Chronicle 2022: The Highlights #1
"I wanna live forever 'til I die". Celebrating what's still at grasp.
Hello! They say they’re gonna make a record in the Month of May, but I’d like to focus on those before that! Sorting some things out, we start recollecting the highlights of the first quarter of 2022. The first of 3 Chronicle posts to focus on Q1 (before moving on to equally big things), we tackle records that deserve to be brought up, discussed, liked, loved? (Not worshipped - that always ends badly.) There’s no overarching theme or order to these albums, other than, expect some variety! Let us have our moments of fun and reflection and let them be all at once. Just for now, at least.
FMK - Desde el Espacio (reggaeton)
If there’s one thing I love to hear in reggaeton - and this may come off the wrong way - it’s absolute losers. Wandering idiots who sort of knocked on the right doors at the right time, and are suddenly superstars without knowing what exactly to do with that information. They’re looking around, they have a lot of contacts and a lot of big features, and they’re way in over their head in a way that’s piercing and noticeable. Imposter syndrome on the dancefloor, integrated into the perreo, because that’s something you can’t get away from so easily.
When Argentinian rap producer Big One hit it big with María Becerra in 2021, he managed to get pretty much his entire crew into the door with him, and one of his first big contacts was FMK. They’d had minor hits dating all the way back to 2018, but FMK quickly became indispensable for Big One, as he found himself as a behind-the-scenes songwriter for many of María’s biggest hits, alongside his buddies Rusherking, Tiago PZK and LIT killah (whose album from last year, MAWZ, was one of the best of that year). He had found a way to sneak himself in by writing good hooks for other people, but he didn’t forget he himself had a career as a performer. And so, he started calling in all favors he could find, amassing hits throughout 2021 and 2022, and then compiling them all into his debut, Desde el Espacio (which rings as more of a half-compilation than a proper studio album, since 6 out of its 10 songs were already well-known singles).
What’s so beautiful about FMK is, going back to this idea, his utter cluelessness as a performer. Back when he was unsigned, he tried to rap, but his attempts were pitiful, and he must have realized it, since all his verses on here follow the typical local tradition of creating melodies out of cadences and pauses, less on a proper, ‘traditional’ melodic structure - even though, when the choruses roll in, the hooks pierce through the brain. But that’s the beautiful dichotomy of FMK: the man really can write a solid pop tune, and he does so for most (if not all) of this album, but his way of singing and emoting doesn’t even register as ‘basic’, but as absolutely lost. His songwriting is painfully literal both in the lyrics and in the melody-making; the way he pairs both of those aspects makes it so that you can’t separate what he’s saying from how he’s saying it. His frigid, timid, scared-little-boy mannerisms and ways of speech, enunciation, and choice of vocal runs make it so that he always feels overwhelmed and surrounded by others who very much know how to handle the nightlife, their sex life, and their love life, while FMK is stuck on the ground, trying to grasp the air, and eventually looking down at his feet. He can write about said things convincingly enough, but can he make you feel as though he’s lived them? Or even more down to basics, as though he’s capable of living them?
He falls to his knees many times on Desde el Espacio, right from the first song. “Nos Fuimos” details him fumbling his way into a threesome, and the chorus is mainly elongated syllables and fear, all the while the verses have him shaking and scared. He describes wanting to see her naked as “Muéstrame los poderes” (“Show me the powers”), like a nerd really into zombie fanfiction. Speaking of geeking out, he makes two separate Dragon Ball Z references in two separate songs, because that’s the way he views relationships. The first one is on “Pa’l Perreo”, where he gets pop starlet Emilia (who he’s written all her hits with) to sing the chorus and no more than 5 lines total, and Guaynaa (an idiot with a throwaway verse), and FMK’s short verse/bridge is a mere static melody undercut with his painful adlibs. The second one is his biggest hit to date, “Tranquila”, featuring María Becerra, where we’re supposed to believe he could persuade a girl into cheating on her boyfriend; the melody is ace, but he sings it as though he was grabbing by her leg, on the floor, begging her to stay. Hilariously enough, María Becerra also convinces (what I believe is) the same girl to cheat on her boyfriend with a verse that she didn’t even write!
