"Your Sex is Overrated" 098 ALTER.NATION.MiX weekly favtraX 17-08-2020 (50')

ALTER.NATION #98

Fantastic Negrito, The Dirty Streets, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Eyedress, Sufjan Stevens, Black Marble, Helvetia, Prins Thomas, Ganser, Fontaines D.C., Robby Krieger, Bill Frisell

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"Your Sex is Overrated"

ALTER.NATION #98 on deezer

An inventive modern-day blues musician who plays with tradition and culture. Bay Area-based singer/songwriter Xavier Dphrepaulezz rebooted his career in the 2010s by adopting the name Fantastic Negrito and pioneering a blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, and funk hybrid ...
Fantastic Negrito - Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? / Your Sex is Overrated feat. Masa Kohama
Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? is a title suitable for the madness of 2020 and its timeliness is further proof that Fantastic Negrito is the rare modern blues musician whose eye is keenly upon the present, not the past. His insistence on grappling with the realities of now also meant that he never resigned himself to playing traditional chord changes, preferring to rely as heavily on funk, hip-hop, soul, and rock as the blues themselves...

No-nonsense blues rock trio from Memphis with a knack for the boogie. Memphis hard rock revivalists the Dirty Streets like big guitar riffs, equally big amplifiers and drums, and tunes full of swaggering boogie rhythms in the manner of their '60s and '70s heroes. Powerfully influenced by classic rock and vintage blues-rock, the Dirty Streets write and play in a manner that honors the artists who paved the way for their music, but with enough originality and passion to establish an approach of their own. 
The Dirty Streets - Rough and Tumble / Good Pills
This rough and tumble recording captures the high-energy power trio Dirty Streets live on Ditty TV, in Memphis, Tennessee. This is heavy, bluesy rock'n'roll played with heart. Crank up the volume and let it rip! Justin Toland (vocals/guitar), Thomas Storz (vocals/bass), and Andrew Denham (drums/percussion), go through a set of songs culled from their catalogue ..

Australian psychedelic collective with an intense work ethic and a wildly experimental outlook that reaches from synth prog to folk rock.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Some Of Us
---Last month, they got back on track with a brand-new song called “Honey” and now they’re following it up with another new single, “Some Of Us,” a jerky and chaotic and barreling track that’s out now.
“This Cookie penned, Stu sung song came together early this year as the world was slowly descending into madness, but before it was truly on fire,” the band wrote in a tweet. “Can’t wait to show y’all some more tunes before we go down in flames.”

Eyedress was the nom de plume of Filipino Idris Vicuña, whose woozy, narcotic sound was not dissimilar to the American "witch house" trend.
Eyedress - Let's Skip To the Wedding / Happy Hour
In its earliest days, Idris Vicuña's solo project Eyedress fell more in line with the dark atmospherics and sludgy beats of the witch house movement, but it grew increasingly dreamier and brighter as it evolved. When Vicuña began introducing heavily processed guitar lines into his arrangements, Eyedress moved away from its early bleakness and into territory more similar to King Krule's fractured songwriting or Mac Demarco's wobbly indie rock. Let's Skip to the Wedding is the first Eyedress album since Vicuña returned to America after a time in his homeland of the Philippines, and the sound has reached new levels of both lovestruck romanticism and faded lo-fi production...

Critically feted indie pop singer/songwriter who paired personal and spiritual musings with hypnotic melodic patterns.
Sufjan Stevens - Video Game
On “Video Game,” the second single from Sufjan Stevens’ forthcoming album The Ascension, the singer-songwriter gazes outward at the nation that still considers itself the most powerful on Earth. The midtempo, soft-rocking synth-pop here becomes a Trojan horse for a refusenik idealism. Your own personal Jesus? The center of the universe? A modern-day Julius Caesar? Stevens rejects all these potential roles, and resume-building careerism to boot, repeating in the chorus, “I don’t wanna play.”

