on the pulse - 2022 - #12 - harry styles, florence + the machine, quelle chris, everything everything, gospel, sharon van etten
This is the sort of episode I like putting together more - more albums I really like, and even if I’m lukewarm there’s plenty to say, even if it might take us all over the place and a lot of what we have here seems to touch on… well, dealing with the past few years. So no more wasting time: let’s get On The Pulse!
Sharon Van Etten - We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong - I think the arc of my reviews of Sharon Van Etten’s music has been a cycle of acknowledging tremendous potential as a performer and a strong songwriter, but for as much as she’s changed up her sound and production, she’s never consistently found that niche that would allow her to knock one out of the park; the closest she got was on Tramp or Epic nearly ten years ago, and it’s exasperating because she’s often so damn close! But then last year she dropped a collab single ‘Like I Used To’ with Angel Olsen and it was excellent - John Congleton balanced the two of them masterfully with the acoustics letting their huge voices swell for the sort of terrific indie power ballad that many would call one of the best individual songs of 2021, and while I wouldn’t precisely agree, I get why! So naturally the course for the new album is to not include that song and instead work with Daniel Knowles, who produced a song for her on the Velvet Underground & Nico tribute album last year - that actually featured Angel Olsen on backing vocals - and otherwise… he’s most well known for being a well-connected live sound engineer and the former guitarist of shoegaze band Amusement Parks on Fire. Suffice to say I had concerns about this… and I was right to, because unfortunately what potential this album might have had is wrecked by the production. I’ve talked about how it can be very difficult to produce for singers with huge, unique voices, and in theory Knowles’ choice to ramp up the electric sizzle alongside the blaring synths and lumbering percussion isn’t a bad idea, give her a storm to ride, really drive it home. But at every point it feels like something went wrong here: the mix feels cluttered, weirdly muffled in patches, and increasingly unable to build to a coherent melody behind Van Etten, and there wasn’t even an attempt to solve the groove issues from Remind Me Tomorrow - if anything, they’ve gotten worse courtesy of increasingly stiff and thin percussion that only seem to emphasize how inert and blocky these arrangements sound. But what’s considerably worse is the vocal mixing: if the mix is not spare or emptied of elements like on the few ballads we get, Van Etten is placed midway into the cacophony where it seems like she’s fighting for air, much less commanding the mix - made worse by this album being where she chose to opt for her most husky and breathy delivery to date so it sounds even more suffocated, so even on the songs where a hook materializes, no one is equipped to capitalize on it! So minus the visceral force and intensity, I’m stuck going to the writing, which has always been characterized by a certain stripped back, direct purity… but given that she’s now a mother who settled in California amidst the numbing isolation of the pandemic and the wildfires, her focus by necessity expands outside of herself, the uneasy balance between her career on the road and the reality of raising her son amidst a world spiraling out of control. It’s an album that wants to force her to drill into insecurities, untangle past traumas and test her current relationship to the limits, leaning on the subtext to fill in the unsaid gaps… and while I can appreciate the anxious, messy headspace an album like this is built to cultivate, it’s not unique within pandemic records and the climax points never really explode, which leaves the record wallowing in tension where the release is more restrained and wistful. And… yeah, that makes sense, it’s less raw but more mature, and the fact that it ultimately winds up optimistic is a point in its favour, but at least for me it doesn’t flatter the strengths Sharon Van Etten has showcased before, especially when you get the feeling there are intended explosive moments that don’t actually get there. So yeah, I’m cooler on this than I want to be, no one song here matches her best… but it’s not bad. Pretty good, I just wanted to like it more.
