Take a Beat w/ Charli XCX & Electroclash
On 5/8/24 we are showing up to pop girl promo events, massaging our brains with cacophony, and listening to and watching WOMEN.
Welcome to Take a Beat! Where I exorcise my beloved pop cultural fixations, allowing them to flourish in the souls of the unwashed masses (i.e., you).
It’s a charitable act, but somebody has to do it. And at least 4 people have expressed a craving for this!! That’s demand and this is the pop cultural open market, baby.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
TL;DR
Charli XCX called her followers to Williamsburg, and she gave everyone a quintessentially Charli experience - Charli XCX sampler here
Dua Lipa called her followers to Times Square, and she played 4 songs out of a semitruck trailer (for which we thank her)
Ever need music that matches your levels of unwell? Try my Brainscratchers playlist and let the soundwaves scrape in between the folds of your brain :)
St. Vincent rocks in all of rock’s forms on her latest album All Born Screaming - read my review below and stream Spotify | Apple
Julia Fox put out a song, and it has no business being this good?!!!
Listen: Spotify | AppleBits & Bobs
Man About Town, Pt. 1:
Charli XCX @ The Lot Radio in Brooklyn
Charli XCX’s new album Brat comes out June 10, and she is promoting it by doing what Charli knows best: showing off and having a fucking blast.
As with any Charli release, she is prioritizing the gays of Brooklyn in her promotion. Last Thursday she used her personal text line, which she has previously used to send voice memos where she simply uttered the words “sweat” and “3 6 5”, to invite NY’s finest alt Gen Zers to join her in par’yin’ in the streets of Williamsburg.
The lucky ~1,500 of us waited while she DJ’d three or so songs in a barely visible corner of The Lot Radio, and we were rewarded with a resplendently Charli display of dancing, lip syncing, and general flaunting on top of a luxury SUV that she presumably likes to drive FAST. All that’s left is to put on our Von Dutch hat and ride.
If you’ve only heard the 21st century pop classics “I Love It” or “Boom Clap”, I encourage you to queue up my Charli Sampler whenever you’re trying to
go fast,
work hard,
and/or party your ass off.
Man About Town, Pt. 2:
Dua Lipa @ Times Square
The “go girl, give us nothing” allegations are back for Miss Lipa. But those allegations are against the music on her highly anticipated 3rd LP, not against the promo for it! Miss Peep has been traversing NYC, hosting and performing (both well!) at SNL, making photo dumps of the whole experience, and hosting a little baby mini-concert in Times Square all before slaying at the Met Gala.
On a rainy Sunday evening she performed her 3 singles - “Houdini”, “Training Season”, “Illusion” - as well as the album closer, “Happy for You”. The singles are the best songs on the new record Radical Optimism, for better or (more likely) for worse,
At the scene with Carson, Faith, and Jonathan,
I heard a man speculating “she probably won’t even tour this time around”
Fewer people knew the words than when I saw Carly Rae Jepsen
We joked about screaming “PLAY ‘LEVITATING’”
I saw a man doing poppers (not relevant)
So anyways, probably just stream Future Nostalgia :/
Can You Sub that Sub Genre Some More?
An Ode to Electroclash & the Utility of the Brainscratcher
I, like many, enjoy listening to music that amplifies my current mood. If I am feeling reflective, I want spacious melodies that will let me peer deeper into the mirror. If I am feeling conspiratorial, I want confident, powerful vocals reinforcing my cause.
But sometimes I’m just feeling SUBSUMED. Events transpire that leave me not angry, not sad, but some combination of bewildered, overwhelmed, unsettled. For me, this manifests in the form of static bouncing between the folds of my brain and the skull that is trapping that unwelcome entropy. In those moments all I want to do is match that unwelcome entropy with the beautiful turbulence of electroclash bangers.
I want bass that drags into swaths of scuzz, I want guitar that crunches and crackles, I want synths that squeal and zig zag into odd, trapezoidal shapes. I want abrupt shifts in melody, I want voices that devolve into primal howls.
I want ELECTROCLASH. Where electronic, rock, hip hop, metal, and any other freethinking genre head to a studio in an unfinished basement for a glorious orgy.
What that sonorous orgy produces is music that muscles its way into the folds of your tense, defensive brain and massages out the kinks. Does it feel good or does it hurt? Yes, a thousand times yes.
That grating static in my head has now settled into a gentle purr, and the dregs of chaos scraped from my brain are draining through my brainstem, leaving my tissue pliant, my eyes heavy with the prospect of well-earned rest.
Next time your brain needs scratched, check out my Brainscratchers playlist, complete with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Death Grips, Grace Ives, SOPHIE, and many more.
Listen: Spotify
Album of the Week:
All Born Screaming by St. Vincent
On her raucous 7th LP, St. Vincent is letting her freak flag fly. All Born Screaming moves through shimmering soft rock (“Hell is Near”), pounding arena rock (“Broken Man”, “Flea”), bouncy funk rock (“Big Time Nothing”, “So Many Planets”), and playful pop rock (“The Sweetest Fruit”). Every track is self-produced by Annie Clark herself, and she brings in Led Zeppelin-inspired folksy strumming, Dave Grohl’s own drumming, an array of horns, and synths both beautiful and violent that swirl throughout almost every track.
But no matter the array of influences nor the subgenres that come to mind while listening to All Born Screaming, never will you forget that this is a ROCK album from the ROCK project St. Vincent.
Annie Clark has always had a predilection for mixing the achingly beautiful with the unnervingly violent. Her operatic vocals routinely traverse an assortment of registers and emotions, all the while leaving the impression that she is hitting those notes *just so*. She chooses crunchy over crisp guitar 9 times out of 10, and somehow it seems you could map every amorphous fizz to a precise note on a page of handwritten sheet music, scripted intricately on stock with an ink-heavy pen. She is acing her every rehearsal at Juilliard, but then she’s heading to a basement in Bushwick to thrash.
Through the years the ratio of formality to chaos in a given St. Vincent project has shifted, with earlier works (up through the perfect self-titled LP) more disorienting than middle-late works. But All Born Screaming finds her closer to a 50/50 ratio than ever, a powerful statement that formality and entropy are always engaged in a conversation. And luckily for us, that conversation fucking rocks.
LIYL: Women who rock; Dave Grohl’s drumming; your electro-rock with a side of funk; your beauty with a side of decay; The White Stripes
Song of the Week:
Down the Drain by Julia Fox
Julia Fox, the… media personality (?), previewed her debut single at Charli XCX’s Boiler Room set a month ago, and… it ripped? And now the song is officially out… and it’s confirmed to absolutely rip?! No wonder this woman was the Safdies’ muse for Uncut J’ahms!!!
LIYL: Charli XCX; queer raves; women screaming; reclaiming “whore”
Bits & Bobs
If you’re not on the Chappell Roan train, here’s another (fake/amusing) reminder to hop the FUCK on:
Baby Reindeer on Netflix really is THAT GOOD and only 7x 30-40 minute episodes to boot.
Something tough about living in NYC is I missed general sale to see the band Mannequin Pussy (yes, MANNEQUIN PUSSY) at a pretty big venue and now they are $200+ resale. Too much taste in this town!!!!
SEE YOU NEXT WEEK WITH… IDK YET BUT I GOT IDEAS!!!! 👋
I could not love this any more! It is smart, funny and beautifully written. It is so very AUTHENTICALLY JOSHUA, of course it is incredible.
can we get a “top movies of the year, so far”?