Influenced by coldwave, early-'80s synth pop, and the mighty bass playing of New Order's Peter Hook, Black Marble is the project of singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Chris Stewart. 
Black Marble - I Must Be Living Twice / Johnny and Mary
Like a lot of bands, Black Marble like to liven up their concert set lists with well-chosen covers. Unlike a lot of bands, on I Must Be Living Twice they took the opportunity to record studio versions of these songs. Chris Stewart and company made the EP at the request of their fans, some of whom loved the group's interpretations of these songs, and some of whom weren't even aware that they weren't Black Marble originals. Listening to I Must Be Living Twice, that confusion is easy to understand: Stewart knows exactly what songs suit his style, and exactly how to adapt them. The EP's mix of new wave, post-punk, and indie pop is very much a continuation of Black Marble's sound, and shares the dreamy L.A. haze that covered the project's previous album, Bigger Than Life...

Experimental indie group Helvetia was formed by ex-members of similarly forward thinking slowcore band Duster. Over the course of the next decade and beyond, founding member Jason Albertini enlisted a revolving host of bandmates as Helvetia's sound moved from hazy indie pop beginnings to unexpected song structures and off-center home recorded production...
Helvetia - This Devastating Map / Inverted
As one-third of San Jose slowcore icons Duster—and bassist for Built to Spill from 2012 until 2019 -Jason Albertini is well-versed in indie rock that peers inwards to find a way out. As the core member of Helvetia, a project that he has helmed since 2005, his pining lo-fi multi-instrumentalism delves deeper still. Alongside a rotating cast including Built to Spill alumni Scott Plouf and Jim Roth...  Still, there’s a sunken, almost submerged quality to many of these songs—the kind of thrifty reverb glow and soft-focus hiss that makes Albertini’s studio seem to be situated not just in his basement but far below it. Stretching this quality to its outer reaches, Albertini—backed by ex-Built to Spill drummer Steve Gere and Tiburones’ Samantha Stidham on bass—fills out a sphere of sound...

Norwegian producer whose vision of space disco encompasses house, electro, psychedelia, jazz fusion, and more.
Prins Thomas - Træns / Traæns 1
With Træns, Prins Thomas explores the common ground between his trademark space disco style and the euphoric trance sound that was prevalent throughout the 1990s. For the most part, he channels trance's more tasteful elements, focusing on shimmering synths and letting the percolating rhythms build steadily, rather than constructing overblown epics with endless breakdowns and bombastic, Wagnerian melodies. Nothing here sounds too self-important or dramatic -- Thomas' take on trance is a smoothly hypnotic ride rather than a peaks-and-valleys emotional roller coaster...

Chicago quartet Ganser built on a foundation of moody, goth-indebted post-punk, drawing on more art rock influences as their sound developed.
Ganser - Just Look at That Sky / Lucky
Chicago quartet Ganser began when two art school students bonded over their shared love of the Residents and David Lynch movies. As the experimental-leaning duo grew into a full band, they took on a dour, shadowy post-punk sound that combined moments of abrasive noise with moody, goth-tinged songwriting. On second album Just Look at That Sky, Ganser continue to develop by embracing a wider spectrum of approaches to their ever-pessimistic sound...

Dublin five-piece who have strong ties to their native city, which they translate into abrasive vocals and driving percussion.
Fontaines D.C. - A Hero's Death / I Don't Belong
Setting a high bar on a debut album has always been a double-edged sword, as demonstrated here on A Hero's Death, which is a fine album that is nonetheless a step down from the booze-soaked sticky floors of Dogrel. Fontaines D.C.'s debut benefited from strong singles and a cohesive locational element to give it strength. Here the singles are not as strong, and the sweaty vibe from the debut is gone, as if someone has switched on the air conditioning... It gets off to a great start with opener "I Don't Belong," which features Grian Chatten's trademark tar-covered vocals bouncing off a midtempo strut laid out by the rest of the band... Although A Hero's Death does suffer from repetition and a lack of literacy, it remains fun enough; the mistakes it makes won't deter existing fans of the band...

