Dance Recital

Today's Top Beats

See what pretty dancing pumps - Jennie Harbour. 1922 illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes

The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

~ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)


A couple of years ago, I was a newly hatched poptimist, thanks largely to discovering exotic and experimental forms of pop, the real “world music”, one that doesn’t market itself as such because it’s firmly in the cosmopolitan swirl. The music of the Mona Evie collective in Vietnam, of Rosalia in Spain (bringing me to understand the sweep of reggaeton in the Western hemisphere), and Amaarae’s mix of West African rhythm, punk attitude and US studio magic. All of it dance-adjacent, and much danceable, as well as pop-aware. My sect of poptimism held the belief that pop could include, and indeed best embody, the primal, experimental forces and influences that artists like these were trying to lead it to.
Miracles still occur - every year has its ‘Easy’, its ‘I Luv It’, its ‘Sports Car’ in its charts. There might even be the odd album, like Brat or C,XOXO, that’s worth indulging in at length.
But pop music that’s too estranged from dance music, and too little influenced by R&B or hip hop or trap or the blues or whatever African American music is called now, is, I’m coming to realize, “not for me”, insufficiently intriguing, as Eli Schoop wrote about Olivia Rodrigo, I’ve given her a chance, because I got the rock references and the Lana Del Rey influence on ‘Drivers License’ but enough is enough already, and the Cure is a safe choice when you have the whole Gothic past to play with. Selena Gomez is the better Disney alumni and no-one but Kathleen Hanna makes a big fuss about her, she just gets on with it.

Alternative music, at least the stuff that keeps getting talked about, isn’t much better than pop. This was the finding that drove me to poptimism in the first place, and unfortunately, I keep finding it true.
When I raved about Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris, as an album of the year 2022 at Songs From Insane Times 2023, I carefully put my love of this album in context:

“I’ve always been relatively cold to the merits of Aldous Harding’s music prior to Warm Chris apart from “The Barrel”, and that hasn’t really changed, but I fell in love with this album the first time I heard a song from it, probably “Passion Babe’.”

I was right about Warm Chris, for me, being a one-off wonder. Aldous’s spot on the last Sleaford Mods album was one of its highlights, but nothing else she’s done since Warm Chris has interested me. Her method kind of demands you be interested in her, but she’s not giving the information or taking the risks that would draw me in. I’m out of sympathy with inoffensive diatonic plainness. The best tracks on Train on the Island sound like outtakes from Warm Chris, and I might appreciate them as such at some future date. Credit where it’s due, Aldous’ vocals are always good and their recording is now exceptionally intimate, but the songcraft fails to lift them and the rhythms aren’t compelling.¹

If it weren’t for a few noisy omens like the new Dunedin Double EP, I’d fear indie music in this country could easily go down the plughole.

As for the old guard, well, as I write, the Rolling Stones have put out the second of their late-stage comeback albums Foreign Tongues. I’m impressed at the way this band, whose sound is now a messy but urgent blend of every style they’ve ever found or invented, are fighting to be heard. The effect is as uncompromising as ever it was, and Mick seems to be in good form. But straight off, their cover of Amy Winehouse’s ‘You Know I’m No Good’ is almost unrecognizable simply because the original is so good and it’s so bad.

You can’t dance to the Stones version, but you certainly can to Amy’s; play it next, it’ll come as a relief.

Elsewhere in the world, as it turns out, lots of would-be pop that’s dropped in the last week or two is not only pleasing to me but seems to be giving new life to the genres of dance pop (the only pop, now), dance, indie and art music.

Sophie Hunter’s ‘Dance Recital’ is the lead single from her upcoming debut album Stereoscope, and a perfect introduction to her world, taking us up a spiral staircase into her Library of Babble, a trip though the underside of her psyche that has something in common with the UK cult rappers like Lee Scott and Dirty Dike (but also Dorothy Parker and Dory Previn).

Emily Perlman, AKA girl_irl, is a New York DJ I came across some years ago on Soundcloud, who impressed me with her reductive nocturnal subterranean club sound. She does this stuff for real, not just in the studio; it’s the music Charli XCX was alluding to on Brat.

Back then, girl_irl still had indie rates of attention, so I was happy recently to see her release a collaboration (as magic girl_irl) with Danny Brown, a man whose taste in such things is top notch, and whose touch at the moment is like a papal blessing.

Now, with the ‘throwback (ruined by 2AT)’ remix of ‘Throw It Back’, things are even more fun, the beats are overlaid with something more colourful - the “Latin Pop” hashtag here seems questionable, maybe there’s no hyperpop option yet, but it’s the best new dance music I’ve heard in many moons.

