halfcactus

Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/model-actriz-cinderella/

Hannah’s pick has us feeling a bit theatrical… and dark… and maybe a little crazy…

[Video]
[8.14]Hannah Jocelyn: DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR i’m terrified of vulnerability and femininity DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR but not anymore!!! DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR DR NR
[10]

Tim de Reuse: The croaky, flamboyant vocals, the sleek thump-kshhh beat, the chugging guitar harmonics, it’s all very modern, refined, elegant, “this is what’s gonna be cool next year.” It’s the perfect place to put an admission of having had a princess phase when you were five, narrated in a contorted half-cry like the author thinks it’s an gut-wrenching, ego-devastating, take-it-to-the-grave secret — which is very, very funny. This is 100% accurate to the experience of gay men trying to be vulnerable with each other.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I bounced hard off of their first record, mainly just because I read some stuff that made me think I’d love it instantly and when I didn’t, I got real demoralized. I still like the sound of the rest of the band more than the singer’s voice (or maybe just the way it’s placed in the mix, it feels a bit remote from the rest of the track), but this s good enough I should probably give them another chance.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: At first, all anyone could talk about was Cats. While I admire the gumption of whichever True Panther exec decided to market Model/Actriz’s nihilist post-punk via the fifth-longest-running Broadway musical, Dogsbody was decidedly more The Slits than Skimbleshanks. But a mere two years later, Cole Haden and co. returned with their very own “Memory.” “Cinderella” isn’t aesthetically camp, but Haden’s snapshots of a childhood spent suppressing sexuality suggest a technicolor wonderland just out of reach. The song’s gaudy grit evokes Disney villains, Hayes Code-era musicals, and other implied queer classics where the ghosts of glamor haunt the frame. If Model/Actriz share anything with Andrew Lloyd Webber, it’s an understanding that sometimes you gotta get in the audience’s face to remind them what you’re about.
[8]

Al Varela: The production is so arresting. The stiff, harsh synths juxtaposed with the steady percussion and rumbling deeper tones makes this otherwise catchy dance song sound like a claustrophobic nightmare. It’s like a club hookup that’s getting really hot and steamy, but suddenly the anxiety burning within you is exploding, amplified by the drugs you took before the rave started. It makes the confession of the Cinderella birthday party that never happened feel like the kind of thing you would admit when you’re about to have a mental break. It’s kind of a horrifying song for all of its sweaty, sexy grooves. It’s awesome, though.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Fear is the mind killer. But it is safe. Courage is punished, boldness is attacked, earnestness is directed toward avarice. To be fearful is to be rewarded with some of the greatest riches and the most power possible. Once ensconced in one’s fear, there is little to do but wait and collect one’s gluttonous portrait and place it high on the shelf. In the moment where Cole Haden finally cracks his mask of veiled abstraction to explicitly lay bare his desire to embrace his latent femininity, it is a beautiful moment. But he shrinks back, bruised, whispering “I won’t leave as I came.” He is now more courageous, but he has thus been punished. We never know if the relationship progressed, if they went home and had sex that night. We remain in that stasis, lip bruised, nose bleeding, but free.
[7]

Will Adams: When I was eight, I asked for a CD of Britney Spears’s Oops! …I Did It Again for Christmas. Earlier that year, I had hung out with my oldest sister and her friend, who played it on her parents’ stereo as we played. I loved it. I wanted a copy of my own. I put it on my wishlist. That Christmas morning, I picked out a small square gift from under the tree and unwrapped it, revealing Oops!. A pit dropped in my stomach, I felt my face flush red, and I sprinted down the hall to my room, hiding from my family. What the hell was I thinking? Britney isn’t for boys. And now everyone knows. How could Santa betray me like this? I remember that day less as a silly kids-do-the-darndest-things anecdote than a painful psychic wound. Even at that age, I had received enough wisdom to know what was Expected and what was Aberrant. That Christmas, I had veered off course. Some days, I wrack my brain for every micro-moment from my youth where I’d made a similar slip, where I unwittingly revealed that something about me was… different. On others, I wallow in self-pity, feeling pathetic for carrying that shame decades later, for my tendency to still feel closeted even while I’m in bed with someone. “You make me want to be ready,” sings Cole Haden, a confession that’s weighted with the same vulnerability as his would-be Cinderella party. There’s a yearning to break free from the shame, but all the while the swirling tempest — in the form of metallic clatters, squeaking synth lines, and distorted organ chords — threatens a full breakdown. That nervous energy is the core of “Cinderella,” and it’s both brutal and ecstatic.
[9]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/model-actriz-cinderella/

Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/bon-iver-ft-danielle-haim-if-only-i-could-wait/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29563

Charli Jae chooses the song to bring Vaguely Indie Wednesday to a close, and it doesn’t feature anyone from Newcastle…

