Treasure Hunt

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Lou Salome, Paul Ree & Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

The “shameful” elements in music history — sex, superstition, bloody conflicts, altered states, etc. — are usually closely linked to the process of innovation itself.

~ Ted Gioia, Music - A Subversive History

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche


In what is, quite possibly, the most-read post on Substack this week, Kabbalistic Marxist and Nietzsche scholar, reader and inventor of grimoires and codexes, and Fall fan Sam Kriss, one of this platform’s unlikeliest and best-deserved successes, has defined the difference between writing for Substack and the old-school magazines. If you’re reading Songs From Insane Times, the chances are that you’ve volunteered to read it, because you like the way I write and the things I write about. Thank you! That’s very validating. Some of you might upgrade, and encourage me to take it all that little bit too much further, but I don’t begrudge my fellow poor nor do I wish to deny them my particular quality of musical ressentiment that they are, after all, better equipped to understand than the rich to whom all things are possible. But those readers who might stumble across these columns in a real magazine would include all those who don’t ever want to hear the music I like and would rather die than think about the things I like to think about, and for that reason I miss those readers, maybe because they’re exactly the reader I was when I first heard about all the things that mean the most to me. The best I can do here is to plant the latest P.H.F. tracks next to my waxing nostalgic about an old Lou Reed album; it’d be even better if these thoughts were also next to a column about how hard it is to buy coffee in Auckland after dark or a profile of Chappell Roan but that’s probably not going to happen, for all sorts of reasons.

Today’s mission is a simple one - to bring you some new tracks from the newer artists that I already keep tabs on because their work is both reliably very good and not without meaning. But first, the New Thing that everyone’s discussing. If, in 2024, you can make journalists discuss your music in a love-it-or-hate it way, you are winning at Art, and The Dare, a New York DJ who produced ‘Guess’ for Charli XCX feat. Billie Eilish, has done this by answering a question everyone has been asking for some time (unless it was just me), “what if a hyperlibidinal pop star was male and heterosexual? What would that sound like, and what would the response be?” (In his Guardian profile the Dare credits a Pitchfork review of Momus for giving him the idea). His album What’s Wrong With New York sounds great, reminding me more of Electric Six than anyone else (because I wasn’t really listening to much when the electroclash music it’s said to be based on was current). I found this interesting comment on the YouTube of the album

”Beats on this record are all so good but the vocals are such annoying trash. You can tell he has just enough of a shred of self awareness to harbor self-hate over what he's making. When will this cycle of simultaneously self-loving and self-hating art end?”

Never, probably. The Dare is from about New York, where everyone who is anyone has always hated themselves, and his trashy vocal approach isn’t significantly different from Joey Ramone’s. It works. Hating oneself is a standard pose in one’s early 20’s, I hear it enough in my own old songs, it used to embarrass me a bit but it seems okay now. But it’s interesting, this idea that making something good and innovative in this particular way is something an artist could be expected to harbour self-hate over.

If I was writing for the NME in the 1980’s I’d be tempted to describe Vũ Hà Anh’s album tapetumlucidum<3, released in Nov 2023 under the name aprxel, as “a cross between Sade’s Diamond Life and The Faust Tapes”. A remastered version of tapetumlucidum<3 has recently been uploaded to Bandcamp, bringing more detail to what’s still the best album I’ve heard this year. Hà Anh Vũ has what it takes to be another Björk, someone capable of being high-art and pop in the same work; other influences include Jandeck, Jockstrap, and - Ted Gioia take note - Enheduanna, in this hymn to Inanna, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love and fertility, for which producer Pilgrim Raid has supplied the most bespoke, next-level arrangement of the album’s many advanced soundscapes. Her latest single is ‘Cuba’, produced by Flea, a summer R&B groove with only slightly less advanced production; one can only admire how on-brand it is that Vietnam is serenading Cuba.

