Artists with a name in bold released good music in the last year.
Waxahatchee is the best living band. I’ve known this for a while now. The blend of brilliant songwriting (both structurally and lyrically); nineties-era instrumentation; and frontwoman Katie Crutchfield’s voice elevates Waxahatchee above everything else being made now. The second time I saw them live, I left the concert thinking, That’s the way music should sound. I saw them again, and Crutchfield appeared drunk. Still, drunk Waxahatchee is better than everyone else sober.
So I read in a New Yorker profile of Crutchfield that one of her tattoos was an album cover of the band Hop Along. Unfamiliar with Hop Along, I listened to, and was soon alarmed by, singer Frances Quinlan’s incendiary voice, which oscillates between a raspy whisper and a Janis-Joplin howl, often in the same line. That voice is the hook. Everyone that listens to Hop Along first hears the voice. What keeps people listening is the band’s sound: a punchy, driving form of rock that resists categories--too classic for punk, too country for alternative. Drummer Mark Quinlan (Frances’s brother) attacks each song like a pissed-off badger; he sets the tone for the rest of the band. Hop Along rocks. On a scale of one-to-Waxahatchee, they come in at a solid nine.
Both bands are from Philadelphia, and it doesn’t take long for them to get mentioned along with another great band from that city: Cayetana. Cayetana is a blue-blooded, American punk band. Their sound is more accessible than Waxahatchee or Hop Along, and while it may not reach the same heights as the other two, I find myself returning to Cayetana when I need the energy to, say, mow the grass or walk to work. In that respect, they are similar to another female-fronted punk group, from Columbus, Ohio, called All Dogs.
If Cayetana and All Dogs channel energy and momentum, then Toronto’s Dilly Dally reaches deeper, into the the torso, into the gut. Singer Katie Monks, at times, sounds as though she’s about to throw up. Her vocals are Quinlan-esque in their range, but they’re much sloppier. Dilly Dally's vocal dry heaves are good for that run through the mud and rain, or at the end of that nauseating staff meeting. We are brought to an atavistic, visceral sense of ourselves when we listen to Dilly Dally.
Crawl back out of the gutter, relax, and put on some Girlpool or Julien Baker. These artists are much quieter, easier to put on in the background. And yet, it would be a mistake to tune out the lyrics. Personal and specific, each song is a clear-headed image, a unique snapshot. Julien Baker in particular is scathing--her beautiful songs are full of death, religion, addiction, illness, recovery.
It is difficult to understand the lyrics of Helen, a shoe-gazey side project from Liz Harris, the force behind Portland’s Grouper. A Harris band sounds like it comes from deep underwater, as though from a scratchy radio on a sinking submarine. I often play Helen loud before class to unsettle my students and keep them on edge. The vocals are beautiful and instrumental and echo-ey and incomprehensible.
Which is as good a place as any to transition back to the fellas. I’ve tried to find a current male-fronted rock outfit that grabs my attention, and it’s all for naught. I still listen to Nirvana, The Doors, Songs: Ohia, Donovan, whatever--but any rock album released last year, if a man sings it, doesn’t get repeated on my iPod. Thankfully, hip-hop is moving in crazy new directions. While I still have great respect for the Azealia Bankses and Lauryn Hills of the world, the best new music is made by men.
And like Helen, it's almost impossible to make out what they’re saying.
I don’t know when this happened in hip-hop. At first, it seemed like a joke. My buddy and I heard Rich Homie Quan’s hit “Type of Way” on Atlanta radio a few years ago and it sounded like he had a speech impediment. I’ve heard him interviewed--he doesn’t--and so it must be a different emphasis. It reconnects the music with a feeling instead of wild wordplay and lyrical flights, which can get as tiresome as freshman poetry if not attached to a good voice, a good beat. I’ve fallen into the camp that doesn’t consider rap poetry, not in a strict sense, probably because a voice has such potential as the instrument connected to the lyrics. This new trend in rap highlights that point.
One artist that sounds like they’ve come from underwater is Future. His new album, Dirty Sprite 2, is great background music: an auto-tuned, airy, breathy voice over gloomy trap beats. It gives the effect of hearing a car slowly pass, thumping bass, from four stories above. You don’t know exactly what’s being said, but you have a good sense of the mood behind it. It’s the late-night tone of Outkast’s ATLiens, minus the clarity of the lyrics.
This mumbly, slurred effect has become ubiquitous. There are traces of it in Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and in Gucci Mane caring less about lyricism than in abandoning what’s left of his superego. It’s been in rap for a long time, at the edges of verses from Pras or Ol’ Dirty Bastard, but it’s reached an apotheosis this past year.
The Michael Jordan of mumbly rap is Atlanta’s Young Thug. I love Young Thug. His songs are bizarre concoctions of weirdo beats and the craziest vocals I’ve ever heard. Blend staccato bursts of half-sentences, long howls, chicken squawks, shouts from the other room, and unintelligible singing, and you almost have a Young Thug song. Somehow, it all coheres. Young Thug is one of the most popular rappers right now. I know this because I saw him live in October, and it was the most energetic hip hop show I’ve attended. A dirty concert hall in downtown Eugene was set on fire that night, and an enormous crowd lost their collective mind for three straight hours before he took the stage. It was bedlam when he finally arrived. I just remember shouting, dancing, jumping . . . and visions of a thin man on stage with tight leather pants and a furry tail jerking his elbows around and barking murky commands into the sea of bodies . . .
Much has been made of the loss of the monoculture. Outside of Adele and Taylor Swift, no one has common music experience anymore. If a student in my high school classes shares about a musician that they like, fully half the class won’t know the reference. I’ve seen this over and over again, among many students, most of whom are not at all what used to be referred to as “alternative” or “indie” or “hipster.” The internet has scattered us across vast landscapes. For people like me, who think music is important, individualizing experience isn’t a bad thing. The two places I sought last year proved sustaining.
*I don’t like the term “girlband.” It’s gendered opposite is “boyband,” which connotes a totally different type of music than the one I’m writing about. Also, it seems patronizing: all of these artists are adult women. And yet, the progenitorial movement for many of these groups was called “Riot Grrrl.” And one of the bands is actually named “Girlpool.” And everyone knows what I’m talking about when I say I listen to girlbands. And it makes for a punchier title than “Female-fronted rock outfits.”
