jeremyfingertips

Bursting bubbles: the problem with playlists

As many of you may know, I regularly wax lyrical (or try to) about the benefits of musical diversity, especially when it comes to playlists. Hearing music from different decades and genres mixed intelligently together feels inspiring, entertaining, and rewarding to me, in some inscrutable and wonderful way.

The 21st century, however, doesn’t seem to agree. I mean, look around: we are in the Age of the Playlist, according to all accounts, but what kinds of playlists are we given? Sonically homogeneous ones, as far as I can see. Even Spotify’s lauded “Discover Weekly” playlists, ostensibly tailored to each listener’s individual tastes, while an improvement over mindless lists of predictable hits, are not terribly wide-ranging. And then there are the many and varied “mood” playlists around and about the internet, which seem to be populated almost exclusively with songs from the 21st century, and even then primarily from the last five or six years. There is no reason a playlist called “Rainy Day” should be built with songs only from the 2010s but on Spotify it is.

Rest assured: we have both the technical capacity and the intellectual curiosity to handle a much less reductive and more thoughtful musical landscape. And yet the powers that be at our mainstream music services seem not to care about being either less reductive or more thoughtful. It’s no doubt easier to offer formulaic playlists, and if people are clicking on and listening to such things, which they are, there becomes no financial motivation to fiddle with the model.

But like some out-of-sync Lorax, arriving not to speak for the trees but for the forest itself, I arrive to insist that this kind of musical segregation, as a default presentation, is not only unfortunate but maybe even harmful, culturally speaking. I mean, it’s okay (of course!) that EDM playlists and ’90s playlists and such exist—but I would like to help you see that it’s not okay that these playlists that separate songs into like-sounding silos are the default means by which people are encouraged to listen to music here in 2018.

Now then, I’ve long recognized this as an aesthetic/artistic problem: people should ideally be given more opportunity for diverse listening, I’ve insisted, if only because it’s fun and interesting and good for the spirit. Likewise, I’ve long since understood the problem to have sprung largely from technological and financial circumstances, in that segregated playlists featuring one genre or one decade are easier to automate than sensitively curated playlists that mix everything up. In this way, the segregated playlist is another side effect of our having handed control of music distribution over to the technologists.

But lately I’ve wondered whether there’s more going on here than a failure of taste, sensibility, or technology. In the face of wider cultural circumstances that have unfolded in recent years and have been coming to a noticeable, unhappy, and protracted climax since, oh, November 2016, I’ve begun to consider whether there isn’t some larger misfortune on display via the seemingly innocent problem of overly homogenized playlists.

Impenetrable filter bubbles

After all, thoughtful people have here in the 2010s come to identify the affliction of so-called “filter bubbles”—the damaging societal effects that can unspool from individuals being exposed only to a narrow range of information (and, often, misinformation), an idea introduced by the activist Eli Pariser in a widely-viewed 2011 Ted Talk. And yet in 2011 I’m not sure even Pariser anticipated the social poison that filter bubbles would release into our collective atmosphere, the harm that has come to us when large groups of people not only stay isolated among those others whose opinions validate theirs, but even worse, only read news stories they “agree with”—as if news stories, ideally reporting on facts, were something with which one can in fact “agree” or “disagree.” (Reminder: they are not.)

But in our filter-bubbled society facts have become confused with feelings, and as people with similar feelings communicate exclusively with one another, these feelings supplant facts as social currency.

This is not a helpful cultural trend. The current occupant of the Oval Office won the election because of feelings, not facts. Because there are no facts in the world that could justify the result. He is historically unqualified and temperamentally unsuited to the job in which he has, seemingly to his own befuddlement, found himself. Remember too that whatever Russia might or might not have done to sway our impressionable electorate, such folks were only swayable to begin with because they inhabit their impenetrable filter bubbles, and continue from there to insist that provable facts are “fake” merely because they don’t like them. If people could range farther and wider away from their known universes of interests and beliefs, it would be harder to convince them that all sorts of evidence-free ideas are somehow truer than actual truth, and/or to convince them that there is somehow no such thing as truth in the first place.

