Some Music I’ve Liked In 2020 Part Two
I hope you’re holding up okay and taking care of yourselves. Yesterday we went for a walk. The sun was out. It was about as perfect as the eve of spring can be. Because climate change is real we’ve had a lot of unseasonably warm days recently so a lot of the trees and ground flowers have started blooming already. Daffodils pierced the pale green grass with their vibrant yellow buds. Tiny crocus rose just a couple inches from the dirt, their miniature, deeply purple buds sprinkling the soil with bursts of welcome color. The branches of dogwood trees bursted with tiny pinkish white flowers, their petals flittering in the cool breeze that hit my skin and told my brain that no matter the weather inside my house, pandemic be damned, the earth is still spinning, the seasons are still changing. The streets of my neighborhood in West Philly were pretty quiet, though not as quiet as I’d maybe thought they would be. Neighbors on stoops, chatting to each other and to people they knew as they walked by. Children playing while not maintaining social distance. People were running and walking their dogs. A line snaked out of the co-op grocery store while the minority-owned bodega a couple doors down, open, was quiet. A guy sped past us on his way to the neighborhood brewery to buy some takeout beer—something we were also on our way to do. It was a nice walk but there are still errands to run after all. On our way back we heard the distinct song of the black capped chickadee from a nearby tree. Fee-bee. Fee-bee. Fee-bee. We spotted it and stood there for a couple minutes, looking up, watching and listening. It felt good. It felt normal. I briefly thought about what it might be like to be a bird, this time of year, when everything springs anew. No worry of the world, no awareness, no care, really. That sounds nice right now; stupidity, ignorance, a relatively carefree existence. My head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds and my shoulders ache.
Music, too, can possess a seasonality to it. Anna Burch’s Quit The Curse dominated my listening in the spring of 2018. Musically, her songs are often bright and balmy, guitars jangling over relaxed tempos—but her singing often has a solemnity to it that counteracts those moods rather masterfully. Upon initial listen her voice has an airy and standoffish quality to it but repeated listens reveal a much more intricately layered performance; the key change towards the end of the title track help shift the tone of the song from blithe resignation to something more powerful and accusatory in a really smart and surprising way. Then there’s the way Burch sings the word “lovesick” in “Belle Isle,’’ elongating but not entirely enunciating as the lap steel and snare drum drop out to mostly isolate her voice, that communicates a feeling with which we’re all familiar. Burch does big, sweeping choruses brilliantly as well—the breathy, layered vocals anchoring “What I Want” are stop-you-in-your-tracks great, and the lyric “I won’t play the victim just because I can’t get what I want” really cleverly encapsulates the confusion that can often surround interpersonal relationships in this day and age.
Burch’s new album If You’re Dreaming comes out April 3 and, based on the singles released so far, appears to build on and expand her sonic toolbox. “Not So Bad” has a retro pop aesthetic to it, a quiet, optimistic cool. There’s a lyrical darkness to “Party’s Over” that juxtaposes itself against beachy instrumentation. In “Tell Me What’s True” Burch opens by lightly singing When I used to hate myself I saw things so clearly / now I can only see when the lights shine on me, a clever lyric that seems to have an intentional, the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same melancholic uncertainty to it. This one’s gonna be a classic. (Polyvinyl)
Hank Wood and the Hammerheads’ self-titled full-length is a modern classic, a perfect marriage of loud, frenetic basement punk and soulful, passionate singing. It’s not a direct sonic comparison but hearing it for the first time a couple years ago instantly conjured the same feeling I felt when I discovered Royal Headache. “What the fuck is this? How is this person singing like that?” Completely flooring, forever perspective altering. It’s hard to recapture a feeling like that, but more importantly perhaps is where a band goes from there. For Hank Wood and the Hammerheads and their new 7” Use Me, it sounds like something a little stranger, a little less straightforward perhaps but no less enrapturing. Henry Wood’s singing is as expressive as ever, but there’s a tinge of spasticity that’s been amplified here, especially on “Tomorrow.” Musically, the Hammerheads are still loud, but the arrangements are a little more intricate and smartly shrouded in classic rock tropes, especially when that haunting organ creeps in on the title track, layering a level of dread amidst a jangly, spaghetti Western guitar riff. The upped tempo and discordance of “Look At You” calls to mind the Murder City Devils’ best, weirdest moments. Just brilliant stuff. (Toxic State)