The worst thing is there’s truly so much effort to sound compelling and believable, and the more he tries, the more desperate he sounds. He gets washed away by all his buddies on “YO SE QUE TÚ”, especially an inspired LIT killah who might just take a round trip around the globe twice in a row, and Tiago PZK who seems to be buying everyone drinks (FMK doesn’t even get his own verse, he just sings the chorus and has a 2-bar long bridge). The latter is also on “Prende la Cámara”, which features FMK’s trademark reference-adding for the sake of it (retweets, Bad Bunny’s “BOOKER T” and “Despacito” all referenced in the hook), and both of them trade bars in one long verse where FMK seems to find some better ground in trying to describe how endlessly cool and desirable his object of affection is, instead of himself. Legend Duki shows up on “Tu Nombre” and washes FMK’s efforts away, stealing the show by stretching his vocal chords (and the autotune supporting him) while rhyming “París” with “Givenchy” with “ma cheríe”, and Big One brings in a strong guitar hook that makes for a trap-laced singalong that brings in his horizontal drums that create so much space to fill in once they’re gone.
Big One continues to be on top of the scene. In fact, he might be what saves FMK from completely falling flat on his face, and making him a substantial, almost-likable, even pitiable figure. He brings in an atmosphere of being outside of one’s self, an ‘ego death’ sort of clash that puts FMK’s dumb ideals into a form that seems to sympathize with him. Solo cut “Princesa” has a pushy hook that seems relentless into bringing her into his bedroom (his bedroom! FMK feels it must be repeated!), and his literal way of writing music comes into his play once again, but he’s saved by a wanting synth, alongside distorted bells that feel as lost as he is. If he was aiming for a figure of a spaceman who doesn’t know about the earthlings’ culture, he nailed it. That’s what makes the solo closer, “Tu Ropa”, such a devastating song. On paper, it’s about his admiration for a girl as she undresses in front of him, and the wonderful sex they have. But hearing it, with such a low baseline for everything, no sound popping up, and FMK so beyond repair he can’t even get past the first line (which is literally “Hey, how are you?”) without dropping the ball about 3 separate times, and when half of the chorus is in falsetto, as he ends each word like he was navel-gazing, thinking poetically of clothes falling into the ground, you figure he might just be alone, talking to himself, in silence, fear and darkness.
In a funny way, the best 2 songs here are extreme opposites. One of them is “Pa’l Carajo el Amor” (the only song here not produced by Big One), an intentionally dark, intense journaling of a brokenhearted girl going out to curse love once and for all, destroying herself in the process, and FMK is a mere bystander. He chronicles her pain in a way he seems to understand, how her easy-going hedonism spirals out of control so naturally it doesn’t even phase him; what does phase him, what he doesn’t seem to understand, is how this could have happened to her. The underlying train of thought here is, if someone like her could fall this hard, this could happen to anyone - why would FMK be exempt from this? Yet the other song, “Gatas”, is a celebration, where Big One brings out the strong arsenal of hidden nights and twisted clubs, and somehow works his magic so that FMK is king of it all, if only for a brief 2 minutes and change. He’s still caught up with a girl, but his fast-paced flow makes him feel like he’s truly commanding the vibe, not simply going along, for once. It’s a victory lap, where half of it self-referencing anyway, but it’s the moment where the geek loser stuck in the writing board gets to direct his own world. Desde el Espacio tells the rest of us, those outside the party, if we don’t belong there, if we’re stuck outside, we’ll play-pretend. They may pity us, but if they shall let us in, we’ll leave the door open.
Raum - Daughter (ambient, drone)
Funny, how the view rarely seems this gray, and how the gray often means bleakness, but not here. One of Grouper’s biggest assets as a musician has been incorporating dark, obscure tones into her sonic landscapes that never felt like they were overcrowding the space; those clouds never got too deep into the atmosphere. You could always breathe into the primal beacon of synergy, of something non-human being performed by a human, and get lost in a sort of gone ballet of tinkering lights. Always gray, but never depressing, never let down and hanging around. Daughter serves as a memory, a reel of passing thoughts, passing recollections, passing places, passing physical places and noting what once was there. There could be discovery and joy, but now there’s fog in there. It’s all still there, but the capturing of the moment is gone. It’s time to discuss a legacy.
There’s never a moment of rest on Daughter. Everything moves all the time, and when it’s not, it’s simply because it’s changing scenery. It all keeps changing and escalating, but never reaching a climactic point. A steady view pierced by light, as the tokens of starlight hit the sandy beaches this album takes place in. Always a placid view, but you know it would be more placid with someone else. Someone nice, someone who appreciates the small beauty. It’s never quite the same again once you’ve seen it. Those walks, those fields of sand (or grass, or trees, or concrete), that specific angle? It can’t possibly mean the same again. The effect people have, as they switch the thought of what something could mean and turn it into a display of new beliefs, new ideas to be realized, it’s always good to have a reminder of that. Even if it’s one as abstract as this.
