Jan 2025
My mom used to give me the occasional pep talk too, but it never sounded like she was a hungry leopard barely resisting the urge to bite my face off. Maybe that's why I've never come up with a drop that slams as hard as this one.  Â
A deceptively light touch. All delicate ooh's and aah's and keyboard chimes, but listen to that bass line. It's a closet jam. Â
I read his 16-year-old son died. The mode here is generally cheerful (because Ben Kweller) but I think you can hear the despair. Reminds me of Weezer before Rivers Cuomo stashed his human face away in a vault somewhere, never to be seen again.
At first I thought: "Hey now! Kim Deal covering Burt Bacharach!" But nope, this is hers. A nicely crafted Latin lounge number with a horn break that kicks like a mule.
A country-psych head nodder about skating through the hellscape, from a 25-year-old New Zealand band I've never even heard of. There are still mysteries in this life. Â
There's quite a bit going on in the opening line of this song: "There's a woman in the corner claiming she is just a former one of me, and I am her, just out of context." OK, yeah, tell me more...
I would go to this church. I would bring seven friends.
More loopy, left-field baroque pop from Japanese Breakfast. A dreamy intermezzo having something to do with Renaissance poetry and a Winnebago.Â
Destroyer is just a vibe now. Restless bass lines, insistent bongos, submarine pings. Canons echoing in the distance. A synth climax that sounds a bit like the end of The Safety Dance. Really, I have no idea what Den Bejar is doing here, but it sounds really good.
You're always looking for phrases that 'sing well', that fall naturally into the cadence of the melody, but then Stephen Malkmus comes along and sings "On earth as it is in heaven" like a goddamn alien would, and it totally works.
Right, I get that this isn't for everybody. But listen: At about 2:40 the song bludgeons its way out of the rigid, irregular time signature it's been caged in, and falls into a truly monstrous 4/4 lope that sounds like...well, like a big dog.
"Are you an artist, are you an engineer?" Man, I don't know. Can't it be both?