Guitarist Robby Krieger rose to fame in the 1960s as guitarist and songwriter with the iconic band the Doors. His work after the group broke up in 1973 wasn't as well known; however, he earned critical respect and a loyal following for his solo recordings that blended rock, jazz, psychedelia, and world music, filtered through a guitar style that was clean, expressive, and straightforward.
Robby Krieger - The Ritual Begins at Sundown / Chunga's Revenge
The label described the instrumental LP as a “return to friends” and features a wide range of his colleagues from the era when he began exploring jazz music, including a number of people who worked with Frank Zappa. The record contains nine original compositions and a cover of Zappa’s “Chunga’s Revenge.”

A stunning, eclectic guitarist who blends the best elements of rock energy with jazz harmonic sophistication and melodic interpretation.
Bill Frisell - Valentine / Baba Drame
Bill Frisell's catalog is as vast as it is diverse. Whenever he releases an album, the question is often, "which Frisell will show up?" On Valentine, the debut offering from the guitarist's 2020 trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston, he offers a multi-dimensional display of his many identities. Frisell has led few recorded trio offerings, although he performs in that setting most often. This rhythm section jumped into the studio immediately after a well-reviewed two-week run at the Village Vanguard in New York and that live sense of presence and intuition is ever present... Check "Baba Drame," the set opener by Malian guitarist Boubacar Traoré. It appeared as a droning desert blues with the composer's vocals and Jenny Scheinman's haunted violin on 2003's The Intercontinentals. Here it's breezier, lighter, and jazzier, with multi-tracked drones framed by earthy tom-toms and a syncopated bassline...

Fantastic Negrito, The Dirty Streets, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Eyedress, Sufjan Stevens, Black Marble, Helvetia, Prins Thomas, Ganser, Fontaines D.C., Robby Krieger, Bill Frisell Trio

PnM.mix 1st: 33 from stereogum / the 200 best songs of 2010s

PnM.mix 1st: 33 from stereogum / the 200 best songs of 2010s

(82) David Bowie – “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
The final song on David Bowie’s final album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is one more winking, wistful transmission from one of the most iconic and important songwriters we’ve ever known. Spacious and somehow at peace, quoting the classic Low instrumental “A New Career In A New Town,” it was a goodbye that nodded to history and what Bowie had left us while also alluding to the new adventurous future that could have been. –Ryan Leas

(168) Charlotte Gainsbourg – “Deadly Valentine”
Not to play into stereotypes, but there is something so incredibly French about “Deadly Valentine” and its ability to be sexy, cool, and heartbroken all at once. A swirling synth-pop song from the matured perspective of a middle-aged Gainsbourg, it fights back against the world-weariness of age and all its accumulative struggles by seizing onto a dream newly lush and newly invigorated, abandoning mourning for the thump of a nightclub’s never-ending pulse. –Ryan Leas

(131) Leonard Cohen – “You Want It Darker”
By the end of his career, Leonard Cohen’s ever-wizened voice sounded beyond our reach — an aged poet who had seemingly gained the ability to see through the fabric of time. On You Want It Darker, he was writing his goodbye, and as funereal as its title track might be, it’s also a strikingly beautiful final message. The song sounds ancient, pulled from the ether; the singer, like he’s trying to grasp a lost wisdom one last time. –Ryan Leas

(130) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Jubilee Street”
Nick Cave has built one of the truly rare late-career passages in pop music. Already a cult icon 10 years ago, he ascended to a new level this decade with three albums that rank amongst his very best. Amidst it all is “Jubilee Street,” a career peak that also functioned like a mission statement for his elder-statesman years — a surreal, haunted myth, eventually shaking loose the gravity of time to roar into the night, “I’m transforming! Look at me now!” –Ryan Leas

(78) Radiohead – “True Love Waits”
Once a giddy romantic paean from Radiohead’s 2001 live album, “True Love Waits” emerged on a studio release 15 years later, its warm acoustic strums replaced by frigid piano chasms. In the interim, Thom Yorke split from his longtime partner, who later died of cancer. All this completely recontextualized Yorke’s central plea: “Don’t leave.” Even without details, it’s devastating — the sound of first a romance and then a life dissolving into nothingness. –Chris DeVille

