Cam Recommends

I watch TikTok the way God intended: having my spouse curate the best ones and show them to me as I fall asleep in bed. One that surfaced recently features a bemused person overhearing a conversation where someone earnestly asks those around him: “Betcha didn’t know accordions could rock like that, huh?”

And yeah, that’s a pretty funny sentence to capture. The accordion is such an inherently funny-looking instrument— all clicky buttons and heaving bellows— and one that’s so often associated with levity. It can be easy to forget how versatile the instrument is, even when it still sounds exactly like itself. Take “Kaunis” from Finnish folk-rock group Anis Kittu’s album Kaihola, released earlier this year. The accordion is woven throughout the record but stands mostly solo on this track, complemented only by a plaintive voice and a little wistful violin. It all builds to that solo merging into a duet in the last 40 seconds, which makes me think, yeah, accordions can rock like that.

Just when you think the vaporwave aesthetic can’t get you any more, along comes something that reignites those old neurons you thought were obliterated in the vaporcore schism into backrooms lore onslaught circa 2018. I thought I’d seen my last “fuzzed-out depiction of threadbare memories of an average U.S. kid who grew up in the ’80s/’90s and spent any time at all in the carpeted corporate mega-capitalist palaces of kid-friendly fast food joints and indoor shopping malls.” And it’s malls, in particular, that are the nostalgic locus here, with Discovery Zone’s absolute little bop, “Mall of Luv.” Noise-gated drums, clipped sax samples, and bright synth hits put us firmly in the world of chintzy ’80s pop, but the distinctly modern song construction and intentionally artificial production make it stand out as a catchy bit of whatever current micro-iteration of vaporwave-indebted music we’re currently living in.

Do I dare call this a retro review? I can’t help but smile at the alliteration (we love a good alliteration) and yet also be saddened by the inexorable passage of time. I remember working at Zia Record Exchange when this came out, so how old can it possibly be?

Oh.

Well, regardless, I’m on record with complex (and ever-evolving) thoughts on The Mars Volta’s body of work—having once written: “something about the need to embrace the most obtuse directions for a lot of their music kept a lot of it from being something I’d choose to seek out. And while I liked De-Loused and Frances the Mute, it was frustrating to constantly have them swerve left when I had the gut feeling that, you know, a right turn might be okay too.” 

Even so, every couple of years I’d try to go through their back catalog and see if anything clicked. And early this year, I put on The Bedlam in Goliath on a whim. After all, 2022’s self-titled record from The Mars Volta had made it into my top albums of that year, so it was probably time to revisit the records I’d bounced off of in the past.

And, reader, this time something clicked. Opener “Aberinkula” doesn’t so much start as it explodes like the big bang: frighteningly hot and spiraling out in every direction at near the speed of light. Sure, it sounds like a wall of noise, and I think that wall had just been too high for me to scale in the past. But something about that early day in January had me primed to get my head over that wall and fall into the cacophonous, terrifying whirlpool that is The Bedlam in Goliath. Yes, as a whole, it’s pretty long and can be an exhausting listen, but I think that only adds to the overwhelming nature of it all. There is some sort of narrative going on—something about a cursed Ouija board (and apparently the creation of this album, in and of itself, was an incredibly fraught experience)—but all that really melts away in the unrelenting forward motion as bandleaders Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López capture ball lightning in a Tesla coil.

I really do recommend listening to the whole record if you can set aside the time and get in the right headspace, but for a brief glimpse, I’ll post the song “Agadez,” which is actually one of the handful of tracks that doesn’t explode out of the gate in the first few seconds, so it might be a bit more digestible as a single. Still, I think the song is a good representation of the album as a whole, especially as it starts to freak out in the second half. Even 16 years later, this project sounds innovative, nervy, and entirely unique in its approach to off-kilter art-rock. The Mars Volta go on tour early next year, and I hope it indicates that this pair of veteran weirdos will still deliver future surprises.

