Grooves N Jams

"Situation" by Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds

MG:

Elsewhere, on the dark side of alt country, Sturgill Simpson is horny. I have personally complained up and down this blog about the lack of eroticism in today's media so it's perhaps ironic that I return to say: not like this! Johnny Blue Skies most recent project (titled Mutiny After Midnight) is noble enough in premise. Simpson, too, has chafed against the dry, sexless chasm that is -- I think, specifically -- heterosexual culture. (And certainly the reporting around real sex lives is almost exclusively centered on whether or not men and women are having sex with each other. I have frankly no idea how queer sex lives are faring in contrast.) His solution? Well, his own horniness. His horniness will make us all horny, I guess. Not me, though. Lines like "I wanna get you wet" imply the woman's body has an on/off switch, like she sits around dry until he shows up and plugs her in. And that's the only real thought Simpson gives to his sex object's state, the rest of the song is about the ways he will be used.

If I may intrude to make a confession: until this year I hadn't heard any Waylon Jennings. I mean, yes, I'd heard "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" in passing, but I couldn't tell you that was a Waylon Jennings song nor pick his voice out of a line up. But my husband remedied that, declaring this the summer of Waylon. Having heard Sturgill Simpson's source material, I find "Situation" even more abject. Waylon, too, pursued a latter career disco-ish pivot on his album Black on Black. Its tight, not quite 30 minute runtime ends with "Get Naked With Me" which explores the same concept as "Situation" but without the Millennial dad sex humor or try-hard references to brothels in Guam. Sturgill Simpson is embarrassing -- both for his Single White Female reproduction of his hero's catalog and for writing a song about sex that gives me the same feeling I had as a child when my parents kissed.

DV:

"Lavender Cowboy" by Andrew Sa

DV:

Ever since reading about the growing queer country scene in Chicago (and elsewhere), I've been trying to find a way to reconnect with the genre. Unfortunately - and I fear this is outing myself as a fake country fan but I can't really help it - I kinda want all country songs to hit like Faith Hill in 1998. "Lavender Cowboy," for all its charms, most certainly does not. It's a lovely, heartstring-tweaking tribute to pioneering gay country icon Patrick Haggerty, but man does it have twang. Which is where a lot of queer country seems to fall - this is the kind of music that gets played on NPR and categorized under "Americana" at most record shops that carry it, not the kind that aspires to compete with Morgan Wallen on the charts. Which is probably for the best! But it does mean that while I can appreciate "Lavender Cowboy", I'm not really feeling it the way I thought I might. And that part's a shame, because mainstream country hasn't really been hitting like anything lately. It could really use a shakeup, even if it's impossible to fault Sa and his peers for building their own universe elsewhere.

MG:

"Danceteria" by Madonna

DV:

Never having listened to a Madonna album, Confessions on a Dance Floor included, I had little in the way of expectations for Confessions II - I might not have even checked it out if I hadn't liked the Honey Dijon remix of one of the earlier singles. I for sure wasn't expecting a song to hit like Daft Punk's Random Access Memories if it was done right, which "Danceteria" does. Simultaneously elegiac and euphoric, it's the story of who Madonna is and how she came to be told via a series of connections and names so excessive it moves from fun to funny to poignant and back more than once in the song's runtime. It never bogs down, partially thanks to Madonna's nimble delivery and partially to the sparkling production, from not just Stuart Price but more contemporary hitmakers Cirkut and watt. Credit to all of them for landing on something that feels slightly unmoored in time, a beat and a story that feels like it could play in a club in 1982 or at the turn of the century just as much as I know it's filling a floor in a gayborhood at the moment I'm writing this.

MG:

In some ways this feels an unfair, even misogynistic, comparison to draw, but it's also one formalized in songs like "Madonna, Sean, and Me" and in footage from 1991: The Year Punk Broke, and it's where my mind went first after hearing "Danceteria." Madonna fucking bodied Kim Gordon this year. The two are more alike, more linked, than it might appear on the surface. Gordon's art school persona is just as youth obsessed as Madonna's more overtly trendfucky approach. They've both had obvious facelifts. But while Madonna is embracing legacy, Gordon is still chasing the vanguard. In a world where prepubescent kids are using anti-aging skincare products and botox is present as "maintenance," I think embracing legacy is the vanguard. "Danceteria" is a thrilling new chapter of Madonna's massive, impressive, and always striving artwork because it recalls "Vogue,""Into The Groove," and "Everybody," because it twirls through a lifetime of dance floors, because it's the coolest party with the coolest guest list.

