Music Molly

music for coming into your own, commercially and artistically (megamix 11)

This mix...it's MEGA?!

First thing's first, have you checked out I Enjoy Remixes? The new music label portion of the musicpulsestudios experiment? Two artists remix one another's tracks. That's the concept. Simple stuff...or is it?? Maybe it's actually quite complex. First up is Sun Kin and Styles Munson. All the info you need is in the below embedded blog post. But you can also just zip on over to Bandcamp to check it out.

relating to Patrick Bateman

I have to watch American Psycho every two years or so, or I perish. Everyone likes to talk about Patrick's music monologues in a sarcastic meme-y sort of way. But when I watched the movie a few weeks ago, I was genuinely struck by his passion, and by the way talking about music distracts him, however briefly, from the baseline bloodthirsty state of his soul. Patrick listens to music on his expensive sound system with the people he eventually murders, but he also listens to music in headphones when alone. He has a private relationship to music, and finds value in engaging with the individual elements of music—lyrics, production style, themes, comparisons to other artists. He is a music blogger!

The artists he discusses are some of the biggest hitmakers of the 1980s: Huey Lewis and the News, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins. He's not an underground guy, so it makes sense that he would not be crate-digging at Second Coming Records—he is too busy with murders and executions. But his fave artists all made really interesting, complex, expensive-sounding studio records whose main goal was to stir powerful emotions in the lay listener. I think listening to '80s yuppie pop and rock music stimulated the teeny remaining slice of Patrick Bateman's basic humanity. He felt something. But he could only speak in glorified ad copy. Many such cases...

flamin' hot rock show: Flotilla + USS Batfish

My friend Justin told me I needed to go see this band Flotilla play, so I said "but of course" and caught their show at The Goldfish, part of a weekly bout of rock programming called rocknite.la. First on the bill was a band called USS Batfish and they were incredible—the Doors meets King Gizzard meets early Genesis...scuzzy prog, basically. Really good wonky synth. Drummer who sometimes sings. Great bit where the lead singer began every song by telling the drummer, "Eli, count us in."

And Flotilla was just as good as Justin advertised. The singer (Yesenia Rego) wore a bold blouse over tights, the bassist (Doug Thrash Schultheis) wore a blue silken tracksuit covered in jungle cats, and the tunes sounded like Blondie fronting early Red Hot Chili Peppers. Funky, dance-y, vibey. I texted Justin, "every member has their own sauce." This is obviously my favorite type of live band, the kind where no matter where you look, someone is doing something interesting. ROCK MUSIC IN LOS ANGELES.

Dodgers walk-on music has me scrambling for Shazam

I recently went to Dodgers Stadium to watch the Dodgers play my beloved Mets. It was the most homesick I had been for New York in quite some time. I can't help but get dreamy about all my delightful trips out to Citi Field over the years for hot dogs and glimpses at Mr. Met and his stacked wife. Dodger Stadium rules tho, I think of my departed friend Alan every time I go.

Chris and I visited the Delicious Hospitality kiosk, which serves food with a general Japanese theme. We split a chicken katsu club sandwich. Incredible. The perfect amount of mayo (a lot of mayo). Mets lost but I LOVED the walk-on music for Dodgers player Kiké Hernández (a real one): "La Materna" by El Alfa "El Jefe." Hype as hell, especially that stuttered "Acaba de lle- / acaba de lle- / Acaba de llegar" at the beginning. I think my walk-on music would be LMFAO, maybe "Yes" rather than one of the more classic tunes? I eventually got soft serve in a plastic Dodger cap, and I took the cap home, where I have since used it as a vessel for cut fruit, and cottage cheese.

got my brain melted juuuust so by aya DJ set

I am a huge fan of UK electronic artist aya, whose album hexed! has gotten well-deserved love across the music world including a spicy 9.0 Best New Music from the Pitchfork!! Her production work is wild but she's also a wonderful disc jockey. I was blessed to see her play at Nowadays a few years ago, and she published a recorded DJ set from a January gig that had me yearning for the club once more. Kooky beat switch-ups and a touch of brainrot in all the best ways (the "ice cream so good" moment at 11:52...come on), I just put it on again and am nodding my head like...yeah....

link to set because I think email doesn't embed soundcloud??

Eli Enis's Turnstile review...Now That's What I Call Music Criticism

In the newish IEJ tradition of shouting out quality music writing on the world wide web, it's a little late but I must point you to Eli Enis reviewing Turnstile's new album Never Enough for Stereogum.