Okay: so you’ve noticed that I’ve strayed beyond the essay’s original intent. Let me attempt to gather things back together. A homogeneous playlist, drawing only from its own limited reference point, is its own kind of filter bubble. Just as in a healthy society, citizens have open minds and are ever curious to understand what is actually going on in the world around them, so, it seems to me, in a healthy musical landscape, listeners would be curious and open-minded enough to enjoy playlists that don’t go in one prescribed and predictable direction.

I understand that I’m not presenting a flawless analogy here. No doubt there are people who enjoy a range of music even as they are often just listening to one genre at a time. You might listen to a vintage hip-hop playlist now, and then switch over to a 21st-century indie rock playlist, or whatever. But I will still suggest that there may be something that shrinks rather than expands a world view when experiencing music as existing in discrete silos of sound rather than in a larger, interwoven universe.

The appropriately-named Pandora, a streaming-service pioneer, was in my mind a major culprit in the story of how the internet promoted compartmentalized listening environments. The way into Pandora as a listener is to identify an artist, song, or genre as a seed for a “station” that is then created for you on the spot. Suppose you enter “Juliana Hatfield.” You’ll get, first, a Juliana Hatfield song. Then you’ll get a song by a different artist—Liz Phair, say—along with an explanatory note, if you want it, that tells you that this next song was chosen because it shares a specific series of musical qualities with the previous song. Things proceed from there, with the operative idea that you are going to continue to want songs as much like each other as possible. You can go on to create as many different “stations” as you want, each micro-targeted towards the sound of the original seed. Along the way you can give a song a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down,” to help “train” Pandora even further towards delivering music as much like what you are hoping to hear as possible—provided that what you are hoping to hear each time is a song very much like the previous one.

Pandora has always been so proud of their human-generated capacity to analyze music into component parts and make connections between artists and songs based on these analytics that they seem never to have contemplated the idea that people might actually be entertained by a stream of music that offers the unexpected as an ongoing rule. Nor, of course, have they contemplated the longer-term cultural effects of operating a popular service that encourages uncurious listening. It’s weird, because all the streaming music services, Pandora among them, make a big deal about introducing listeners to new music. But they have strong-armed the meaning of the word “new” into such a constrained box—“We’ll play you new music that sounds exactly like music you already know!”—that we maybe need a different word for it.

Homogenized playlists and their discontents

I should note that Pandora’s approach was partially born out of the licensing idiosyncrasies built into the world wide web that separate the idea of a fully on-demand streaming platform from what is considered to be “internet radio.” A fully on-demand system, where a listener can pick out what he or she wants to listen to on a song-by-song basis, is a more expensive and complicated proposition online than a radio model. In line with Silicon Valley’s tendency to present bugs as features, this was the main reason Pandora gives you the opportunity to create a Juliana Hatfield “station” rather than actually let you listen to a Juliana Hatfield album.

By now of course it’s not just the algorithms producing the homogenized playlist environment in which we are mired. There are plenty of human curators who at this point are doing little more than imitating the robots, with the addition, maybe, of finding lesser-known new songs to throw into mixes that fit right in with the established aural palette.

For casual listeners seeking amenable background music, the idea of a stream that aims above all to provide aural consistency may be just the thing. Likewise there of course are occasions and moods that seem well-suited to a single genre or musical ambiance. What I am questioning is the single-genre and/or single-mood playlist as more or less the internet’s default mode. And, circling in on the principle point, I am wondering whether this may slowly be having as deleterious an effect on musical culture as information-based filter bubbles are having on our culture more generally.

Think about this: rock’n’roll came of age as an artistic musical medium precisely when music was most freely presented: when FM disc jockeys in the early- to mid-’70s were unleashed to present their playlists (called radio shows back then) with no guiding principles other than their own taste and expertise. Many artists and styles of music were mixed together, and listeners willingly came along for the ride. Not every song was a winner, not everything from back then is worth revisiting now, but the free-ranging canvas on which the DJs painted was an environment that gave space and validation to everyone from Joni Mitchell to Yes to the Velvet Underground to Stevie Wonder to Roxy Music to Randy Newman and so much more. As a listener you may not have been in love with every song a DJ was playing. But there was no “skip” button, and not often a lot of other interesting listening options. You stayed with it. Your mind was not trained at that point to be quite so judgmental, so in need of immediate gratification that you couldn’t sit through one song that you didn’t know and maybe didn’t immediately like. And this too: you stayed with it because you trusted the human being who was putting the show together.

