The Music Dispatch: April 11th, 2023
Inside: Yaeji, Rae Sremmurd, the case for an imminent rock revival, the Absolute State of Pop and IVE
Welcome to The Music Dispatch! This is a weekly part of this Substack where I shortly review every new(-ish) release I listened to. Out every Tuesday. All mentioned songs are available on your streaming platform of choice unless stated otherwise. Is there an album you want to recommend me? @ me on Twitter or head on over to the Retrospring!
Anyone else have a cold April? Urgh, it's been terrible over here. And of course I get a cold. You give me one (1) week with constant weather changes and I get sick. Horrible.
We have to change the format up again. Not because I am not on time, but because there’s recurring threads going on, and it makes sense to cluster them that way. Next week… will be different… but in two weeks we’re back to the usual, I hope.
Yaeji — With A Hammer
I don’t actually understand “female rage”. Certainly I enjoy women “difficult” — that is to say, them being given the same grace that men give so readily to themselves — and certainly I too have felt anger, but I figure rage is rage no matter the gender, no? (Speaking very strictly of emotions right now, not the actions.) It’s not like we say “male happiness,” either. But it was a buzzword a while ago, and the phrase hovers a little over the explanations and media rollout of Yaeji’s debut album on XL Records, With A Hammer. (To the point where in this hilarious Pitchfork profile, the label suggests that she and writer Cat Zhang go to a hammer-smashing place, and Yaeji is so befuddled by it she starts bumping Poison Girl Friend’s HARDLY EVER SMILE WITHOUT YOU. I’m in stitches!) Even that title evokes aggression and smashing around. (Or, if you’re German and you watched the anime block on RTL 2 and know that the show that started the adult sitcom reruns was Hör mal wer da hämmert, Listen who hammers aka Home Improvement— nevermind) With A Hammer is more complicated than that. It’s not (just) a weapon, but a tool with which Yaeji tries to untangle all the complicated emotions and memories she’s spent a lifetime repressing, all of which came forth when the pandemic rolled around. The hammer becomes her younger self on Passed Me By, a Super Saiyan at the ending of For Granted, even a pen to remember on the jazzy and warm I Remember For Me, I Remember For You. That’s not to say that there’s not anger on here — the Ohhyuk-assisted Fever vehemently rejects the anti-Asian wave of hate that rolled around two years ago — but Yaeji uses her anger as a form of therapy. With that regard, even with the way that there’s a whole single about embracing your younger self, I’m reminded in parts of Rina Sawayama’s Hold The Girl. But Sawayama wouldn’t sound childlike on her vocals, and Yaeji is unconcerned with pop structures — or most structures, really, as she freely goes from trip-hop to ambient melodies to free-flowing flutes to submerged piano (I implore you to put your headphones on when listening to Happy; those drums sound like they’re clashing in the middle of your head, it’s quite insane!). The collaborators are all friends and the homeliness of it, the listener senses, is what makes Yaeji comfortable to express what she needs to express. It’s a friendly, accessible record overall. More importantly, though, one gets the feeling that the fog that has enveloped so much of Yaeji’s music prior this point — EP2 and mixtape WHAT WE DREW — has lifted. When I have no courage, I close my eyes, Yaeji singsongs in Korean on the closer Be Alone In This. It’s easy to be mad — but it takes a world of courage not to succumb to the kneejerk urge to destroy, to create something out of it instead.
Rae Sremmurd — SREMMURD4LIFE
The once exciting trap duo picked up where they left off from Sremmlife 2, an album dating back seven years ago, with music that honestly sounds like vault tracks. There’s two fun tracks on here: Flaunt It / Cheap, with a bouncy bass and spirited efforts, and ADHD Anthem (2 Many Emotions), which is Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi trying to do what Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert do — to decent results. The rest is a dud, I’m afraid.
I think the rock revival is imminent and here’s why
Linkin Park — Meteora (20th Anniversary Album)
When Lost, an outtake of Linkin Park’s landmark sophomore record Meteora, was released, it not only debuted at #1 on the Alternative Radio and Rock charts (just in time on Mike Shinoda’s birthday!) but it also started trending on Tiktok. Speaking to Billboard, Mike Shinoda says he didn’t expect it — from the guy that knew that Linkin Park, an alternate spelling of Lincoln Park, could secure a domain name? I’m not sure if I believe him, but alright! So let’s talk about Lost first. Originally taken out of the album because it resembled the juggernaut Numb too much, the song features almost bright-sounding piano while the late (and stunning) Chester Bennington sings about mental illness in a way that… sort of sounds anonymous a bit in the chorus. And that’s exactly the kind of thing TikTok loves: anonymous-sounding, sad-sounding songs with a tinge of happy notes, but easily digestible choruses like this one. (Previously trending on TikTok: Deftones’ Sextape, which does the same. Currently newest song to trend on Tiktok: Sade’s Smooth Operator, and I bet this one comes pitch altered too lmao). But the wall of sound that rock is so good at clearly still has an audience, or regains an audience, and I don’t think I’m off when thinking that rock is poised for a revival. There only needs to be one song that debuts on the Hot 100 for people to notice. (Look at the Hot 100… look at how dead it is!) Will Linkin Park be the ones to go there? Who knows. Possibly.