(85) St. Vincent – “Strange Mercy”
Amidst all of St. Vincent’s self-conscious performance-art posturing, it can be hard to get a handle on Annie Clark the human being. But the title track of her 2011 album Strange Mercy is St. Vincent at her best and her most personal, an emotional, perspective-shifting response to her father’s imprisonment for financial crimes. It’s strange and merciful, yes, and powerful. –Peter Helman

(73) Sufjan Stevens – “Death With Dignity”
A multidimensional treatment of the residuals of love and grief and their interlocking frayed edges, framed within a series of immaculately-realized arrangements that still strike with the raw immediacy of peak Elliott Smith, Carrie & Lowell is the clear classic in a career strewn with masterpieces. The album’s stirring overture tracks Sufjan Stevens’ journey from fear to acceptance of what follows immutable loss. –Pranav Trewn

(181) Mac DeMarco – “Chamber Of Reflection”
Mac DeMarco has cooked up some great songs on guitar, but his greatest achievement may be a synth hallucination that demarcates the blurry line between chillwave and avant-garde hip-hop instrumentals. The further you retreat from consciousness, the better it sounds. –Chris DeVille

(140) Chromatics – “Cherry”
Chromatics, and Italians Do It Better at large, are architects of a particular ’10s sub-trend: a hazy echo of an ’80s that never quite existed, a cinematic and strung-out romanticism. “Cherry” was the perfect distillation of this, that “Drive soundtrack sound,” all yearning night drives through cityscapes drenched in lush, imagined neon glow. –Ryan Leas

(179) Cloud Nothings – “Wasted Days”
Dylan Baldi has written lots of great songs at the intersection of pop, punk, and indie rock, but his crowning achievement remains these nine minutes of body-clenching tension, carried along by a mantra that will resonate with anyone who’s ever disappointed themselves: “I thought I would be more than this!” –Chris DeVille

(136) Caribou – “Odessa”
That bassline, though. Dan Snaith has managed to successfully reinvent himself with every new album, shifting from IDM to krautrock to neo-psychedelic pop. But in terms of pure bangers, he’s never done better than “Odessa,” the off-kilter nocturnal dance song that kicked off the Swim era with verve and style to burn. –Peter Helman

(161) Gotye – “Somebody That I Used To Know” (Feat. Kimbra)
A Belgian-Australian songwriter coos post-breakup bitterness over a sample from an old Brazilian instrumental from the ’60s. A New Zealand singer howls them right back at him. In the video, the two of them paint themselves up in abstract time-lapse. The result: a global smash that Prince copped to loving when he handed Gotye the Record Of The Year Grammy. These days, Gotye is just somebody that we used to know. But his one hit established how, in an internet economy, a catchy viral jam could conquer the world. –Tom Breihan

(77) Beach House – “Myth”
Beach House excel at putting a melody to incomprehensible feelings. They paint the atmosphere with cascading guitar riffs that overlap into a blur of twilight. Being conscious, being human, lends itself to a sometimes paralyzing temporality and life’s unknowable meaning. “What comes after this momentary bliss?” Victoria Legrand asks, her voice glowing. –Margaret

(182) Colleen Green – “TV”
“TV is my friend,” Colleen Green sings. “And it has been/ Always there for me/ In times of need.” Her noise-pop ode to prioritizing television over actual human connection, “TV” is both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, a painfully relatable modern sentiment for loners and pop-culture addicts alike. –Peter Helman

(155) Waxahatchee – “Never Been Wrong”
Out In The Storm is a tremendous breakup album, detailing pain, resentment, and, ultimately, growth. “Never Been Wrong” is its moment of interim murk — bitterness, unresolved conflict, being aware that you’re acting out and only doubling down. Katie Crutchfield is biting amidst major-chord rock, finding triumph in the unraveling. –NM Mashurov