Gospel - The Loser - By now you should all be familiar with my reticence towards a lot of post-hardcore and math rock - more the latter subgenre, but when it’s short on structured melody or competent production, a lot of it runs together and just doesn’t really click much with me. So when I heard that Gospel was highlighted as one of the most influential bands within this scene, I was bracing myself when I went back to their previously one-and-done 2005 album… and yet while it’s very much of its time, I was shocked how much I really liked it! Definitely more of a progenitor of sounds that other bands in post-hardcore and screamo would do better, but it was well-balanced in its atmospherics, frenetic and howling while still being tuneful and remarkably well-produced, and generally really damn solid, so I actually found myself a bit excited for this comeback seventeen years later! And… well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a pivot, I’m a little more shocked that they seem to have stuck the landing! What it reminds me a bit of is when the avant-garde metal band Cynic came back over a decade with Traced In Air after their debut Focus with a shift in sound towards a more measured progressive lane compared to their initial manic, raw experimentation, which for Gospel shows them easing back a little on the screamo and post-hardcore atmospherics for… well, keyboard-saturated, math-rock adjacent prog metal that captures a lot of the same loose compositional strengths. Which is pretty damn sweet - the melodic core is still strong, this is a band that did not feel the need to go djent, the guitar work is legit terrific, this is not a band that lets math rock wank keep them away from strong motifs or good hooks, and getting Kurt Ballou of Converge in to assist with production was absolutely the right call, especially for cuts like the sizzlingly progressive album centerpiece ‘S.R.O’ - but there is a textural difference that comes with more clean vocals, a more saturated mix off the analog keyboard and organ swells that might not let everything have a chance to breathe, or may even sound a bit backwards looking or dated in a way their debut wasn’t. And while I appreciated how they worked on the careening cascades of ‘Hyper’ or how the organ drove the crescendos on ‘Bravo’ and especially ‘Metallic Olives’, or how they set up the slower melancholy of the Grinderman-esque ‘Warm Bed’, I get how it won’t be for everyone, especially when it feels more seedy and unstructured like on ‘Tango’, a song nearly a decade old that could have easily been cut. That said, I did appreciate the lyrics here - they obviously take less of a focus, but for an album grappling with aging in a decaying world where nothing seems to be getting better, they know that a sheer bullheaded return is strapped with arrogance, especially when many are comfortable in their blind consumption and this album is wracked with guilt at potentially feeding it; losers all the way down, and they don’t exclude themselves. So a pretty bleak album all things considered, but when the melodies are so robust, it’s the sort of comeback that’s hard for me to deny; frankly better than it has any right to be, and considering this is more accessible on some level, worth a shot even if you didn’t hear their debut in the 2000s, great stuff.
Everything Everything - Raw Data Feel - So the last time I covered Everything Everything in 2020, I talked about the band being on the wrong side of the one-and-done indie hype cycle, which became a lead-in to an album that frustrated the hell out of me for its obvious Radiohead worship and a lot of thematic ideas that had potential but never coalesced into more. And thus I was kind of stunned folks wanted me to cover their next project - this got more votes on Patreon than anything else on my schedule this week, y’all sure you want me to go through this again? Well, turns out I kind of get why… because this might be the best thing they’ve released since Get To Heaven, and yet for precisely the opposite reasons that album worked at all! If anything I’m reminded a bit of the pivot Steven Wilson has made on his solo work in embracing a bit more pop accessibility in compositions and texture to match his progressive tendencies, and for Everything Everything that means falling somewhere between the wonky theatricality of Sparks and warping alternative dance grooves that are all over the UK and are a lot smoother and better balanced. Melodically this album still contains a lot of offkilter progressive elements, but on a textural level the choices of synths and guitars are smoother and flow more naturally together, where even in the weirder moments made inevitable by Jonathan Higgs’ unique delivery it’s less obnoxious and turgid. Now the album is still a bit longer than it can get away with - it’s hard to keep this sort of momentum for nearly an hour - and I can see some thinking this is Everything Everything embracing buoyant synthwave and dance elements as a play for more mainstream attention or at the very least mimic what Muse tried with Simulation Theory, especially as you can say they’re not really pushing the envelope within these genres, closer to peak The 1975 or Future Islands than their more challenging art rock. On the flip side, when you have some of your strongest melodic hooks ever on songs like ‘Teletype’, ‘Shark Week’, and especially ‘My Computer’ and cleaning up the production got rid of most the lingering instrumental issues, it’s hard for me to complain… and while we’re in this territory, let’s talk about the content. A lot has been made about Everything Everything utilizing A.I. to craft some of the more batshit lyrics on this album - ‘Shark Week’ with that Obama / Osama line springs to mind, or pretty much all of ‘HEX’ - but considering this is an album circling ideas of how we deflect and retreat from trauma, especially in childhood, and enmeshed in the demented abstraction of the internet with the past two years hanging heavy in the background, the more personal stakes and framing coalesce more effectively; plus it’s less pop culture free association word salad than a weirdness that feels more directed, which is a lesson The 1975 never learned. Funnily enough, this isn’t that far removed from ideas and framing on Re-Animator, especially given how all of this flies in the face of rationally confronting your demons, instead retreating into reckless flights of hedonism and consumption, but this is where embracing a more earnest, populist framing really helps the band, blunting some of the dark detachment that could feel so standoffish and adding some emotional complexity in these coping mechanisms, as you can tell these scenes strike a little closer to home and there’s no clean ending. Ironically, for an album that embraces more technology than ever, it’s easily their most emotionally resonant, and dare I say human. And while I’m not sure I’d say this is “better” than Get To Heaven… I sure as hell know I’m going to go back to this more - what a surprise, great album.
