Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: there’s never a bad time to listen to Gorillaz, but I certainly could’ve timed when I listened to Humanz better.
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 2/9/25
“Swamp Dream #3” – Everything Is Recorded & mary in the junkyard
We now return to some much-needed mary in the junkyard-posting. I suspect it’ll become consistent…at some point. Not to pressure them, but hopefully this year (or the next) holds a full-length album in the future?
In the meantime, we have an excellent collaboration between them and Everything Is Recorded, the stage name of producer Richard Russell (also the founder of XL Records); he’s produced several albums under the name, often amassing a wide variety of musicians and songwriters to bolster them in a Gorillaz-like way, minus the cartoon characters. His forthcoming album, Richard Russell is Temporary, includes the likes of Florence Welch, Kamasi Washington, Noah Cyrus, Roses Gabor (a.k.a. the singing voice of Noodle on “DARE”), Bill Callahan, and mary in the junkyard! Granted, I hadn’t heard of Everything Is Recored until mary in the junkyard announced this single, but if this guy’s the owner of a record label, I could only hope this would introduce this fantastic, burgeoning gem of a band to a wider audience.
If “Swamp Dream #3” becomes the band’s ambassador, I wouldn’t mind either. Even though it’s more electronic than most of their catalogue, it’s got a naturalistic, moss-covered feel to it that you can’t scrape off of their sound no matter how many synths you paste onto it. It has the juddering thrum of rusted machines, all at once simple and a doorway into a hidden world; although I love the music video, “Swamp Dream #3” is begging for some kind of stop-motion treatment. I imagine it as an outside view of a termite’s mound or a rabbit’s warren, with the camera panning over clay worms poking out of the dirt and tiny insects, moles, and other underground rodents traversing the vast network of tunnels. (The real worms and beetles suffice, though.) Clari Freeman-Taylor’s vocals bring a kind of wonder to the song, a curiosity that isn’t quite childlike, but still seeks to shove its hands into the sand and the dirt, searching for hidden pathways and possibilities: “Mystery of my own flesh/I’ll never stop wondering/Never stop/Turning inside out.” Needless to say, the chorus, a repetition of “into the dirt” backed by looped vocals and a stuttering drum machine, could not be a better fit for a song with hands dirtied from looking for earthworms in the ground.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Search for WondLa – Tony DiTerlizzi – “You are from an old land/Crafted out of wet sand/What is it all about?/Staring at your hands…”
NEW TUNDE ADEBIMPE JUST DROPPED!! THEE BLACK BOLTZ!! OUT THIS APRIL!! I’m not sure if anything will ever cure the decade-long TV on the Radio drought, but man, a new album from such a fantastic talent sure comes close.
I never got around to writing about “Magnetic,” but it felt so much like TV on the Radio to me—it was distinctly Tunde Adebimpe, but it had that same urgent propulsion that made their indie hits feel ageless. It’s one of those tracks that makes you see how far the footprints of one particular member of a band in their music. TV on the Radio bunched several people together with magic touches into a single band, which is startling, but this touch is unmistakably Adebimpe’s. But “Drop” is where his sound begins to branch out and diverge into something wholly new. It has a flavor that’s simultaneously ’80s and 2010’s indie pop. Once the beatboxing intro fades away, rhythmic as bubbles popping in midair, it becomes a much more relaxed yet introspective dive into Adebimpe’s mind. As the guitars—clean enough to almost sound like synths—radiate into the calm ripple of the track, he grapples with a sensation of awakening; “Drop” couldn’t be a more apt title for a song whose lyrics are steps away from launching off a daunting yet hopeful precipice: “I′m gonna try it for myself/I’m gonna need somebody′s help/Cast an extraordinary spell/And rise into the night.”
Together, “Magnetic” and “Drop” couldn’t make me more excited for the range of Thee Black Boltz. “Magnetic” was a perfect access point for the fans who were wanting something close to TV on the Radio 2: Electric Boogaloo (listen, it’s kind of a self-callout), but “Drop” represents the somewhat uncharted territory that we have yet to see Adebimpe cover fully.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Sound of Stars – Alechia Dow – “We′re gonna feel it when we drop/Let′s go out where the visions never stop/There is a light/There’s a light just beyond this horizon/See it shine and rise into the night…”
Generally, the British were absolutely cooking with grease as far as rock music goes from about 1964 on, but there’s something so fruitful about the ’90s to me. If it’s from the period from 1992-1999 and it’s British, there’s a solid 75% chance that I’ll enjoy it. No, wait. Not exclusively the Brits, just because ’90s rock was so good, guys, but I just love the ’90s. To me, 1994 seems a particularly ripe crop of the vast harvest of the decade, especially the Britpop boom of the first half of the ’90s. Three out of the four of Britpop’s Big Four released albums: Blur with Parklife, Oasis (🤢) with Definitely Maybe, and Pulp with His ‘n’ Hers. But even if you look past the big players, 1994 is full of gems—”Insomniac” being one of them.