So three mutually reinforcing phenomena were fostered back then: artistic exploration by musicians, intuitive and idiosyncratic playlist creation by DJs, and open-minded listening by music fans. This sounds to me like the opposite of what single-genre playlists might be fostering, over time, in artists, curators, and listeners alike. Expecting little more than one type of music from your playlists seems like another minor but symbolic way we shut down the capacity to be reached by external reference points.

In fact, I’ll go as far as to hypothesize that had the constraints of today’s musical landscape been in place back then, little of what we now know of as classic music might even exist. You don’t get to “classic” via algorithms that focus on formula; you do not find artistic breakthroughs through the relentless application of RIYL. To funnel music ongoingly into pre-established sonic silos is not only to encourage listeners to seek and be satisfied with the overly familiar but to render jarring and/or foreign any music that does not glide soothingly into place from the previous song.

Return to eclecticism?

So, we have found out the hard way that people who are too dedicated to their own information bubbles tend towards an adversarial sort of “other-ing” when encountering people who have different opinions or orientations. In the worst cases, when his or her information bubble itself is dominated by evidence-free ranting, a person can lose track of reality altogether, all the while thinking he or she is the smart one. What, therefore, I have to wonder, will be the long-term effects of music listeners who grow accustomed to hearing music cordoned off by style and sound?

The answer is probably nothing as serious as what’s going on politically, if only because the stakes are not as high. Another mitigating factor is how readily available musical diversity remains, even for those who listen genre by genre. You don’t find a New York Times story on the Fox News web site, but you will find pop and country and hip-hop and rock and jazz playlists all available on your streaming service of choice.

This is certainly better than the complete isolation we’ve gotten with information filter bubbles. But I also think that expecting listeners to actively decide to go explore an unknown genre is expecting a lot. As such, the detrimental effects of genre segregation—whether they be artistic or social or some combination of the two—may not become clear for quite a while. I don’t anticipate that this would mean that one day people who like one kind of music will be unilaterally angry at people who like a different kind of music. But I do believe that brains that receive homogenized input, of any kind, are brains that do not over time develop the elasticity that characterizes our best and brightest citizens.

But I hold out hope, if cautiously. In the early days of digital music, I sensed a bracing spirit of curiosity in the air, as music from a wide variety of eras was abruptly available to one and all. There was a cultural moment or two when it seemed normal for high school kids in the mid-’00s to be listening to Led Zeppelin and The Who, for instance, because it was now so easy to hear anything from any time, anything you might be curious about.

If eclecticism didn’t take root for long at that point—if, instead, a literal Pandora’s box of genre- and decade-focused listening has become the norm—there remains much promise latent in the accumulated force of recorded music. The President and his partisan zealots can walk around pretending that facts don’t exist but the music industry really has no motivation to pretend that wide varieties of music don’t exist. As such, at some point, I’d like to believe the platforms will catch up to the reality that an amazing amount of recorded music is out there and available, in greater variety than ever, and that the best way to put it on display is, at least sometimes, to mix it all together. Not all music from all genres is great, by any means, but there is enough that is great to keep you listening for years and years. What creates cultural vitality is the widespread ability to appreciate an inclusive spectrum of artistic output. I mean, if the progressive-radio DJs of the ’70s created wonderful, idiosyncratic mixes with just 15 or 20 years of rock’n’roll at their disposal, think of the eclectic adventures to be had with 40 more years of music and so many new genres to choose from.

Look, people: the robots aren’t going to save us here. It’s going to take human beings, one by one, looking up from their screens long enough to picture a wider world than they can imagine, and realize that it’s up to them to find their way in it. And maybe, just maybe, the mundane act of expanding one’s world view just that little bit of enough to encompass an unpredictable playlist can for some be a small step in the larger process of remembering that we are all connected, and not just when we look alike or sound alike.

While I still remember it (Eclectic Playlist Series 5.04 – April 2018)

With the 2015 edition of the Eclectic Playlist Series in full swing, I thought I may as well review the concept here, for anyone who’s more recently been stopping by to listen.

Each month the Eclectic Playlist Series features a mix of 20 songs, which are purposefully blended to encompass music from at least six decades (typically the ’60 through the ’10s but as you’ll see this week, earlier is definitely possible). Along the way, a variety of rock’n’roll genres and sub-genres are visited; you’ll get your share of R&B and/or soul here too, along with the occasional foray into international pop, jazz, blues, and any other type of music that just happens to work in any given mix.

