100 Albums: "Touch" by July Talk

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the explainer or view the master list.

Artist: July Talk
Title: Touch
Released: 2016
Genre: indie alternative swamp-rock

For a few years there, it was just a given that an "indie" band would have both a male and female singer, the most famous probably being either Of Monsters And Men or She & Him. But aside from a few exceptions, the blended male/female typically result in neither vocalist being very memorable or distinct.

July Talk is the exception, co-fronted by Leah Fay and Peter Dreimanis, who sound kind of like a happier Karen O and an angrier Leonard Cohen, respectively. They sing at complete opposite ends of the spectrum, Fay with an almost keening soprano and Dreimanis with a growly baritone, which means they don't blend so much as form a two-pronged assault. Fittingly, a lot of their vocal lines aren't so much handed off to each other as they are a call-and-response. You can hear that used to great effect on Lola + Joseph, a song about a chance romantic encounter at a liquor store, and also just a damned sexy song.

Despite describing their actual relationship as "brother/sister" Fay and Dreimanis frequently sing in character as paramours, and the messiness of adult relationships are an undercurrent throughout the whole album. Topics include being unsatisfied with voyeurism (Picturing Love), staying in a broken relationship just because the familiarity is comfortable (Strange Habit), and the complications around a casual "booty call" relationship (Beck + Call). The album ends with Touch, an atmospheric slow-build song about needing to connect with someone but at the same time needing to keep yourself walled off from everyone. And for good measure, there's also a song about colonialism (Jesus Said So).

It's a compelling album with a unique sound. I heard the song Touch on the Next Music podcast and knew I was going to need to hear the rest of the album. They're a new band, but one to watch.

Further Listening: The band only has one other album, a self-titled album from 2012. It's not nearly as refined as Touch, but you can hear rougher versions of the sonic elements that are on display here. It also has Summer Dress, which is perhaps the band's best song.

100 Albums: "Astro Lounge" by Smash Mouth

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the explainer or view the master list.

Artist: Smash Mouth
Title: Astro Lounge
Released: 1999
Genre: alt-rock surf-pop

Twenty-two records in and this is the third surf-rock album. I may have a type. This is another album that is just plain fun. And yes, All-Star is much maligned, and I suppose that's fair. It's light and fluffy and got seriously overplayed when it came out. But the entire album holds up. I make sure it's on my iPod before any lengthy road trip, because not only is it compulsively listenable, it even sounds good on crappy car speakers with messed up EQs.

It opens with Who's There, a track that gleefully announces what you can expect for the next fifty-odd minutes: vintage-guitar-and-rock-organ dance-pop that's been bedazzled with sci-fi sound effects and theramins. It's not deep, but it's up-tempo and immensely fun. And even if the singles are kind of played out, there are plenty of other great songs to choose from. I'm a big fan of Waste, Fallen Horses, Diggin' Your Scene, and I Just Wanna See. The only thing I don't particularly like about the album is the ending. The penultimate song Home would have been a perfect closer, but a cover of ? And The Mysterians' I Can't Get Enough Of You Baby is tacked on after (yes, I know The Four Seasons did it first, but SM's version definitely is inspired by ?atM). Skip it.

Further Listening: Fush Yu Mang, the band's debut, has a couple decent tracks, but nothing else Smash Mouth has put out really holds a candle to this, not that I've heard anyway.

Curious Fictions (And Some Blog Cleanup)

Hey everybody!

I'm going to be doing some housekeeping around here, deleting older posts and what not. Part of that means I'll be taking down the Friday Flash Fiction posts. I anticipate most of them will be given a coat of polish and then moved over to Curious Fictions.

Which, oh, by the way...

I've got a page at Curious Fictions. It's a platform for authors to post their reprints, so I'll be migrating previously published stories over that way. If you are so inclined, you can subscribe to my posts over there.

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100 Albums: "Play" by Moby

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the explainer or view the master list.

Artist: Moby
Title: Play
Released: 1999
Genre: alt-rock but also techno and somehow kind of archival?

Alt-rock and grunge were on the wane in the late 90s, having been displaced by nü-metal, rap-rock, and the boy-band revival. Into that melange, enter Moby, a tiny bald vegan from New York whose song Natural Blues was essentially an EDM-lite remix of a Depression-era Mississippi Delta song by Vera Hall. So when that creeped into radio playlists, my cohort's collective reaction was "Wait, what the hell was that? Play it again!"

Though Play felt like a bolt from the blue, Moby had been working in music for nearly two decades. He'd started in the early 80s playing guitar for a hardcore punk band called the Vatican Commandos and then had a career as a DJ and techno artist through the late 80s and early 90s. In the mid-90s he'd started blending those sensibilities, putting out Everything Is Wrong, which has the vibe and tempo (mostly) of an alt-rock album but whose songs are largely structured like EDM songs and sung by guests vocalists. Several of those had found their way onto film--notably God Moving Over The Face Of The Water, which is prominently featured in the finale of Michael Mann's crime drama Heat.