I just love Britpop, man. God. I talked a bit about Echobelly last year (with “Bellyache,” from this same album, Everybody’s Got One) with their propensity to take the genre’s penchant for social commentary a step further, as well as their much more diverse lineup compared to many Britpop bands of the time. (Not one but TWO women of color in a Britpop band was pretty much unheard of at the time) “Insomniac” is much more radio-friendly, but it embodies the “pop” of the Britpop, but never in a mindless way—more in the way that their contemporaries could wrap commentary in the most delicious guitar hooks. As Sonya Madan sings of her concerningly high subject (“I think we’ve lost control, dear/Whatever turned you on/You put it up your nose, dear”), the guitars absolutely knock you upside the head. You couldn’t wring the pure Britishness out of it if you tried (particularly the way that Madan sings “I swim in circles/In puddles/In trouble and then I go” like it’s a nursery rhyme…on a song about substance abuse), but you couldn’t wring the pure rock n’ roll out of it, either—this is what a hit should be.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea – Maggie Tokuda-Hall – even though Alfie gets a more sympathetic redemption arc in the final book, some of his relentless drug abuse certainly rings close to this song.
“Ride A White Horse” – Goldfrapp
“Ride A White Horse” is about as clean of a song you could get. It’s more than polished—it came out of the womb shinier than a disco ball, and its blinding sheen is made for dancing. Alison Goldfrapp has insisted that the title wasn’t a nod to T. Rex (but sort of was a reference to this), but the two songs couldn’t be further from each other—the dance-pop glamour of this song is about as far as Marc Bolan and company frolicking through the woods, but both have entirely distinct energies that differentiate themselves far beyond their respective choice of animals. Even for something made in 2006, Goldfrapp and Gregory’s work still sounds straight out of a club in the Blade Runner universe. Part of this is why I think the choice of making the music video for “Ride A White Horse” the epitome of dirty is kind of genius fit—it’s such a sanitized song, and yet Alison Goldfrapp sings it against superimposed backdrops of rotting food waste with scraps of toilet paper stuck to her heels, not to mention the cameo from what appears to be the proto-Trash Man. Even when there’s flies buzzing off of it, the polish of it never fades.
Also, because this popped up when I looked this up on YouTube, here’s a bit of unexpectedly delightful Goldfrapp content:
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick – as much as I disliked this book, I can’t deny that it fits the atmosphere—more so of the movies, as I said before.
“We Got the Power” (feat. Jehnny Beth) – Gorillaz
In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to listen to Humanz for the first time mere days before the inauguration just because of the album’s conception. When telling Pusha T, one of the album’s plentiful collaborators, what the atmosphere of the album was, Damon Albarn described it as “a party for the end of the world if Trump wins.” Not only did he say this well before Trump was elected, but…well, y’know. We all know the mess we’re in. Humanz often gets lambasted by the fandom as their worst album. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but I think it’s the nexus of modern Gorillaz, which is to say that it’s the point where their albums became increasingly devoted to their collaborators as opposed to the creative force of Albarn and Hewlett. Said collaborators are hit or miss, but most of the songs have a verse by Albarn with the exact same filter over his voice once the collaborators have had their place in the sun. Much as I love my guy Damon, it got slightly tiring after about 10 songs. But if it’s a party for the Trump-era hellscape, Humanz fulfills its purpose with flying colors, balancing social commentary with gloriously catchy pop songs. I feel like the thesis is perfectly encapsulated by Vince Staples’ chorus on “Ascension”: “The sky is falling, baby/Drop that ass before it crash.”
In spite of all that, the album ends on an anthemic note—”We Got The Power.” As simple as the lyrics are, simplicity is what this track needs. In times so overwhelmed with shock, horror, and doom, sometimes a more concise message is the best thing to cut through the noise. “We got the power to be loving each other/No matter what happens.” IT’S TRUE! It’s why “All You Need Is Love” has endured for so long. It’s simple, but it’s the kind of uniting message that we needed. If anyone should know that, with their history of cleverly packaged social commentary, it’s Gorillaz. Albarn is joined by Jehnny Beth (if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard Jehnny Beth sing a French verse on a British band’s song, I’d have two nickels, etc., etc.) and an uncredited Noel Gallagher. I briefly mentioned it before it, but as much of an Oasis hater as I am, it really is beautiful that they were able to set aside the stupidest possible differences, realize how stupid they were, and join forces on a song about loving each other. You can’t not appreciate it. (To say nothing of Liam…) And as the closing track to an album about a party at the end of democracy, it’s a welcome light at the end of the tunnel, and a true light—it’s not the flashing club lights that shroud the fear of most of the album, but a real lodestar.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei – “And we dream of home, I dream of life out of here/Their dreams are small/My dreams don’t know fear/I got my heart full of hope/I will change everything/No matter what I’m told…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 