NPR Music - The Contenders, Vol. 10: The songs we can't stop playing this week

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Our biweekly update of the year's best tracks is a mix full of "the hurries and the worries" from Alkaline Trio, wistful reflections from Lake Street Dive, Cindy Lee's sprawling double album and more.Like the show? Tell your friends and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.Feedback always welcome: [e-mail] artists and songs:1. Alkaline Trio: "Teenage Heart," from 'Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs'2. Lake Street Dive: "Twenty-Five," from 'Good Together'3. Les Savy Fav: "Void Moon," from 'OUI, LSF'4. La Luz: "Poppies," from 'News of the Universe'5. Cindy Lee: "Wild Rose," from 'Diamond Jubilee'6. Four Tet: "Loved" from 'Three'See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You know what, I feel like people are going to kind of get both sides of the coin on this show. You know, I listen to your picks, Dawood, Dalai, Dalai, Dalai, I don't know, a therapist could tell us a lot about maybe where you and I are in our lives when they listen to these picks. But your songs seemed very unsettled, full of questions. And mine seem more like, more settled, but sentimental and kind of reflecting, like, Yours are still working on wherever it is they're going, and mine have kind of arrived and are looking back. I don't know. I think that's a diagnosis of somebody peering down the barrel of middle age and somebody who is living in the absolute center of it. Well, let's start with the Alkaline Trio. This is a cut I know you want to play.

Yeah, I've been thinking for the past couple of days about different mutations of emo. I saw Claire Rousey play in D.C. a couple of days ago. I'd gotten used to saying Roussay, but she introduced herself. And it's rousy. I was Roussey. I was Roussay. Yeah, I've always said Roussay. Yeah, but she's very upfront about her fealty to emo as an idea. She sells T-shirts and hats that say Emo Ambient.

Come out of this place where she had, you know, been making this crazy field recording music and then made this pivot. And I just started thinking about how does subscribing to an idea like that across different generations like that, how does the meaning of it like start to warp? And the thing with Alkaline Trio and this record of theirs that came out earlier this year is they've been doing this quite a long time. That band's been together like Nyon 30 years, which means that they're around the age, probably, that their parents were when they started doing it. Amazing. Yeah. But the thing that really struck me is Alkaline Trio is a band that's always skewed dark. But the vibe to me was kind of like Halloween dark.

They would talk about murder and death and self-harm and all these grisly things. but there was this undercurrent of humor to it. This song that I want to play is different, and we can come back and talk about why. It's called Teenage Heart. Sunsets, surprise, sometimes I guess, inside of head. I got the aches and the pains and the poison and the veins, so come on.

I got the hurries and the worries And the good times won't last long I got the shakes And the quakes in the world in my wake So I think I sweat I pretend to sleep And I'm waiting to break life

A teenage heart in America Love that The Hurries and the Worries Yeah I got to start using that I got the Hurries and the Worries, man This is a song kind of to your point where you were saying going into it, that, like, it would be very easy to take this song at face value

and just not dig into it too much, just enjoy the beats, those guitars, the melody. But, man, it is super dark. I'm sorry to start us in such a little place. But, I mean, it's, so that's the interesting thing is that the topics that they're addressing here are still very extreme, at least they should be extreme to anybody. But they also feel very real and very familiar.

It's things like, you know, I mean, hinting at ideas like mass shooting, and like opioid abuse and addiction and just the loneliness of the social media era. And the thing about it is that like these horrors are very much a part of the world of young people, of people who like aren't finished growing. So I'm compelled by the idea that they're sort of looking at this catalog of music that they've made and this, you know, sort of like loose constellation of bands and ideas that make up, you know, this world of emo.