"Lost Boys" by Phoebe Bridgers

MG:

If you'll forgive me for where I've decided to begin this analysis, I watched Ezra Klein's interview of author Gary Shteyngart discussing, mostly, his 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story. Haven't read it, but in discussing the characters Klein says to Shteyngart: "There’s nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal hoping somebody would one day read their journal entries." And that's where I'm at with Phoebe Bridgers in 2026. I guess I disagree with Ezra Klein because for close to a decade I've really enjoyed her lyrics; lyrics I think are pretty obviously mined from diary entries, or sometimes generated by narrating memories to her audience. Bridgers homes in on acute details -- the ceiling fan in "Not Strong Enough" or the payphone in "Kyoto" -- that become these unforgettable thematic symbols for relationships or emotional states. And that's here in "Lost Boys," too; it's the twin bed -- mirrors, dopplegangers, union, birth, and loss. But as beautiful as that leit motif bridge is, it's not enough to make up for the utterly boring remains of the song. One of the problems with using your diary for art is that the text reveals how often we repeat the same mistakes, over and over. "Lost Boys" rehashes "Kyoto" on a line of cocaine -- the motorbike goes 90 now, she's in Germany instead of Japan (how edgy), she's sorry instead unforgiving. The trumpet returns.

As she retreated from Punisher and as her influence advanced on a generation of singer-songwriters I hoped Bridgers would give us her Kid A. Make those memories abstraction, write in the second person or something. Necessarily, I thought this would also correspond with more outré production -- and Jack Antonoff, producer of Grammy music, is capable of delivering, he's just not capable of suggesting that direction. I find the count-in to the final chorus particularly infuriating because the best part of this era, so far, is Bridgers locking her audience's phones in pouches. There's nothing distracting them from the big moment except for the fact that it's a defused grenade, inert in a vacant field.

DV:

"DJ Turn It Down" by Boy Throb & Kesha

MG:

Though the conceit of "DJ Turn It Down" might seem arch on its face -- this song does, after all, feature the club's very own Kesha -- I think it has literal merits. The club is just too loud, and I don't say that exclusively as a middle aged woman with hearing damage. When I was a child I'd leave with a persistent ringing in my ears; now I leave with a sore, hoarse throat from screaming to be heard. It's the exact problem Boy Throb specifies and Kesha legitimizes: the club is for everyone. What makes "DJ Turn It Down" genuinely interesting beyond its reversal of the boy band paradigm is Darshaun's verse. Evan, Zachary, Amthony, and Kesha are all perfectly talented, but without Darshaun this is basically just a straightforward pop song. Darshaun's Indian-accented English is a powerful frisson of possibility.

By now we're all well aware the American empire is crumbled beyond repair, doomed to alternating periods of hard and soft fascism. Our economy is a bubble and our cultural power is ceded. There's no better evidence of the nation's decline than its refusal to grant Darshaun an O-1 visa. This country used to thrill to hear its language in the mouths of outsiders -- we sent Eggy Eggz to the top of our pop chart, we let Taylor Swift top the country chart, we created a sexuality for Ricky Martin. If we're going to turn over national security to South African-Argentinian Peter Thiel, we could probably acknowledge Darshaun's contributions to modern music.