Let’s talk Meteora, then, the album that had to prove that Linkin Park was here to stay after the insane run they had with debut Hybrid Theory. Out of that pressure emerged an all-killer, no-filler record that not only spawned Numb (and, later, Numb / Encore with Jay Z) but also houses one of my favorite tracks of theirs, Breaking the Habit. As Shinoda’s rapping and Bennington’s vocals come together to great results, coupled with great shredding and militaristic drumming, and those lyrics detailing anguish in darkness, one hears clearly the influence of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on here (especially how Session is their take on The Fragile’s Just Like You Imagined). The segueing is ingenious and makes for a fulfilling album experience full of high points. It makes one think that the nu metal movement was more than just a couple scratches and metal shredding, how potent rap and rock can be in conjunction. I won’t lie, sometimes Shinoda’s rapping is… well, that (for my K-Pop stans: he raps like I.M of Monsta X does sometimes, really ridiculous rhymes at points). I guess Nobody’s Listening is fun with the flutes throughout. Bennington always makes up for it with his gorgeous vocals. If you haven’t picked the album up yet — I hadn’t, I was only familiar with a couple tracks and the big singles — today is a great day to do so!
As for the other outtakes… well, they’re kind of buried — if you were to scroll it down on your phone, it takes ages to get there. The demos start at Disc 4, and then there’s another disc of a live record, and then on Disc 6 there’s the outtakes, seven of them in total. Like my usual stance with outtakes, they sound like there were reasons they were left off. I suppose Fighting Myself and Massive could’ve been on the record. Healing Foot is very Trent Reznor circa Downward Spiral. Wesside sounds like what would eventually become Session, the track before Numb. The closer Resolution… either sounds like Bennington didn’t turn over his lyrics, or it was really meant to sound like this, but in that case the chorus feels sort of empty. It makes sense why it’s at the very end of this record as a send-off and goodbye to Bennington.
☆ Wednesday — Rat Saw God
I remember once in… I’m going to say middle school… my homework for English class was to describe where I’m from. I used the word “outskirts” at the time, but I don’t quite know if that fits. Anyway, I live in a social housing project / big apartment complex that the government provides, “Gemeindebau” in German. Across my window you’d see actual peasants sow their grain. (They’re gone now; an apartment complex replaced it.) After that came the houses, lots and lots of them. One long street, a terribly paved pedestrian zone, and the numbers going up rapidly. Down south are housing projects, too — my sister and I went there last summer, walking around. I mostly look ahead, but sometimes I look at the houses. Then suddenly, while I’m watching, there’s this woman, holding onto her fence, staring right back at me. Where I’m from is not a trashy place; this isn’t the part of Vienna that has my coworkers go, “oh, the Turk district” (that one’s down south). This is a part of Vienna that doesn’t feel like it’s Vienna. The suburbs, but take out the middle-class factor. A strange place. Undead.
That undead place, its smells, its hot summers that I’m familiar with, is what I hear the most going into Rat Saw God, the fifth record from Asheville, NC group Wednesday. A lot of these songs tell stories of people that live here: exhausted characters that declare that they can raise the dead [too], fucked up characters, characters that feel like their life has somehow ended before their death: I like to sleep with the lights on / While you’re watching Formula One; doing it in a cul-de-sac; or, as told in the highlight Bull Believer, the protagonist passes out on a couch at a New Year’s party, with a nosebleed that won’t end while their distant lover is playing Mortal Kombat. Every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes, we are told. To that end, the band plays fast and loose with all strands of rock music, whether that is emo, country, shoegaze, or even an acoustic moment on What’s so Funny. (Sometimes it’s a mix of both, like the mix of straightforward rock and country on Got Shocked that picks up on speed five seconds in. So cool!) At the center of it all is the woman that tells and brings the songs to life, Karly Hartzman, who sings like she’s close to crying. Her presence is nothing short of magnetic, but don’t count the rest of the band out, either. Years back, when Pitchfork was singing the praises of Big Thief’s UFOF, the first sentence was how the New Yorker band was “their own small ecosystem.” I didn’t hear that there. I hear it on Rat Saw God, though: a band well attuned to one another at every turn. Rock is having a fantastic moment, and Rat Saw God is a towering achievement of it.
