2021 in Review: Water From Your Eyes Structure

Structure was released in August 2021 on Wharf Cat Records.

Water From Your Eyes burst onto my radar over the summer of 2021 like a lot of new releases do: I lug a bunch of downloaded records with me out on one of my extended weekend walks. So there I was, bebopping and scatting along when I pull the experimental duo's fifth record (and first on Wharf Cat), Structure, up from the queue. 

And it starts innocently enough. The lead cut, "When You're Around," begins and you quickly get this peppy late 60s/early 70s vibe. It is like a song from a montage moment in a film from the era. Think "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," B.J. Thomas' song that appeared in one of those moments in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Now, that was a song that -- to me -- was typical of the period in which the movie was produced but not necessarily the era it was depicting. In other words, there was a disjunction. 

And I don't choose that song at random (even if I don't really think When You're Around is at all like Raindrops; just of songs of its ilk). I found it an effective starting point for the record (and super poppy paired with my walk¹) as I initially listened to it. But it in no way prepares you for what follows.

When You're Around fades and then silence for a few moments that are broken by three knocks. And then a brief silence again. The pattern continues, only with two knocks succeeded by a discordant note in the same sequence. That is the turning point. Because then, after a couple of seconds of pause, the bottom drops out. A loud, fuzzy synth blasts the door open and the record immediately takes a left turn into something completely different on "My Love's" and beyond. 

I mean, I love that feint, especially as a first encounter with the group. Here are the expectations for this album and our music. Psych! In some ways, it lures you even more into how Water From Your Eyes bends convention in crafting their music. 

There are a pair of spoken word tracks, so Structure really is just six proper songs in a little more than half an hour. But the duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos pack so much into that.""Quotations"," the album's closer, seemingly made a lot of year-end lists of top songs, but "My Love's" is such a genuine gem of synth pop noise. It pulsates with that same fuzzy blast echoing throughout, often in a call and response of sorts with the Brown's vocals. But even those give way to a staticky break in the transmission two-thirds of the way through the song. And in the absence of vocals, that jaunty little synth line and dissonant keys take over. It just works.

"Quotations" (not to be confused with the aforementioned tune) and "Track Five" tread similar ground Although, the latter layers in the most danceable beat on the LP. That drum machine just screams late 80s hip hop and R&B. It isn't "If It Isn't Love" -- like, AT ALL -- but there are elements of it that are evocative of the late era New Edition single (for some reason in the musical hodgepodge in my head).  And "Monday" slows things down to a tick tock pace and into ballad territory, but ballad with a stripped-down, airy twist, perhaps.

This is a fun record. It sizzles and cracks in all the right, weird places, and it has had me dipping back into its well for more since late August. Structure is definitely one of those not to be overlooked LPs of 2021.

Notes:

¹ Honestly, the vocals, not to mention the pacing, were reminiscent of Broadcast in my eye. That'll always check a box on my ledger.

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2021 in Review: Goat Headsoup

Headsoup was released in August 2021 on Rocket Recordings.

Okay. Let's get this out of the way. 

Enigmatic Swedish group, Goat's 2021 record, Headsoup, is dripping with 60s psychedelia. It's inescapable.

But that's just the baseline. It's a wild ride. The first half of the record takes on a kind of jam band feel. No, not in that way. It's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard with a world music flare. And while that marriage of psychedelia and world music might evoke Khruangbin, Goat delivers in a different, more African-tinged way with woodblock percussion on "Dreambuilding" or the woodwinds on "Union of Mind and Soul".

"Union" sends things off in a different direction on side B. That King Gizzard foundation remains, but the jam expands. It's like Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony from Wild Flag came over to lay vocals down and Bill Ward and Geezer Butler ducked out on Black Sabbath to add a darker, fuzzier, more brooding layer to that foundation. That heaviness peppers much of the back half of the album but is most apparent on both "Let It Burn - Edit" and "Fill My Mouth," the latter of which may as well also have Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson swooping in with a flute solo. [It sounds that way.]

