Month: September 2019

Bat For Lashes Returns to Her Roots on “Lost Girls”

Bat For Lashes’ previous album, The Bride, wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser: a slow, deadly serious collection of songs about a woman whose husband-to-be dies on her wedding day. While I argued at the time (and still do) that it was an emotionally powerful and worthwhile record that took some audaciousness to release, it was easy to see why many found it unengaging. It’s also easy to see why she chose a more accessible direction on her new album, Lost Girls, which feels like a much-deserved vacation after such heavy material. It’s a shimmering, upbeat pop album that sounds like a love letter to the 80s music and cinema she grew up with.

If you’re like me, the last part raises some eyebrows, since we’re currently at peak “have you heard of this thing called the 80s” culture from Stranger Things and a gaggle of artists embracing that synth pop sound. And like it was hard to argue with The Bride being too slow and difficult, it’s also hard to take issue with anyone who is turned off by the nostalgia and references at play here. But I think it works on this album because Bat for Lashes is referencing a past she actually experienced, and I sense a genuine appreciation for the material she’s referencing instead of it being a cynical nostalgia-grab or put-on. Her whole career proves this in a way, because she was working with these sounds and reference points years ago before it became a cool thing to do. Lost Girls feels more like her coming full circle than her jumping on the bandwagon of 80s mythologizing.

What also helps Lost Girls become more than the sum of its nostalgic parts is that, well, the songs are great. Similar to some other pop acts I’ve appreciated in recent years like Kristin Kontrol and Carly Rae Jepsen, this album has a charming “I’m just here to write memorable pop songs” energy coming from an artist with a deep knowledge of the craft. The first five tracks on this album could all be classified as “jams” (good songs), starting with the lush “Kids in the Dark,” which introduces the album’s themes of young love that are further established on “The Hunger,” which has a similar slow-burn style with an organ added to the mix. “Feel For You” feels almost like a conscious attempt to see how simple she can make a song with it still being good — it’s just a recurring synth part and the lyric “I love you; I feel for you” over and over, yet it doesn’t feel underwritten to me in any way. The sparkling “Desert Man” and the whispery, seductive “Jasmine” close out this opening salvo of tracks, all of which prove that Bat For Lashes can still write catchy, listenable pop — she just didn’t feel like doing it on The Bride.

The instrumental “Vampires” segues into the final few tracks, most of which are slower ballads that are in the conventional Bat For Lashes style (meaning slow and beautiful). While this album lacks the emotional punch of The Bride, it’s a useful companion for showing another side of her artistry, and it’s satisfying to hear an album that doesn’t overreach. Without having some grand contrived narrative, Lost Girls still creates its own world that evokes feelings of youthful innocence and imagination.

“Zdenka 2080” is a Quirky, Cosmic Adventure

People often approach me and ask me “Josh, what do you think music needs more of? By the way I’m a huge fan and love what you do.” I always look them straight in the eye and answer: “we need more music that embraces whimsy and we need more concept albums about traveling into other dimensions.” Lindsay Olsen, who records as Salami Rose Joe Louis (I’m going to refer to her as “Salami” because that seems fun) has delivered my request with her new album,  Zdenka 2080,  which is delightfully bonkers and one of the year’s most creative records.

It takes place in a dystopian future where, as outlined in the second track, “Octagonal Room,” corporations have used the power of the sun to fuel a giant spaceship. When the earth begins to cool, they flee the planet in their ship, leaving the earthlings to inhabit a cold, dark earth. One of those earthlings then stumbles upon an octagonal room with eight paintings, all of which lead into another dimension, and she searches through each dimension to try to find a way to save earth. This gets even weirder through the album, and I’ll resist sharing more of the plot, partially because I don’t want to give it all away and partially because I’m still not sure if I really understand it (or if I’m supposed to).

The plot is told through occasional expositional narratives backed by the music, but for the most part its purpose is to provide a narrative thread that connects all of the tracks, which are quick 1-2 minute collages of abstract pop that are reminiscent of some of Broadcast’s later work with The Focus Group. Salami’s wispy, soulful vocals combined with her quirky retro-futuristic electronics make for a relaxed mood that lets the listener get sucked in and appreciate her mad creativity at work. She is also a planetary scientist, so there is some appropriate science nerdery in the lyrics with songs called “Diatoms and Dinoflagellates” and “Transformation of a Molecule.”

There aren’t really traditional verses or choruses on Zdenka 2080. There is more a collection of intriguing sounds, with memorable keyboard hooks or vocal melodies coming and going quickly as Salami throws all of her musical ideas out there. “Meet Zee in 3-D/Third Dimension” has a beautiful dreamy segment that is probably my favorite part of the album thus far. After a brief keyboard-backed narration at the start, “Love the Sun” turns into a more upbeat piece of lounge pop that would make Stereolab proud.  While many concept albums go for epic scale, Zdenka 2080 is strengthened by its economy of sound and thought, which gives it a wide variety of sounds that don’t overstay their welcome.