DV:

"On Wires" by Carly Rae Jepsen

DV:

She may say that "On Wires" is a signal to "expect the unexpected", but hearing noted theater kid Carly Rae Jepsen start off a song with the same basic vamp as "It's the Hard-Knock Life" and "Into the Woods (Prologue)" and a dozen other musical classics is not exactly what I'd consider surprising - except in the sense that it's taken until album eight (or seven, or ten, depending on how you're counting) for it to happen. Thankfully "On Wires" does get stranger as it goes on, building on the baby steps Carly took in that direction last album cycle with tracks like "Psychedelic Switch" and "Kollage." Credit producer Kyle Shearer ("Switch", "Fever", and many others), back with Carly again and bringing an interestingly looped sample, a willingness to deploy aggressive instrumentation, and a bracing approach to reverb to the track. But also credit Carly, who writes a chorus that's like a funhouse mirror version of "I Really Like You." There, the breathless repetition was an expression of anxiety and uncertainty; here it's much simpler, horniness expressed in three little words. And that shift, from the lightness of the theatrical verses to the crashing rock idiom of the hook, is where "On Wires" actually delivers on the promise of being something new. After the relative bloat of the Loneliest/Loveliest Time era (there's a great album in those two records!) I hope the rest of Day and Night follows suit.

MG:

"Secret Language" by Ryan Beatty

DV:

Here's a slow burn that actually pays off. "Secret Language" starts with Ryan Beatty singing just above a whisper, intimate and precise, easing into the song before it slowly begins to unfold. It's less that "Secret Language" adds layers and more that the layers we begin with gradually add intensity. The muted trumpet that's setting off fireworks at the end gets carefully seeded early on, adding quieter punctuation. The lead guitar unspools a solo, but first it gently slides its way into the mix. The drums keep a quiet shuffle long before you hear the crash of a cymbal. Beatty himself builds from the space his vocal maps out in the first verse, never becoming overdramatic but expanding his emotive range alongside the production. It's a kind of ecstatic precision, like watching a flower spread its petals as the morning sunlight touches it.

MG:

"the feeling" by Steve Lacy

DV:

A while back MG described Lauren Auder as "almost there" and this is perpetually how I feel about Steve Lacy, an artist whose songs always strike me positively on first impression and diminish as they go on, enough that I sometimes forget what I'm listening to by the end. "the feeling" is a case in point: lush and enveloping from the first note, it seems instantly familiar. And then it spends four and a half minutes feeling the same way. Lacy tastefully layers in some additional instrumentation and some backing vocals over time, but the baseline remains constant - and his lead vocal is no less stable - beginning at the exact vibe that it'll retain for the entire song. It's a song that simply refuses to waver from its set register, from the lyric to the topline, and one that would benefit from any variation. The second verse comes closest, spoke-sung by Lacy in a deadpan that the production, unfortunately, barely acknowledges. And "the feeling" is dotted with these near-misses, including the "Am I your baby" refrain that should be heartbreaking but doesn't stand out enough to conjure the depth it reaches for. In a way, Lacy's polish works against him: the sound is beautiful here, but beneath the surface, something's missing.

MG:

"Prophecy at 1420 MHz" by Boards of Canada

MG:

Both nostalgia and eeriness are tacked to the Boards of Canada inspiration collage, so to hear them dialed up on "Prophecy at 1420 MHz" is no great surprise, but on previous releases the group has pulled at those concepts until they were much less specific and recognizable. This isn't to say "Prophecy" is bad by any stretch; it has the darkness, the atmosphere, the foreboding that I love especially during a barren and haunting winter. It is to say that Boards of Canada now find themselves in an imagined or remembered past rather than their own hermetic universe. "Prophecy" is nakedly cinematic instead of carefully evocative and it's good, but it lacks imagination, which was once an element of that above collage.

DV:

"The Beast" by Patrick Wolf

DV:

If anyone had told me four years ago that after a decade's absence we were on the precipice of Patrick Wolf dropping a EP and LP, and that he'd follow the latter up with a new single less than 12 months later - not to mention multiple US tours - I think I might have passed out. But here we are, and if every release still feels a little improbable, well, that sense of the uncanny has never been entirely absent from his work anyway. "The Beast", a song built on the concept of drawing strength from strangeness, dropped the week before Pride Month. It'd feel pointed even if we weren't experiencing a sustained, multi-national attack on queer (especially trans) people. Wolf begins with fairytale imagery, characters trapped in stories they choose to reject - it works, but seems a little too arch up until halfway through when the song makes a sonic turn from the dance pop of the beginning to a sort of deconstructed version of its own production. "I don't owe you an explanation/ Of the nature of the beast that I've become," he intones, his voice low in the mix. The atmosphere ceases to be a party and becomes unsettled, dramatic. So when he croons, "But I'm not the only one/ Yes it's all the rage," Wolf recontextualizes the narratives of the song's first half, transforming them into expressions of comradeship within the queer community. And he turns one of the attack lines deployed against queer people for longer than any of us have been alive - the idea that queerness is contagious, like a meme or a trend - into an expression of power. If queerness is "all the rage," if "we become the beast" (as Wolf says at the end), then it is a threat to the power structure that seeks to eradicate us. What "The Beast" suggests is that we embrace this, rather than seeking to shrink ourselves into a world that will never see us as small enough. It's a defiant anthem for a gayer tomorrow, and while June is young enough that I'm sure we'll hear other attempts, I suspect there isn't a better song for Pride Month 2026.