What could be an easy dunk / dismissal of Turnstile's storied Fresh New Twist On Hardcore is instead a thoughtful and thorough digestion of the album, backed up by deep knowledge of the current hardcore scene. If you read Eli's great newsletter Chasing Sundays, you know he is out there in the pit getting his shit rocked for the story. He is Outside, he knows what's up. Expertise + entertainment, exactly what we want out of music criticism, right folks??

MUSIC WALK SYNERGY

Yr corresp. must stay abreast of new tunes while going for walks. This combination of motion and novelty creates an ideal physical and mental state, a suspension between the familiar (this foot goes in front of other foot, vice versa, repeat) and the unfamiliar (whoa this song is crazzy). On a recent New Walk Tune, I listened to some songs from my need-to-listen-to-listen-to-these playlist pile, and weirdly they all seemed to align and cohere.

The stately drama of "Ancient Boulder" by Dream Dream Dream (a new project from friend of the blog Matty Fasano of House of Feelings) flowed into the slinky electro-pop of "MY WEIRD APPETITE" by Moss Side Sauna Club (fressshhh band from Manchester UK), which transitioned nicely into the industrial classic "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal (not a new song but I'm re-reading Marc Spitz's memoir Poseur for the first time after reviewing it when I was a little baby writer, and he mentioned it as a song that blew his youthful mind), and then that run was capped off by the spooky banger "Magazine" by Alyse Dreamhouse (new solo project from Alyse Lamb of the band Parlor Walls, a band I filmed some really fun live stuff for back in the day)...perhaps there is no such thing as 'randomly playing songs'...perhaps the songs are randomly playing me...

"clean" discographies

So I saw this tweet...

...and it took me a second of scrolling the replies to understand what a "clean discography" is, but I figured out that they're talking about when an artist's streaming profile doesn't have multiple versions of albums (deluxe, instrumental, compilation, soundtrack, etc.) visible, just their main releases in chronological order. Someone else shared an example of an artist who does NOT have a clean discography:

This tweet kind of cracked my brain open, just thinking about how a huge subset of music listeners experiences music visually, and how streaming looks and feels different on an elemental level for young fans than, say, owning physical releases or stacking downloads from file-sharing or from the iTunes store. Even within a relatively frictionless format, there's still lots of room for creating meaning. Something for me to chew on.

I listened to music because I saw people saying it was good

Oh I have been Eavesdropping.

I listened to Emily Allan's Clanging because several people in my life recommended it to me after she guested on TrueAnon (favorite song probably "Naked Body" because I love the lyric "We can buy a salad spinner / I can spin the salad right"). I listened to Lucid Den's album 33 1/3 because friend of the blog Monty Cime posted about it on IG stories, describing it as "an abridged anthology of the styles of underground CDMX electronica and art pop over the past 25 years" (it's amazing). I listened to the groovy instrumental album Superb by the Australian band Surprise Chef because it was mentioned in the newsletter Human Pursuits (which I started reading because newsletter proprietor Ethan Sawyer interviewed my friend Ben Firke) by the Canadian sportscaster Jay Onrait. I listened to the album Inevitably...Hesitation by the Brooklyn band Aspartame ("Angular Guitar music") because June said it was "easily [her] favorite album of 2024." I listened to the new Career Woman album Lighthouse because of the great Pacing collab on it (you really must hear both versions of "Boyfriends"). And I listened to MØ's new album Plæygirl after reading about its producer Nick Sylvester describe the production process through an exploration of "the 0dBFS aesthetic."

And then real quick, some musicpulsestudios alums with new tunes!

Trash Panda Go Kart, last seen on musicpulsestudios in a nice interview with 5-Track, released "an animist raccoon-rock manifesto you can hold in your paws" called RACCOON GODS:

Charlie Baker, last seen in a write-up of a "See Hear Now" DJ set for We Take Manhattan, released a debut single "Piece Of Ass," a Dimes Square tradcath diss track (!) with a fabulous music video directed by Alex Tepper:

and Canadian alt-folk band Green Eyes, Witch Hands, last seen recommended to me by a blog reader, just put out a new album called The Lumberyard that I'm getting into today...

Gentlemen's Quarterly?

I am ride or die for independent blogs for life, but when it's time to chomp off a little Big League Chew, I'm not gonna say no! This month, I have written two pieces for GQ.com that indulge the pop side of my taste. One is a defense of Benson Boone, who I think we can bully into being the boy pop star of our dreams. The other is an examination of the Overt Sexuality of the latest batch of pop gals, and why no one is capable of being normal about it...