And if that sort of amalgamation does create enough of vision of a wall of experimental sounds, then Goat also veers off toward free jazz on "Friday, Pt. 1" in between those heavier two tunes toward the end of the record.

Again, it is a wild ride, this album. I think I may have balked at side A on my first listen, but was drawn in once I started hearing Black Sabbath influences seep in as the record progressed. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Headsoup is a nice diversion if you're looking for a solid palate cleanser or just a fun, challenging listen.

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2021 in Review: Motorists Surrounded

I don't know. The back half of 2021 saw -- at least where I was looking -- a lot of hype for Geese as an heir to The Strokes. I get it: young, up and coming NYC band with a DIY/garagey sound. Fine, but I'd honestly take Gustaf and their album if I had to choose in the New York space.¹ 

The thing is, that sound is not confined to Gotham. In fact, north of the border in Toronto, Motorists cooked up a mélange of sound on their 2021 debut LP, Surrounded. (We Are Time [US], Bobo Integral [most everywhere else]). The trio jangle their way through twelve tracks that consistently marry the post-punk of Gang of Four or Pylon with the 80s college radio sensibilities of REM. And yeah, those are lofty comparisons, but Motorists deliver time and again. 

The title track kicks things off catchily enough, but it feeds into the even hookier "Vainglorious." Then you spend the rest of the record saying to yourself, "It can't get any catchier/hookier than this, can it?" I don't know that it does match those first two cuts, but damn, it comes close. 

...a lot. 

This record reminds me of that Barney Stinson line about the science behind a good (music) mix from the early New Year's Eve episode of How I Met Your Mother: "Now, people often think that a good mix should rise and fall, but people are wrong. It should be all rise, baby!" 

Surrounded rises quickly and maintains a plateau throughout. It is one of the most underrated albums of 2021. I mean, the lo-fi 80s VHS video for the title track -- complete with masked drummer (yeah, covid mask) -- should sell you on that right off the bat. 

Notes:

¹ Seriously, with a record called Audio Drag for Ego Slobs, how could you not give the nod to Gustaf anyway?

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The 2021 Playlist is in

The first rule of playlist is you don't talk about... Wait, that was a different set of rules. 

Ever since 2012, I have put together a playlist for the year. The premise is simple enough: chuck a bunch of songs into a growing (and evolving in real time) Spotify playlist made up of songs that moved me in some way at some point between January 1 and December 31 of any given year.¹  After a couple of trial runs, the rules for assembling said playlists were largely solidified in probably 2014 when I set out with the goal of listening to one new (or new to me) album a day (or at least averaging an album a day over the course of the year). 

[I mean, if that isn't a New Years resolution you can get behind, then I don't know what to tell you.]

Like any set of rules, there is a healthy mix of permissive and restrictive structures that guide inclusion.

On the permissive side, I don't have to like the whole record, most of a record or really the whole song for that matter for a tune to make the cut. There are always a handful of songs every year where there is an element in an otherwise nondescript song that does something for me. Take Barrie's song "Clovers" from 2019, for example. There's a part of me that will always say that that one is a bit too far out on the poppy end of the spectrum to fit neatly into even my broad musical sensibilities. That said, that bouncy synth line about three-quarters of the way in that runs through the end clouds my judgment of the song in its entirety. I fall for it every time. Usually it is something on the low end of the register (read: bass) that draws me in or some other snaps and farts.

There are also low barriers to entry elsewhere. A song does not have to be new, new to me or released in the year of aggregation to be included in the yearly playlist. Again, the main criterion is that a song -- or element of it -- moves me in some way. It can be an older song. Often one will drift back onto my radar through film or TV. Year after year, television gets better and better at augmenting the final product with (what I'll call popular) music. And hey, sometimes nostalgia just brings a song back up into your memory bank and it serves as a sort of mile marker in the year in question.