Quelle Chris - DEATHFAME - So as much as everyone seemed to only focus on Kendrick Lamar dropping, there were two other projects that deserve some real scrutiny that came out on the same day, even in hip-hop. And this Quelle Chris album had me intrigued - I’ve been a fan for years now, and reportedly with a return to production closer to Shotgun & Sleek Rifle but bringing his tuneful side developed in recent years, this was set up to be pretty damn great… and it is, but in a different way than you might expect. In comparison with the conceptual experimentation of Quelle Chris’ projects in recent years, this feels closer to a ‘back-to-basics’ detour, where he’s back in the warbling, roiling murk of his early 2010s material augmented with stronger melodies, where alongside the lingering samples and pianos of ‘So Tired You Can’t Stop Dreaming’, ‘The Sky Is Blue Because The Sunset Is Red’ and the twinkling of the title track, you get the swaggering fat low-end on ‘Feed The Heads’ and ‘The Agency of The Future’, and the drums on ‘King In Black’ can sound like distorted trash cans off the subtle pianos and a bassline that just feels corpulent. And there are more textural parallels to New York underground acts like MIKE, Navy Blue, and even some Earl Sweatshirt, where he comes across as the haggard veteran with dry wit and knowing eyes who is still hungry but feels the weight of everything around him only getting heavier. And that feeds into the loose thematic arc of the album, how many rappers especially in the underground only get famous or acclaim after death and that’s not something Quelle Chris remotely wants - he’s in the game now, and even if he can see darkness around every corner, from violent environments to his own struggles with alcohol and a lingering disappointment of getting plans thrown off-course, there’s a dogged undercurrent of gallows humor that drives this album forward even if it all feels murky and haunted. Detachment might be envied - or hell, just escape - but he’s been forced to confront his demons the past few years and he has to keep it moving, where there was a forced shift because of pandemic lockdowns and cancelled tours, but it doesn’t feel like a “pandemic album” so much as one that has to confront a lingering, adrift feeling, and if you’ve drunk too much over the past few years and have felt things stall out beyond any conceivable control, there are moments that hit way harder than you might expect, especially ‘So Tired You Can’t Stop Dreaming’ and ‘The Sky Is Blue Because The Sunset Is Red’. This also easily makes it Quelle Chris’ most straightforward and direct album in years, helped along with the sampled instrumental interludes that slip between songs - which I’m not sure always helps the pacing of a heavy album - and how much more he embraces singing his own hooks like over the humid keys on ‘Alive Ain’t Always Living’ or just outright crooning on ‘How Could They Love Something Like Me’, where his nasal drawl is just endlessly charming. That said, this is the sort of album that has to sit with you before sitting on you, and like with MIKE’s work I’m not always sure the slower, weighty moments connect as powerfully as they could, especially as the writing seems to be feinting around a lot of the angst rather than hitting it directly - it strips away a lot of Quelle Chris’ flourishes for something more downbeat and textured, and that can make it a tougher album to revisit as a whole. Still, like every Quelle Chris album it grows on me with every listen, and while I don’t love it as much as Guns or Everything’s Fine or even Innocent Country 2, it’s still low-key great.
Florence + The Machine - Dance Fever - It’s funny, midway through Kendrick Lamar’s album on ‘We Cry Together’, we got a very obvious sample of ‘June’, a song from Florence + The Machine’s High As Hope. And I still thought that was the band’s best album, an opinion only reinforced by seeing them live in 2018 with Grizzly Bear, so maybe it was just a sweet coincidence that they just so happened to drop an album the same day as Kendrick that in certain spheres was getting as much critical acclaim, if not moreso… and while I think it’s pretty damn great, I find myself divided on whether it matches High As Hope. The biggest leap forward is with Florence Welch - she’s always had a huge, expressive presence, but more than ever she’s embracing thicker, borderline biblical swell in the vocal arrangements that are really doing more work than ever on this project, which is more percussive and expansive, and that’s before she bends into parts of her register that are intentionally rougher like on the strikingly effective interlude ‘Restraint’. It’s also by far the most confrontational that Florence Welch’s writing has ever been and that’s a big compliment, as while the anxieties of the pandemic and isolation and social unrest inflame the emotions, this is where she’s probably the most conscious and politically charged that she’s ever been, leaning into iconography of witches and Cassandra and a strident feminine presence challenging toxic and manipulative male figures but also organized religion. But it also digs into the complexities of femininity, her own tempestuous nature as a recovering alcoholic warring against insecurities she knows can be exploited in this system, but also how she’s feeling the increasing divide between choosing a family over a career, which feels all the more precarious given these times. In other words, it’s about the closest that she’s gotten to making a Lingua Ignota album - especially given how ragged some of the melodic fragments and textures she claws together - and while it’s nowhere near as intense or literary, she still has her poppier