Don't know if you've heard, but there's a whole pile of it
Mix 15: Karma, aardvarks, Caribou, Brits At It Again (sprechgesang indie), and North Americans At It Again (songbook standard jazz-pop)...but nary a tortured poet
Tom Ewing recently finished an incredible essay series on Cerebus the Aardvark,1 the massive multi-decade comics project from troubled auteur Dave Sim that began as an idiosyncratic genre pastiche incorporating popular trends in mainstream and alternative comic art but eventually devolved into a convoluted, paranoid morass of dubious quasi-religious lore.2
…Did I mention I’m writing about Taylor Swift again?
In my first postscript to the Taylor Swift series, I made a broad-strokes argument for Swift’s mixtape era, a deluge of content that to my ears is mostly a hodgepodge of writing exercises—which have never stretched further into lyrical experimentation for experimentation’s sake—all set to music that has never sounded more like an afterthought, a parade of “Taylor Swift type beats.” (I almost wonder what the album would have sounded like if she’d just sung her lines over other people’s songs.)
I liked BDM’s point about the boy-lore:
One place I disagree with both [Tom] Breihan and [Ann] Powers is that I think it’s not only easy to listen to this album without being invested in the drama of Taylor’s personal life, it’s a much better album if you don’t. And maybe it’s just because I’ve genuinely never, ever cared about the Kens (as Taylor calls them on “Hits Different” and again here). I’ve felt no emotional investment in any of them, Travis very much included.
I’ve long avoided the murder podcast red-stringing of Taylor Swift’s celebrity life, mostly because who could possibly give a shit, but also because I’ve known since meeting Ashlee Simpson’s “Josh” on TV (his name was actually Josh, I just think the quotation marks get across his personality better) that this didn’t tell me anything about “Unreachable,” the song ostensibly written about him, which I love and have written about a lot. Not only that, when I thought about a real person at the center of the song, the behind-the-scenes knowledge actively threatened what I liked about it. The song was bigger than someone’s personal life, as it should be.
That said, even if I don’t think knowing the figures of inspiration for songs necessarily adds anything to them, there is still a distinctively closed-circuit quality to the Tortured Poets stuff. I tried to fit a song from it on the mix this week, and it just sounded weird. So here are 22 songs that do not feature Taylor Swift.
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14
MIX 15: DON’T KNOW IF YOU’VE HEARD, BUT THERE’S A WHOLE PILE OF IT
1. Margaret Berger: Karma Is A
Margaret Berger didn’t make it to Eurovision this year, but the consolation prize is that, according to the cover art for this single, she is maybe (maybe??) working on an album called Songs My Friends Might Wanna Dance To. As one of her dear friends (i.e. paid import prices for her 2006 album), I am very much looking forward to this — Pretty Scary Silver Fairy is one of those rare totally perfect pop albums, like Rachel Stevens’ Come and Get It (love it) and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion (just OK).
2. Aili: Nandakke?
Billed as a “Belgian-Japanese electro-pop duo,” to which, sadly, I can’t add much except, “yep.”
3. Caribou: Honey
A bit closer to down-the-middle house music than I remember Caribou getting.
4. Thys, Nikki Nair: Poppitt
House, but less down-the-middle: starts in media res (INT. BONGO JAM - NIGHT) and then layers on noise. I especially love those blown-out kick drums.
5. Tisaoriginal: كلامي
Not sure if this Tisa is “original” against some other litigious Tisa that requires technical differentiation (like how Death From Above had to add “1979 “ or Dinosaur had to add “Jr.,” major improvements to both names so hooray for nuisance suits!), but there’s certainly no relation to TisaKorean — it’s Maghreb sing-rap in a dry ice fog.
6. VHOOR: Flash
I’ve written before how VHOOR has found a way to soften his baile funk sound without losing all of the friction and urgency in it: here his synth clouds act like a pillow muffling the gun SFX, while various hoots and grunts are mixed at a respectable distance from your eardrums.
7. Breimen: ラブコメディ
Rollicking sax-positive Japanese funk-rock that just skirts Muppetcore—a fine balance for what must be a bunch of dorks, though they never make it all the way to sounding cool.
