They fed you to the alligators
Mix 35: Comebacks from Diddy, Sugababes, Pretenders, and 90s artists from Angola and Finland, plus Corinne Bailey Rae, Pale Blue, and Bad Boy Chiller Crew.
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs mostly from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
September is historically when my interest in listening to new songs completely shuts down for the year and I go into a kind of new music hibernation until around February. But this year the momentum isn’t flagging, and I’ve been able to keep up the newsletter as a personal discipline practice instead of feeling like I’m feeding C-O-N-T-E-N-T into the maw of an insatiable beast. Progress?
One nice thing about continuing later into the year is seeing the stuff I’ve noticed develop or resurface in interesting ways. The Príncipe label tracks that I’ve pulled consistently all year have started me on a survey of Angolan and Portuguese dance music, and this week I randomly picked a track in conversation with that survey from a 90s kuduro artist despite it sounding nothing like his 90s work; my deeper dive into baile funk and amapiano are showing me signs of those forms changing after years of ferment; a bunch of tracks I liked months ago wound up with incredible albums attached to them (see photo above).
So I think I’ll probably make it through. This week was a bumper crop — still have over 20 holdovers that might get worked into the next few weeks, or maybe soon I’ll need to preserve songs like that in jars to sustain me in leaner times (i.e. December).
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 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18 // Mix 19 // Mix 20 // Mix 21 // Mix 22 // Mix 23 // Mix 24 // Mix 25 // Mix 26 // Mix 27 // Mix 28 // Mix 29 // Mix 30 // Mix 31 // Mix 32 // Mix 33 // Mix 34
MIX 35: THEY FED YOU TO THE ALLIGATORS
1. Diddy f. Justin Bieber: Moments
Diddy is back — though, like the old slogan goes, maybe it’s just new to me, since there have been a few albums since the last time I was paying attention in 2010, with the Diddy-Dirty Money project. He recaptures some of that group’s sumptuousness and Sade-ness and makes Justin Bieber sound natural in front of it. I feel great about my insistence at the time that Last Train to Paris was better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — and that it was specifically better in the way MBDTF was trying to be good:
The difference in a nutshell is that Diddy aims for mildly eclectic competence and exceeds it, while Kanye aims for mad scientist greatness and misses it. Kanye wanted Who Framed Roger Rabbit and he got Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. This is Space Jam – not aiming too high, but better than it has any right to be.
Anyway, this song sounds great. And the drums—the drums!
2. Lauren Flax & Pale Blue: I Don’t Want to Hurt You
I heard Pale Blue for the first time in the League of Extraordinary Tracks, where “I Walk Alone with Acid” was a tournament standout among dozens of incredible tracks. This is less striking, but the breathy, disaffected vocals still manage to get across some fluttering anxiety, if stopping short of the bracing dread of “Acid.”
3. Sugababes: When the Rain Comes
Another comeback! This is a pleasantly unfashionable return to form — who writes a chorus like that anymore? Sugababes do, apparently, along with a boybander turned Eurovision songwriter, plus a producer whom I’ve never heard of and doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page. (Don’t worry, the Popjustice hive has reassembled and provided a playlist of everything he’s produced).
4. Vagabon: Lexicon
Excellent “heard it in the shop” pop from a New York songwriter.
5. Bad Boy Chiller Crew: Sliding
Bad Boy Chiller Crew is back! I don’t fully understand Bad Boy Chiller Crew’s deal — I’m merely Anglo-curious, after all — so I will have to defer to Samson Savill de Jong’s assessment of BBCC’s relationship to their hometown of Bradford a few years ago in the Singles Jukebox:
Bradford isn’t a place you go to, at least not the actual city; tourist attractions usually involve getting on a train to Skipton or Shipley, which have Bradford postcodes but are really countryside villages. You don’t have to walk around long to see why. Outside of the (quite nice) central square you quickly start to see the boarded-up houses and worn-down streets, proof of the underinvested North of England, along with the failed clubs that people tried to open before quickly giving up. If you’re young and you want to go out in Bradford, you go to Leeds, the New York to Bradford’s Newark. It certainly feels like the land time forgot, and so when BBCC talk about their sound being a throwback in part because nobody in the (few) Bradford clubs they DJ’d wanted to hear newer music, it makes complete sense. Bradford is a bit of a shithole. But for the people who are from Bradford it is their shithole; they may get to take the piss out of it, but they also love it, and woe betide the outsider who comes and starts shitting on it.