[Video]
[6.38]Will Adams: Pretty!!
[6]

Al Varela: Something about that calm ripple that plays over the dusty drums and keys makes this already lovely duet even more beautiful. Drifting away in that pool of melancholic yearning.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: Starts off at 100% Bon Iver and only climbs from there; as it progresses, layering more and more and more syrup onto the mix (corporate-music twinkles, arpeggios, echoing chords, a whole string section near the end, reverb, reverb, oceans of reverb) it packs more and more sugar into a configuration that has no crust to give it form. Bon Iver and Haim’s voices attempt to share space with each other and it sounds more like a production mistake than an duet, especially when they’re talking past each other on competing lines. All this cotton candy hides a lyrical core comprised only of vaguely tenacious Iver-isms. “Keep holding on?” To what, exactly? There’s nothing here!
[1]

Claire Davidson: The quaking synth notes that sound like an echoing vocal sample aren’t the first thing you hear on “If Only I Could Wait,” but they are the first thing that catches your attention The way these tones boomerang across the mix, bursting forth like a heartbeat before quickly evaporating, already evokes a potent wistfulness all on its own, but when paired with the track’s jagged rushes of guitar and Jim E-Stack’s shuffling percussion, the song strikes a balance between tempered weariness and eager optimism that promises a real lyrical awakening. Justin Vernon’s typically frail delivery, quavering but sonorous in timbre, is a natural fit for the meandering candor of his opening verse, capturing the discomfort of sitting with uncertainty with a palpably earnest wisdom. Danielle Haim’s delivery is a bit incongruous with Vernon’s, finding a relatively more conventional meter to her musings, but she has a place here, too, her beleaguered yearning a fitting counterpart to Vernon’s more idyllic daydreaming. Yet the tension between the performers’ more pensive delivery and the instrumentation’s halting energy suggests a sonic breakthrough that never really comes — rather than exploit this tonal contrast with true disruption, the two vocalists simply bridge this gap by coming together to harmonize on the outro and finally sing in tandem. That eventual resolution is poignant enough, sure, but for a track that operates with such grandeur, it feels like a half-measure in a song otherwise devoted to unvarnished emotionality.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Jim-E Stack’s drums frustrated me as I began to listen. The first one was a slow, half step behind the then assembled synth lines and keyboards, the guitar hurling itself into my chest, a lush well played progression that comfortably fit, yet the drum programming upset me. Danielle Haim’s voice, however, comfortably soared in its uninterrupted glory before Vernon’s limpid baritone, just out of sync, just as Jim-E Stack’s first drum arrangement was, dragging the song backwards. So I listened again, but that first drum beat frustrated me even more. It felt as if 2 different loops were placed in the same session, and unable to kill his darling like Lucien Carr begged Allen Ginsburg to do, Jim-E forced both to share space as an artistic mistake turned into a moment of beauty. This did slowly begin to irk me less on the third listen, especially as I played it over the aforementioned film footage. But still through each listen, Danielle Haim’s warm, agave mezzo-soprano was dragged back by Vernon’s baritone, and only as they sang together did their voices mesh. And as the two drumbeats viciously slammed headfirst into each other, the beauty of the keys and guitar, even the lushness of the bassline and the sprinkles of viola and violin added by band member Rob Moore, finally began to impose on my heart. If only I could wait to let it grow on me.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Like Christopher Cross reformatted as Chris Martin, Bon Iver waxes sensitive over heat lightning synths and bursts of guitar. Danielle Haim offers the usual emollients. Blankly pretty. Ideal as non-diegetic accompaniment to a movie love scene. Ask me about it tomorrow, though, and I’ll say it sucks.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I still think 22, a Million is great, but I am a little nonplussed that when you dial back some of the fracturing that makes it so compelling you get… Bruce Hornsby doing Coldplay?
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Contemporary worship music for people who put down Mere Christianity once it started trying to explain the three-personed God. I mean that as a compliment; for both Lewis and Vernon, the direction of travel is what’s most important, even up to the final feared moment, “alone in highways.”
[8]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/bon-iver-ft-danielle-haim-if-only-i-could-wait/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29563

Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/richard-dawson-gondola/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29558