8. Vũ Thảo My: Chỉ Cần Anh Muốn
A big V-pop release with an old-school American radio R&B sound. I’d heard the album already but liked this better showing up out of context in my list last week.
9. QWER: Soda
Hyperpop producer Alice Longyu Ghao meets K-pop halfway (in irritation level, hook stickiness, irony, and BPM). It works!
10. Valknee: OG
Japanese rap propelled by a Baltimore club beat. Sounds like Spank Rock with a J-idol in front. (Why didn’t he do that?)
11. Wonderframe, Jack Papho: สโนว์ไวท์ยังมีคนแคระรักเธอนะแจ๊ะมีแค่เธอนะจ๊ะ
I was all in on MILLI as the great crossover hope for Thai rap a few years ago, but I’m more consistently interested in the work of her YUPP! labelmate and occasional collaborator Wonderframe, whose shift from sappy pop singer to piss-taking pop rapper was a savvy one.
12. Haterappers: Мані Бег
A lucky break for this goofy Ukrainian rapper, who got in as an alternate when one of my mix MVPs had to bow out at the last minute (was a 2016 Serebro track from my all but useless Discover Weekly mix).
13. Franek Warzywa, Młody Budda: Dziury
Polish art-rock duo provide pulsing monophony with some pep in its step.
14. DJ Tira f. Amatycooler, Big Nuz, Focus Magazi: Singenzenjani
Really liked this gqom track, which introduces a vocal that recalls the clarion joy I associate with 80s South African music I grew up more familiar with.
15. English Teacher: R&B
16. The Pill: Bale of Hay
Two acts that would likely be slotted into the Brits At It Again category in the Twitter People’s Pop Polls (now entering the final melee: the RAGNAPOP battle of previous winners). “The Brits Are At It Again,” or BAIA, is the tongue-in-cheek complaint when Gen X British tastes steamroll other worthy contenders. At year-end time, the epithet is sometimes applied to heavy-rotation favorites from BBC’s Radio 6 that blindside those of us not privy to UK radio programming. (I’ve remedied this blind spot in my weekly playlists: won’t get fooled again.)
Only one of these, the post-Wet Leg sprechgesang indie group English Teacher, is already on the Radio 6 playlists. The Pill, though equally British (and equally sprechgesang indie), has not as far as I can tell made it through yet. But they sound like they have a fighting chance!
17. Nia Archives: Cards on the Table
I wasn’t going to feature anything else from this Nia Archives album, but I really love the way that she combines the wild drum n bass backing to something that could have practically been a Macy Gray ballad in the late 90s.
18. んoon: Nana
Gauzy Japanese indie palate cleanser before the final jazz stretch. Buckle in.
19. Margo Guryan: Moon Ride [1958]
20. Caity Gyorgy: Colloquially
21. Andrew Bird, Alan Hampton, Ted Poor: I Fall in Love Too Easily
Three oblique takes on the American standards songbook. The first is a recently rereleased space race novelty by Margo Guryan, who passed away at the end of 2021, recorded in 1958 at the very beginning of her career (by one account it’s in fact her first recording). The second is a contemporary attempt at writing a standard, scat inclusive, by Canadian artist Caity Gyorgy. The third, surprisingly (to me anyway), is from Andrew Bird, who keeps finding interesting ways to trick me into putting him on my mixes—in this case, going full crooner but adding some jagged string arrangements.
22. Cassie Kinoshi, Seed: Gratitude: Movement I
Composer and saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, formerly of Kokoroko (whose “Uman” I loved a few years ago), creates a jazz-inflected post-rock (post-rock-inflected jazz?) wall of sound with an assist from the London Symphony Orchestra. I’m imagining Quincy Jones commandeering the studio from Mark Hollis.
***
Until next time, don’t let anyone force you to talk about Taylor Swift against your will!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from English Teacher’s “R&B.”
I’ve linked Tom’s conclusion post, not least because of its absurdly economical 300-word synopsis of the entire 300-issue arc of the series.
When Tom started writing the series, I was certain that I’d never read Cerebus, but when I saw some of the art I realized that Cerebus was probably hanging around on the fringes of some of my friends’ comics collections in the early late 80s and early 90s. My childhood friend, whose older brother introduced me to both Sandman and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, may have had a few aardvarks lying around.