(159) EMA – “California”
“Fuck California. You made me boring.” That’s a hell of a way to introduce yourself to the world. Erika M. Anderson, former howler for the great and unheralded blues-drone trio Gowns, made a dizzy leap into the unknown with “California,” her solo statement of intent. It’s a bruised, confused, half-rapped statement of rootless, reduced personal darkness, an itinerant millennial’s unmoored plea, a Bo Diddley quotation transformed into a damaged noise-folk lament. It’s really something. –Tom Breihan

(144) Phoebe Bridgers – “Motion Sickness”
Phoebe Bridgers renders the nauseating mindfuck of humiliation and heartache that follows a toxic relationship using details both morbidly funny (fake orgasms, a fake British accent) and deeply unsettling (“You said when you met me you were bored”). As the song’s sinister edge has become clearer, it plays less like a “breakup anthem” and more like a survivor’s testimony. But revelations about her inspiration only prove how effective Bridgers is at turning emotional paradoxes into stunning music. –Jael Goldfine

(143) Black Midi – “953”
What could easily be mistaken for a machine going haywire and melting down is actually four warm-blooded human beings achieving superhuman levels of bizarro synchronicity. Nonetheless, you should probably still wear protective gear while listening. –Chris DeVille

(149) Fontaines D.C. – “Too Real”
Fontaines D.C. are beginning as the decade is ending, with one of the more implausible rock success stories in recent memory. “Too Real” represents why. Brainy but brawny, arty yet raw, the band’s best moments are like this, barely-controlled engines of chaos that force you to pay attention. –Ryan Leas

(89) Parquet Courts – “Stoned And Starving”
“Stoned And Starving” is the signature song from Parquet Courts’ 2012 sophomore album Light Up Gold, the track that laid the framework for the New York band’s brand of brainy post-punk catharsis. It’s loose, but fidgety and restless — bothered, but ultimately apathetic. –Julia

(132) Kurt Vile – “Pretty Pimpin”
Kurt Vile is a modern-day troubadour who soundtracks his yarns of the troubled — himself included — with such beguilingly breezy guitars you almost forget to ask: “You okay, man?” Dissociation is the theme on “Pretty Pimpin,” and losing your sense of self has never sounded so easy. –Harley Brown

(93) Courtney Barnett – “Avant Gardener”
Courtney Barnett is a winded wordsmith, a playful poet, and “Avant Gardener” is ceaselessly clever. Her deadened delivery hammers the song home, approaching the end of the world with a sardonic casualness. It’s about trying to sink into the pleasure of something methodical, like gardening, making new life in a world that feels like it’s dying every day. But the apocalypse is a constant reminder, a shadow that makes those tomatoes on the front steps wither and die. Seems like enough of a reason to have trouble breathing in. –James Rettig

(133) Big Thief – “Cattails”
Big Thief can find the magnetic and beautiful world of a speck of dust and hide it in a song. “Cattails” captures Adrianne Lenker’s natural mysticism as she remembers the beauty of her Minnesota home. Big Thief conjure the easy sway of the wetland plants with fingerpicking fuzz and sunlight trickling in as piano keys sputter at the track’s closing. It’s as gentle and mindful as a deep breath. –Margaret Farrell

(115) Ought – “Beautiful Blue Sky”
The rare post-punk epic, wracked by the rote, deadening rhythms of our lives — “How’s the church? How’s the job? How’s the family? Beautiful weather today” — but refusing to accept suffocation under our late-capitalism lives. Instead, Ought earnestly relocate some sense of wonder, some sense of peace. What begins in anxiety blooms into a catharsis that arcs, well, skyward. –Ryan Leas

(91) Sharon Van Etten – “Every Time The Sun Comes Up”
Sharon Van Etten has built a career out of mining commonplace failures. “I washed your dishes/ But I shit in your bathroom,” she sings on “Every Time The Sun Comes Up,” elongating the vowels like she’s at least trying to dodge the blows. After the song’s fadeout, you hear her headphones fall off. It’s an endearing trip-up, the kind that results in a dorky laugh. Sharon Van Etten is flawed, but she’s still fighting, and that’s more than most of us fuck-ups can say. –Nina Corcoran