Mark (NCT) — Golden Hour
Mark Lee kind of taps into the imminent rock renaissance, too. At least, he’s now joined Vernon in a solo that is sonically different from what his main group(s, in Mark’s case…) does. In K-Pop, we’re… well… this year’s trend is the easy listening one for girlgroups while boygroups do their usual nonsense. (We’ll see what the group coming out of Mnet’s Boys Planet will do.) I suppose in that sense, the one-off Golden Hour slots in somewhat with the flirtation of pop punk that swept the industry last year. Except Mark, who has always been one of the main vocal architects of NCT’s sound, brings in some of his hip hop expertise (and, by extension, NCT’s sound) into it: Kanye West’s Black Skinhead’s staccato drum loop appears in the chorus, the verse and bridge. Guitars are introduced and abandoned at random, and there’s a free-flowing structure to it overall that is only held together by Mark’s megawatt charisma, the same thing that he’s wielded all the way back in 2016 on The Seventh Sense. Long-ass ride indeed! The oddly incoherent nature of the song also translates to the lyrics that are simultaneously about not being able to cook (I do not how to make eggs / But that, I do not stress) that also ends up about flaunting wealth (the literal next line: ‘cause I’ve never been hungry and the hilarious Boy gives governments allowance), but also about being… uh… how we live in a Society? (Everyone’s being everyone but themselves, here but not around, Mark says solemnly in the bridge, and sheepishly adds: Wait… but what does that mean?) I quite like it, but the beginning is for sure the strongest part. I wish the whole song sounded like it. More to the point, the marriage of rap and rock just about sounds right. It’s almost like there’s a whole genre that does that… (just realized this could also be K-Pop; I do not mean K-Pop.)
And now over to pop…
Pictured above is me looking for new ideas. Where are the new ideas? I beg! Melanie Martinez doing high streaming numbers… Morgan Wallen scoring a #1… can someone please save the Billboard Hot 100? And as for K-Pop… I heard Kepler’s Giddy yesterday. It’s fine, but the bass drop is back. You know when K-Pop discovered the bass drop? Attention. By Charlie Puth. It’s been six years. Free me!!! Seems the alternative is… easy listening music. Like Fifty Fifty’s Cupid is Kiss Me More if NewJeans performed it. They charted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #100 and trend on TikTok… actually… you know what… maybe it’s time we end this app. Doja Cat said her newest album Hellmouth, due this year, is fully rap, because “pop isn’t exciting to [her] anymore,” so she doesn’t want to make it. #ImWithHer!
I’m semi-dramatic about this. At the end is the best of my week’s pop listening.
Ellie Goulding — Higher Than Heaven
I want to meet Dua Lipa on one of her private jets chilling on some island and watch myself get dragged away by the bodyguards as I scream for her to undo Future Nostalgia. It’s been three years and we’re still on this wave. For what! Where’s the new things? Higher than Heaven is Ellie Goulding’s least personal record full of anonymous lyrics, bog standard structures, and completely whatever vocal performances that are only elevated because Goulding’s lemony voice demands attention in the same way Halsey’s or Tove Lo’s does. I suppose if you were to add this album to your library and hit shuffle, it’d make for a really good experience; as an album, they blur together and utterly bore. Streaming-era pop, y’all. What did I enjoy? Midnight Dreams, and the moody Love Goes On that reminds me of Mario Kart 64’s Toad’s Turnpike track melody. Everything else I’ve either heard better from K-Pop (and no doubt this album will be cloned a lot for b-sides), or from Future Nostalgia. That entire second half is diminishing returns. What island is this woman on again? Just… you know… curiosity.
Cub Sport — Jesus at the Gay Bar
There’s breakbeats on here that support my theory that we’ll see a lot more of breakbeats and garage in the charts in the coming… I’m not even going to say “months” anymore, because it seems like at this point, we’re going to have to talk years… but for the most part, the new Cub Sport record sounds anonymous and for background music purposes only. Surf guitars… tropical house drops… these piano synths… I’m sure if you enjoy it, it’s fun, but I don’t. As mentioned before, I work out to this type of music, but only because I can’t mute the video and listen to my own music at the same time. This is regression. The Spotify biography reads that this group "has undergone a transformation from local indie band to global pop powerhouses” and I instantly knew what they did to get there. Okay, let me not be too mean. The track I like off of this is High for the Summer featuring Shamir.