An important self-imposed restriction impacts these playlists: I will not feature one artist more than once during a calendar year (although I should note it’s happened by mistake once; oops). As of now no artists has been featured more than four times even as we have moved into year five. In this month’s playlist, only five of the 20 artists have been previously featured on EPS mixes.

Bonus notes and observations for April:

* Levon and the Hawks are, essentially, The Band–this was one of the names they used after they quit their gig as Ronnie Hawkins’ backing band but before they became Bob Dylan’s backing band and then sequestered themselves in that big pink house with Dylan and emerged on the other side, once and for all, as The Band. This early single, though, has some rough signs of later greatness, and is just kind of fun to hear.

* Nearly two years after its release, I’m still slowly making sense of the moody but accomplished Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool. During a recent listen, “Present Tense” kind of jumped out at me, after my not much noticing it in the past.

* It’s easy to forget what beautiful, effortless-sounding songs James Taylor wrote back in the day. This one, from his Apple Records debut, which didn’t sell at all, quite obviously made an impact on George Harrison, who sang a bit of uncredited backing vocals on the album.

* It’s interesting how new-wave-y 10,000 Maniacs sound on this song. But hey they did form way back in 1981. And while most of their early stuff veered more towards R.E.M.-like proto-alternative/college rock, this one tells me how much they probably listened to U2’s Boy when it came out.

* And speaking, sort of, of new-wave-y things, how about this unexpectedly cool cover of a Chuck Berry song from England’s Ian Gomm, who is known, if at all, for the 1979 single “Hold On,” which somehow cracked the top 15 here in the U.S. that new-wave-y summer. The Berry cover comes from Gomm’s debut album, which came out in the U.K. in 1978 as Summer Holiday, but was slightly fiddled with and retitled Gomm With the Wind for U.S. release in 1979. Bonus trivia: Gomm was a guitarist in the legendary pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz, alongside Nick Lowe, with whom he co-wrote Lowe’s own top-15 U.S. hit, “Cruel To Be Kind.”

Full playlist below the widget.

“The Stone I Throw (Will Free All Men)” – Levon and the Hawks (single, 1965)
“Kick Me Where It Hurts” – The Booze (At Maximum Volume, 2011)
“Misty Blue” – Dorothy Moore (1976)
“Bachelor Kisses” – The Go-Betweens (Spring Hill Fair, 1984)
“¡Que Lleva!” – Juana Molina (Segundo, 2000)
“Lotta Love to Give” – Daniel Lanois (For the Beauty of Wynona, 1993)
“Whenever, Wherever” – Minnie Riperton (Come To My Garden, 1970)
“Present Tense” – Radiohead (A Moon Shaped Pool, 2016)
“Brite Side” – Deborah Harry (Def, Dumb & Blonde, 1991)
“Black Coffee” – Sarah Vaughan (single, 1949)
“Something in the Way She Moves” – James Taylor (James Taylor, 1968)
“Pattern Pieces” – Dive Index (Lost in the Pressure, 2014)
“My Mother The War” – 10,000 Maniacs (The Wishing Chair, 1985)
“Just Because” – Lloyd Price (single 1956)
“Gotta Get Up” – Harry Nilsson (Nilsson Schmilsson, 1971)
“In California” – Neko Case (Canadian Amp, 2001)
“I’ll Bet You” – Funkadelic (Funkadelic, 1969)
“Bedsitter” – Soft Cell (Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, 1982)
“Come On” – Ian Gomm (Summer Holiday, 1978)
“The Bike Song” – Kate & Anna McGarrigle (Matapedia, 1996)

Free and legal MP3: Wye Oak(dreamy and driven)

When Jenn Wasner’s multi-tracked vocals arrive, they wash into the song in full-on School of Seven Bells fashion and, with the ongoing jig of synthesizers, conjure some sort of soaring, hopeful ache that seems to make life both challenging and worth living at the same time.