It rarely ever passes by like something to hide, or something to keep secret. Somewhat like a dash of light, it seems like it was made to never be held, only be surrounded by. Hints of something darker edge around it, but they’re mere hints, mere passing thoughts; we’re not focusing on that, and we don’t want to either. It never spreads its wings too high or too far, there’s never a crashing wave of sound, yet it never slowly peters away. It asks for your attention, a gentle gleam in your eye, and it offers those grays that sink deeper, but you stay on ground-level. It may end on a hush and a muffled plea, a remembrance of the times you felt that special something else, but the memory doesn’t stray away from home. You can feel it going to someone else, touching them in a different way, staying with them for a little while and then moving on. You were a visitor of that landscape, a spectator. Now, the time is ripe to keep that memory alive, and take a step forward. The grays will always be there, and now you know both how to return to them, and how to keep your distance.
40 Watt Sun - Perfect Light (slowcore)
“I’m strong enough to lift you up” - no, you’re not. That’s something we’d all like to believe, but when push comes to shove, like it does on this album, Patrick Walker and his prolific band 40 Watt Sun simply have too much to bear and too much to carry. All the songs are long, longer than the compositions will let them, but they push themselves to exhausting limits to transmit that painful monotony of being stuck; feeling there’s nowhere left to go. The phrases take forever to complete themselves, the pacing is lull and inconsequential, and there’s never even so much an attempt at a climax. It’s a rock band with all the ‘rock’ sucked out of it. Typically, I’d call this kind of music self-indulgent to a fault, or throwing in a harmful musical idea to the world (surrendering is the only option), but with 40 Watt Sun, it’s different. Most slowcore bands will sing their pretty sad words looking at the ground and sighing. Patrick Walker looks at you straight in the eye.
Coming from the beginnings of lyrical doom metal, never screaming or hollering his words, but rather reciting them slowly through dreary instrumentals, with each main album he made (starting with Warning, now onto 40 Watt Sun), he found himself stripping himself away from the distortion, and then from the build-up that generic post-rock could offer, and Perfect Light sees him reaching the bare essentials of what he’s been trying to make since the 2000s. The main focus is the words, and the musical imagery is restricted to the passing by of a walking man as the sunset has already passed, but the night hasn’t begun just yet. The broken, the destroyed, the crushing, prepares itself neatly and with precision, in order for the wallowing to come later. Perfect Light takes its time - 8 songs at almost 70 minutes - to a point where listening to it can almost become a chore, but Patrick Walker sees a specific point in the distance and follows it, and never gives it up, even as he’s lying on the floor. “You live in everything I love / And everything I’ll never be” is a devastating phrase in its own right, signaling love and its perceived impossibility all at once, and the fact that he sings it in such a held-back manner, showing his emotions but also demonstrating firmness, like broken glass where all the pieces are still held together by friction, only makes it more crushing.
Crushing idealization comes at the expense of losing one’s own identity, and the mellowing guitars playing at midtempo never lose sight of what they lost. As that ideal is gone, so is their identity, and they’re now found playing for (what feels like) nobody. It’s a complicated affair that wants to discuss itself over and over to try to reach a conclusion. “The way they go by reminds me of my pain”, Patrick sings in “Raise Me Up”, as every soft crash of the drums hits lazily into a thin mist. Once that idealization is not consumed, it gets projected onto pretty much everything and everyone they see. Trying to reach out but everything becomes hidden and the resignation becomes too real to be fulfilled. “I dig deep, pulling up lines / To cleave through a thousand miles”, sung on “A Thousand Miles”, with one of the most melodic phrases on the album, is quite representative of this sad back-and-forth between the inability of letting go, the weighing down of holding on. Patrick is aware of it, and so is the music for that matter, but putting that into words isn’t enough to make the sadness go away; “A cry in an empty room / A run down an open hill / A spirit that defies every ill / And I loved you for that”. How can you talk someone out of this?
Such is the case that Perfect Light demonstrates how that process is solitary - or, at least, it starts off being that way. It’s the point where going back becomes a pointless exercise in masochism, not only a sad reminder, but a sad reminder of the wrong things. This album tries its best, with long pauses and imagery of light and revelations, to come to terms with things it doesn’t want to admit. Again, we begin with the self-delusion of “Ophelia, I’m strong enough to lift you up” on “Reveal”, but that comes after 7 minutes of constant repetitions of total devotion to something that’s clearly no longer there, but Patrick Walker’s still looking at their shadow. The music can’t lift itself up, how could it do that with something, or someone, else? Questions come to light on “Until”, and the self-awareness is palpable, as the sizzle of the drums shows the shaky ground upon which Patrick, holding himself together, is standing on. But there’s still that endless pleading; “Fold me in your perfect light, perfect light!” - there’s no such light, and if it was, it was a flash, and now Patrick struggles to see the rest of the light still around him.