and zeroing in on an idea of youth, of sort of terrifying youth, but viewed from like the far side of it. So many great shifts in the song, too. It starts off and you think, oh, they're just going to shred on this. This is going to rock so hard. And then it takes, it's only about 30 seconds in,

it takes this really subtle shift towards pop. I got the in the aches and the pains and the poison and the veins come on. I got the hurries and the worries and the good town. Partly because of that the little chorus that's going on in the background. Yeah, yeah, people chant, you know, that is a real pop element. But then it shifts again and it's got like almost this sort of reggae sort of beat to it as he's singing about fentanyl and, you know, assault rifles and just how broken and dysfunctional

everything is. It's sort of, it's all part of this like very darkly humorous, you know, painting that they've been, you know, filling in the corners of for your years and years. Yeah, it's absurd. Yeah. It's great pick, alkaline trio. Teenage Heart, that's from blood, hair, and eyeballs. I totally miss this. I went so, I'm so glad you brought it. Let's do what I think is probably the most, you know, I said mine are very sentimental and wistful sort of songs this week. I think this is maybe the most sentimental one that I have. It's a new single from Lake Street Dive. They've got an album coming out called Good Together. You know, I think, not just being in middle

age, but I think just particularly this month, I've been feeling the weight of time. You know, it's a period of transition. Schools is about to end for my kids. My daughter just turned nine. I've got a birthday coming up. My wedding anniversary, 15th wedding anniversary was this month. Just a super reflective time for me. And I think this is a song that I could see some, some people think is maybe kind of sappy. I don't know. But it really resonated with me. It's called 25. There was a time when I imagined us forever. I can't quite remember how I thought we'd work it out. I guess I would move to California or you to Boston.

I'd learn to like to stay at home. You'd learn. Oh, the stories that I tell myself. Don't take me to the grave of being old. Somebody else think of you and I drink off a cato's Because that summer we would have them every after Hot and cold was such a perfect combination Melt altogether bittersweet and creamy

And always gone too soon Love we gave a way back You know, people often say, Oh, God, getting old is the worst. Oh, it's terrible getting old. I actually like growing older because you just feel things. It's just that whole cycle of life. I can't imagine camping out forever at any one point in my life.

And to me, it's a gift to be able to look back at something that was a long time ago in your life and really appreciated in a way that you just never can when you're in that moment. I think that's what the song is doing for me. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's, you know, a 25-year-old just feels their feelings at a different volume than somebody twice that age or half that age.

And I'm always very taken by love songs that are about how actually it was never going to work. Troy Savon's album from last year did that a lot for me. It was like a breakup album that's set in this very particular place, or it's not the depths of depression, and it's not the ecstatic highs of new love. It's this sort of like in-between place where you're thinking about all the places that you've been,

and you're looking back on some of the, you know, the more passionate and kind of loudly felt moments of your life, but sort of recognizing, yeah, this wasn't going to work. It was impossible. There was just like a total, whether it's an incompatibility, whether it's just the one or the other party, is just not ready to be committed, whatever it is, I think at the time that it's happening, that can feel, you know, really devastating. And much later, with some accumulated experience,

it can feel kind of beautiful because it's not wasted time, right? You learn so much from those things. Yeah, you know, I am not with the person that I was with when I was 25, even though we thought for sure we'd be together forever. And, you know, we were together for a long time over a decade. And, you know, whenever I think back on that time, it is never with regret or with anger or, you know, disappointment or anything. It's always with love and also just thinking like, yeah, you know what, we grew up together. Yeah. We grew up together. And that was, and I'm so glad that I had that time. I think that something else that this song does that I really like, which is there's a generosity of spirit in this song and humility. the idea of wishing nothing but the best for someone you're no longer with, right?

The idea that you're always going to be in love with them in your memories, in your memories, you know, even as you both have moved on. There's a world where those two 25-year-olds exist and they're happy. Yeah, that's a great way of thinking of it. And then there's all the other things that are sort of implied and understood in what is, you know, it's other words. This is a very on-the-nose straightforward song lyrically. but there's, you know, lost youth, dreams that never came true, the passing of time, the unexpected directions that our lives take. It's all wrapped up in that. And to your point, again, about your perspectives changing as you get older Lake Street dive, they are a band that's been together 20 years now.

