SCALES #77: helmet on tight
Hello!
“You want drama? I’ll give you a reality show” kicks off a verse on “Drama”, the opening song on Erika de Casier’s Sensational, one album I’ve gotten hooked on in the past months. The sound—clearly post-90s/00s R&B but maybe also post-Kate Bush and post-fka twigs?—scratches a powerful itch: familiar sounds and gestures, reconfigured. The production is undeniably busy, but all the pieces serve to construct a coherent, organic groove: the loose, syncopated bass lines, the arpeggiated piano gestures, the reverberent harp runs, the birdlike synthesizer calls—especially on “No Butterflies, No Nothing”. Always something to capture the attention.
Sitting on top, the vocal delivery feels personal, playful, unafraid of the quotidian: “You gotta have some manners if you wanna roll with me” on “Polite”, the ad lib “I like to keep [my room] really tidy” on “All You Talk About”, “Jumping on my bike, helmet on tight / Gotta get to work real fast” on “Busy”—the last being the biggest tell of de Casier being Copenhagen-based.
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I’ve also been spending time with Lorde’s Solar Power. It’s a deliberately reserved album, not immediately ear-catching, but for me its lack of showiness basically works; I’ve enjoyed getting to know and examining its construction, better understanding the joinery.
Lorde’s charming email newsletter shows her care for words, but on the album itself the lyrics often carry secondary importance. That said, lyrics hit with extra oomph on the Te Ao Mārama EP, which features (to my ignorant ear) beautifully sensitive translations of some of some of the strongest songs into Maori, as described in an article in The Spinoff. (There’s also the funny unexpected thread connecting “Solar Power” the single with, of all things, 100 gecs’ “800db cloud”: sometimes you want to “throw [your] phone into the lake, yeah”, and sometimes you want to “throw [your] cellular device in the water”.)
Instead what gives the songs staying power are the small musical details that reveal themselves on repeated listen: the melismatic curlicues that increasingly decorate the melody in the back half of “The Path”, reaching an understated climax at the final “Savi-o-o-o-[probably u, considering]-r, it’s not me”s; the vocal line’s unexpected drop-out at a repetition of, “I don’t know, maybe I’m just—” in “Stoned at the Nail Salon”.
If Lorde keeps returning to a songwriting trick on the album, it’s understanding the power of having a song arrive somewhere that’s different from where it started. This includes the (relatively) showy structures on the album’s bookends—“The Path”, as mentioned, and the even more obvious song/album coda to “Oceanic Feeling” at record’s close—but also smaller moments such as the “It’s just a dream / I wanna wake up” outro to “California”.
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Some final questions from Big Red Machine's “Phoenix”: “How does the long way feel? Kneading your hand too tight against the wheel? […] How does the wheel not turn on hour on hour on hour?” Big Red Machine is the (Cincinnati name-indebted) project led by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of The National (and other collaborations); “Phoenix” juices the lineup with Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes and Anaïs Mitchell, creator of Hadestown and member of Bonny Light Horseman.
There’s no way I could have anything resembling an objective read on this song. Is this good? Is this bad? I have no idea! Listening to it tells me there is a particular nexus of let’s-say-circa-2008-white-dude-indie-rock nostalgia—spinning around The National’s self-serious songwriting and piano- and horn-driven arrangements, and the double-barreled earnestness of Robin Pecknold’s and Bon Iver’s vocals—that renders me completely powerless to resist. It makes me think once again of Helena Fitzgerald on The National: “Isn’t it ridiculous really that we’re all still here doing this same thing, still, even as age, even as we get old, even as time moves on and we should be better than this? And yet we still aren’t, and here’s another record.”
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Craig Mod takes another walk:
Did you know buna (Beech) is written “橅” in kanji — literally “tree nothing” or “not a tree.” The wetness of them made early botanists question their inherent treeness.
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—Adam