Yet, there are some restrictions in place that limit what passes muster. Music from one artist or group can appear in the playlist more than once but only if they are songs from different albums or EPs. Just from a listening (back) perspective, you don't want artists to dominate even the shuffle of a playlist. That can mean some Sophie's choice situations if there are two or more tunes on a record that you're torn over including. [There are work-arounds to this. That's why it can be good to have a summer playlist you can dump good but +1 songs into.]

Generally, in recent years I have also had a one song a day for the year goal as well. But I'm less strict about that. There has to be some quality threshold. I'm not going to include a song just to include it and get to 365 songs as New Years approaches. Covid helps in this one area. The pandemic has had me listening to a LOT more music these last two years.  

[As an aside, if you follow along with the Musical interludes I do in my Instagram stories and on Twitter most days, then these playlists might look like an aggregation of those. But just because a song is a musical interlude, does not mean that it will make the playlist. Most interludes do, but some of those are drawn from past playlists as well. And I try not to add a song to multiple yearly playlists. It happens. Hey, music moves us all in different ways at different times. But it happens rarely.]

The 2021 playlist includes 390 tracks and clocks in at a little more than 25 and a half hours. Enjoy. 

¹ Playlists cannot (or should not in my mind) be listened to before the end of the first quarter of the year in which they are being curated. The reasoning is twofold. First, it allows for the accumulation of enough songs to actually be a real playlist and not just some weirdly small collection of songs. But second, that rule is in place to give tunes added late in the year to the previous year's playlist a chance to sink in a bit more. Otherwise, they can get lost, ahem, in the shuffle. Regardless, having a contemporaneous playlist always -- ALWAYS -- skews my Spotify Wrapped at the end of November each year. These playlists offer a bit of a "Re-wrapped" for me at the end of the first quarter. ...that includes December music/listens!

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Low has another winner in HEY WHAT

Low's HEY WHAT was released September 10 on Sub Pop

No one likely needs an introduction to Duluth, Minnesota band, Low. The three piece has been at it a while, churning out spare, what-you-see-is-what-you-get rock for nearly three decades. Yet, my path did not cross theirs — well, their music’s — until 2005’s sunny The Great Destroyer (Sub Pop), a happenstance discovery via probably All Songs Considered or some magazine. [I know. How quaint.] 

Subsequent music from the trio drifted in and out of my life until 2018 when Low released Double Negative (Sub Pop). At the time, the record was hailed as, if not a departure from, then an evolution to the formula the band had tended to use to that point in their career. Fine, that was enough to get me to give it a whirl. 

First impression? Not good. And folks, I’m just about as tolerant a music listener as you will find. I can feel guilty for not liking some records that I feel like I should like based on some history with the band or whatever. But Double Negative did not do it for me. 

However, that said more about me than it did about the album. Because I wasn’t done with Double Negative and its warped and crumpled contours. I trekked out to the beach one weekend, pressed play and started walking. As the landscape became more desolate, Mimi Parker’s and Alan Sparhawk’s warbled harmonies fronting crackling distortions began to make much more sense to me. It all clicked. And there’s a lesson in there. There’s this commingling of time and place and mood with music when they cross paths and dance, however fleetingly, that never ceases to surprise and is almost always among the most beautiful of things. 

So, when HEY WHAT (Sub Pop) was released recently, I was better prepared. I was in a better headspace before I tackled it. And it is a fantastic extension of the tracks Low laid down on Double Negative. Those vocal harmonies may not be the prettiest out there, but there is this quality about them — and this is nothing new — that makes them feel like home. Over (or hell, behind) the hairpin bends and breaks of the lurching guitars, those vocals on songs like “More” or “Disappearing” or “Hey,” for example, are like a call from somewhere distant. Not a distress call from space necessarily, but a reassuring message (albeit with some urgency) from somewhere out there, whether in the cosmos or your own head. What better soundtrack for these times.

And if that is the sort of diversion you need, then HEY WHAT is worth a spin.

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