(108) Lana Del Rey – “Venice Bitch”
When you’re a pop star operating at the top of her game, and when you’re fresh out of fucks forever, you write a luxuriant and pillowy 10-minute psychedelic elegy for peace, love, truth, justice, the American way, and human life on planet Earth. Nothing gold can stay. Signing off — bang bang, kiss kiss. –Tom Breihan

(70) The National – “Bloodbuzz Ohio”
The National’s post-recession anthem nails their signature balance between stately grandeur and raw vulnerability. Bryan Devendorf’s drums pound steadily, a brass section wafts upward into a swirl of melancholy guitar, and Matt Berninger toggles between surreal personal reflections and a more dispiritingly universal refrain: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe/ The floors are falling out from everybody I know.” –Chris DeVille

(42) Father John Misty – “Pure Comedy”
Gifted with a natural instinct for classic songwriting but an eye and mind born for modern times, Josh Tillman was already running circles around many of his peers in the indie world. Then, on Pure Comedy, he really tried to say it all. Its title track might not encapsulate the full spectrum of FJM — it’s all big-picture mode, with none of the self-reflexive examinations that make his narrative so rich — but it’s the quintessential FJM song. In just a few minutes, Tillman grapples with the grand farce of our existence, and injects profundity back into a time-worn hope — in the end, we can only find meaning by showing each other a little bit of kindness. –Ryan Leas

(61) Tame Impala – “Let It Happen”
Kevin Parker reforged psych rock into a contemporary frontier, then set his sights on fashioning EDM as high art. “Let It Happen” is the intersection of acid house raves, Sgt. Pepper’s, and Diplo — a bold prototype for what the monogenre might have looked like if anyone else knew how to make music like this. –Pranav Trewn

(58) The War On Drugs – “Red Eyes”
In 2011, with Slave Ambient, the War On Drugs had already located an entrancing strain of classicism equally cosmic and world-weary. Back then, nobody could’ve imagined they’d become one of the biggest rock breakouts of the decade. But a couple years later, “Red Eyes” arrived — the band now barreling down the highway of generations of classic rock tropes, lighting the past up with new psychedelic colors born from our bottomless, hazy digital-era memory. And as soon as Adam Granduciel let loose that raucous, sublime “Woo!” you knew this band had found something else. You knew they were going to be way bigger than anyone thought. –Ryan Leas

(48) Boygenius – “Me & My Dog”
There are Boygenius songs that better display the talents of all three musicians involved, but none of them hit as hard as Phoebe Bridgers does on “Me & My Dog.” It’s a love song that’s highly specific, one that’s embarrassingly pure, one that makes you redden up with the sheer weight of it. “I wanna be emaciated/ I wanna hear one song without thinking of you,” Bridgers sings, wishing that love didn’t have to be so total, so immense, so devastating and yet something that we constantly crave, a connection we cannot live without. –James Rettig

(26) Lana Del Rey – “Video Games”
Though the work of Lana Del Rey has grown richer and more expansive over time, the project was already fully-formed when Lizzy Grant first made her proper introduction under the persona. Her doomed recontextualization of Americana tropes, her ability to communicate contemporary isolation in classical language — it was all right there from the start in “Video Games.” It’s a tragic song that sounded as if it could’ve been released 50 years earlier, and yet it spoke to the eternal aspects of the human condition in such a way that LDR immediately won a lot of people’s fervent devotion. –Ryan Leas

(18) Perfume Genius – “Queen”
“Don’t you know your queen?” Mike Hadreas crooned, a coronation worthy of a god. Up until “Queen,” Hadreas had been making affecting and beautifully still piano ballads, but this was a definitive level-up and Hadreas knew it. He was swooning straight into being one of our best experimental underground pop stars, with a statement of purpose bent on world domination: “No family is safe when I sashay.” –James Rettig

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