“The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs” – Wye Oak

Both dreamy and driven, the title track from the new Wye Oak album chugs to a brisk, intricate-sounding 4/4 beat, propelled by an array of synth lines with enough texture and zest to support the 57-second introduction. (Listen in particular for the pentatonic arpeggios punctuated by percussive stabs and distant twiddles on top.) When Jenn Wasner’s multi-tracked vocals arrive, they wash into the song in full-on School of Seven Bells fashion and, with the ongoing jig of synthesizers, conjure some sort of soaring, hopeful ache that seems to make life both challenging and worth living at the same time.

And okay that’s a lot to put on an indie rock song, or any song for that matter. So let’s get back to the music itself, and specifically the guitar work. Do you even notice it? There in the chorus, that distorted, antic melody underpinning Wasner’s repetition of the titular phrase, that’s her partner Andy Stack on guitar. The sound is charming and inventive as it intertwines with the staccato synths and Wasner’s plain-spoken vocals, producing in its entirety a song that feels very alive, very of the moment. So…can we lay to rest, yet, the streaming-induced hand-wringing about the death of rock? Is getting three million streams the only legitimate goal in musical life? There are smart young musicians out there who find artistic merit in extending the spectrum of rock’n’roll history to include what they’re trying to say and do. Part of separating ourselves from the 21st century’s digital trance involves remembering there is more to music than virality. There’s more to everything than virality.

“The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs” is available as an MP3 via KEXP. The album was just released this past week on Merge Records. Wye Oak has been featured on Fingertips three previous times, dating back to 2008 (see the Artist Index for details).

Free and legal MP3: Long Neck

Guitar-driven indie rock

“Elizabeth” – Long Neck

An homage of sorts to a city most people know only from the aromatic oil refineries adjacent to its exit on the New Jersey Turnpike, “Elizabeth” has an appealing, homespun vibe that unexpectedly recalls 10,000 Maniacs from their early days. Front person Lily Mastrodimus, a New Jersey native, has a rich, Natalie Merchant-esque quality to her voice, and a knack for the half-introspective, half-rousing melodies Merchant delivered in her younger years.

And this is all about guitars, isn’t it? Rhythm guitars, jangly guitars, ringing guitars, this one has them all, and if no one wants this sound anymore, don’t tell Mastrodimus, who has crafted maybe not so much an homage to Elizabeth, New Jersey as to rock’n’roll itself. “Elizabeth” is based on one of rock’s sturdiest riffs, the I chord to the IV chord, but Mastrodimus and company play it all with casual affection, and proceed to bury their most prominent guitar motif underneath enough general jangle as to tease the ear with its melody instead of flaunting its stoutness (listen, for instance, at 0:33, or 1:23). I keep wanting to hear this phrase more clearly but then kind of like that it takes until 2:56 to fully emerge, as the song at this point slows down for a marvelously constructed coda, which converts what had been a sort of unaccountable second part of the song’s verse into a memorable finish.

“Elizabeth” is the second track on Will This Do?, the second full-length Long Neck album. (I like by the way the built-in ambiguity of how by appearances this looks to be a song about a person.) Long Neck began as Mastrodimus’s solo project, in 2014, but has become a full-fledged band. Check out the extensive discography (there are a bunch of EPs and singles) on Bandcamp, where you can also listen to and buy Will This Do?, which was released in January on Tiny Engines. MP3, again, via KEXP.

Free and legal MP3:Mattiel(smart, stylish lo-fi rocker)

Propelled by a fuzzy, fluent guitar lick, the song evokes something lonesome and long ago in a package that feels nevertheless very up to date.

“Not Today” – Mattiel

I guess it turns out to be guitar month here on Fingertips. A smart and stylish lo-fi rocker, “Not Today” oozes confidence and wonderfulness through the course of its perfect 3:38 pop song length. Propelled by a fuzzy, fluent guitar lick, the song evokes something lonesome and long ago in a package that feels nevertheless very up to date. And I’m not sure exactly how that works, as fuzzy guitar rock isn’t exactly the most up-to-date sub-genre on today’s scene. But that’s the beauty of plumbing rock history for inspiration here in the year 2018—you can find sounds and attitudes from past decades and still, because you’re a 20- or 30-something person in the digital age, write and record a song that feels like now.

Beyond the foundational guitar lick, “Not Today” is dominated by Mattiel Brown’s arresting vocals, which are also fuzzed up a bit, and infused with a tone at once sharp and blasé that recalls Amy Winehouse, at least a little. Meanwhile, don’t overlook the unusually in-sync rhythm section, in which the smashy drums tumble around and about a bass line so deep and concise it too feels like percussion.