6. Corinne Bailey Rae: Erasure
Was pretty excited for this album when I shared “New York Transit Queen” back on Mix 23 and I’d heard it was going to be sonically adventurous, but I figured it would stop short of offering a top-notch PJ Harvey song about racism.
7. Cyndi Wang: BITE BACK
Great Taiwenese pop track, don’t know Cyndi Wang but she’s huge there and this is from her thirteenth album across almost 20 years.
8. Nídia: É COMO?
Another home run from Príncipe — tempted to just purchase the whole label discography at this point. Excited for the new album (this is the only released track from it so far), available for pre-order on Bandcamp.
9. Vintage Culture: Tudo Bem, Tudo Bom
Brazilian DJ working in a more straight-ahead house music mode, positively genteel compared to the mutant EDM direction that baile funk has been taking lately, sometimes veering into Jock Jams territory — a development I should like in theory but don’t in practice (might write about this in a future newsletter). Relative gentility works just fine here.
10. Bruno Castro: Deliciosa
Another comeback, this time from an Angolan producer with roots in mid-90s techno-informed kuduro. Don’t have a clear sense of how Castro stacks up to other heavyweight influencers from this period, but should probably at least check out the 2014 documentary on it, I Love Kuduro, which apparently features him.
11. Dlala Thukzin f. Sykes & Zaba: Imoto
Good amapiano track that is either reaching back to amapiano prehistory or forward to its future — my sense is the former, but it’s hard to say, amapiano has proven to just be one of those “know it when I hear it” genres, and my ears code this as “sort of it, but not exactly.” I have a sense that the amapiano moment is slowly morphing into its next phase, but that’s all gut and no brain so far, so I don’t have much to say about it.
12. Maritta Kuula: Toteutan unelman
This one’s from a 90s Finnish alt-rocker whose first album from 1992 I am now very seriously considering buying on Discogs.
13. Le Couleur f. Standard Emmanuel: À la recontre de Barbara
Rigidly formalist disco-pop from Montreal, perhaps satisficing for any early 80s funk you might be craving but don’t have immediate access to, like Nicorette for an expensive record habit.
14. Léon Phal f. K.O.G.: Idylla
French-Swiss jazz guy pays homage to D’Angelo in his bio and sure enough fooled me that he wasn’t a dork long enough to even tolerate the rap starting 1:20. Was tempted to replace this with a track from the new Nas album—the one where Lil Wayne rhymes with “icon” 40 times in a single verse, if I counted correctly—but that was too much of a powerhouse in this slot, will leave it for a spotlight next week.
15. ako: Trank
J-pop with no discernible Spotify footprint (most listeners are coming from Taiwan). But the YouTube is pretty popular, so, via Google Translate:
“It sounded like a song about something fleeting, delicate, and anxious, about not being able to stay strong all the time, but wanting to be as happy as other people. I listen to this song all the time, thinking that ako is very good at expressing the unstable, human-like delicacy of this song.”
That’s pretty good, though I find the breathiness a little too affected for genuine delicacy myself.
16. nath f. 1988: aloha spirit
Weird, good, and carrying the hyperpop torch? Must be from Poland.
17. DeCarteret f. Bricknasty: Belly
Also weird and good, insular Irish bedroom pop that offers hooks tentatively like it’s a little afraid you might enjoy yourself.
18. Sara Tavares: KURTIDU
Portuguese-Cape Verdean artist on the world music scene throughout the 00s gets much hipper than her other previous stuff I listened to.
19. Pretenders: Losing My Sense of Taste
I guess the Pretenders never left, but given I make no effort to follow them, when one of their songs catches my ear it sure feels like a comeback. These are the post-COVID “wrote the album remotely” songs Chrissie Hynde wrote with James Walbourne, but I’m giving a bunch of credit to producer David Wrench, who gives the whole thing a rawness and muscle I don’t usually associate with the Pretenders.
20. Maren Morris: The Tree
There is talk of Maren Morris “leaving country,” which then inevitably turns to folks talking about Taylor Swift “leaving country,” which seems weird to me since Taylor Swift only made one country album (her first) before running for the hills — will have to write up my next installment in the Taylor Swift series sometime soon. Anyway, I wish her (Morris) well; I hope she continues to write songs that sound exactly like this but just releases them on Kill Rock Stars Nashville or something.
21. Harp: I Am the Seed
How could I not end things with the seed after the tree? A track from the Brooklyn Vegan playlist. Sounds folk-gothic in a British sorta way. (I like Pentangle now!)
***
OK, one quarter to go in the year and I might actually wind up with 50 mixes to show for it. Fingers crossed!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Erasure.”