  

 A spacey little minor-key jam that flows so smoothly and has such a great release that it somehow feels infinitely longer than its relatively quick 3:50 runtime would suggest (which is a compliment!). The longer you listen, the more you feel your reflective aviator shades catching the dimly lit neon skyline around you as wind blows through your hair while driving a top-down 80s Corvette, trying to escape a hazy ennui you can’t explain. Give me nighttime driving moods forever, I say. 

Ok, so I’m not always gonna write a huge block of text for one of these so I don't scare everybody off. Sometimes I can just recommend something because it’s rad and leave it at that. So, here it is, another great track from Tycho. It’s groovy, melodic, catchy and just a little bit melancholy. You know, like a great Tycho track is supposed to be.

(And, reminder, if you just want to just listen to the tunes and avoid heading here altogether, make sure to follow my playlist on Spotify).

 

Dozzy’s work on Magda, the album from which “Santa Cunegonda” hails, reminds me of Finnish producer Aleksi Perälä’s output, especially pieces that he relates to the “Colundi sequence,” a concept that I’m still not fully sure I understand, or even think is entirely real (it may be some elaborate musician’s joke), but in practical terms, for Perälä anyway, it means a single-minded obsession with a small set of tones and beats, repeated in hypnotically long fragments. The point isn't really developing a song so much as putting all the components on display as quickly and often as possible and to let the listener really dictate the vibe. It’s ambient music with a thundering heartbeat, and I’m really glad to have found Donato Dozzy as he, alongside outfits like Craven Faults, 36, Loscil, Lawrence English, M. Geddes Gengras and the aforementioned Perälä, are really at the forefront of this mesmerizing type of music. “Active electronic ambient?” Hm. I’m not trying to pigeonhole Dozzy (or any of these other artists), but I find the wavelength that they’re all exploring just a fascinating liminal space between already relatively amorphous genres. Take a spin through the 10 minutes of “Santa Cunegonda” here, and if it kinda drives you up the wall in the first few minutes, you can stop listening since it more or less stays that way, and this just might not be the kind of music for you. Buuuut if you find yourself captivated and maybe even a little bit transfixed, then the rest of this record might be right up your alley.

Canadian post-rock pioneers Godspeed You! Black Emperor return with another stunning piece of melancholic instrumental grandiosity on their new record, titled NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. Godspeed have always been staunchly political, and that number references those who have been killed during the devastating and horrific genocide in Gaza. Even conservative estimates suggest that the death toll has nearly doubled some eight months after they presumably finished this record. It’s a powerful piece of work—one that, as always with GY!BE, requires deep listening and patience, but I promise it'll be worth any investment you make. Turn it up and raise a fist.

So, how ‘bout that Brat summer? It’s not like by the time I started following her in the early 2010s that Charli XCX was an underground artist or anything. By August of 2013, she had already featured on the massive Icona Pop track “I Love It” and was on an expansive worldwide tour; and that’s when I saw a video of her covering Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” for the A.V. Club’s Undercover series (which they’ve since removed, but a YouTube historian has helpfully archived it). That particular performance has always stuck with me, not because of its technical proficiency (indeed, she’s even a bit nervous and doesn’t quite nail the key change) but because of the pop-music savvy, passion, and most importantly, the vulnerability and earnestness that she displayed. A real pop star’s pop star. It marked her as an artist to watch, and I was continually rewarded over the next decade as Charli made bigger, bolder, and weirder moves in the scene. And while she was indeed of “pop star” status, she always seemed like an underdog. And it’s hard to see that now, especially in the wake of the bright green, pixelated black-text world we now live in, but following Charli in the early days was exciting exactly because of the dissonance of her being a huge star but also a kind of hidden gem.