Mattiel is a trio based in Atlanta. “Not Today” is from their self-titled debut album, released back in October on Burger Records. It’s a KEXP trifecta this week; this MP3 found its way there in January, and here it is, some months later, as I could no longer ignore it. This one is definitely a grower.

Another thorn in my side (Eclectic Playlist Series 5.03 – March 2018)

Spring is here so of course it’s snowing like Narnia. It’s been that kind of year. But the more I dive into the music, the more I root around, pick up a little of this and a little of that, the more I figure out (usually by accident) that these two songs sound pretty good together, and then this next one too–well, the more I do this, the calmer I get. There’s hope buried in here somewhere. Obscure Northern Soul singles are good, and so are big Madonna hits (sometimes) and semi-forgotten Grateful Dead album tracks and extended drone-y 21st-century electronic tracks with indomitable melodies, and so is Joni with her special chords and so is the first track we ever heard from Fountains of Wayne and so is a dollop of yé-yé to finish us up this time. RIP France Gall, who died in January. The young grow old, the old pass on, the music remains, and maybe that’s where the hope is buried. Don’t let them tell you that guitars are through, don’t let the people who bend over backwards to find art in interchangeable pop radio fodder hypnotize you into overlooking the actual artistry of songwriters who sing and singers who write songs and melodies that nourish you even when it’s the first day of spring and there’s still this shoveling to do.

Full playlist below the widget.

“Information” – Dave Edmunds (Information, 1983)
“Hurt the One You Love” – David Ruffin (single, 1990)
“Bitchenostrophy” – Rickie Lee Jones (The Evening Of My Best Day, 2000)
“Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” – Ezra Furman (The Year of No Returning, 2012)
“Hope You’re Feeling Better” – Santana (Abraxas, 1970)
“Blue Rondo á la Turk” – The Dave Brubeck Quartet (Time Out, 1959)
“Live To Tell” – Madonna (True Blue, 1986)
“Only Shallow” – My Bloody Valentine (Loveless, 1991)
“Doctor Blind” – Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton (Knives Don’t Have Your Back, 2006)
“Remember Russia” – Fischer-Z (Word Salad, 1979)
“Compared to What” – Roberta Flack (First Take, 1969)
“Carlo What Do You Dream” – James Irwin (Shabbytown, 2017)
“Victoria’s Secret” – Lisa Germano (Excerpts From a Love Circus, 1999)
“Skin Deep” – The Stranglers (Aural Sculpture, 1984)
“See You Sometime” – Joni Mitchell (For the Roses, 1972)
“One of Us Should Go” – Heidi Gluck (The Only Girl in the Room, 2014)
“Radiation Vibe” – Fountains of Wayne (Fountains of Wayne, 1996)
“Keep It Clean” – Camera Obscura (Underachievers Please Try Harder, 2003)
“Estimated Prophet” – Grateful Dead (Terrapin Station, 1977)
“Nous Ne Sommes Pas Des Anges” – France Gall (single, 1965)

Free and legal MP3: Firestations (fresh, well-crafted British rock)

Firestations is a London-based five-piece with a straightforward mission statement: “We write simple alt-pop songs and then mess them up.”

“Receiver” – Firestations

Lord knows I am not going to single-handedly upend the 21st century’s predilection for unabated idiocy, whether on the airwaves or in the White House, but as long as I can I will stand up here for music that is well-crafted, both catchy and interesting, and sonically fresh without pandering to mindless trends and/or soulless technology.

Which is I guess a somewhat grumpy way of saying I love this song. With its propulsive (but not head-banging) beat, “Receiver” launches off a riff that repeats itself from 0:04 through to when the verse starts at 0:32, yet feels regenerative via the off-kilter interval leaps and syncopated shuffle it makes in the second of its two measures. And while you almost don’t notice the wordless backing vocals that accompany the resolute riff they’re also what keeps the ear gratified as the song builds a subtle nervous energy.