From Geordie Mick to Geordie Richard, courtesy of Tim de Reuse…

[Video]
[7.83]Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The line between Richards Dawson and Thompson has never been finer. Fortunately, all varieties of archaic-pastoral English guitar yawping are deeply charming to me; when this snaps into purpose in its last verse and becomes a vivid rendering of maudlin elderly wanderlust, I can’t help but be captivated.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: It’s deliberately hard to parse, the way Dawson crams together unrelated signifiers of lower-class Britain into these rhyme schemes; the day-to-day can only be grasped as a bunch of unconnected, unordered images, pasted together awkwardly like an automatically-generated slideshow. The only times the song finds some momentum and smoothness are when it’s wailing about failures of the past (the sinister, drunk-fainting cry of “Let the darkness roll inside” buoyed by enthusiastic guitar strumming) or when it’s shooting for glimpses of relief in a possible future (the sudden burst of life that starts with “I can’t believe I’m a grandma” and lasts through the whole fantasy of Venice). In a scant two hundred-odd words, barely any of them repeated, we get not only a description of a wasted life but a feel for the texture of it – the impossibility of the narrator’s present moment and the ease with which she slips into any other point in time, aided by cheap wine and bad TV. I do not know much about daily life in northern England — I’ve only ever been to London, and then just for a few days — but I know that senior citizens not being able to pay their energy bills is an increasingly urgent topic, and that things in general are getting worse all across the UK, with public services unravelling and quality of life diminishing as a result; so, this song feels particularly prescient, perhaps because despite having demographically nothing in common with this alcoholic pensioner I can see the same tendencies in my own life, and the lives of many in my own neck of the woods.
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: Richard Dawson’s Talking Heads strip away the artfulness in a way Alan Bennett never could. “Gondola” is pushed by the power of plain speaking along an unrefined route. Thora Hird would read it and ask where the clever bits are, but Dawson dares to have his characters just say things, finding the music within and laying it bare. Crucially, he doesn’t sound like a bad ventriloquist — affinity and affection abound, with their potential unextinguished.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The way Richard Dawson pitches his melodies, “Gondola” plays like a four-minute chorus, perpetual climax; it forces me to listen to every well-turned use of the demotic. I’m not hearing the Method acting, though.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Honestly, his album with Circle brought a little “I don’t know what” to Dawson’s work that, for me, pushed it into true greatness. The sparser backing here doesn’t seize me quite as much, but he’s still a wonderfully idiosyncratic voice (literally and figuratively) and I’m always glad to hear from him.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: A fond feeling is that you love your grandmother. Not at all. Love is caring for a elderly woman who can barely walk and breathe, cooking her favorite foods, listening intently to her stories, even taking her on holidays and watching the last few embers of her youth smolder in her eyes as she rushes down the hill or is carried over the grass, once remembering how easy it once was to sprint through the mud without budging much, now instead the frustrated complaints and rustling wheezing of a body having survived the unending torturous prolonging of a life long lived and long forgotten by even their beloved grandchildren, who rarely think to call or write or even visit until it is too late. There are the few of us who do not try, or attempt, who are reading this blog off their phone as they are lazing around the 2 story home assembled and bought long after the knee cartilage has begun to wear and grind against the kneecaps, close enough to hear the labored breathing, there to see the rheumy eyes flutter open and their lips cast off the last stories they still have yet to tell you. The body betrays you once you leave fighting age, leaving a crumbling ruin to harbor a once great mind grown weak and thin with disuse. Even the simplest dreams and delusions have long since deserted them. And there is nothing left to do but take a breath in the gondola, then finally float away.
[10]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/richard-dawson-gondola/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29558

Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/cafune-ft-riovaz-temporary-lover/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29549

And we’re back stateside for some indie pop courtesy of Katherine…

[Video]
[7.00]Katherine St. Asaph: Crushes require fuel, so much fuel, blazing through your reserves faster than you can ever replenish. And false hope is a readily available fuel: tainted by exposure to the outside world, corrosive and you know it; but more potent than the real thing, and maybe the only fuel you’ve got. Songs are impervious to corrosion, though, and nothing fuels a pop song like false hope. That’s what makes “Temporary Lover” — even the title has futility baked in — work better than it perhaps should. It sounds like a 2000s video games soundtrack and feels like all those early ’10s dance crossovers that were nominally powered by bro-ness but actually powered by uncontainable emotion. The intro is short, a two-note loop impatient to get to the hook the way one might be impatient to get to a future rendezvous. (And a specific time in the future, too; “November” functions the same way in the lyrics that “2019” did in Raye’s “Escapism,” an inlet for any time-bound yearning or regret a listener might have.) The vocals are effortfully pianissimo, trailing off lines, straining not to emote. “I hope you’ll handle things differently” is a measured “are you in the right headspace?” type of lyric, the kind of thing you would text in this situation after triple-checking (or I guess realistically these days getting Claude to do it if you must, which you mustn’t). The percussion expresses what her voice barely conceals: frantic, sputtering, an engine idling. Then comes “guess I’ll just hold this in for now,” and the engine accelerates from 0 to 100 then stays at top speed. The hook is huge — this probably won’t show up in karaoke books, but I desperately want it to — and the vocals are just short of slipping into Nessa Barrett-style TikTok pop-punk (a compliment, here). Riovaz plays her inevitably less invested counterpart: emotionally blunted rather than emotionally frantic, or at least that’s what he thinks. When choosing a song for this year, I had a shortlist of tasteful tracks, hooky tracks, Jukebox-bait tracks, tracks with discourse, tracks about which everyone here would undoubtedly have a lot to say; I went with the one I know I’d have had on repeat. (Uh, however, necessary disclaimer on that: I heard this from a promo in my still-overflowing inbox and only found out later, as in like three days ago, that it was a former Pitchfork writer — which is probably how it got in my inbox in the first place. Any nepo is purely coincidental.)
[9]