And so is Alexis Munroe’s ‘2 My Face’, which puts her firmly in contention with any mainstream star you care to name with a performance that successfully sets her punk metal and trap ideas to a club beat and proves what I’ve always known, Alexis has the best voice in any club, and an aesthetic of heartbreak, an ability to write about and sound hurt, that anyone would envy, like a futuristic Avril Lavigne. Inside an airtight 2 minutes and 48 seconds, that passion is streamlined and concentrated to a lethal extent, and Karegi’s beats have the same colourful sparkle and rhythmic appeal as girl_irl and 2AT’s. It’s a perfect example of an indie artist showing your industry favourites how it’s done.²

A couple of years ago I read Ted Gioia’s 'Music - a Secret History’ on Hayley’s recommendation. Gioia’s thesis is that innovation in music has always been closely associated with the shameful expressions of our nature - sex, drugs, violence, madness, and witchcraft. Gioia, annoyingly, doesn’t get into the contemporary examples of this in his blog, but there sure are plenty of them. One is the DMV crank scene (covered there by Eli Schoop, on whose Constantly Hating blog I found this track), a regional example of the post-trap, dance inflected evolution of hip hop (D.C., Maryland, Virginia). Crank describes music that goes hard, and ST6JodyBoof does on ‘NOBODY SAFE’.

He tried to get out that bitch and got shot in his face
Tell me keep on goin', don't slow this bitch down (Keep on goin')
P sing like Alicia, I love how it sound (P sing like Alicia)
And they know how it get, they ain't fuckin' around (They know how shit get)
Tried to duck from that switch and got tapped in his crown (Brr)
We gon' dunk on his ass if he fall out of bounds (Gon' dunk on his ass)
When he fall on the floor, I'ma shoot at the ground

There’s a tunefulness to this music, especially the rhythmic impact of its wonkily-placed samples, which reminds me a little of some of Kitty Ray’s wavy dance beats, like the chrome sparks remix of ‘Marijuana’. And, who’s P?

Meanwhile, over in Great Britain, that country’s genius for indie rock is reborn with mary in the junkyard’s debut album Role Model Hermit and especially its single ‘New Muscles’. When I heard this on Hunter’s Totally Wired show on 95bFM (it plays after The Saturday Spring) I thought “surely here’s someone who’s listening to KatieJane Garside”, Clari Freeman-Taylor’s voice gliding and soaring around what turns out to be a stripped down version of the mary in the junkyard sound, with a pretty loose viola part and a beat instead of the muzzy post-rock indie sound they’re good at. This song’s extremely catchy (“I will make it so hard to forget me” indeed), in that politely quizzical English way, which reminds me of Jockstrap despite the difference in style.

The whole of Role Model Hermit is enjoyable, there are no missed notes amid much adventurous writing, and some very fine ensemble playing, but whatever happened to guitar solos? By now I’d even be open to a song with a 6 minute drum solo.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, VĨ (FKA aprxel, and formerly of Mona Evie) mixes dance pop and plugg’n’b (a sublime microgenre especially in that country) with pieces of more avant garde classical composition, the latter in a style influenced by her mentor Ly Trang. ‘Sóng Thần’ is a grand soundscape of voices, synths and metallophone textures, and also a bluesy meditation on doom, a modernist, feminist ‘Dies Ira’ from an original R&B stylist, which, when it veers into polyphony at its climax, reminds me of the slow movement of a Bohuslav Martinů concerto.

And what do you know, here’s ‘Miss Bitchy’, brand new dance pop music that dropped today from Dunedin’s house of 2000, from the 7-track EP of the same name. Jaggs’ beats are tight and in sympathy with Kushla, who’s the real deal; her deadpan delivery keeps Miss Bitchy’s electroclash humour onside with the listener, bringing us in on the joke with without spilling any of the music’s sacred qualities.

The future seems secure.

1. The other day Hayley and I drove out to the op shops in Kumeu and Helensville and I picked up a couple of pop CD’s - This Is Icona Pop, which features Charli XCX at her must annoying, and This is Sina Nordenstam (2001), the Swedish singer-producer’s fifth, most pop album. Sina in pop mode sounds a lot like Aldous at her best; there are even a couple of songs where Suede’s Brett Anderson shadows her vocals like Jason Williamson’s parts in Aldous songs. It’s a CD that we’ve played and replayed on our car trips more than once.

2. “She started making music in 2016 using an app on her phone” is almost all the biography I can find online for this artist.