Once the lyrics arrive, it’s never quite clear where we are, structure-wise. There’s something that seems like a verse at 0:32, which repeats musically at 0:47; the vocals here are multi-tracked and wonderfully processed (one layer sounds like a whisper, the other like a megaphone). We are led through this to a stand-alone lyric (“I won’t be fine”? hard to decipher), at which point the opening riff and wordless vocals return. The tension is even higher now, and it breaks, at least somewhat, at 1:16, with what feels like a chorus (“You are the receiver/You get the message”), even if, musically, it’s not too far from the opening verse. Note the staccato synth line that bops and boops in the background, adding texture and oomph; it’s around now that the song for me goes from good to great. The electronics later come to the foreground (1:58) to introduce and accompany a satisfying guitar solo, constructed out of chords rather than pyrotechnics. Still later (3:04), the electronics and guitar collide and disintegrate and then land in a coda that first revisits the introduction then dissolves on a radio-receiver-like flourish.

Firestations is a London-based five-piece with a straightforward mission statement: “We write simple alt-pop songs and then mess them up.” That’s pretty much what took me two long paragraphs to say. “Receiver” is a track from their their second full-length album The Year Dot, coming out in April on Lost Map Records. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Hollie Cook (reggae-inspired goodness)

There’s something in the character of her voice, in the nature of the melody she’s singing, and in the texture of the mix that together lend a bewitching vibe to the dubby proceedings.

“Stay Alive” – Hollie Cook

The smooth-as-silk “Stay Alive,” from British singer/keyboardist Hollie Cook, undulates to a reggae beat, and manages at the same time to feel unshackled from genre conventions. There’s something in the character of her voice, in the nature of the melody she’s singing, and in the texture of the mix that together lend a bewitching vibe to the dubby proceedings.

So, look, it’s 2018, and reggae elements have obviously been roaming far and wide in the musical world for decades. Often it comes across as pastiche but so strong is the underlying premise that, to me, it works in just about any setting anyway. What I love here, though, is how fully committed to the sound Cook remains even while bringing genuine individuality to it. I’m not explaining this well but even as, to my ears, the song sounds fully ready to be filed under “reggae” (or “lovers rock,” for you sub-genre fans), there seems a contemporary charm and mystique infusing the music that transcends a pat label. I’m especially taken in by the melodies, which somehow combine a slinky nod to spy-movie music with a girl-group insouciance, while being supported by an acrobatic bass line (that would be Jah Wobble doing his thing), a haunted-house organ, and a creative, organic horn section (sax, trumpet, trombone, in the house).

Credit here to Youth, who produced (and who by the way is now 57), and to Cook herself, whose personal lineage has landed her among some notable musical friends and relations: she is the daughter of Paul Cook, drummer for the Sex Pistols, and Jeni Cook, who sang with Boy George in Culture Club. Here on “Stay Alive” we not only get Wobble, a one-time bandmate of John Lydon in Public Image Ltd, but Keith Levene on guitar, himself a founding member of both the Clash and PiL, as well as part of the semi-legendary band Cowboys International, and many other projects since then. Cook, meanwhile, cut her own musical teeth as part of Ari Up’s re-boot of the seminal British punk band The Slits from 2005 to 2010.

“Stay Alive” is the second track on Cook’s third album, Vessel of Love, released in January on Merge Records. You can listen to the whole thing and buy it via Bandcamp. MP3 from the tasteful folks at KEXP.

Free and legal MP3: Loma (beautiful, dirge-like)

“Black Willow” – Loma

With its deep, deliberate beat and hushed group vocals, “Black Willow” floats into my ears like a visitation from a different, unsettling, yet somehow more benevolent dimension.

Listen to how the almost uncomfortable slowness of the groove is soon counteracted by the solace of the humming voices that rise up at 0:14. When the words start, 10 or so seconds later, they engage us with one of the most tantalizing words with which to begin a song: “Because.” The opening verse, in fact, delivers a series of “Because…” statements, which deftly engage the ear for the mystery implicit in an answer delivered without a question.

And talk about implicit mystery!: listen to what the sound of voices singing the same note brings up for you. It may take a while for this to register but there are no harmonies here, just a group of voices (two, maybe three) singing directly on the melody, all the way through. To me, this feels counter-intuitively enigmatic. Another moment of satisfying elusiveness is the soupçon of time-signature shifting that happens a couple of times (first at 1:20), which registers as a subtle hiccup, a passing “what was that?” moment in a song otherwise measured and resolute.