If this is truly about “unmaking everything we’re ashamed of”, like “Behind My Eyes” says, something begins to align. The deep-seethed feelings of embarrassing angst, overcrowded grief over something that might seem pointless but in one’s heart means everything and may seem never ending, that’s what 40 Watt Sun capture. They don’t romanticize not being able to move past something, but rather they address it; they capture that arrested sentiment of stillness, and how wrenching it can be to stay in that state for so goddamn long. It’s a telling thing to come forward about, and maybe that way, you can find some sense of lenience within yourself. Never accepting things the way they are, but facing one’s shameful thoughts of regret and words left unsaid can make it so that the dark can stop. And when the backdrop is so non judgemental, and one’s weaknesses can come forward, you can find comfort. “This night won’t define us; it reveals us / Let’s believe ourselves”.
Capping off with “Closure” makes things not easier, but stronger to understand. The yearning remains, the missing pieces remain missing, but the thought of escaping them becomes more fragile. We leave all sense of constant dissatisfaction and, once that is accepted as reality, something else can become part of one’s life. Walker closes the album with the lines: “If you were here to ask me what I now believe, I’d say / Life can never be held… but only lived.”. He can’t sing it while fully believing it - he’s still singing to a shadow that’s long gone - but stating it outright, having some words to hold on to as an option to collapsing multiple times, well, that’s a start. Catharsis can be stating things as facts, not as statements or mantras. Just remembering what’s right and what’s true, while trying to live with the bruises, but never forgetting them. We’re still a ways away.
Avril Lavigne - Love Sux (pop punk)
I’ll never fully be in love with the fact that Travis Barker seems to be the only pop punk producer who’ll get attention from the mainstream. On one hand, he’s immensely good and competent at what he does - he maximizes pitchy voices, his more inspired productions get a sort of Andrew W.K-style Wall of Sound that’s always welcome, and his way of producing drums (obviously) is top of the line, with a crisp tone to them that gets matched very well with the more synthetic trap percussion. On the other hand, he mostly wastes his talents with artists who just aren’t worth it, and he’ll often put more effort into their sound than the artists will. He can be discouraging, and the monotony within the scene is starting to feel present, alongside the presence of tryhards and trend chasers.
Not Avril Lavigne, though! What a profitable comeback this is, both commercially and artistically. It’s fun to realize Avril was never this openly bratty and childish before, but since her biggest hits have been maximized due to nostalgia, she can’t help but lean into that character even harder than before. It’s mostly music to pass the time, but time flies indeed! Love Sux is such an interesting way of looking at how things have changed for so many artists, and what once felt like something too cliché or too surface-level suddenly became the norm. Aiding Barker on rejuvenating Avril Lavigne, there’s newcomer Mod Sun (mostly mediocre) and John Feldmann, responsible for making 5 Seconds of Summer at least sound tolerable during their first 2 albums. Producers who know what they’re doing, dealing with a veteran who no longer feels any need to appease any sort of fanbase other than the one she’s cultivated.
That’s the truly great thing about Love Sux. This is an album made to catch up with the trends, but it certainly doesn’t feel like one; it’s fluid, skippy, with more pulse than most of mainstream radio would actually play. It goes above and beyond to fit in, so much that it ends up surpassing what it wants to emulate in the first place. Most of this album passes by open parks, running around in the open sun, and the imagery doesn’t really give much room to interpretation; this is as simple and stimulating as a merry-go-round. “Cannonball” and “Kiss Me Like the World Is Ending” sound like their titles, and they skip around love-drunk melodies, bashing drum fills and long vocal runs that signify a climax. “Bite Me” is simply one of Avril’s finest moments ever, as unsubtle as ever regarding her feelings, going at it with production that feels too invested in the moment to realize there’s bound to be a triple-way harmonic breakdown - every sound seems shocked by it!
