Pop songs with party sounds in them constitute a genre of their own, one that we’ll call party-sounds pop. I mean this literally, as these songs contain the actual sounds of celebration (laughter, genial greetings and affirmations, clinking bottles and glasses, general carousing) and loosely, because songs with party sounds in them are almost always party songs. They are songs about partying, with the sounds of partying in them, meant to incite partying or augment partying already in progress. How meta!The majority of these songs sound like they were recorded in a studio packed with people engaged in actual partying; imagining these scenes of debauchery is part of the fun in hearing these songs. Others sound like they were edited to include field recordings or found sounds, sometimes in experimental ways, like Dean Martins "(Open Up the Door and) Let the Good Times In," The Beach Boys "Wonderful," and Van Morrisons "Virgo Clowns." Live songs with audience noise in them were not considered, unless the audience sounds more like a party than a concert crowd (see: "Let Me Clear My Throat" by DJ Kool, "Mercy Mercy Mercy" by Cannonball Adderley, "Voodoo Chile" by Hendrix). Some, despite the mirth, are melancholy ("Tracks of My Tears" by the Pharoahs, "Undone - The Sweater Song" by Weezer, "Good Times" by Eric Burdon & the Animals, a song that presages Modest Mouses "The Good Times Are Killing Me" by 37 years).Regardless of the particulars, the ultimate effect of putting party sounds in a pop song is a sense of living, breathing atmosphere. It creates narrative and adds context, putting you right there in the song, sharing a high point of someones life. Also, hearing party sounds is infectious. Run this playlist to a room of people on the brink of a good time and youre all but guaranteed to tip the proceedings into full-blown throwdown.
Cool cant be trained and it cant be manufactured. Guys like Archy Marshall, a.k.a. gutterpunk angel King Krule, are simply born with it. Or in Marshall’s case, born into it: His mom, a screenprinter, outfitted Prince Be of PM Dawn for the “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” video; his uncle played in a ska band called the Top Cats; his godfather was in punk band The Ruts. Marshall grew up a school-ditching, music-loving rabble-rouser, immersed in London’s wildly progressive art world. No wonder then that he began writing songs and making beats as a teenager.Now 23, Marshall has applied his inherent cool to two King Krule LPs, both of which feature an inimitable postmodern pastiche of blues, dub, lounge, hip-hop, jazz, downtempo, and experimental noir. His latest, The OOZ, is an itchy, bleary smear of atmosphere and attitude, swinging on saxophone and laden with songs about marginalized Bohemian existence, sung in Marshalls tongue-swallowing Cockney twang.Before he anointed himself streetwise royalty, Marshall ran under a slew of other names, some of which he still adopts depending on his mood, including Zoo Kid, DJ JD Sports, Pimp Shrimp, and Edgar the Beatmaker. He’s collaborated with now-disbanded Manhattan rap crew RATKING and London soundscapers Mount Kimbie. He even recorded an album under his own birth name.Given his lifelong exposure to off-the-radar music, it’s no surprise that Marshall’s stated influences—and the less obvious ones—comprise a sonic roadmap through the global underground. From ’80s New York no wave to golden-era hip-hop to mid-century country crooners to Jamaican classics to of-the-moment indie agitators, King Krule has swallowed it all and spit out something wholly unique and utterly captivating. Here’s your tour through the Kingdom of Krule.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