The song is grounded musically by the bass and the drums, with well-placed keyboard fills offering some counter-balancing brightness. A windswept synth sound is added at a lyrically opportune time (“I make a home inside the wind”; 2:28). And then check out how the voices themselves transmute into something wind-like at around 3:13. This leads us to the song’s delayed, haunting chorus, featuring the title repeated over and over, while the voices, at the end of each repetition, morph increasingly into the echoey, windy soundscape.

Loma is a band that seems to have begun inadvertently, when Shearwater front man Jonathan Meiburg was so taken with the music made by the Texas duo Cross Record (Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski), opening for Shearwater on a tour, that the three of them began playing together. Adding to the depth of the experience: Cross and Duszynski’s marriage was disintegrating when the three of them were writing and recording the music that would become Loma’s self-titled debut album. “Black Willow” is the tenth and last track on the record, which was released last month on Sub Pop. MP3 again via KEXP.

Why wouldn’t you try? (Eclectic Playlist Series 5.02 – Feb. 2018)

“I hate and I love. How do I do that, perhaps you ask?
I don’t know. But I feel it is happening and I am tormented.”

Those are what the words in the first song mean, translated from the Latin. They were written in the first century B.C. Here they are being sung by a computerized voice. It’s a piece by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannson, who, sadly, died this month at the age of 48. I have not heard too much of his music but did stumble on this one back in 2006 and featured it here. It’s odd but compelling, and enduring; I urge you to listen with full attention.

From there, we’re off into another irregular journey through the decades. I’ve branched back into the ’50s this time, twice for good measure, and for whatever reason cleared out a little bit of an instrumental section in the middle. It just seemed to want to work out that way.

Random notes:

* Another song I urge your attention onto is “Muddy River,” from Shelley Short’s sadly overlooked 2017 release Pacific City. What a beautiful and powerful collection of acoustic songs; you can listen to it and buy it via Bandcamp.

* There’s actually one more “memorial” song in the mix: the very satisfying if semi-forgotten R&B hit “Don’t Look Any Further,” to honor Dennis Edwards, one-time front man of the Temptations, who also died this month. The song has not only an incisive, melodic bass line, but a surprisingly effective off-the-beat synth motif threading through. Props too to Siedah Garrett, who sings here with Edwards.

* I just stumbled upon the band Scars recently, and enjoy the authentic mid-new-wave vibe of “All About You.” Their album is somewhat hard to find (it’s not seemingly digitized), but I’m going to see if I can track it down, short of paying $35 for used vinyl.

* Favorite segue this time around probably goes to Johnny Cash into the Casket Girls, with R.E.M. into Elbow as honorable mention, if you’re keeping score at home. And note that while I never completely took to the Bill-Berry-less version of R.E.M., I find “Walk Unafraid” to be one of a handful of classic songs they managed without him.

Full playlist below the widget.

“Odi Et Amo” – Jóhann Jóhannson (Englabörn, 2002)
“Chequered Love” – Kim Wilde (Kim Wilde, 1981)
“She Came Along To Me” – Billy Bragg & Wilco (Mermaid Avenue, 1998)
“I Still Miss Someone” – Johnny Cash (The Fabulous Johnny Cash, 1958)
“24 Hours” – Casket Girls (The Night Machines, 2016)
“Don’t Look Any Further” – Dennis Edwards (single, 1984)
“Muddy River” – Shelley Short (Pacific City, 2017)
“American Garage” – Pat Metheny Group (American Garage, 1979)
“Baby That’s Me” – The Cake (The Cake, 1967)
“Days of Steam” – John Cale (The Academy in Peril, 1972)
“Penthouse Mambo” – Xavier Cugat (Bread, Love and Cha Cha Cha, 1957)
“Swapping Spit” – Big Deal (June Gloom, 2013)
“What Do You Think?” – The Sundays (Blind, 1992)
“You Keep Running Away” – The Four Tops (single, 1967)
“Portions for Foxes” – Rilo Kiley (More Adventurous, 2004)
“The Holdup” – David Bromberg (David Bromberg, 1971)
“All About You” – Scars (Author! Author!, 1981)
“Moonshine Freeze” – This is the Kit (Moonshine Freeze, 2017)
“Walk Unafraid” – R.E.M. (Up, 1998)
“Weather to Fly” – Elbow (The Seldom Seen Kid, 2008)