At this point, you can’t really talk more without discussing hyperpop, that day-glo, caffeinated, straightforwardly artificial offshoot of electronic music that coalesced in the early 2010s. And you can’t discuss hyperpop without discussing A.G. Cook, founder of PC Music (arguably ground zero, or close enough to it, for hyperpop’s breakthrough) and producer and musician in his own right. And you really can’t discuss any of this without eventually landing on SOPHIE. Her presence and impact in the hyperpop scene cannot be overstated. While never signing to PC Music, she did work with Cook throughout the 2010s and worked on a number of Charli’s projects, including the absolute top-tier “Vroom Vroom.”

And it’s, unfortunately, SOPHIE’s untimely death in 2021 that brings us to the track recommendations here. SOPHIE’s absence leaves a profound void in the music scene, and this year both A.G. Cook and Charli XCX released tribute songs that grapple with her loss, each standing out in their respective (and excellent) albums. Each song takes a vocal line from a different SOPHIE song. Cook, in “Without,” repeats a line from SOPHIE’s breakthrough “BIPP,” though he strips it entirely of its hyperpop energy and arch delivery and sings simply, his voice even breaking: “I can make you feel better, if you want to.” Charli, for her part, sings of her regrets of not taking more opportunities to work with SOPHIE but even offers herself the assurances that SOPHIE would have been sure to give her: “And I know you always said, ‘it’s ok to cry,’ so I know I can cry.” They’re both heartbreaking and fitting memorials to lament the loss of a friend and collaborator. Taking all these songs together certainly forms a picture of how artists can find inspiration and solace in each other’s work, and it also leaves a forever dangling thread of future SOPHIE/Charli/Cook work that can now never come to pass.

At the time of this writing, SOPHIE’s posthumous album has been out for two weeks, but I’ve struggled to give it a full listen for a multitude of reasons we don’t have to go into here. But we’re also a week before the release of the second special edition of BRAT, this version weaving a reimagining of the entire album through remixes and collaborations on each track. Already, some of these versions have not only been as good as the originals, but some are arguably better, and they’re all certainly metanarratively interesting in the context of Charli’s career up to this point. The collaboration with Robyn positions Charli as an inheritor of experimental pop; the massive success of “Gir, So Confusing” with Lorde has shown how presumed industry beefs or slights can be mended through the power of music, and her collab with Billie Eilish really shows just how much fun she can have with other musicians. The big question mark at this moment for me is what the reinterpretation of “So I” will bring us. So far, collaborators for the album have been announced, but the track title where “So I” will slot is still just plainly listed as “Track 9.” We’ll see what Charli has in store for us. 

 

I admit I’ve been asleep at the wheel on this one, and it was about 30 minutes into viewing the new Sundance-favorite Irish film KNEECAP that I realized this wasn’t a fictional story and that, indeed, there really is an Irish-language hip-hop group from Belfast that mixes equal parts revolutionary fervor over Irish independence and identity (especially as expressed in the speaking of the language) and odes to hedonism as a way to both escape the bleakest parts of living in the fallout of a generations-long conflict and a way to seek salvation, enlightenment, and even—maybe—some kind of unity. In the film, the lyricists and rappers who go by the names of Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap are shown as basically arriving nearly fully formed, only needing a little prodding and beat making from schoolteacher-turned-Irish-flag-Balaclava-wearing producer DJ Próvaí to commit their monstrously ribald but meticulously constructed tunes to tape. Yet with their incredible chops, it’s obvious how much KNEECAP have been honing their craft. The music in the film (with much of the Irish lyrics helpfully—and creatively—displayed onscreen) is, quite simply, stunning. They blitz between English and Irish, passing the mic constantly over production that’s energetic and clean. The trio are also enormously charismatic presences onscreen, and no more so than when they’re performing their music.