Even the drama feels incredibly low stakes, and to its advantage; this kind of sound doesn’t need big emotions to carry itself to the finish line. She can’t make an album with Barker without getting Machine Gun Kelly in the picture, but “Bois Lie” is a deceptively interesting piece of writing: a juvenile “he-said-she-said” back and forth that eventually makes everyone culpable and gullible. MGK has enough chemistry with her to make it work, and they throw stones at each other with enough viciousness that the underlying complacency of making a song together because the market demands it doesn’t ring at all. It’s a magic trick! They try to make that magic work again with blackbear’s feature on “Love It When You Hate Me”, but it’s too easy a song to make, and it’s hard to sense much commitment coming from him when she outdoes him with one word. Dueting with Mark Hoppus on “All I Wanted” was an easier bet (getting the blink-gang back together!) but it still pays off well; Mark can still play the fast-paced anxious low voice to hang with Avril’s high-pitch tonality, and they also compliment each other very well. Turns out, when everything’s as loose as it can be here, good things can happen!
Not everything is bound to work. When Barker leaves the table and Avril picks up the ballads, Mod Sun and Feldmann are left working with very odd tones and production choices; “Dare to Love Me” has Avril’s voice way too close in the mix and she definitely could have benefited from enunciating less (a rare thing to say nowadays), and “Avalanche” works alright until the disastrous synth breakdown that appeals more to the ‘easycore’ 2000s scene than it does the skate punk one. Even some Barker tunes don’t fully hit - “Fucking over You” isn’t an acronym for “F.U”, no matter how much you want to squeeze that in. But with an album this short and this crisp, Love Sux works as many things, but one of them being a revindication of elements that never needed saving, from an artist that didn’t need a reinvention, working with professionals who are still hungry. I’ll root for these folks for as long as they let me.
Rema - Rave & Roses (afrobeats)
So much high-rolling romance here! The ‘roses’ part of the title is more than accurate. Rema by all accounts is a man who thrusts upon the opportunity to love, cherish, truly be marveled by the women in his life, and he can put together sounds that accompany a sort of now-or-never urgency to the tales of love, where the chances may never come again if he doesn’t say his peace at that very moment. The beauty of the one who flushes with care and affection for others as the sounds add up. Rave & Roses is a monument to devotion; staring deep into the eyes of the one you love, and breaking into dance.
The thing with Rema is how much he’s able to emote off of songs that may sound like simple sex jams at first. He adds an extra oomph to them, importance that breaks into many increasing thoughts that end up overwhelming both him and the music. There’s “Hold Me” with 6LACK, that swoops in with underwater synth tones that meet strings that, at first, are synthetic, but as the track goes on, they become harsher, deeper. Rema does his best to explore the moment, try to stop time if you will, and while he describes her body with such care, the melodies keep coming like they were outside of him. All this comes to a crushing end where the strings, this time indisputably real, meet spaced-out synths that make the bedroom where this all takes place feel like it’s in 4D; it goes above to a different direction, never to be found again. A moment forever sustained in time. By the end of the album, there’s the yearning “Carry”, with bass keys that creep around, a smoke into the night, and a sinister wordless motif that only gets more intense in its repetition (“Hmm-hmmm”), like it was hiding something. All this time, Rema has fallen in awe while trying to express his thoughts without falling into despair, and the tension between his thoughts and the instrumental is palpable. What if he were to slip up?
Surprisingly, he doesn’t, and for an entire hour! He manages to keep his cool, even if the intensity seems to grow with each passing moment. That’s another great compliment to this album: incredibly well-sequenced. The sexual and romantic intensity is always at 100 on Rema’s side, but the women in his songs slowly start to unwind and loosen up as the album goes on, to the point where he’s the one to ask to slow things down. He gets tested, and the extent of just how far his romance will go is put into question. An incredibly healthy thing to do - let’s not make promises we can’t keep, and the music makes sure to keep Rema in check.
All that’s left to do, once that happens, is to temper with the expectations, and you realize there’s so much you can do with these sounds! Songs like “Dirty” and “Jo” base themselves off guitar licks that end up being surrounded by wavy synths, like silk around rhythm. Even songs without so many keys like lead single “Soundgasm” are backed up by a disgusting, fratty bass that supports Rema’s economic singing in the verses before performing said ‘soundgasm’ in the chorus, always appreciating the moment right after the climax. When so many ideas end up colliding like on the colorful “Calm Down”, as Rema gets to grow a melody out of ‘oh-oh’s and strings come in very slowly and a guitar that could have come from a 90s alt-rock song puts everything at ease; it’s a lot of influences and hands on deck treating this with such care.