Wow. Yeah, so they're all hitting middle age or in it. So, yeah, the album from them is called Good Together. It is out June 21st. We need to take a quick break here, but we will have more music right after this. So this is the band Les Savi Fav, who I didn't think we were ever going to hear from again. They haven't had a record in like 14 years. Wow. They were a feature of my youth to an extent.

I remember I had like a high school girlfriend who I, you know, came over and saw my CD collection, was just like, oh boy, we got to do something about this. and became a very diligent mixtape maker and wanted to, you know, hit me to all of this stuff that she was listening to. So I learned about this band, this Brooklyn, you know, quote unquote art rock band. This is a song from Les Savi Fav's Wii LSF and the song is called Void Moon. Coming back after 14 years and putting out something like this. Pretty fierce. That's incredible.

That lead guitar is mixed so loud. Yeah. It is unhinged. Yeah. I love it. It's weird. It sounds wrong, but it doesn't sound like a mistake. Yeah. It is just very much in defiance of convention.

And it's so intense and in your face that you forget about the singing sometimes. Yeah. Parallel melody that's just diving all over the place. Yeah. So I didn't know what void moon, or I guess they're saying void moon, of course. I didn't know what that was. So I did a little research. And I guess in astrology, it's kind of an in-between time.

It's like when the moon has finished a cycle in one sign, and it's about to transition into another. I think about those in-between times a lot. It feels like it fits really well with the rest of this narrative that we've been having. But it even feels in tune with the way that that song is put together instrumentally

because it's not the kind of thing where the elements feel glued together. You can very clearly pick out each individual element and they sound miles apart from each other. The fact that it's managing to all lock in together is kind of a miracle, but it works. Yeah, I made a note here. I just wrote very shaky.

Yeah. It's not stable here. This should not work. Yeah. But it does. Well, very cool. Great to have them back. We, the French Wee.

LSF is the name of the album, Void Moon. I've got another song that I think is maybe, again, the inversion of the one we just heard. This is from the Seattle band La Luz. They just put out a new album called News of the Universe. And, you know, talking about the in-between times in-briended times in-void. moon, you know, one of the things about in-between times for me is that that is the time when I think you see the most possibility in life. It's when everything is sort of simmering. This song from Lelous, it's called Poppies, it has the sound of possibility. I'll be curious to

see what you think, but it's the sonic equivalent of standing at the precipice. While we were listening to this, we started talking about the Beatles. and that Hoffner bass sound. And then that little Amen chord resolving at the very end, that's also very much of a Beatles thing. It makes me think like she's leaving home or something like that. It's true. It's that kind of chord interval that makes it so you feel like the song might just never end

because it's always queuing up the next loop. That's it. And as I was listening, I kept thinking that's why it feels like the in-between time or a time full of possibility because it's never resolving. It's just like you said, it just keeps kind of looping back and you're rising and there's the slow sort of lift in the song. Sorry, I have an answer to your proposal about hearing the sound of possibility in this. I think this is the kind of thing that if you handed DJ Shadow or like RJD2 or a guy like that a copy of this record, they'd be like, I know exactly what to do with this.

Yeah. It's just, you know, it's got the mallets and the dusty Tom fills and that exaggerated. the strum, the brang. Yeah, yeah. And like you said, that thumpy kind of Paul McCartney type bass. It's an interesting thing. It is the sound of possibility, but possibility doesn't always have to be good. There's an element here where it's like, this could be the start of something incredible or something very sinister.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that it speaks to what informed at least part of this album, which is that the lead singer and songwriter of the band, Shannon Cleveland, was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple of years after she had her son. So she was, you know, not just very reflective, but she'd entered this point in her life where she was sort of recalibrating her entire worldview, right? So I feel like there's, you know, there's kind of a sense of cosmic wonder in this music, too, that is really, really wonderful. A lot of this album is actually, I would call like Prague rock, like super gritty. Sounds like something from like the early to mid-70s. Oh, that surprises me. Yeah, very gritty, very trippy.