MG:

"Fuck the DJ" by Eli

DV:

Back when Nadia Oh told us she wanted to be the DJ's girlfriend, it felt a little like settling - like, if you're the visionary singer whose work anticipates everything from PC Music to hyperpop, why wouldn't you just be the DJ? Thankfully Nadia's final single to date finally took that step and put her behind the decks (RIP, she's a Tory now.) It may be too soon to tell whether Eli has a similar song-based character arc in front of her, but "Fuck the DJ" has so much to say that maybe it's best if she stays a little bit on the outside, throwing darts wherever she needs to. "Nobody getting ugly in the club these days," she muses in the chorus, just before dropping the titular line. It's brash and bold and - as is typical for Eli - walks a tightrope between funny and heartfelt. "Hey, I wanna fuck the DJ" doesn't sound like settling because it's not asking for a relationship: the hook hits like a whim, a joke, an urge during an eventful night of partying that also allows Eli to drop some ridiculous names. It sounds carefree in the best sense.

MG:

"Miss You" by Ms Ray & Nourished by Time

MG:

Ms Ray's Melt EP is designed with architectural sophistication as its guiding principle. All five songs sound like they're set in an LA office building at dusk -- right before both the German terrorists and John McClane roll in for the yearly Christmas party. Its highlight is "Miss You," featuring Nourished by Time fresh from last year's fantastic The Passionate Ones. Where he's earthy and sincere, vamping parts of his verse, Ms Ray is airy and delicate, vague in her concept of loss. Together they're natural duet partners, joining to elevate "Miss You" from minor break up to major earworm.

DV:

"Together" by The Avalanches ft. Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, Prentiss

DV:

Perhaps I should learn a lesson from "We Will Always Love You", which still makes little sense as a standalone single but fits neatly into The Avalanches album of the same name, a record that's grown on me tremendously since it was released in 2020. On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't overcorrect too much; "Frankie Sinatra" is still kinda a mess and so is the sophomore album it comes from. "Together" is in yet another lane - it sounds unlike anything the group's done before, and burbles and bleeps with enough energy that it's instantly sticky in a way they've sometimes struggled to achieve with their singles. But it still seems a little like it's waiting for context. "Frontier Psychiatrist" aside, The Avalanches have always been an album band, and when "Together" stops - not ends, just stops - it only serves to emphasize that the success of this song hinges on how it fits into a greater whole that we've yet to hear.

The interesting thing about The Avalanches as they enter their fourth decade as a band and approach their third album since their "comeback" is how their post-2015 releases have changed their legacy. Since I Left You made them legends, put them in a club with other artists who dropped a perfect record and never followed it up. But then they returned 14 years later, and everything changed. With their once-innovative approach to sampling now so mainstream it's almost not worth mentioning and a discography that's no longer legendary in its brevity but spotty-at-best, I'm no longer sure quite what distinguishes them from someone like their occasional collaborator Jamie XX, who shares a similar crate-digging ethos that leads to equally inconsistent results, or producers like Sofia Kourtesis, who take bits of their aesthetic in more personal directions. Or even #content-driven followers like Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who don't have anything new to add but raise the question: do The Avalanches, either? It's strange to think of a fourth album as a referendum on an artist, but that's where I find myself with The Avalanches - after a disappointing re-debut in 2016 and a promising follow-up, number four seems poised to be a deciding vote on whether they should have returned at all. Based on "Together," I'm undecided but cautiously optimistic.