Now, the movie is deliberately blurry in its distinction between reality and, charitably, embellishment (but sometimes more accurately, self-mythologizing), and it can suffer the more it contorts the plot to fit within the bounds of biopic tropes, but when focused on the high-octane zeal of the three lads and coloring outside the storytelling strictures (it truly is a “drugs are good, actually” non-cautionary tale, which might be somewhat morally dubious but, as a counterbalance to the fearmongering extremes of the usual depictions of so-called anti-social behavior, it’s at least refreshingly straightforward), it’s a great introduction to a band that just feels electrifying to watch. Their album from this year, Fine Art, is a riot from start to finish, its interlude skits alluding to a narrative about our protagonists careening around a pub—from hiding from having to be role-models to their community with fans hovering over them quoting lyrics, to wanting to celebrate having just enough expendable income to guarantee a good night (hence they're be "sniffing loads of banger!”), to drowning their sorrows and navel-gazing about their mental health, to heading off advances from a sniveling British record producer (“I’m English, but don’t hold it against me,” he snorts, to which Mo Chara replies, “Oh, we will.”), and that’s just the first half! I’ve taken a few spins through this now and am excited to follow this band. They’re creative, profane, silly, profound, revolutionary, and dangerous to the exact people who should be scared of what, underneath it all, they really stand for.

That all said, as a quick starting point, jump into “I’m Flush,” which seems, at first glance, a typical braggadocious “look at all the money I have” throwdown. Seemingly, since they’re now a well-known band, they have all this cash to flash around: “I’m spending all my money, no matter the cost, once second-hand Lacoste, now it’s Gucci and Balenciaga,” raps Móglaí Bap (which not only features a name-drop of a past employer, but then flows into a smooth run of Irish to complete the rhyme scheme). But, of course, we’re talking about real down-to-earth people: “I’m a working-class fella with a middle-class palate // We went from rags to riches, and now we got a wee machine that be cleaning our dishes.” The plain reality is that just a little bit of financial flexibility can seem like luxury, and even if all it can get us is one wild night out—then maybe that’s just worth it. Gotta point out—and I guess this is something to keep in mind for those who also want to follow my playlist—that nearly nothing they’ve released is even close to “safe for work.” You know, these are working-class lads from the North of Ireland who rap about resistance to British imperialism and the madcap insanity of taking such a high dose of ketamine that it could “put rhinos to bed,” so, you know, it’s filled with language that’s not suitable for the young or faint of heart. Fair warning.

Spencer Krug has long been one of indie rock’s most enigmatic and prickly lyricists and songwriters. So much of his recent solo work (many of which he releases in a near-constant stream on his Patreon) is more like inward-spiraling poems, recursively looping around minimal instrumentation and allowing the listener to focus on the words. And the words are beautiful. Krug has a way with both storytelling in general and finding specific magical turns of phrase that stick with you. What’s also interesting is that Krug has a deep catalog of work that also proves he’s an immaculate pop songwriter as well—at least, when he puts his mind to it. That said, it does seem that without other collaborators to rein him in (like his work in Wolf Parade, or, and we are getting to it, Sunset Rubdown), he usually works in his more formless poetic mode. Now, don’t get me wrong, that work is extremely listenable and valuable, but so much of it is also challenging in a way his more straightforward rockers aren’t, and I can find myself missing when he can demonstrate those sides of his talents. Which is why I was really excited to hear about the reuniting and new album from his once stalled-out side band, Sunset Rubdown. Now, 14 years after Dragonslayer (which, for the record, is one of my favorite albums of the ’00s), they’ve returned with Always Happy to Explode, which, despite its bombastic title, is very much a “once-raucous band returns with more introspective and world-weary songs” kind of record. Not to say it’s not a worthy follow-up, but its vibe is much more low-key than its decade-old predecessors. That said, there are some moments of pop clarity and exuberance that floor me like it was 15 years ago. Most notably, I’ll single out “Candles,” the third track, as the song that most catches my attention. It roils with upbeat synths and relatable but still sometimes magical lyrics (“Call me if you need me, I’m still here, I’m in the last place that you found me,” contrasts delightfully with “lighting candles in a room already filled with light”). I don’t know what this record (and just-started tour, which, unfortunately, doesn’t pass through where I live) signals for the future of this particular iteration of the band, but, for now, I’m very thankful for what we've been given here.