On paper (or screen, I guess) this might all sound like a bit much. In practice, Salami weaves all of these elements of the music and story together in a way that feels cohesive. In the context of music now, this is a really refreshing album — one that commits to its ambitious concept and fully embraces the idea of music as a way to expand the listener’s mind, to make them think and wonder. These days, I get a lot of joy out of hearing music that is so willing to be quirky and strange.

Lana Del Rey’s New Album is an Overhyped Bore

There’s this popular and annoying Twitter account called So Sad Today that posts depressive “deep” aphorisms that are clearly engineered to be retweeted by people who are feeling vaguely down and can’t articulate why — stuff like “i love when i’m not awake” and “just got a terrible feeling that I exist.” The account is run by Melissa Broder, an educated woman who is married, lives in LA, and has published four books. I don’t question the validity of her experience with mental illness, but I do find the way this account portrays depression to be rather distasteful. It’s this cutesy, faux-self-deprecating tone that many use on the internet, and it glorifies depression by turning it into a blandly relatable performance that doesn’t contain any real truth.

Lana Del Rey is the So Sad Today of musicians. Her new album,  Norman Fucking Rockwell, appeals to the same audience of disaffected young women, and it taps into very contemporary feelings of nostalgia and anxiety about the future. It’s a huge, ambitious album, and it has an undeniably appealing sound with its piano plus string arrangements and Del Rey’s vocals, which are gorgeous and full of longing, similar to Hope Sandoval’s. Despite these obvious positives, and some good songs like “Mariners Apartment Complex,” I find myself loathing this album because everything feels so fake and performatively sad.

Admittedly, this might be my contrarian instincts kicking in in response to the wave of hype surrounding this album, which has frankly been preposterous. But I can’t buy into this material, which is presented with such seriousness while taking on this silly and cliché 50s Americana aesthetic. Del Rey can sing and back herself with good production, but it never becomes anything to me other than some vapid tunes done in a style that has been performed by countless much more interesting artists. This nearly 70-minute album does not contain a single original thought or sound, yet it’s presented as this majestic, novel commentary on American life.

Norman Fucking Rockwell is so transparently ambitious and trying to be a Great American Album that it becomes unbelievably tedious despite its beautiful sound. A song like “Venice Bitch,” for instance, has no real reason to be nine minutes long except that this is an epic album that needs epic songs. Its long instrumental section tries to be mesmerizing and psychedelic but is really just some pointless noodling– it’s length for the sake of length. That song ends up being a microcosm of this album’s entire contrived self-indulgent vibe. Del Rey now believes she is an artist who has Something to Say about America and culture and everything else, so the album drags on and on with samey songs that are full of banal observations about how great things used to be, how she has no fucks to give, etc. There isn’t really poetry or depth in these lyrics, most of which sound like they were algorithmically generated to maximize likes on Instagram. Anyone pretending that these songs are some really deep exploration of the American Dream is out of their mind. I’ve read fortune cookies that had more insight.

What is maybe most frustrating about this album is that it’s totally in my musical wheelhouse as someone who really likes this type of nostalgic, emotive pop. It irritates me, probably irrationally, that Lana Del Rey is the artist being celebrated for this style when she is bringing nothing new to the table. Widowspeak’s Expect the Best did everything this album is trying to do in half the length and I might have been the only person to chart it on my year-end list. Fiona Apple makes music that is somewhat reminiscent of this album, but she puts authentic feeling and experiences into her songs. When Del Rey sings, I don’t get that — it all feels like a character and a performance, and she’s singing these lyrics because she knows people will relate to them and like them, not because she feels them. This entire album is such a surface-level exploration of subjects that have been covered so much better by other art. You could probably re-read most of The Great Gatsby in the time it takes to listen to this thing and be much better off.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that this is the album people have decided is the greatest thing ever in the social media era. When people are brought up on the idea of likes and popularity being equal to quality, it makes sense that they all go wild for pandering middlebrow nonsense like this. And when writers and listeners are all desperate to seem positive about pop music to show how not-snobby they are, they convince themselves that Lana’s vacuous lyrics about walking on beaches in California are the pinnacle of the form. Meanwhile, the music that really does have something to say often goes ignored in this social media driven cultural monopoly held by mainstream pop. Norman Fucking Rockwell being a boring album isn’t what bothers me so much: it’s that it represents a tipping point in our culture where every big pop album with some hype behind it is lapped up uncritically by maniacal fans and celebrated for accomplishing the bare minimum artistically. Our standards should be much higher than this.