To call one’s first released song “Lizard Queen” is to evoke the singer as shaman, and it’s Zheani’s unique contribution to music history that she’s successfully updated the ethos of the rock star, today’s provocateur and tomorrow’s scapegoat, into those newer electronica artforms that are replacing rock for her and her fans. New single ‘Sex Never Dies’, spun over the heaviest-yet trap beats (by top trap/industrial metal producer, and Zheani collaborator since ‘Darker, Emptier, Simpler’ (2018), King Yosef), has more than a lot of the ancient religion about it. It amazes me that this successful Australian independent artist, with her interesting history and self-taught outsider perspective, not to mention recent sell-out tours and an awe-inspiring back catalogue of strong, innovative work since 2018, doesn’t have a Pitchfork review or Wikipedia page, or any profile in the online music media that she hasn’t essentially written herself. Until that day, you’ll have to make do with the occasional interview, like this latest with Anne Erickson for Consequence of Sound’s Beyond the Boys Club, which is part provocation, part exposé of the music business, and my track-by-track review of I Hate People On The Internet, the album that may be her masterpiece to date.¹

I already reviewed P.H.F.’s Suffer a couple of weeks ago, but feel compelled to return to it after hearing Hunter’s interview with Joe Locke on BFM, because there’s a warning here for me about the potential for the critic, that’s me, to read too much into the sound of any music, or the style of its lyrics; the process of creating Suffer seems to have been rather idyllic for Joe, and why wouldn’t it be a joyful experience to create such wonderful music, however dark it feels? The best bit of the interview is where Joe explains how ‘Cuss’ was written as “a Lana Del Rey song”. And I can hear that; cleaned up a little, it wouldn’t be out of place on Honeymoon.

Kim Deal was always The Pixie’s magic weapon - her cowritten song ‘Gigantic’ on Surfer Rosa and her occasional vocals would make the intensity of Black Francis’ songs more palatable for years to come - there was always the possibility of hearing more from her, like this cover of Neil Young’s ‘I’ve Been Waiting for You’ (Deal’s struggle to get her own songs on Pixies albums caused a rift with Francis, who eventually threw a guitar at her on stage).² Her next band, The Breeders, made two of the best rock singles of the 90’s, ‘Divine Hammer’ and Cannon Ball’ and some classic albums (they also endeared themselves by getting busted when me and my friends were getting busted). That other bass-playing American Kim, Kim Gordon, has already made one of the year’s best albums with the trap-influenced The Collective, and Kim Deal, also not too hung up on heritage rock at the moment, is making tracks here - the moreish psychedelic drone-pop of ‘Crystal Breath’, like the earlier mariachi-themed ‘Coast’, is from an upcoming album Nobody Loves You More. I feel I should recognize that opening phrase from somewhere.

Pilgrim Raid, mentioned earlier as producer of tapetumlucidum<3, was also a founding member of the Mona Evie collective, and is somehow able to make both sublime synthetic trip-trap pop, eclectically referential rap beats, and weird experimental music that’s not a huge distance from Frog Power’s; they have this in common, that neither is a slave to the concept of pitch, they’re often carrying out underground warfare against the temperance scales. His recent Bandcamp album Anna Agenda is a mostly instrumental collection of some pretty wonderful bent V-pop beats and collages; on the other hand, here’s ‘Divine Feminine’, found on Soundcloud, earthy, hippy music, full of feeling, in touch with nature, so real and true that it sounds like it was recorded outside in bare feet, touching grass. Here’s the rabbithole — Soundcloud is the place to hear a producer in action.

In other news, I recently attended a cultural show at a rest home, where the staff dressed in their national costumes and danced national dances to their national musics. Diverse as the staff were (and the DEI speech was quite sweet actually), most of this turned out to be Bollywood routines, which as it turned out I didn’t mind. Hits like ‘Gun Gun Guna’ and ‘Sauda Khara Khara’ (bhangra produced very much like modern US pop) kept on coming. Afterwards we went into New Lynn and ate at my favourite local restaurant, Raaj, where there’s normally some ready-made playlist of Hindi guitar pop, always at a perfect volume, but on that night they were playing the best of Bollywood on TV, and we caught this “rock ‘n’ roll” video from the 1987 film Dance Dance.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

My modest algorithmic suggestion for your further listening pleasure is The Breeders - Cannonball (Eclectic Method Remix)

1. Note also that The Spiritual Meat Grinder, the Dare-like project that Serbian wunderkind VenesiaWorld produced for Zheani last year, is now up on Bandcamp, where it sounds better than ever.

2. "I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies." - Curt Cobain