I caved at the last minute and took a break from my breakfast on Friday to buy a ticket to see Beyoncé and Jay-Z over the weekend. The show was a real spectacle in all the best ways: moving stages, fireworks, a massive band, lots and lots of dancing (or, Jay’s case, choreographed walking). None of this week’s tracks come from bands I can imagine headlining stadiums anytime soon, and they’re all probably better for it. Most of the time it’s best to let bands make their own fireworks.
Cave: “San’ Yago”
The psyched out krautrock of Chicago band Cave doesn’t make good for 30-second sampling, but if you’ve got no important plans for the next six minutes, I can’t recommend listening to “San’ Yago” enough. Because the song quickly establishes itself as a repetitive instrumental track, close listening rewards the listener with big payoff as Cave’s drums and synth loops show their human touch with consistent, small gestural shifts among the song’s meandering rhythmic backdrop. Even if the music video for this song wasn’t an incredible, foggy trip through the expansive wealth of hot dog places Chicago has to offer (it is), it’d still be an excellent first release from the band since their 2013 album Threace.
Mitski: “Two Slow Dancers”
We lucked out with another great Mitski single this week ahead of Be the Cowboy’s impending release on Friday. It’s an interesting move to release the final track of the album (as this is) as a single, particularly because her first Be the Cowboy single “Geyser” is the album’s opener. It feels like a wry, winking refusal to indicate what ‘happens’ on the album, instead setting parameters of Once Upon a Time and The End — with only the very ‘New Mitski’ “Nobody” to stand in between them. None of this would matter much if Mitski’s albums weren’t as strong and as cinematic as they are, and it just makes me more and more excited for Friday to roll around.
“Two Slow Dancers” feels like a meditation; its blue nostalgia places old flames in context of their childhood history as Mitski’s calm vocals float over orchestration that swells with the narrative. It really cements The Mitski Closer as a certified ‘thing’ as “Two Slow Dancers” fits in the grand tradition of previous finales “A Burning Hill” (Puberty 2) and “Last Words of a Shooting Star” (bury me at makeout creek.)
Foxing: “Grand Paradise”
“Grand Paradise” begins the hour-long runtime of their latest album Nearer My God, my most-listened to new album this week. St. Louis band Foxing has a whole lot of things going on in Nearer My God. The singles are great too, but I have been returning over and over to “Grand Paradise” to witness the intro slowly unfurl to reveal electronic claps, pizzicato guitar and sinister piano chords. As they enter, singer Connor Murphy’s vocals are first viscerally reminiscent of the falsetto of TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe but soon cascade into the kind of howled urgency that was a hallmark of late-era Brand New records. It’s a killer intro to a really great album, and I can’t get enough of it. Nearer My God feels like a big development in Foxing’s discography. It’s a potentially divisive move for some of the old die-hards, but it’s certainly got the potential to launch them further into the national consciousness.
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