The darker hues like “Addicted” also get to hit, with a dark neon adapted to the dembow rhythm, as 808s get to beat around a dangerous melody, and Rema gets “stuck in the blue”, wondering how it all came to this level of recklessness. He’s a romantic, but also an idealist, and the thoughts of self-destruction are something he can’t see himself entertaining, not even for others. In that sense, he’ll defend all the fights he’s had to get through even before birth, as he documents the process of his mother giving birth to him on the opener “Divine”, a slightly intense piece that puts into perspective how Rema internalizes other people’s struggles, especially when they involve him somehow.
In many ways, Rave & Roses is a highly symphonic project, not only because of the constant presence of strings, but also because of how many voices are projected into one sole presence, which is Rema. He finds himself realizing how many people he’s touching, interpreting and getting to understand, speaking for them if you will, and so he takes it to task to treat them with the utmost respect and love. My favorite moment is on “Mara”, where he stutters his words at the start of the second verse (“jealo-o-o-ous”), sort of realizing how much he needs to put of himself to think of being in other people’s shoes. All along, the music plays along. Romantic and also deeply humanist.
Hikaru Utada - Bad Mode (j-pop)
For such a landmark of an artist, this might feel intimidating. The biggest artist possibly of all time in Japan comes back after 4 years with a project that sees her working with Western producers (Sam Shepherd (Floating Points), A.G. Cook, Skrillex) without needing to adapt to the Western sound, like she did in 2004 or 2009 with Timbaland and StarGate. Hikaru has always been heavily involved behind the boards in their own music, and they have production credits on every song here; there’s no trying to appeal to a market that will never take them, but the drive to work with left-field artists in order for one of their longest albums to date marks that will to expand. They’re a legend now, and nothing can take that away from them. One thing is, they certainly don’t act that way in their music.
By all means, Bad Mode is a highly reflective album. After years of bad relationships and now being able to have a legacy as an artist and also a child they worship, Hikaru Utada feels as though solving mental health needs a one-day-at-a-time approach. Never aiming for the high histrionics that they never actually made in their career, this album stays in a mellow, comforted, somewhat melancholic but eventually wistful ambiance; the feel of laughing behind your shoulder at your own thoughts. Sometimes, anxiety will take hold of you, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing - it’s the learning of how to cope that Hikaru practices here. So, gradually, they begin to let go of those things which weigh them down, and begin the process of taking their time, of focusing on what’s important, on valuing the new and the important, instead of letting it fade into the air. A long journey, but one necessary after so much time has passed.
All of this goes to emphasize how rich and powerful the music is. In an era where we all need some form of rebirth, of restabilization, or reconstruction, Bad Mode acts and feels like a well-taught, well-behaved child discovering a world, not roaming around aimlessly, but appreciating every tinge of light that passes them through. A lot of ‘downtempo’ tones in here, but there’s never a dour moment. “Kimi ni Muchū” passes through its low-key piano line and matches it with twinkling highs that pass through only once in a while, and then it meets percussion fit for light dancing on one’s own, touching whatever’s at reach and feeling the texture. “Time” has the audacity to match an acid jazz synth and bass pattern with a clearly autotuned Hikaru, only to strip them from any filter and letting their voice pass through the track without causing any ruckus; there’s always a shift back to what once was; the romanticism in the lyrics could imply some form of overwhelming passion (images of secrets, hearts, standing in the rain, being held), and while the yearning remains, the music slowly comes to a moment of resignation and moving on. Not all love stories get to be healed.
The inclusion of “One Last Kiss”, the song they made for Neon Genesis Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, the fourth song they’ve done for the Evangelion reconstruction movies, is adequate and accurate. It doesn’t reach the impossible heights of “Beautiful World”, but the idea of moving on to something else, while having one final memory that will linger and acknowledging the love that once was there (“Can you give me one last kiss?” “I love you more than you’ll ever know”), is fitting for someone going through life-changing moments like Hikaru, and A.G. Cook demonstrates a certain amount of finesse and subtlety in his production that’s quite revealing; piano chords that create tension just as they let go of it, vocal samples that pitch in just enough, synth strings that never make it all the way through like a forgotten memory.
“One Last Kiss” portrays a level of maturity that genuinely makes me curious about the ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’ saga, just to see how the approach to the material has changed since the 90s (Evangelion is not a world I’m particularly eager to revisit), but it also demonstrates a point about the album: this is quite visual music. Its scope isn’t big enough to be ‘cinematic’, but it’s certainly evocative, to the point where you don’t need to fully understand the lyrics before you realize what’s going on. Highlight “Not in the Mood Today” is a 7-minute trip-hop piece with drums straight out of early Massive Attack (think “Safe from Harm”), and a rainy atmosphere that portrays the one sour moment on the album, where the loss of love and Hikaru’s own loneliness haunts them; they’re wise enough to choose their battles, and fighting against the rain is simply futile. As the song gains more footing in its groove, the guitars barely have a presence, and the piano just follows its jazzy structure with not much to say. This isn’t that trip-hop nighttime, it’s the cloudy day, the lazy one, the one you wish you could shrug off. The near-instrumental outro feels like looking at that street, thinking there’s something salvageable there, but it’s going to take some time… before the drums come back.
