listening to Your Favorite Songs 2024, part 3
Another day another Favorite Songs post...I am having a good time...
Part one is here. Part two is here.
"Defense" - Panda Bear & Cindy Lee
from Nick Harley (Boring Story)
"I feel like everyone is going to have Waxahatchee, Mk.gee and MJ Lenderman covered (currently corresponding with you from my houseboat at the Himbo Dome), so I decided to select Panda Bear’s excellent collab with 2024’s indie darling, Cindy Lee. With a steady, no-frills backbeat, the song layers pretty guitar licks behind a hooky, instantly memorable vocal line until Cindy Lee explodes with arena-ready guitar solo. I am a simple man."
Much respect to the song choice strategy. Carving yr own path is important. Anyway, I love this song!! That insistent stomping beat is so addictive, and the hook has a very familiar timeless/placeless feeling to it. Take it out of modern indie-pop-rock context and I feel like you could easily hear Carole King singing this vocal melody, or Elvis Costello, or Bob Pollard. It's got that 'excavated from the buried jukebox' classic thing going for it. And the Cindy Lee guitar really does go nuts on this one. All noodles, no cup.
If I were a trendspotting kind of music blogger, I would say that the influence of the Animal Collective / Panda Bear sound is going to stretch longer and longer and more young people are going to get into it. All trends are cyclical, and all trends are reactive to prior trends, and right now I think we're in a peak shoegaze/nü-gaze moment—monolithic guitars and synths, buried vocals, a focus on texture rather than flavor—which means that melody, dynamism, bold contrast, and complex but clear arrangements are gonna really going to start hitting soon*. I will be ready.
Superdestroyer
":::91:::Crown:::Vic:::" - Superdestroyer & (leave) nelson b
from Curtis L. Reeves Jr.
"Sometimes I get a more nuanced access to artists and I just happen to call Superdestroyer a friend and colleague. At the start of the year he helped me through some debilitating anxiety resulting from a family loss. This song is a reminder of that help and friendship. Serving as an affirmation that my job is to be purposefully connected to my living and not distracted by the reality of dying. It helps me get out of my own way and connect to and help others. With the way this year turned out, in many aspects, we need moments of hope. This is one minute and forty-five seconds of life affirming hope!"
2024 was a wonderful year for Lonely Ghost Records, and for leave nelson b and Superdestroyer specifically; the former artist put out a dense and eclectic sample-based album (4.0: The Doppelgänger), plus a collection of remixes of songs like "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs and "Big Ole Freak" by Megan Thee Stallion (The Ellen Bemixes Vol 1.), and the latter released a genre-chaos mixtape (yeah fine ok). They also both did Three Music Thingz! And together they collaborated on the album Nelson Comes To Visit, which is where ":::91:::crown:::vic:::" comes from.
That vocal hook—"It's all a loop, it's all, it's all a loop / It's all a loop"—is really special. It just sounds so pretty with the synth bloops (these are definitely bloops, not bleeps) and the tenderly strummed guitar. Part of me wishes they took that hook and played it back to back to back, like one of those YouTube mega-compilations of a single song...I know both Superdestroyer and (leave) nelson b are definitely not scared of an unorthodox song shakeup, so here's a direct appeal: if you ever find it in your heart to do the :::91:::Crown:::Vic::: (10 HOURS) mix...I would be ever so grateful...
"Seabirds" - Wildflower
from Zac Djamoos
"It is just 9 minutes (sorry) of pure peace and serenity and good feelings"
When I was in high school, we read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and my English teacher gave us an open-ended assignment: we could do pretty much any project we wanted, in any medium or format, as long as we were analyzing the novel in some way. The only thing we were forbidden to do was make a diorama of Huck and Jim floating on the Mississippi. Literally everything else was fair game.
One of my classmates arrived unprepared, but managed to deliver an extemporaneous analysis of the themes of the novel using his container of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt as a visual metaphor. Another classmate did, in fact, make a diorama of Huck and Jim floating on the Mississippi, which I still kind of can't believe. I wrote 50 haiku because I liked the idea of writing a large number of short things of specified structure. (I've always been in blog mode, I guess.) My teacher liked my poems, but his only note was wishing I had written more about nature, because that was part of the tradition of haiku writing. Bah, I remember thinking. Nature is boring. I want to write about...uhhh...the concept of freedom...
Now I'm older and much more appreciative of nature in art: a wide shot of a scenic vista in a movie, a description of water / plants / weather in a song. "Seabirds" has some existential questions tucked into its pleasant composition, but it is also simply about how stuff like the ocean and the flowers and the birds are nice. Nature IS freedom. I didn't know it in 2006 but boy I know it now.
"Birthday" - Sinai Vessel
Ben Sooy (A Place For Owls)
"I cry literally every time I listen to this song. And every time I meet a stranger on the street that's asks for money I think about this song. Every person you meet is a human being with hopes and pains and as rich of an internal life as you have. I don't know how to explain it, but this song is spiritually true."
This song is a perfect vignette of a certain kind of youthful, socially-approved instability—summer jobs, bus trips, sleeping on couches, turning 21 while "waiting around." The kicker: at the end, a kid on the street asks the singer for money, demonstrating the kind of instability on which society tends to turn its back. Ben is right of course—no matter how hard politicians and businesses try to convince you that someone who asks you for money on the street isn't a person, you can't buy into that mindset. The kid asks for five bucks, and the singer gives him ten, which feels instructive. I think if someone's vulnerable enough to ask you for something and you've got enough to make it work, give 'em back double...The Abundance Principle.
"Mutations" - Nilüfer Yanya
from Scott Alexander Howard (author, The Other Valley)
"first of all the guitar tone. yanya's vocal timbre. a chorus (bridge? you decide) that's somehow tossed-off and transcendent. those tom rolls heading back into the verse. then an impeccably brief appearance by a string section for dessert"
I first heard Nilüfer Yanya's music when her 2019 song "H34T RISES" was in the television show Industry, which I started this year; I am having a hard time plowing through it because all of the risky money decisions make me too nervous before bed. I know it's a television show and not real life but after watching Succession and now Industry, you can't convince me that 'business' is essentially calling someone on the phone and saying numbers back and forth to each other until you agree on one. Anyway, all of the music in the show is fab, with every needle drop providing ambient energy upon which you can project anxiety or excitement, depending on how much stock market gambling your constitution can handle.
The word I keep rolling around in my head for "Mutations" is "elusive." Every element on the track is mellow but restless, from the shadowboxing drums to the open-ended chord progression. Yanya's voice holds everything together—she sounds like a cool customer even as she's singing about uncertainty and ambivalence. Liminality has never been so invigorating. Obsessed with the way she says "watch this" at the end of the chorus. Hey, Nilüfer Yanya was on the Bombay Bicycle Club track I wrote about for last year's batch of favorite songs!! That's neat.
*It's kind of already here if you know where to look! May I suggest Sun Kin's Sunset World, or fantasy of a broken heart's Feats of Engineering....
Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
Thanks to all the song recommenders <3 See you...tomorrow?