very raw. There's a line in there. Someone made a big machine that somehow makes the air more clean in Germany or something. I forgot. Funny, too. It's a little bit of a, it's not quite a haiku, but has a little bit of that sort of flip energy to it. Because yeah, there's, there's, you know, I mean, all of us, right, are sort of going through

the day being like, how much of my mental energy and emotional effort am I going to devote to thinking about the big problems that are facing the world and how much am I going to devote to just trying to survive. Yeah. Great song. This is my favorite cut from News of the Universe from Luluz that is out now. We got to take one more quick break, but we will be back with a couple more tunes for you right after this. Have you been following this new album from Cindy Lee and everything around it? Yes and no. It is such a saga to witness unfolding. So, So it's, I am, but I'm kind of still cracking it open. How about you?

Well, yeah, same. I mean, it is quite something. It's called Diamond Jubilee. For people who don't know, Cindy Lee is kind of the alter ego of the Canadian artist Patrick Flagle. They had a band called Women that broke up around 2010, which is when they started making music as Cindy Lee. To your point, this new album is sprawling. It is a double album. 32 songs?

It's more than two hours of music. And honestly, I scarcely know where to start with it. I could pick any track from it, but let's go with one called Wild Rose, and then we can talk more about it after we hear it. So right off, I think one thing that people will notice with this music is that it feels really, really familiar. But completely alien at the same time. A lot of this album makes me feel like I wandered into the ballroom from The Shining. Oh, my God. I was thinking a David Lynch movie while I was listening, but that's even better.

That too. Isabella Rosalini singing Blue Velvet for sure. Yeah. But just to the extent that it feels anachronistic, which it obviously does, it's not like Amy Winehouse or something like that. Oh, exactly. It's not like this fun revivalism that's using these old arrangement times and analog gear and whatever, even though it might be doing some of that, it feels like a sound that you shouldn't be able to hear that sort of pierced the fabric of time. Exactly. Or for, you know, it's like, again, when I say alien, it's like it's like psychedelic girl group music, but from another planet that we've, we have been fortunate enough to dial in on some sort of receiver. Yeah.

Well, one of the reasons I asked if you were following this album and sort of everything around it is because there's been a lot of news around the fact that Patrick Flagell, Cindy Lee, you know, has largely gone silent about the project, not doing interviews. The album isn't on any streaming services as of. this recording. You can't even really buy it. I mean, I tried to buy it. I couldn't even buy it. There's no PR machine behind it. It's only available as a single two-hour plus stream on YouTube, no ads. Or you can download it from the Cindy Lee website. But even the website is a bit of a head scratcher. You're like, is this a legit website? Because it looks like it was made in 1995. It's like the way that the Space Jam website is still online somehow. And it just looks exactly like it did. And it's got geocities in the URL, you know. But you can get the music if you get to the website and, you know, it is available, but there's this air of mystery about it.

It takes a certain level of investment. There's two resources that I want to point people to that really helped me out. One is a story that we actually published on NPR Music by Megan Garvey called How Cindy Lee became the Music World's Underground Success Story of 2024. Megan actually went to what was the last show on the Cindy Lee tour that actually wound up ending early. And that's another thing like all these shows got canceled. Yeah. What's going on? It's, you know, this is not a person who covets the traditional spotlight or just sort of any part of the traditional kind of music media machine.

And Megan kind of unpacked that sort of feverish mini history that's unfolded over the course of the first part of this year. The other one is an essay by the music writer Sadie Sartini Garner on her site and newsletter taxonomy. And the essay is called Who's That Lady? And it's about a bunch of things, but I found it really compelling because it sort of zeroes in on the two grabiest things about the Cindy Lee story. One, this drag persona and two, it's affinity for this kind of sound that feels ripped out of the 60s and has this kinship with Brian Wilson and Phil Specter and all of the rest of that. And so Sadie Sartini Garner, through the lens of her own transness, Sadie is trans, identifies that Patrick Flay. is swinging in the direction of a very particular idea of femininity and a very particular idea of pop music. And the interesting thing is not their ability to replicate them perfectly.

