Welcome back! Ready to talk music? I hope so, because, uh, that’s—that’s what this is. Okay!
While March brought a slew of great new albums to check out, April had some real AOTY contender heavy hitters. I decided against writing about the new Vampire Weekend record, despite having had it in heavy rotation all month. A lot of people smarter than me have written about it way better than I could have, so I’ll let you read those instead. BUT, I do have one take on that album that I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet. The beat drop that comes at 2:22 in the song “Mary Boone” sounds almost exactly like the beat drop in Eels’ “Last Stop: This Town.” Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. Coward.
“Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is having a hell of a year. Two decades years after its initial release (is the anthem now for a thirty-nine year-old girl?) the Broken Social Scene masterpiece has been covered twice in the span of as many months, with Yeule’s cover getting the creepily-slowed-down treatment to score the trailer for the indie horror movie I Saw the TV Glow. Clearly, something about that song struck a hell of a chord with a bunch of millennials, and that chord continues to reverberate.
claire rousay’s latest full-length “ambient emo” record seems to be produced entirely from said seventeen year-old girl’s point of view. Synth pads and swooning strings ebb and flow throughout the album, room tone and field recording fills in every available nook and cranny, and rousay’s own heavily-auto-tuned vocals conjure the same heartbroken robot through whose voicebox Emily Haines once begged, “dream about me.” Lest you think I’m reading too much into one hypothetical influence, the album’s second single “lover’s spit plays in the background” confirms rousay is a true You-Forgot-It-In-People-Head.
rousay has said the album is about the aftermath of using vices like alcohol and sex to escape difficult situations. The song “head” is told from the perspective of someone who has been banking sexual favors as a defense against some possible transgression they might commit against their partner in the future. The effect is that these are songs about bad behavior where the person behaving badly seems to know there are consequences coming, somehow, someday.
Living like that can do a real number on your pleasure receptors. One of my favorite moments on the album is the end of “asking for it” which seems to prematurely flame out under the weight of its own beauty. Then, on the very next track, “iii” rousay delivers the album’s centerpiece, a magnificent bedroom pop arietta. It’s almost like rousay recovers from her own stumble, takes a breath, and doubles down to create something so beautiful it could only have been forged in a moment of pain.
I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, about an hour’s drive from Austin. As a teenager who was into music and movies in the days of Internet 1.0, Austin was the absolute coolest place in the world. There was live music and record stores and indie movie premieres and festivals. I had some real formative experiences driving up to Austin to see a band or a movie, knowing that I would come home with a bunch of other cool discoveries. As a result, the city still holds an important place in my heart despite the fact that it no longer bears much resemblance to what it was twenty years ago.
As anyone who lives or has lived there will tell you (usually without you having to ask), the city has changed dramatically with the influx of tech companies and other businesses looking to escape state taxes. The population has almost doubled since 1999. With increased popularity has come more corporate involvement. All the cool festivals and small businesses have been hollowed out or sponsored within an inch of their lives. So it goes. The clubs are still packed with new bands, but you’re less likely to see a scrappy young local group and more likely to see someone whose tour stop has been strategically placed to make them seem more “indie.” A few years back I went to a show at one of the last remaining OG downtown clubs The Parish and the opener begged the audience to follow her on Instagram because she was afraid of getting dropped by her label. Weird times.
All this to say, I have not followed the rise of Austin indie duo Hovvdy over the last decade, mostly out of jaded suspicion. Perhaps it’s fitting then that, despite being their fifth full-length release, their latest record is self-titled. When a band drops an eponymous record well into their career, it’s usually a signal that they’re trying to reintroduce themselves. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t completely sold on the singles in the runup to this release. I thought they sounded like the 1975 if they came out of Austin rather than England. After listening to the album, though, I’m forced to admit that that is actually something I like.
The songs on Hovvdy aren’t afraid to get poppy with slick production and tastefully filtered vocals. But what really intrigues me is that the pop they’re going for is a sort of late-90s VH1 Inside Track vibe (don’t take my word for it, just ask King of Carpool radio Rob Thomas). These songs are catchy and singable with pleasant acoustic strums underlining most of the choruses. Songs like “Forever” and “Jean” have just enough of a country twang to sound good coming out of a truck stereo, but they feel urbane enough that the dude driving the truck is probably on his way to play frisbee golf or something. “Forever” even features the sound of a DJ scratching, if you needed more proof that we are in for a 1998 summer.
Lyrically, the album has a heart-on-sleeve quality that initially struck me as a tad corny, but has grown on me like the rest of their music. Turns out, these dudes from Austin aren’t too different from me, a guy who grew up a few miles down the road. On the track “Big Blue,” co-lead singer Charlie Marin laments, “Take a trip to Texas, get together with my friends, been a while, been too goddamn long.” Like me, these guys had some real good times in Austin, and they don’t get to relive them as much as they’d like.
And that might be the most Austin thing about the band. The members themselves grew up and moved away.
A little over halfway into Malegría, the debut album from the pseudonym of Mexican-American writer/producer/singer Fabi Reyna we get the album’s spoken-word title track and thesis statement. “Malegría,” for non-Spanish speakers like myself, is a portmanteau of the words for bad and happy. So, the word applies to those times when one feels sadness and happiness at the same time. “You can dance to sadness,” the speaker informs us.
It’s a hell of a concept to drop on the listener twelve songs into a dance party, as it happens here. But it also might clarify the slightly uneasy feeling of listening to the album up until that point. These songs, infused with Columbina, Peruvian, and Mexican rhythms, are certainly danceable, but they also have a darker edge. Listening to this album feels like going to a music festival under looming storm clouds. We’re having a lot of fun, but something darker might be around the corner.
Reyna started the band with friend and collaborator Nectali “Sumo Hair” Díaz, and the two recorded together as Reyna Tropical until Díaz’s unexpected death in a freak accident in July 2002. Reyna Tropical released one final single featuring Díaz’s production, “Ya Va Pasar,” making Malegría Reyna’s first outing as a solo act. So, how do you express your grief when your brand is making music for people to dance to? You get them to dance to your sadness. It’s a brilliant instinct, delivered impeccably, and it makes for one of the most unique dance records I’ve ever heard.
To hear music from those albums and more from the month of April, check out the Adult Contemporary playlist on Spotify. I update this playlist monthly, so save it now and play it at your next BBQ or when you pregame a baseball game or something, I don’t know.
Here are the albums I’m most excited to hear in May:
Kamasi Washington Fearless Movement. Every one of the jazz saxophonist’s albums since his aptly-named 2015 debut The Epic has felt like an otherworldly experience. With a total runtime of an hour and twenty-six minutes, this one promises to carry on in that direction.
Jessica Pratt Here in the Pitch. Pratt has a knack for making quiet, spare folk music feel full. Lead single “Life Is” has a 60s girl group shuffle that takes her sound in a new direction without abandoning the qualities that make it feel so distinctly her.
Lightning Bug No Paradise. The shoegaze band’s 2021 release A Color of the Sky was a sleeper hit for me, and since the band dropped the great single “Opus,” I’ve been spinning that one a lot again. It’s a terrific record, and I can’t wait to see what they have in store.
That’s it for April. See you in May! XOXOX