NMIXX — expérgo
I read last.fm comments. Most of them are stupid and/or not to be taken seriously. And then there’s the comment section on NMIXX’s newest single, Love Me Like This, where people have genuine debates. Fans say the lead single is “fine” but “lacks the experimental edge.” My personal favorite? The person who is very disappointed that the track is like this, which came to be “probably because of the unnecessary amount of negative comments from non-fans who desperately wanted to like the group while they could have been supporting other groups that release the songs they like.” My reaction to this information. It’s almost like pop music stands for popular music and is meant to be enjoyed by a general listening public (here: K-Pop stans)? Demanding people become more and more insular with their music taste, acting like non-fans shouldn’t say a word… that’s boygroup stan behavior. Those same fans will probably be bitter that “them Koreans didn’t get NMIXX the first time” as Love Me Like This enjoys chart success domestically currently. As you’ve gleamed, this is a track that does not actually sound like a highlight medley but one, coherent song, taking inspiration from the brass-heavy and bratty attitudes of Megan Trainor and Fifth Harmony’s BO$$. In the K-Pop sphere, they have a predecessor too: Wonder Girls’s 2012 release Like This in its verses especially. (I’m not the only one who made this comparison! Check out the Youtube comments to Like This). After a thrilling pre-chorus, the chorus is a vacuum with cowbells and the sole trumpet, but adds electric guitars in the second half that makes it sound like the sonic equivalent of somebody blowing a giant electric fan on a superstar, making their hair look supersized. That chorus has been stuck in my head for weeks! It’s lots of fun.
The less I say of pre-release Young Dumb Stupid with its nursery rhyme chant chorus, the better. (I hate the rest of the track too, for the record) The rest of the EP is alright, a bit reminiscent of Red Velvet’s Red side releases. There’s singers here, who sing and sound good together.
Okay. There’s the IVE. Hmm…
IVE — I’VE
I now know what song I was actually thinking of last time with Kitsch. It wasn’t Püf. It was Dan Dan by Gülsen with the percussion. And I came around on the song. Yeah… opinions are fickle… also, it works as a B-side. Speaking of: there’s these Turkish strings on Blue Blood in the chorus. I’m onto this Turk! I see you!
The debut album I’VE is fine. It’s an assorted mix of usually good, occasionally great pop music that has strong production and serviceable vocal moments from all members. Everything you want from a pop album is on here: the cheery tracks, the ballad closer, the midtempo tracks, all sequenced in an acceptable manner. I hear Red Velvet on the summery NOT YOUR GIRL, but as far as K-Pop comparisons go, that’s about it. The album cements IVE as a group that is good at what they do, but without a big unifying concept... in their album tracks, anyway. Maybe that it loosens the rigid image of the rich spoiled girl that IVE have cultivated so far? My personal highlights are Hypnosis, which sounds positively trashy in the background, like a $5 808 beat and piano that a Youtube rapper would go for, and Cherish, with Ryan Jhun pretending he’s Pharrell by beginning with a four-count start of the synths, which is otherwise a solid mall pop track. The lead single, you say?
☆ IVE — I Am
IVE have become too big to fail on August 22, 2022. That’s when their third single AFTER LIKE came out, complete with the I Will Survive sample that still sounded subservient to the big, glossy, shimmering overall package. It was a victory lap cinching their top dog position in the K-Pop world. All that goodwill — and, it must be acknowledged, Jang Wonyoung’s incredibly strong star power — gave them enough of a safety net to release something like Kitsch* and still dominate the Korean charts for days on end. More than that, IVE’s conceptual gamble — this vision of rich young (and, why lie, sexualized) girls only ever having fun, a perennial fantasy — means that everything feels grandiose from the jump. But the thing is that they sonically always back it up, too. I Am is a relief from all the easy listening that has permeated girlgroup K-Pop thanks to NewJeans: Europop, backed with flashy synths and a muscular bass and a choir-like group vocal that feels positively transcendent, doing almost no detours. It’s mixed better than tracks of like ten years ago, but it feels like the K-Pop of the 2nd generation, back when producers would think girlgroups needed big walls of sound (I’m thinking KARA’s Step). I hear some Ava Max on it, but here’s where K-Pop is better… with a group, there’s a) variety in the vocals and b) you get choruses like this. I’m a fan. Dare I say IVE cinched K-Pop SOTY for the second year in a row?
* I said what I said about Kitsch earlier, but a B-side like that would usually not be released a couple weeks in advance, unless they’re… too big to fail.
Here’s everything I reviewed in a neat playlist:
Every Music Dispatch for 2023 I post about a Turkish vocal I love. This week, the man once called Turkey’s Justin Timberlake — except, you know, isn’t like Timberlake at all — Kenan Doğulu. That intro is one of my favorite ringtone pop moments.
mike shinoda and changkyun are really tethered huh...
Oh my god lol these appear as Notes now too huh