side that allows for huge dramatic populist swell, where songs like ‘Free’, ‘Choreomania’, ‘Cassandra’, ‘Daffodil’, and ‘My Love’ swing for the fences and kick a lot of ass, while still allowing a terrific ballad with ‘Morning Elvis’ that finds her plenty rough around the edges, but still able to make the stage and save, both for her audience and herself. That said, there are issues with this album, the first being that the influences are impossible to ignore - this has been an issue with Florence + The Machine for years, and while I doubt Lingua Ignota is one, the most recent Fiona Apple has fingerprints all over this project, especially in the rougher vocal arrangements and percussion. But then there’s the bigger issue: producer Jack Antonoff. and while he thankfully gives the mix more space so that we don’t hit the oversaturation point of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, the album has the same problem of marginalizing its instrumental melodies to support her. It’s less of an issue than it was seven years ago because the vocal arrangements and hooks are better, and the ragged, aggressive presentation finally adds some welcome texture and grit to an album that feels more urgent, but Antonoff is developing a reputation of leaving a mix empty rather that supplementing with more melody to flesh things out, and I found myself wishing for a little more tune in these spaces, which might hold back any individual cut from being as anthemic as a ‘Hunger’ or ‘What Kind of Man’. Still, I think this is a great album, folks who are more onboard with How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful will likely adore it, and while I can’t ignore the influences, the band is in enough of its own lane to stand with power. Absolutely worth hearing, check it out.
Harry Styles - Harry's House - Maybe it's just me, but there's something about Harry Styles’ career that has felt like a bait and switch. His self-titled debut and his image evoked so much retro rock styling and with a few great songs - and with enough refinement in performance that comes with years as the main face of a boy band - he seemed built to be a star. But in the wake of Fine Line, it became hard to ignore that there was more flair than substance, where he had locked into a comfortable niche that could win on the charts but certainly wasn't living up to the initial promise. And with Harry’s House… well, this was the point where I realized I had to start lowering my expectations for Harry Styles, but even on that note I can’t say this is that good. Part of the problem is the very specific era of sonic influence Styles is drawing from, most notably the soft rock between 1979 and 1982, when disco was fading, synthpop was slowly breaking through, and the pop charts… were generally pretty bad, awash in easy listening schlock, fading 70s teen idols, what would wind being called yacht rock, and a whole lot of outright crap; you might remember specific classic songs or artists from this era, but they were either underground or not as popular as you might remember, this is a rough era. The problem is that this is a mostly forgotten era in pop that predates a lot of Harry Styles’ target demographic, and even some of their parents, so while I have the context of wondering why the hell he’d want to bring this back with modern percussion and slightly more modern sensibilities, to me this once again feels like a retro pastiche where not only is it not new, it’s the least interesting sound that Styles has tapped to date, full of goopy guitars and synths, staccato grooves off programmed percussion, and increasingly tepid hooks only saved by the occasional good bassline like the Destroyer ripoffs ‘Cinema’ and ‘Satellite’ or jagged spark of rougher guitars that never properly ignites - ‘Daylight’ being one of the most exasperating examples with that fuzz guitar. And this is where I find those comparisons to Prince and Bowie a little offensive this time around, because vocally Harry Styles has gone into his breathy upper register and falsetto - neither of which are impressive and only gets worse the more synthetic filters he runs them through - or this dazed, half-engaged crooning where he’s clearly trying to sound like he’s not trying. The only place it’s tolerable is when he stacks his vocals for richer harmonies like on the sultry ‘Little Freak’ or the tender acoustic ballad ‘Matilda’, or he cuts loose on the end of ‘Daydreaming’ but that’s few and far between, and there’s no hook on this album with the immediacy of even the better singles from Fine Line. But fine, it becomes very obvious with repeated listen that this is not trying to be an ‘immediate’ album - it’s languid, chill, all about the vibes, where even ‘As It Was’ lyrically focuses on hazy stasis as it splits its influence from early a-ha and the classic 2015 Lower Dens song ‘To Die In LA’… and on some level, I hear how it could work. I might not like the sound Styles is using but it’s a very well-produced version of it, and even if the lyrical content feels completely shallow beyond fleeting love songs, hazy memories of debauchery just out of frame, and a tired longing that’ll work for hot and humid late afternoons halfway through a bottle of wine… there’s a place for that too, which I don’t think this is precisely bad. But Harry Styles had the potential to make more than just this, coasting on charisma and vibes, and put aside the weird food details that crop up all over this album and aren’t as sexy as he thinks they are, especially on the opening track, give these songs to any other writer and nobody would care. He’s built his house and I’m sure it’s quite comfortable… I’m just not that interested in visiting all too often.