Fluxblog 617: even the mistakes that you make have a certain cohesion

“Love and Devotion” is a lovely, laid back, and agreeable song about being in love, but it’s written from a somewhat contrarian point of view. Here’s what Sam Sullivan has to say about it:

“These days, it seems like people are always saying, ‘ooh, love is so hard; let’s work on our relationship; we need to find compromise.’ No. Wrong. Love is easy, actually. Love is quite fun. Don’t fall for this insidious, anti-love propaganda.”

If you’re in a happy relationship, it can feel like you’ve cracked a code for living and everyone who hasn’t figured out can look a bit foolish. It can make you quite smug! But Sullivan is right about this. Love may be difficult to find, but real deal true blue love is easy and fun.

Like most of Sam and Louise’s songs, “Love & Devotion” is so deeply rooted in folk-pop tradition that it could pass as something written 40-50 years ago. The duo’s fundamentals are strong, the substance is tried and true. But I don’t think it actually feels retro. The Sullivans have a peculiar arrangement and production style – they’re always pushing for a sound just beyond their grasp and landing on odd aesthetic balances and textural contrasts. R&B impulses get blurred by folk sensibilities, attempts at reggae grooves end up closer to Mac DeMarco vibes. No matter what they do, they can’t sound like anything but themselves.

Which is for the best, really. They may not be bone-deep eccentrics like fellow brother/sister duo The Fiery Furnaces, but they have a similar magnetic charm and also seem like they’re building a little world together.

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The aesthetic premise of Music, Fashion, Film is basically “pop-punk, but aesthetically interesting.” Charli XCX has been toying with rock sounds through her entire career, so it’s not surprising she’d tip in this direction. If anything, she’s always been a punk making pop and dance music, and not the other way around.

The intriguing thing about this body of work is how she and collaborators AG Cook and Finn Keane reinterpret a very 00s version of rock music. They clearly have a lot of affection for the dynamics of pop-punk and “landfill indie” of their youth, but not so much the drab and limited palette of all that music. They splice up chords, aggressively transpose and mutilate timbre, and glitch it up to avoid plodding rhythms. It’s not unprecedented – for one thing, Madonna and Mirwais were on this at the turn of the 21st century – but it’s well-executed and highly effective in applying fresh style to an overly familiar form.

It is a little frustrating to me that this music is so poetic and evocative in its abstraction of guitar rock, but Charli’s lyrics are direct to the point of total artlessness. I suppose for a lot of people that’s the entire appeal – the sound is ultra stylized, but she’s telling you exactly how she feels. If you have a parasocial investment in her, it may seem unguarded and brutally honest. It might feel like she’s letting you in. But I don’t feel that way about Charli XCX, so the lyrics mostly sound like a flat statement of neuroses. Sometimes it just sounds like she’s singing a press release or publicist approved notes app message. I’m fine with the subject matter, I just wish it felt more of a piece with the music rather than a supposedly artful juxtaposition.

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At my age, Goodbye 2012! is a hilarious title for a record. By that point in my life I had been writing Fluxblog for 10 years, had just finished my runs with Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, and was just starting a job as music editor for BuzzFeed. I suppose I have some nostalgia attached to my early days at BuzzFeed – it truly felt like joining a cult early on – but I don’t have a romantic feeling about this era. I was too adult, too jaded, too settled into my identity.

Not so for Coupdekat, who was a preteen in 2012, and made Goodbye 2012! as a way of exploring an innocent time in her life just prior to puberty. I love this idea, if just because I’m curious about what this period looked like to someone from a totally different perspective.

A lot of the record isn’t particularly retro – to my ears a majority of tracks are firmly rooted in contemporary post-hyperpop electronic indie production – but “mwah” is a very evocative throwback to the later phases of what’s now called indie sleaze. It feels more 00s to me, but that’s only because I spent a decade before 2012 collecting songs just like it.

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• Molly Mary O’Brien wrote about going to the Osheaga festival in Montreal. There’s some great stuff in the post, but I particularly like this bit about Tate McRae:

Our artist wristbands granted us a close range for Tate McRae, who was kitted out in low-rise black stretch pants and a black going out top, looking like a cross between an Express customer from 2003 and an Express employee from 2003; her set was, incongruously, a structure that evoked ancient times, with elegant white columns; she should have worn a lovely toga. Maybe I'm old, too steeped in the pop iconography of yore, but I don't get what Tate McRae wants. Janet Jackson wanted control, Britney Spears wanted to demonstrate the tension between innocence and experience, Beyoncé wanted to show femininity could be just as strong/powerful as masculinity. What does Tate want? To pursue or perhaps be pursued, to kick one's leg over one's head. Situationship music, neither yes nor no. Her last album was called So Close To What and that's how I feel about her music. It's so close...to...what, exactly?!

• Shelfdust’s Steve Morris wrote about Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books for the site’s Year of Evil rubric. But who exactly was the villain of the series?

• Check out Madonna’s tribute to the late William Orbit, who she worked with on her classic Ray of Light album.