to push through the transition. There’s something strange about watching people you don’t know pack up parts of your life to take somewhere new. Standing in my slowly emptying apartment, it felt like a part of me was dissolving. In a way, the old me was. When you live in a space for any extended period of time, you start to trace every crack and surface with your mind. You become part of that space whether you want to or not. Leaving is transformative, a visual and spiritual molting. It’s been hard to acknowledge that and say goodbye, but it’s been necessary.
The settling comes after: the endless boxes, the arranging. It makes the grief sweeter but it all takes time for everything to find its place. It’s a process. The space we’re in now has lots of natural light and we’ve worked hard to preserve a sense of weightlessness here, partially because I think we need that sense of calm these days. It’s been an exciting few weeks but I’m trying to prioritize rest and recovery now that it feels like a huge weight has been lifted.
Cassandra Jenkins - Hard Drive
Spielbergs - Five on It
Sun June - Bad Girl
Mahalia - Grateful
Spoon - Outlier
Tyler, The Creator - A BOY IS A GUN
Julien Baker - Relative Fiction
Stay Inside - Divide
Jimmy Eat World - A Praise Chorus
Elliot Smith - Color Bars
Cassandra Jenkins put out one of my favorite albums of 2021 so far. There’s a frailty and grace that punctuates An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. The record simply glides across its run time with a smoothness that’s as reassuring as it is calming. “Hard Drive” is my favorite, a song that merges spoken word vignettes with blooming jazz and shuffling drums. Jenkins extracts profound truths from ordinary encounters, drawing the ineffable back to the pulse of our breath. There’s a kindness on “Hard Drive”, one that’s both cosmically sweeping and an internal anchor for those of us adrift in the material world.
“Five On It” embodies the kind of rusted power pop I love. The guitars sort of heave and grind against each other while the rest of the band stomps alongside broken leads and earnest exhaustion. Spielbergs do a great job of marrying the kind of second wave emo/slacker rock that seemed to simmer just below the mainstream in the mid 90s. The rest of the album is more expansive but a song like this could have easily fit alongside the Jimmy Eat World push that happened around Bleed American (which is also featured this week).
As I mentioned in the intro, I’ve been preoccupied with space lately, both physically but also emotionally. “Bad Girl” operates with space in mind too, with a dusty kind of slow core that reveals Laura Colwell’s preoccupations about the roads not traveled. The distance between our present tense and our prior flaws are often impossible to bridge with ease. Ruminating, as well as letting go, takes real work. On “Bad Girl” we see Colwell doing the work to make sense of her past lives, the countless cigarettes, and the desire to maybe look at little more closely at the choices that might have felt better in the moment.
“Grateful” sounds like it was formed in a cloud, with snappy high hat claps, gauzy synths, and Mahalia Burkmar’s floating voice. The song is a plea for honesty in the hopes of intimacy. There’s something disarming about how direct she is—no threats, no ultimatums—just the vulnerability of saying this could be nice if you want it to be. We could use a lot more of Burkmar’s brand of honesty in this world. It could do wonders.
Spoon’s mix of nu-disco, driving baselines, and nimble flamenco seems like it would be an overblown disaster. Somehow it works though, coalescing into the kind of song that’s tailor-made for long night drives to nowhere. It’s the kind of song you get lost in, the lushness playing well against Britt Daniels’ insular explorations. This one stands out in Spoon’s repertoire, the title says it all.
It’s surprising that Tyler, The Creator—who was once touted as the new Eminem (as if we ever needed another Eminem)—had an album like Igor in him. It’s less about the sonic experimentation (even though the blissed out synthesizers and retro soul suit him) because he was always a gifted musician and broke out at such a young age where he was bound to just get more interesting over time. Instead, what’s more striking is his vulnerability. Even the best parts of Goblin were performative, putting up a wall between the artist and the listener to purposefully provoke, to the point where we never knew what the real Tyler was thinking. That changed on Flower Boy and to an even greater extent on Igor. “A BOY IS A GUN” explores the messier ends of attraction, the uncertainty and danger surrounding how hard, and far, we fall for those that aren’t good for us. This is pretty nuanced stuff from the man that once trolled about dragging girls into the forest.
The breakbeat by way of twinkle daddy pulse of “Relative Fiction” is a great snapshot of the new Julien Baker album—fuller, richer and deeper than her predecessors. But what makes it special is Baker’s revealing reflections. Where her first two albums found her howling into the endless abyss, Little Oblivions finds Baker turning inward, examining the narrative maze of her own self sabotage. Baker’s voice cuts like a knife in the night with lines like, “When I could spend the weekend out on a bender / Do I get callous or do I stay tender? / Which of these is worse and which is better?” Ultimately, Baker’s own experiences with addiction show that the myths we repeat for ourselves lead to a zero-sum gain, whether or not we believe we’re righteous.
I got into Viewing late last year, which, in a way, short changed my chance to really examine what Stay Inside were trying to achieve. Part of that is because of how sour and isolating this album plays. There’s the same kind of urban darkness on Viewing that you might find on Thursday’s Full Collapse, but with a little bit more mathy/post-punk tendencies. There are also Jesus Lizard style freak outs that come out of nowhere, which is all to say that Viewing isn’t the most accessible album on first listen but one that pays dividends overtime if you’re patient. “Divide” is a strong standout out though, full of spiraling guitar work that will let you function on edge, or through your daydream, depending on how your anxiety voice is that day.
Crimson and clover. Over and over.
I didn’t immediately love Figure 8 when I first heard it. I think it’s because I was expecting Elliott Smith with an edge, the same menacing singer that wandered on “Between the Bars” and “King’s Crossing.” Figure 8, by contrast, is a very LA record, full of technicolor power pop, piano, and multi-tracked harmonies. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that it’s just as tragic. The darkness that permeates Smith’s work isn’t necessarily evidenced in the instrumentation on Figure 8, but in the longing, the desire to set down the yoke of addiction, and the dream that maybe he could one day find peace. “Color Bars” sports molasses slow strings and an almost Beatles-like piano motif, but the star is Smith’s voice as it splinters in the sunlight and comes together in warm resonance. It’s the kind of song that makes you feel like the release from suffering is possible, everything bad fading into the orange horizon with the passage of time. It’s clear that Smith was unable to find peace in this lifetime but the sublime shuffle here serves as a reminder that maybe his enduring gift to the world was the map to find it ourselves.
Originally published March 14, 2021 as part of Hella Vibes.