What makes this record so interesting impressive is actually in the distance, in the sort of tension in between its origin point and its destination. I think that the remoteness that you talk about is an interesting thing to consider in this music, because that is definitely in there too. And it's almost defiantly low-fi in a way. You know, all the stumbles and the, you know, the song Wild Rose, as we listen to it, you know, it falls out of beat. It falls off constantly. Yeah, all kinds of errors that were very clearly on purpose and just left in.

That helps underline the whole idea of subverting expectations and all the norms built around a sound that was very regiment. in some ways as it was replicated over and over and over and over again. Yeah, right. You know, it's that hit factory sound. And I think it's, you know, sometimes it's that thing that we're looking for when it just feels like everything that you consume, whether it's music or TV or whatever else, is just all coming out of this one content pipe of like gray sludge. Even if there's good stuff in there, it just feels totally undifferentiated.

And this is so different. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. I've never thought of the sludge pipe that's feeding us all of this stuff. God, I think about it all the time. I do think that Diamond Jubilee, this album, is a really good example of the kind of music you can make when you are completely unencumbered. Yeah. You know, you're not thinking of what a label wants.

You're not thinking of what'll play on streaming services. You're not thinking of creating a hit. You don't even care what the PR machine wants in order to promote your stuff. or whether it's going to end up on TikTok, right? And the result, I think, is pretty glorious. I mean, this is the kind of art that I always seek out, you know, and that I can sit with for a very, very long time. What's the White Stripes song?

You're in your little room working on something good. If it's really good, you're going to need a bigger room. This record is unconcerned with the bigger room, for sure. Love it. Again, Diamond Jubilee from Cindy Lee. Go and check it out on YouTube or do a certain. for the Cindy Lee website, it's, all I can tell you is it's got GeoCities in the URL. And if it looks like it's not the right website, it probably is the right website. You know, I actually see

some similarities between the Cindy Lee album and the song we played and this next cut that you've got. They both come from avid crate diggers, I would say. And there's also a little bit of an air of mystery around this release. I mean, at least there's not a ton of press, or interviews or anything about it, it just kind of appeared. And if you want to bring it full circle, I think this song you want to play, maybe has a vibe that is more in line with some of the other stuff that I've been playing. Yeah, you could say that. So Fortet, the performing alias of Kieran Hebden,

is somebody who has such a gigantic, overwhelming discography when you count not only his official releases, but just all of his weird side projects and collaborations and the things that he released under a totally, unpronounceable, unintelligible string of symbols that, you know, you need to be able to search really precisely in order to even find it. There's just so, so much. And I've often felt so overwhelmed by that that I'm just like, I don't know how to engage with this at all. And I've kind of made peace with that over time and just been like, you know what? When something comes around,

I'm just going to dip my fingers in the stream and enjoy what I can. And this record that came out this year called Three is certainly an example of that. The song that I want to play is called loved. And I was very curious to hear what you thought of it, Robin, because there is a drumbeat in this song that once I started thinking about it, it reminded me of so, so many songs that have a similar feel, including Loser by Beck, which is itself based off of a sample. But you know the vibe I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Back to Life by Soul to Soul. Back to Life. Paidant Full by Eric B and Rakim. It just like the list goes on. and on and on. And it's obviously you're talking there about a lot of sample-based music. And so there's

these layers of history that just sort of keep spiraling and taking you to other places. And it's hard to ever, you know, it's hard to imagine what the origin point is for any of this stuff. It always feels like you're listening to kind of like a copy of a copy of something that's been thrust into this new context. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I had not made some of those connections, but I did definitely, I mean, the minute the groove hits right off the bat, I'm thinking, okay, I could listen to just that. Yeah. Just that groove for hours.

I actually heard in this song a sweetness in it that I wasn't expecting. Yeah, there's something a little pastoral about it. Well, we'll go out on this fortette the song loved from the new album three. Thanks so much, Dawood, for just hanging out and sharing some great tunes. I love having you on the show. Appreciate you, Robin. And I'm Robin Hilton for NPR Music. It's All Song.

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