Therefore, the moments where Hikaru finds themself in a more level-headed position are moments where the music slides along with them. “Find Love” is one of the glitchier songs on here, as a piece of acid electronica with greasy keys and a looping main melody, all of which feels like a digital hallway, a possibly never-ending one but you don’t exactly want it to end, either. It’s the only English-sung on the album (if we don’t count the bonus tracks, which include a Japanese version of this song), and the lyrics are quite simple: a focus on finding who you share your affection with, aided by therapy, being able to question your impulses without feeling you’re hiding from the world, and not wanting to lose control again. Honorable ideas, sung in a calm, thoughtful way; like mini-mantras and thoughts that Hikaru knows how to keep in check. In that sense, the shortest song on this album, “PINK BLOOD” (like “Find Love”, co-produced by the prestigious Nariaki Okuburo), is one of purpose and statement: enough bleeding out for that which isn’t worth it. Healing as an essential process in the moment of making art and making music, and Hikaru’s voice provides a dash of trepidation to their words, as if they were reaching something a conclusion too difficult to admit. Healing may not end with oneself, but it does start there.
The album carries itself all the way through (except for “Face My Fears” with Skrillex; I appreciate Hikaru’s tradition of incorporating her video game/movie soundtrack songs to their albums, but Skrillex really didn’t bring in his A-game), but the two main highlights of the standard edition are the album’s bookends. Both produced by Floating Points, whom I’ve never been a fan of but his interest in organic instrumentation clashes well with Hikaru’s ear for digital tones, they establish the course to move forward. Opener “Bad Mode” is a delight of melody, where Hikaru’s harmonies and high notes in the chorus are gentle and inviting, and as the song develops a groove, the invitations of sitting down to watch Netflix as the sky winds down in a Moog synth-led breakdown of tone and figure is irresistible… intimacy in nowhere land’s form. And closer, 12-minute long “Somewhere Near Marseilles”, doesn’t have much going for it, just 4-5 different sections strung together and repeated, but the way each of those sections are placed make it special. Hikaru’s voice compressed as they sing the title, their interest in making something happen with this other person, and the song’s digital flair makes it so that there’s this constant tension that, as the song goes on, dissipates. Voices find their way through a busy street that wants to find different souls in need, only for them to slowly disappear and give way to sparse sounds that never reveal their intentions. “I’m gonna give it to you / I’ll get a room with a view” - a promise, but for how long can it be sustained? Hikaru doesn’t seem to care, neither should they. If self-care, self-discipline and full-fledged empath are what constitute being on ‘bad mode’, we should all be this way.
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (indie folk, folk rock)
When you look at folklore, what do you see? What is found? How do you find it? What do you make of it? Do you intervene, do you interact with it, do you let it be? What conclusion do we reach to free the celestial body? If Big Thief are focused on anything, it is to be able to learn, in the most intense ways possible, how to live in the flood of so much information and so much despair. They search and search, and they manage to find something.
Not to say that there is no precedent. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is their fifth album, and they had already formed a relationship with the American landscape that was not about taking over these places, but about appreciating them and incorporating them into their music. They were always attempts that sometimes went more towards the basics of American folk, like in their first albums, or tried to cause some disruption with the green and natural as in their last album of 2019, Two Hands. Lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker always sings with a scratchy, fragile, even "ugly" voice according to conventional aesthetics, and her lyrics go for the abstract with a political tint, but with greater use of mantras and phrases that try to mean a whole in her ambiguity. If you will, you can think of her as a spiritual successor to an early 1980s Michael Stipe.
Here, however, there is a jump, and a pronounced one. Before, their games with country and Americana were just that: games. Here, in an album of 20 songs that reaches the 80-minute mark, the incursions into different genres are more pronounced and more heavily supported. Something that had always put Big Thief at a disadvantage with other bands of this style was a lack of color and musicality in the instrumentals, in what the band itself was playing. At times, they could have been Adrianne Lenker's support band and not much more. On this album, the rules change. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is produced by the band's drummer, James Krivchenia, and the focus on instrumental tones and how they accompany Lenker's compositions is key, and is something that sets Big Thief head and shoulders above their contemporaries. There is a strange, even original sound design that allows the band to expand their musical palate.