Play takes those same musical sensibilities but adds a new gimmick: several tracks feature vocals sampled from delta blues songs. Trouble So Hard becomes Natural Blues. Joe Lee's Rock becomes Find My Baby. Moby himself sings on a few, notably the singles Porcelain and Southside, the latter of which featured Gwen Stefani on both the single re-mix and music video (honestly, I prefer the non-Gwen version, but your mileage may vary). Overall, it's an odd duck of an album. It absolutely should not work, but it does work and it's kind of amazing. Moby's process at this point was to just record 150 songs in his apartment and then pick his favorite 17 or 18 to make the record. It's mostly driven by piano and slide guitar over looped drums. There are a half dozen lead vocalists. The liner notes contain essays about veganism, prison reform, and fundamentalism. It includes progressive dance (Bodyrock), gospel (Run On), spoken word (The Sky Is Broken), ambient instrumental (Inside), alt-rock (Southside), in addition to the delta blues remixes (Natural Blues, Find My Baby, Honey).

It is, in short, Moby being Moby. This is the man who, as a successful musician, opened a tea store in New York City where he would occasionally buss tables. He's just a guy who found a way to make a living doing what he loves, and his albums are always just doing whatever he's interested in, and for a while there, whatever he was interested in happened to be very popular.

Further Listening: If not for my one-album-per-artist rule, Everything Is Wrong would be on this list for sure. Animal Rights, which fell between EiW and Play, is an interesting mix of lo-fi punk and ambient piano that just doesn't quite work. I do like 18, the follow-up to Play, but it doesn't break any new ground. It feels very much like a re-tread of the Play formula.

100 Albums: "Puppy Love" by The Kickstand Band

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the explainer or view the master list.

Artist: The Kickstand Band
Title: Puppy Love
Released: 2012
Genre: garage surf-rock

I got this album as part of a bundle from the now-defunct music curation service Sound Supply. Of the dozens of albums I got from that service, this is the only one that really stands out (I've discovered lots of interesting songs, but this is hands-down the best album). It's light, it's poppy, it's energetic, and while musically it hews to a fairly classic formula, it has a lot of fun within the constraints of said formula. The two singers--it's an early teens indie band, so of course there's one female and one male singer--sound great together, and the playing is tight and lively.

Puppy Love is a mere 24 minutes long--the longest of its ten tracks barely crack two-and-a-half minutes. Still Thinking Of You is one of the of the slower songs. My fave from the album is Purgatory, which gives the afterlife the same sort of treatment the Squirrel Nut Zippers did with their song Hell: dressing it up with genre-specific lingo. I'm also a big fan of New Years Eve, the album closer. But honestly, there's not a track here I don't enjoy.

Further Listening: They've put out a few EPs, but no other proper albums. Nothing else I've heard from them shines quite a brightly as this. I'd recommend going to their Bandcamp page where you can stream the entire album and buy it at whatever price you think is fair.

New Fiction Out Now: Please [redacted] My Last Email

I've got a story out in the Futures section of the new issue of Nature Magazine. This is my second time being published in Nature. It's probably the weirdest story I've ever sold, and I'm super proud of it.

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100 Albums: "Tron: Legacy" by Daft Punk

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the explainer or view the master list.

Artist: Daft Punk
Title: Tron: Legacy Original Motion Picture Sountrack
Released: 2010
Genre: orchestral electropop

I've never seen the film, but I love this soundtrack. Neither am I a particularly huge fan of French EDM pioneers Daft Punk. This is simply a situation where the right elements came together to make some incredible. Instead of their normal sample-heavy dance tracks, Daft Punk crafted the music for this from whole cloth, blending their synth sensibilities with an 85-piece orchestra to create something that wasn't quite a movie score and wasn't quite a dance record, but existed somewhere in between. It's great background music. I can put it on while working on something and enjoy it without being too distracted by it. In fact, after Trouble Will Find Me, it's my favorite music to write to.

There is a single motif that runs throughout the album, and it's a great one. A stripped down version of it shows up in the Overture, a high-energy version over the end titles, and other permutations throughout. A few tracks break away to do their own thing, and of those I highly recommend Derezzed and Adaggio For Tron. It's got highs and lows, staggers and stops, but unlike a lot of the scores that you can find to listen to on their own, the tracks here each feel like their own song, not just an aggregate of music cues that have been glommed into a single track because they run together.

Further Listening: Random Access Memories is interesting, and digs a little more into funk and disco. Paul Williams sings on it, so that's fun. It's an odd duck of an album, but it features Get Lucky, which was destined to be the song of the summer of 2013, until it got blasted out of the water by Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines. And then there's the Daft Hands meme that sprang up around Harder Better Faster Stronger, which is itself a great tune.