I’m heading up to Eau Claire this weekend for the annual Bon Iver Wisconsin Hangout Fest. While I’m thrilled to have the chance to see [buzz band, name redacted] and [legendary songwriter, name redacted] play a collaborative set at Eaux Claires, I also think it’s possible I’ll spend much of the fest alone with my iPod in the woods, listening to the new RP Boo album that’s coming out on Friday. It’s all about the new releases, my friends!
Ovlov: “Stick”
Ovlov is back together, and if you didn’t know who they were or that they were broken up in the first place, honestly you’d be in about the same boat I was when I heard “Stick” for the first time a few days ago. Well, sometimes it pays to get the band back together in order to make fans of the dopes who never got around to you earlier. “Stick” feels melancholy, taffy-stretched to the breaking point, and draped in guitar fuzz. Like last week’s Ariana Grande track, it shifts between feeling pretty quick and very slow, all the while maintaining tempo. It’s hard to stick out as a band making ’90s-inspired guitar pop in the late 2010s, but Ovlov definitely pulls it off with this song.
Charli XCX: “No Angel”
Charli’s Number 1 Angel is my favorite album of 2018, largely in part to her handing production controls over to a suite of producers from the PC Music collective, which shaped her 2017 output with their trademark saccharine, bubbly touch. “No Angel” brings her out of that mode into one more akin to her earlier work, particularly the bratty joy of Sucker. As a shameless Charli stan, I have to note that this marks a curious loss — as it exists officially, “No Angel” is an adaptation of the unreleased, SOPHIE-produced fan favorite “Girls Night Out.” Will “Girls Night Out” be lost to YouTube bootlegs? Oh, the implications!
Mitski: “Nobody”
Mitski’s steady rise in popularity has always reminded me of (stay with me here) the rise of Fall Out Boy in the early 2000s, in that an organic slow burn of word-of-mouth adulation built up over her first handful of earnest and hyperpersonal indie releases and propelled her earlier and further than many of her peers into a sort of “indie royalty” status. At risk of downplaying the many other great bands out there in her cohort, it really does seem like she’s just on another level.
“Nobody,” the second single from Be the Cowboy, sonically exists somewhere between (again, stay with me here) “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “Lovefool” all while absolutely being a Mitski Song. While thematically canon, it feels radically different from any other Mitski song I’ve heard, and it’s got a terrific music video that I don’t feel entirely off base for comparing to Michael Gondry’s classic “Let Forever Be” video. She and longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland are very clearly stretching their wings on this new record, and I’m thrilled to imagine what more depth waits for us on it.
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