Sunday Songs: 4/28/24

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: holding back on my thoughts on my most anticipated album of the year and a movie that makes me angrier than I’d like to admit, but just for the sake of showcasing the songs I meant to showcase, I kept that short.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS

“Sweetest Fruit” – St. Vincent

Sometime when I’m out of the finals woods, mark my words: there will be a review of All Born Screaming, because, predictably, I have Thoughts. But, in the interest of not making myself sound like a broken record a few weeks in the future, I’ll keep it snappy. All Born Screaming is a great album, but…not in the way that I expected it to be. What it isn’t, however, is the hard rock album that it was advertised as. It’s much less cohesive than I’ve come to expect from St. Vincent, but for the most part, the individual songs that were thrown into this unexpected stew are good—we’ve got the world’s most perfect pairing for “Marrow” (Annie I am BEGGING you to play these two back to back live), “Five Years” 2: Electric Boogaloo, and tons of other elements that hit you from beyond left field. It’s a mess, but I’m starting to feel like that’s almost the point: All Born Screaming is the musical form of a mental breakdown, and it certainly sounds like it. I swear that’s a compliment. Mostly. Some of it’s dissonant in a way that doesn’t seem all the way intentional. But that’s a discussion for when I break down the whole album.

For now, I’m shifting the focus to my favorite of the new tracks. “Sweetest Fruit” is, like the title suggests, genuinely delicious to listen to. The main synth line that anchors it balloons and blossoms like polyps, or a sped-up version of said sweet fruit ripening on the branch. In a quieter, science fiction world, that sound feels like an alarm, a reminder—maybe that the laundry’s done, or that your spaceship is alerting you to the fact that you’re close to docking at the planet of your choice. But unlike MASSEDUCTION, where such synths were the stiff, Barbie pink foundation upon which all the tracks were built, it’s woven through with lightning strikes of her signature shredding, jaggedly slicing into the synth-pop frame just when you start to feel relaxed. Now, for my token mention of St. Vincent’s godly self-titled record: All Born Screaming is far less organized than it, but sonically, this is the closest it’s been in a decade; it’s not fully glossy pop like MASSEDUCTION, but there’s plenty of dystopian franticness undercutting what would otherwise be neat. And the synthy, shiny feel is the perfect medium for, at least, part of what “Sweetest Fruit” was meant to do: for Clark, it partially functioned as a tribute to the late SOPHIE, who Clark has said that she “admired from afar” for quite some time. Most of the mention of her is reserved to the first verse and doesn’t continue, but some took it as capitalizing on her death; if the whole song was about it, I could almost see it, but it’s simply a retelling of a too-soon death; in 2021, SOPHIE fell to her death while watching the moon on the roof. I don’t mean to rush to defend everything that she does (because the album cover hasn’t stopped being tone-deaf, and I’m incredibly disappointed that she didn’t at least acknowledge that), but this seems like a stretch. It isn’t like this is anything new for Clark—what was “The Melting of the Sun” if not an extended tribute to the women who she loved and who inspired her, dead and alive? I remember hearing, back when MASSEDUCTION was released, that she’d scrapped several songs that were tributes to David Bowie; I can see why that would have felt like capitalization as well, since MASSEDUCTION was released a year after his death, but there’s something to be said for connecting artists across music, whether the other hears it or not—we are all indebted to so many people for the styles we create, as much as they are our own. And if there were any track to eulogize SOPHIE, it would have to be “Sweetest Fruit,” coated with the same, shining gloss with which SOPHIE made a name for herself.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“The Dresses Song” – Lisa Germano

This song does in less than four minutes what Poor Things failed to do in two and a half hours. I’m not saying that I could do better than an award-winning director, but at this point…skill issue. Lisa Germano did all that without the gratuitous shots of Emma Stone’s feet as her character learns how to masturbate…at the mental age of a toddler.

Can you tell I had beef with Poor Things?

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s shift the focus to a tale of feminine identity that’s actually worthy of praise. I haven’t listened to Lisa Germano’s debut, the ironically-titled Happiness, in full, but its clear from the start that she came here to make unsettling music, and that’s exactly what she made a career out of, as criminally underrated as she continues to be. Happiness, though steeped in solemn, eyes-averted confessions (see: the hauntingly beautiful “The Darkest Night Of All,” which I talked about back in October), hasn’t yet gone off the deep end in terms of said unsettling quality just yet—it would be another few years before we got into the “mom, come pick me up, I’m scared” atmosphere that came to dominate her sound. Yet “The Dresses Song” unsettles in its flatness and complacency. Not quite at the shivering, clenched waver that I’ve come to love in her voice, Germano instead sings much of “The Dresses Song” in a flat affect, dull and sucked dry of emotion. Amidst the bounce of tapestry-weaving bass, clinking tambourines, and the kind of folksy violins that would suggest somebody’s about to break out into a jig, Germano seems to sit cross-legged as everything happens around her, but never to her: “You make me think about nothing/It feels so good like that/You look at me so fragile.” Germano sings of the powerlessness of slipping into a loss of autonomy; like the doll’s head on the album cover, she sings as though she’s being dragged through the dirt by a child, dressed up and posed for tea parties at will, outwardly welcoming but inwardly dreading the surveillance of her body. Every repetition of “you make me wanna wear dresses” is uttered as a twist of the knife, convincing herself that oh, it’s not so bad, and yet her hollow, bird-bones voice strips the illusion bare—the illusion that, like in the music video, that’s she’s okay with being paraded around in costume like a child. “The Dresses Song” comes from a place of the darkest kind of complacency—the period where you’re stuck at the bottom of an empty well, but you’ve convinced yourself that the polluted water trickling down goes down just fine—at least it’s something to drink.