To start with an example, one of the singles released in anticipation of the album, "Time Escaping," is disorienting in several ways. Its sound is scratchy, with the drums distorted and well separated from the percussion in the mix, a lead guitar that follows an off-key arpeggio, a noticeable absence of bass, and a melody in the verses from Adrianne that acts as if everything was under control. It's like distant lights in the middle of a day of camping, like getting lost in the grass and looking for guidance. Even when the chorus enters with an exquisite melody, it feels very short. If there is so much space to spare, how is it used? There is talk of a nature that knows more than us, that takes advantage of the richness of its own nectar and, if it is going to leave us out, so be it.
On the other hand, Big Thief are not quite ready to let go of past feelings, and even if they think that nature can take away what once was, human feelings remain. Another great example from this album, “Little Things”, is a neutral declaration of a lost relationship. Lenker plays with her high, damaged voice and doesn't try to create a stable melody, she lets the band do that for her. In this way, we get a raw version of jangle pop from the 80s, with exhausted and tired guitars, drums increased in the mix like little clouds, a bass this time present but doubtful, that doesn't know how to enter this cycle of apparent perpetuity. As the song progresses, the sounds fill out, condense, and Lenker's question comes into focus: after seeing out that "needle eye", after so many kisses, after wanting to understand what the other person is saying and not being able to, she asks, "Where are you now?" What follows is a small distorted scream; decades of anxiety, anguish and longing in a microsecond.
It seems kind of redundant, focusing over and over again on just 2 songs on a record with 20 of them. But Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You has such attention to detail, you could easily discuss almost every song for months. Part of the grace is the little things, it's the little moments and small decisions that make this album an achievement. It's being able to appreciate how a song in the middle of the album, like "Flower of Blood", enters with shoegaze intentions, more strongly than any other song on the album, to demonstrate the weight of another's body in Adrianne's life. (“Flower of blood bloom on my tongue, steady / When you touch me”). It's listening to the tender flute on “No Reason”, which comes to a conclusion in the form of… a chorus ripped out of the best of ABBA, with its communal spirit, and so many voices in unison. It is being able to listen to the rich harmonies of “Dried Roses”, “Certainty” and “Sparrow”, which look towards the horizon and its pasty nuance, and settle for their calm melodies.
There's a great balance within this record, one of how to deal with conflict. Yes, there are the calm and tender songs, but others hide something else. We can hear the acoustic guitar that resounds in “Promise Is a Pendulum”, where Adrianne tries to look towards a break-up and insist that jealousy is not going to destroy her. But we can also think about how that interacts with the album's humble opening, "Change", which shifts from thinking about the changing seasons and trees, to thinking about how some things, like Adrianne's feelings for her former lover, still have not changed.
In, again, a humble and calm way, the band is assimilated in "Simulation Swarm", Big Thief manage to leave a mark on the humane to be found in the ordinary, how they follow a calm and subdued groove which they leave on suspense so that Adrianne can expand, as if it were her last moment, a few rays of energy towards the people she loves: her family, her own body, her adopted brother that she will one day meet, in an agitated gust of love that she does not know how to communicate. "I wanna drop my arms and take your arms and walk you to the shore." Textures, like small daggers, are kneaded.
But the question arises again: "What’s it gonna take to free the celestial body?" That's what they ask in “Spud Infinity”, one of the most ecstatic songs on the album, with a great use of the fiddle, which seems to be in love with that question. Guitarist Buck Meek manages to play his guitar, focusing on the notes he doesn't play, and Adrianne plays her own voice in a jovial spirit, showing us what she means: “When I say celestial / I mean extraterrestrial / I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart.” It’s not the first time that they have played with the alien, but they have never dealt with it in such a personal way, in a way that feels like their own. It is a call to understand the individual within, not only a society, but a world in constant change and evolution, which needs that spark that one has, so that something else is generated. Understanding oneself involves understanding and taking others into account.
Big Thief's vision is to generate a community, a way of understanding the world that looks to the beyond, but that feels and touches what we have in front of us. There's a moment in "Red Moon," another great song on this record, where Adrianne sings, "Open the screen door, talking with Diane Lee", and all of a sudden she screams, "That's my grandma!" And there everything is revealed: they are laughing. They're telling jokes, they're talking about the good and the bad, and they're trying to figure out how to deal with it not as individuals, but as a group. In Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Big Thief finally become a unit; they want to live forever until they die. The spirit of the curious, hungry and playful youth is still chasing that high.