new obsessions

I’m a selfish music listener. I tend to latch onto a song or a style and refuse to let go until I am absolutely and completely sick of it. Sometimes I will wear something out forever — it can never sound good to me again — but more often the excitement dulls and the song just slowly fades into the background, forgotten unless my memory is unexpectedly jarred.

Which is all to say that my personal recommendations are often unreliable; for the past three months the only records I have really listened to are Alexis Taylor, Selected + Collected and Cotton Jones. But there are a handful of young pups that have gotten my ear lately. Here they are, in order of preference:

Future Islands, “Little Dreamer”: At home, I sing this song to myself constantly, the refrain of “my little dreeeeeeeeeeeamerrrrr” so innocent and loving. So generous. I sing it and think of my own love and know that I’m singing to her. But I’m more the dreamer of the two of us, and I harbor secret fantasies that one day she will sing it to me. (She has a beautiful voice.)

The song is this preposterously gorgeous ballad: organ, a slight beat and then this incredibly performative vocal line that’s part Bobby Darin, part Peter Laughner (Pere Ubu). It goes so many layers deep, from the perfect echo on the vocals to the seeping guitar feedback to the patient bass line to “When I was just a child/ A lonely boy/ I held onto my dreams/ Like they would run from me.” I mean what else is there to say beyond that? It’s so sincere. So sincere. I can’t recommend this song highly enough.

Teengirl Fantasy, “Portofino”: Adore this. Adore. It’s this enormous woozy thing — picture waking up drunk and mummified and stumbling around a crowded city. That’s “Portofino.” It’s all subtleties — it’s hard to see with all that gauze! — and it drifts along, untethered, until, out of nowhere, comes… Three Six Mafia? Yes. Either them or someone that sounds just like them delivering a heavily melodic refrain that pitch-shifts with the beat, the track and the rhymes bumping up and down the same ladder. It’s so out of nowhere, so bizarre, that it seems like a mistake at first. “Who’s playing that?” you first wonder, but then you realize, “No, this is Teengirl Fantasy” and listen again.

Appaloosa, “The Day (We Fell in Love)”: I’m fascinated with this song. It starts as prime-era Nico — Germanic female voice with a stilted accent singing a connect-the-dots melody that’s super smooth — and then it turns into this incredible discordant disco track, this refrain of “two hearts/ changed/ flying” where every note is really flat, but at the same time very powerful, clashing with the chimes and soft-disco beat. And then the song just devolves into this deconstruction of the song to that point, the vocals not stopping, never ever ending but the arrangement undergoing slight tectonic shifts — more of the wicky-wicky guitar line this round, more strings the next. And then the song just ends, not really going anywhere, never returning to the Nico bits, wrapping up with a shrug. It’s barely even a song! And yet I love it. Again, highly recommended.

Miracles, Colony Collapse: This went up a couple of days ago, and every time I have played it out loud someone here has IM’d asking what this is. Always a good sign. Musically it’s similar to Wilderness — post-punk and plodding — but there are also some Lightning Bolt bits (some real spastic, heavy on the low-end instrumentals) and, most importantly, a nicely energetic voice leading this whole thing. Even though the bands Miracles are most similar to are hyper-serious (even anti-fun), this record is modestly exuberant. Really fond of this.