Isn’t it so lovely to grow up where every inch of your body is policed just because of your gender? Surely that won’t have mental repercussions further down the line. Surely, one Yorgos Lanthimos would at least somewhat understand that and realize that a) discovering one’s sexuality isn’t the be-all, end-all of what makes a liberated woman, and b) that said depiction of sexual exploitation was so constant and gratuitous that it became exploitative in and of itself. Surely.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Some Time Alone, Alone” – Melody’s Echo Chamber

I’m honestly surprised that Noah Hawley hasn’t come across Melody’s Echo Chamber (that we know of), because…come on. This was made for Legion. It’s not even psychedelic inspiration anymore—it’s purely psychedelic in a way that’s not just trying to recreate a sound from the sixties.

Like Tame Impala, it just seems like the next generation of psych-rock. So it was not a surprise in the slightest when I found out that Melody’s Echo Chamber’s self titled record (pushes glasses up bridge of nose) was produced by Kevin Parker himself. (Did you know that Tame Impala was just one guy? It’s just one guy. Can you believe it? I bet you didn’t know that. It’s just one—[gets pulled offstage by a comically large cane]) “Some Time Alone, Alone” has distortion so thick that you practically have to wade through it with a hazmat suit—it’s hard to describe the atmosphere that Melody Prochet and Kevin Parker have created with any words other than thick. It’s like sticking your arm into rainforest greenery, endlessly pushing aside massive fronds just to find the pulse of light gleaming at the heart of the glen. Every riff and rhythm circles into each other like a diagram of an atom, forever orbiting the warm nucleus—Prochet’s voice, which has the feel of Nina Persson if she happened to stumble upon the blue drugs from Legion, suspended in the ether. It’s gone beyond sounding like the ’60s into something truly representative of how the genre has evolved: it sounds so modern, but never in a polished way. It’s a child nurtured by the ’60s, for sure, but there was no place it could have gestated other than a 21st-century test tube.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Here Comes President Kill Again” – XTC

Nothing I could say could complicate this song or shed new light on it, really, and certainly not when we’re living it, and have been living it on and off at least since the ’80s. Probably further. XTC always seemed to be attuned to the needle of the social climate, and save for a handful of outdated political references here and there, they’ve stood steadfast against the battering of the waters of time. “Ain’t democracy wonderful?/Them Russians can’t win!/Ain’t democracy wonderful?/Lets us vote someone like that in.” Certainly feels like King Conscience and Queen Caring have been rolling in their graves for quite some time…ah, no, surely, we don’t need to put our heads together and solve pressing issues like gun violence, climate change, genocide, and a nation bent on killing its queer children, no way! We’ve got to call the national guard on the student protestors using their right to free speech to call attention to the horrific Palestinian genocide that our tax dollars have basically been funding! Ain’t democracy wonderful?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Strange Phenomena” – Kate Bush

If there’s anybody who’s intimately familiar with strange phenomena, in whichever meaning you take the phrase, it’s Kate Bush. How else does one write the most horrifying song about being turned into a kite against your will and make it so groovy?

Most of my enjoyment of The Kick Inside remains dominated by “Them Heavy People,” “Wuthering Heights,” and the aforementioned “Kite,” but ever so often, another track rises back from the ether, summoned by the erratic will of my shuffle. It’s easy to lump “Strange Phenomena” into that very specific breed of early Kate Bush where it’s all swinging-from-the-curtains theatre, and…yeah, rediscovery didn’t erase that quality (see: the video linked above), but it made me remember why Kate Bush (mostly) gets it right. Centered around the concept of what Bush described as “how coincidences cluster together,” it has the starry eyes of an ingenue as piano notes rise and fall propelled by wind from a fan, made to make her hair billow. (Apparently it’s not centered around getting your period, despite the opening: “Soon it will be the phase of the moon/When people tune in/Every girl knows about the punctual blues.” The only thing convincing me of anything else than the period reading of that line is the “punctual” part. Punctual my ass.) “We can all recall instances,” she said to Music Talk in 1978, “when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a mutual friend who—totally unprompted—will begin talking about that person.” It’s an unabashed celebration of whatever it is, that unknowable part of the brain or simply a truth of the unknowable universe, reveling in the love that we can glean from ordinary things. I can’t think of a much happier outlook to life that Bush’s declaration that “we are surrounded by strange phenomena,” whether or not you believe that something is pulling the strings to bring them together. For once, the theatre doesn’t come off as silly or overly self-important—it feels like a calculated response to the joyous puddles that we leap through as we move through this life.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!