music for slurpees (musical moments megamix 6)
Hellloooo it's another blessed musical moments megamix. Going to try to do these a little more often and send them as emails...making more efforts to unplug a little from the social media zone and start surfing the web once more.
The most important thing to announce before getting into various musical moments from the past few weeks is: I would like to hear from you. Reader, email receivers, blog believers. Will you email me? Tell me about a song you are enjoying, or an album you just discovered, or a great concert that you saw, or a playlist you created that you are very proud of, or something musically magical that happened to you. Or you could also complain about music stuff that's bothering you!! I'm cool with that...meet me in the Khia Forum parking lot.
If you have something to share, please do, and then I can share it on the blog. I would like to encourage more interactivity and musical connections on the blog, because music is social and often enjoyed best together. You don't have to be a musician or anything, just a music enjoyer. So THE MAILBOX IS OPEN. ienjoymusicblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
please, don't break our new synths - Jersey
This was a pull from—believe it or not—Instagram Reels. I'm in a really fucked up place on Instagram right now, I basically hate using it 99% of the time, and I absolutely need to quit, I'm gonna quit, I swear...but also I'm having a great time watching people make these freakish matcha drinks and chocolate desserts on Reels. So who can say whether it's bad for me or not.
Anyway I saw a clip from this YouTube video. It had one of those clickbait-y screen captions that was like "no one knows how to dance to 200bpm" only everyone in the clip was dancing to 200bpm just fine. Jersey are a brother duo from France. They seem to come from the school of Fred again.. in terms of tap-tap-tap-tapping on their synths, but I appreciate their commitment to relentless ecstatic maximalist beatz. Also everyone in their video is dancing and no one is holding a phone, which feels significant. No téléphones allowed at le French rave?? What if not a cell phone in sight, just ppl living in the moment becomes an aspirational social situation?
"Vibe" - Gulab Sidhu feat. Sruishty Maan
I was in my local 7-11 buying a cucumber-lime Gatorade (dehydrated) and this song was playing in a wonderfully atmospheric way. It sounded sublime through the 7-11 speakers, with its relaxed beat, chill guitar, and occasional tasteful DJ scratch. I Shazamed, of course, hovering near the iced coffee machine to get the loudest possible sound.
"Socks" - Macy Moose
I talked to Macy at the Sunday Brunch Collective party where I had a live-blog kiosk about things like vocal harmonies and guitar fingerpicking. "Socks" is a folky and cozy and bittersweet song about how magical friendships are, and how painful it is to have them fade with time: "Remember when we shared our secrets til the sun came up? / You've ruined me, no other love seems to measure up." And it features guitar by Sandalwood—another very talented Los Angeles artist you should listen to.
singing "Creep" at karaoke
My husband's cousin had a birthday party that featured some at-home karaoke. This is one of my favorite kinds of karaoke, though all have their merits; it's intimate, you're hopefully around at least some people you know and trust, it's not too hard to parse the vibe of the night, and the queue is usually short. My husband's cousin's husband sang "Creep" and it hit its group sing-a-long stride perfectly. Man, it feels crazy good to sing that run...run...RUN...RUUUUUUUNNN vocal. Whatever you've been chewing on, that part of the song helps you masticate. The rest of the song gets off on withholding, with lots of tension and lower register vocals. Thom lets the dogs out for that bridge.
Lex Leto
I am here but I must go - Lex Leto x The Christine Burke Ensemble
I last featured Justin K Comer—musician, podcaster, exemplary Iowan—in this blog when he released a live experimental jazz record. Justin played sax on this newly released collaboration between experimental multi-instrumentalist Lex Leto and the Christine Burke Ensemble, a group of Iowa City-based musicians playing instruments like...flute...clarinet...bassoon! A word in their press release stood out to me because I don't think I've ever seen it in the wild (rare...I feel like I know sooo many words...jk jk): aleatory, aka 'music in which some element of the composition is left to chance.' For example, a flock of wind instruments interrupts otherwise steady melodica on "The Fly" in a way that I would say feels aleatoric. Hey, check out these cool spray-painted limited edish CDs...
"Mr. Struggle" - Watch Your Tone
Did we as a society totally give up on making cheeky pop punk songs about possibly out-of-your-league ladies you want to date for very specific reasons? "Teenage Dirtbag"? "1985"? "Girl All The Bad Guys Want"? I thought we gave up, but it turns out we did not, because the band Watch Your Tone just put out a song of exactly this nature called "Mr. Struggle." I've written about Watch Your Tone's bassist Sam Thorne in the blog before because he has a "post-everything" band called Fierce Invalids with a great typographical style. "Mr. Struggle" is all about hankering for a girl with health insurance and a good credit score, and also a little bit about not knowing what dust is...I'm cool with random tangents as well as existential questions about dust.
"Basic Being Basic" - Djo
Ending this with a rave for the newish Djo song. You probably know Djo (the musical identity of actor Joe Keery) from his song "End of Beginning," a pensive track about the feeling of being back in Chicago, with a social media montage utility that Max Read would call "FYPcore." This new single has some tingles of interesting influences. The droll spoken word is giving Cake, maybe a smidge of "Your Woman" by White Town. The lite dance tendencies and upper register vocals are giving Chromeo, maybe a smidge of "Cake By The Ocean" by DNCE. The didactic list-making at the end has a whiff of "You Get What You Give" by New Radicals! We seem to be plundering some good music eras: festive millennial, sarcastic late 90s. Djo is no one-trick djony. We're cooking with gas.
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