Jel Bugle: A lament from the machine. I liked the clangy clashy percussion sounds.
[7]

Claire Davidson: The opening of “Temporary Lover” is really quite striking: Sedona Schat’s airy delivery floats across a crystalline keyboard melody that clashes potently with an undercurrent of muffled noise that becomes powerfully propulsive in its staticky discord. That foundation gives way to a galvanizing chorus, too, as the first verse’s more contained anxiety bursts into a blend of sandy but energetic percussion and distant melodic chimes, the combination of which allows Schat to plead for a partner with a more potent angst, the reverb surrounding her creating a tension that readily replicates the feeling of begging with someone who’s impossibly distant, Still, Schat’s choice to not belt more heavily on this chorus does rob “Temporary Lover” of some of its urgency, not helped by her more diminished place in the mix. What really slows the song’s momentum, though, is the presence of Riovaz on the second verse: his more subdued crooning isn’t bad, per se, but it feels borrowed from a wholly different song, so muted in its mournful goodbyes that the entire track feels disjointed as a result of its inclusion.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: The instrumental is cluttered with exuberant little chirps and flutters that recall my most nostalgia-clouded memories of GameCube battle music — Sedona Schat weaves her way between the heavy, noisy percussion, filling up all other available space, while Noah Yoo holds back to give the third act more oomph. It’s got exactly one sonic trick — one “oh, this is nice” moment at the beginning when its candy-sheen production drops in — and, for the most part, this alone is enough to hold my interest for three minutes, even if there’s not a lot of surprises past that.
[7]

Ian Mathers: One of the slighter “ft.”s I’ve heard in a while, and not one that particularly adds much; but the original vocal performance and production is so strong that’s not really a huge knock against the song. The first 30 seconds or so immediately puts me in the mind of the most devastatingly well-cut-together AMVs that got passed around in high school, and I do actually mean that as a compliment.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s easy to see why producer Noah Yoo singled out this song in his review of Against All Logic’s 2017-2019. Underneath the fierce sloganeering of Lydia Lunch, Nicholas Jaar contructs a seething, rumbling banger that lays its heavy, dusty kicks doubly over the fizzing, spiting synths as well as the purring, hoarse bass. Compare this to the desperately fast breakbeats that underlie Riovaz’s Alvin & the Chipmunks tenor on “See U There,” produced by Linguini, which is lithe, fleet footed and rubbery sweet, easy on the ears yet hard to catch in the mind. Yoo strikes a solid midpoint with the heavy handed kicks of Jaar yet the speedy pace of Linguini, allowing Sedona Schat to comfortably sing over them without much strain, tender yet tart. Riovaz sounds both forthright and poignant in his appearance, with only a brief hint of percussion allowing him to settle into the warm plush chords, which Schat snaps them back out of, leaving Riovaz in the panning. Rough and heavy handed yet fleet and lively. Perfectly balanced, allowing for catharsis.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: I like how the “indie kids go electronic” trope is performed here with an uncomplicated earnestness, like they’re volunteers doing re-enactments at the Recession Pop Historical Society. The choice of guest vocalist, however, signals Cafuné’s desire to engage directly with the contemporary microscenes that have adopted them. It’s a worthy desire which is ill-served by the production’s more stock-sounding elements, chiefly those bloated and attention-seeking snare hits. Riovaz has a lithe and adaptable voice which deserves some open space to crawl around in; here he’s used to add emo-R&B flavoring to a four-on-the-floor placeholder beat that wasn’t lacking for moodiness to begin with.
[5]

Dave Moore: A hazy makeshift club for one, smoke machine and strobe light in the bedroom, painfully lonely and full of life.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Solid dance pop whose anonymous vocal and beat propulsion are just enough.
[7]

Will Adams: It’s almost there. “Temporary Lover” reminds me a lot of earlier PVRIS (before they fell off): propulsive and brooding, with lyrics that express a sense of dread creeping into one’s bones. Here, it’s the realization that a relationship you’ve poured your whole self into has fizzled out. To its detriment, the song fizzles too at its midpoint. Riovaz’s verse fades slowly into view, the drums fall out, and the momentum is gone. Poetic in theory, frustrating to listen to in practice.
[6]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/cafune-ft-riovaz-temporary-lover/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29549