Dear listeners,
What did you listen to after Spain won the World Cup on Sunday? Rosalía’s “Despechá,” as I suggested in last week’s newsletter? Or perhaps, if the results of the match weren’t to your liking, a tearful rendition of La Mosca Tsé-Tsé’s “Muchachos,” Argentine fan favorite?
If you’re still crying about it, I’ll join you in today’s playlist — a hodgepodge of recommendations that features a Phoebe Bridgers song that recently made me all verklempt in public, along with a suggestion of where to start with my new (old) favorite dream pop band A.R. Kane and a tribute to the enduring, take-no-prisoners ’tude of L7 bassist Jennifer Finch.
Swore I could feel you through the walls,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
The Last Song That Made Me Cry
Phoebe Bridgers: “Chinese Satellite”
To celebrate the return of Phoebe Bridgers — whose first album in six years, “Lost Weekend,” arrives on Aug. 14 — I recently returned to the singer-songwriter’s haunting 2020 album “Punisher.” Bridgers released it at the beginning of that year’s strange and lonely summer, and I don’t revisit it too often for that reason: It feels like a sonic time capsule of an era that I don’t particularly want to remember. But when I queued up “Punisher” on my commute to the office a few weeks ago, I was instantly seized by its still-potent power — we’re talking goose bumps from the very first song. Before I knew it, “Punisher” had me dabbing away tears right there on the N train.
The particular song that wrecked me was “Chinese Satellite,” a stirring meditation on belief that’s full of Bridgers’ signature blend of dark humor and sudden emotional wallops. Bridgers is a razor-sharp writer and an expert chronicler of the absurdities and banal disappointments of modern life: “Took a tour to see the stars but they weren’t out tonight / So I wished hard on a Chinese satellite,” she sings. I love the way her vocal performance on this song swings between deadpan numbness and sudden surges of feeling. There’s something so vulnerable about her admission (in opposition to the more cynical loved one she addresses in the song) that she doesn’t judge those around her who believe in something larger than themselves — if anything, she’s jealous of them. The whole song is frighteningly good, but here’s the line that always destroys me: “You know I’d stand on the corner, embarrassed with a picket sign / If it meant I would see you when I die.” Oof! There I go again. Anybody have a tissue?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
A New-to-Me Discovery
A.R. Kane: “Crazy Blue”
I first heard about the pioneering and utterly bewitching indie group A.R. Kane only a few weeks ago, as I was making my way through a copy of the great cultural critic Greg Tate’s recently reissued 1992 essay collection “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” Tate devoted one of his 1988 Village Voice columns to the British duo — who, incidentally, coined the term “dream pop” to describe their impossible-to-categorize, phantasmagoric sound — and itsfull-length debut “69,” an album he describes as “where dub reggae meets its free-jazz and psycho-candy cousins.”
This mesmerizing lead track is as inviting a portal into A.R. Kane’s alternate universe as any song they ever released, but if you’re into it, I’d encourage you to dig deeper into their woefully underappreciated catalog. Next stop: “Up Home!,” the atmospheric EP they released just before “69,” which has had an enduring influence on the subgenre that would come to be known as shoegaze. (Though, as A.R. Kane’s Rudy Tambala put it in an interview two years ago, “seriously, your honor, it was not our fault. We never gazed at shoes.”)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
A New Song I’ve Had on Repeat
Kelela: “Linknb”
Intentionally or not, I hear an echo of A.R. Kane’s murky atmospherics in “New Avatar,” a freshly released LP by the R&B experimentalist Kelela that I’ve been listening to quite a bit. I love the way this album finds Kelela adding layers of reverb, distorted guitar and samples to her electronic soundscapes, giving tracks like this brooding tune a uniquely textured feel.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
A Song I Enjoyed Live
Spoon: “Got Nuffin”
Two weeks ago, I caught the long-running and remarkably consistent rock band Spoon when they headlined a free show at Central Park SummerStage. I meant to revisit as much of their catalog as I could in the days leading up, but instead I got stuck listening to one particular album over and over: “Transference,” the group’s polarizing (and, I’d say, wildly underrated) 2010 LP. Spoon is the sort of band that seems to find the creation of perfect pop songs almost too easy. So I hear the resolutely minimalist “Transference” — a more challenging follow-up to the band’s 2007 commercial breakthrough “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” — as a kind of experiment in just how much can be pared away from a song while leaving some sort of pop logic intact. “Oh, you need three chords to write a catchy tune?” Britt Daniel and company seem to be saying on this album. “Watch us do it with one.”
I was delighted, then, to hear that two of the acquaintances that I ran into at the show are also “Transference” stans (Stansference?), and even more delighted that the band played a whopping four songs from the album during their set. They even closed with this nervy and hypnotic “Transference” rocker, which, like so many of the best songs on that album, manages to do a lot with very little.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
And One for Jennifer Finch
L7: “Everglade”
Finally, Jennifer Finch, the badass bassist of the grimy and gutsy grunge band L7, died on Saturday at the criminally young age of 59, after a battle with brain cancer. In the late ’80s, after catching a performance by an earlier incarnation of the Los Angeles-based L7, Finch convinced the rest of the members to let her join — even though she didn’t really play bass. Yet. Precisely the sort of chutzpah needed to be in a band like L7.
In Finch’s honor, let’s go out with a total cherry bomb of a song she co-wrote (and on which she sings lead) from L7’s most successful album, the Butch Vig-produced “Bricks Are Heavy,” from 1992. “Everglade” is a searing ode to a girl who goes to a rock show to blow off some steam, faces off with a drunk dude who won’t let her have her fun in the pit, and ends up kicking him right out the venue’s door. Finch hollers her defiant protagonist’s personal motto on the chorus: “‘Don’t cross my line,’ says Everglade.” Took one to know one, clearly.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“The Last Song That Made Me Cry and 4 Other Recommendations” track list Track 1: Phoebe Bridgers, “Chinese Satellite” Track 2: A.R. Kane, “Crazy Blue” Track 3: Kelela, “Linknb” Track 4: Spoon, “Got Nuffin” Track 5: L7, “Everglade”
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The post The Last Song That Made Me Cry, and 4 Other Recommendations appeared first on New York Times.