MG:

"Shattered" by Jump Source

MG:

Helena Deland released one of my favorite folk albums of this decade, the resolute and sparse Goodnight Summerland which unfurls at the pace of time spent alone. It's an album for noticing the details, all the little moments of life that escape our attention amid the din of everyday distraction. So, it's fascinating to hear her voice on "Scattered," doing a kind of slick, Suzanne Vega on "Tom's Diner" thing for Jump Source. She's the source of tension that propels the song everywhere from grimy clubs to chic modern living rooms to the worlds that exist between a pair of headphones. "Scattered" is both intimate and universal thanks to Deland's hums and whispers; a fantastic star turn from an artist who previously seemed disinterested in the kind of electricity a spotlight requires.

DV:

"Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" by Debbii Dawson

DV:

Despite Bruno Mars' best efforts, the 70s remain an untapped source in the modern pop ecosystem. Part of the problem is that he makes music for passing time between sessions at corporate conferences, but part is that Mars is almost never fully committed: his pastiches bounce between winking at the audience and patting himself on the back for whatever technically-impressive feat he's pulling off this time. He has plenty of hits but they rarely hit.

I don't expect Debbii Dawson to bring the 70s back to the top ten, but I do think she absolutely believes it's possible (and someone else must too, since this is produced by Joel Little ("Royals", et al.)) Unlike Mars, Dawson plays this theatrical throwback straight, and more or less pulls it off: while "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" lacks the mid-song twist of last year's "You Killed the Music", it shares that song's sense of drama and sweeping ambition. Is it still a little silly? Of course: at one point Dawson asks whether the good men got lost in the Bermuda Triangle. She strikes exactly the right balance, passionate without being polished into dullness, and the humor fits well into a pop landscape that currently has potential-peers like Sabrina Carpenter, Raye, and of course Chappell. There have been stranger hits recently - maybe it's time.

MG:

"drop dead" by Olivia Rodrigo

DV:

First of all: where is this cursed bar that closes at 11:00, three full hours earlier than any normal bar in the real world closes and five or more hours before last call at what is commonly known as a "late bar." Perhaps this date is happening at a bar for children? It's all very confusing, but winds up contributing to the overall charm of "drop dead," which convincingly makes the case that Dan Nigro can't ruin every song he produces. Part of that is down to the lyric's detailed, compelling encapsulation of a suddenly inescapable infatuation, part is Rodrigo's half-spoken delivery on the second verse and the fantastically euphoric "Pieces and a Gemini" bridge. I'm vaguely reminded of Haha I'm Sorry and DAISY Rage era Kitty - though Rodrigo is much less densely referential, she shares more than a little with the emotional openness and vulnerability Kitty tapped into there. "drop dead" could still stand to be bolder - Nigro still seems fundamentally incapable of handling drums, and the song can't decide between committing to dreamy or driving, splitting the difference and losing the dynamism of either approach in the process. It's a testament to Rodrigo (and Nigro and Amy Allen, in their capacity as cowriters) that the song works as well as it does. But as is increasingly the case with everything Nigro produces, I can't help wishing we could get a remix from someone who knows what they're fucking doing.

MG:

"New Jesus" by Truck Violence

MG:

I have many childhood memories of my mom frustratedly demanding my dad turn off some abrasive music. Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Muslimgauze -- even in what we now perceive as the good, easy times it still wasn't pleasant to work 8 hours and come home to cook dinner while some asshole bleated loudly in the background. Despite largely sharing my dad's taste in music, I always thought this was a bad dynamic and that a shared space should be titrated to the lowest common denominator. It wasn't like that didn't exist; we all loved Belle & Sebastian.

It takes more to offend my husband than it did my mom but every so often I stumble into something that rubs me raw in the right way but cannot be tolerated over speakers and "New Jesus" is just that. Frankly, until Karsyn Henderson started bellowing about 45 seconds in and was promptly silenced I kind of felt like I was losing my edge, like my taste had grown safe and stale. Fear not! “New Jesus” is loud and hard enough to be distasteful but still too bleary-eyed and concussed to be metal – my final genre frontier.

DV: