Tone Glow 045: Our Favorite Songs, October-December 2020
Tone Glow's writers highlight 20 songs from the year's fourth quarter
I’ve always known this time of year to be special, if only because I can reliably expect my friends and family to be more available. With work on the backburner for the majority of us, there’s time to meet for dinner, to exchange gifts, to celebrate and bond at parties and events. It’s why, regardless of any religious affiliation, this season feels so special, so sacred—like a microcosm of what all of life should be like. On top of that, it means I have ample time to listen to music, unhurried and unbothered. New releases slow down, publications are put on hold, editors have created out-of-office messages—at last, I can catch up on everything I missed. Maybe that’s what this time is like for you, too. And if you’re in need of something to hear, you can peruse our list of 20 songs we loved from the past few months. Happy holidays, happy listening. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Oliver Coates - “Reunification 2018” (RVNG Intl.)
I was so close to the stage at an Oliver Coates show in 2018 that the massive speakers on the edge of the raised platform were perched at eye level, facing directly at me. When Coates began to play “Reunification 2018,” the fortissississimo, crunchy sound of his amplified cello nearly blew me out of my chair. Coates is in the business of making sounds that make you feel something—alive, maybe. Under his fingers, the cello leads you on a path of sonic resurrection, and “Reunification 2018” is its climax, with its mix of metallic, dark drones and spiraling repetitions that get lost in a shoegaze-y atmosphere. This is the kind of music that’s best experienced so loud it blasts your thoughts out of your head, vibrating through your body until it shakes, until you’re fully consumed by the sound.
Upon leaving that show, I desperately searched for a recording of “Reunification 2018” to no avail. But now it’s out in the world, and you too can experience the pure catharsis of an electrified cello blaring at beyond-maximum volume right into your ears. Dive in, head first. —Vanessa Ague
Purchase skins n slime at Bandcamp.
Okkyung Lee - “Teum (the Silvery Slit)” (GRM Portraits)
Anyone familiar with Okkyung Lee’s work is well aware of her ability to wrest all manner of scrapes, croaks, moans, and other abrasions from her cello. Her practice stems not from an obsession with the instrument but an acute attention to the sonic environment and a desire to create sounds that engage with it. It’s why I often find her collaborative work most exciting—at the very least, I bet it’s why there’s so much of it. Because of this, I’m surprised at how long it’s taken for her to make use of live electronics as a soloist; on Teum (the Silvery Slit), they enable her to generate her own sonic environs to play with and react to. The cello playing here and its analog resonances melt continuously into one another, evincing intense autonomous counterpoint and producing a motile drone utterly enveloping in its fullness. None of Lee’s previous experiments with pre-synthesized / recorded sound possess the dynamism and vivacity of Teum; this feels like a natural development of her improvisatory idiom, the addition of yet another extended technique to her arsenal. —Jinhyung Kim
Purchase Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit) at Bandcamp.
VOSP - “B.C.S.I.” (Anathema Archive)
Eric Grieshaber is perhaps best known for his involvement with Pool, the ultra-minimal tape/noise ensemble and important precursor to non-music groups like Shots. However, whereas Pool excels at sidelong, improvisatory jams, Grieshaber’s solo work under the VOSP moniker feels denser, less spontaneous and more composed. Clocking in generally between four and six minutes, the pieces on Pale Shelter (released on Gunther Valentine’s always-excellent anathema archive) incorporate familiar techniques and textures from Grieshaber’s work with Pool, but unfurl with a greater sense of purpose.
Opener “B.C.S.I.” is well-chosen as a thesis statement for the album as a whole. The track begins with what could pass for untreated field recordings, if not for the sporadic but persistent tape manipulations which warp and bend the recorded noise. Soon, what seemed like incidental noises—ambient scratches, scrapes and bangs—become sharper, more rhythmic and more insistent, until the track more closely resembles the roarings and thrashings of some great, monstrous machine. It’s a clever effect, which shows Grieshaber’s attentive handling of his materials. It assures us that, over the album to come, no matter how lost we feel in the tracks to come, we are always in the care of an expert guide. —Mark Cutler
Purchase Pale Shelter at Bandcamp.
Nondi_ - “Interlude (Vision of a Memory)” (HRR)
Pennsylvania-based artist Nondi_ (pronounced “underscore”) has had an astoundingly prolific 2020 with 17 releases under a variety of aliases; she’s explored densely packed hardcore techno and gabber as Yakui, lo-fi drone and power ambient as part of her duo Crushing Union, demented “post-nightcore” and weightless grime as Fuuka ASMR, and straightforward, bitcrushed minimal techno as B.G.S. While all these are great on their own merits, it’s her releases under her footwork and juke-centered main project, Nondi_, that I’ve found to be some of the most compelling work of the year. Her Gray Sun series of EPs focus on a defiantly unique sonic landscape of hazy, sepia-colored ambient footwork that reaches the ears as though escaping from the depths of a dying star. “Vision of a Memory,” an interlude from the second volume of Gray Sun, is my favorite of these tracks, featuring slow-moving synth pads that collapse in on one another beside a solemn percussive loop. It’s eerie, soothing and imbued with a strange universality: I could imagine it scoring anything from lilting fog covering a graveyard to a sunny nature documentary. As the days grow shorter and the nights bleed through the dawn, it’s a track that remains firmly in my mind. —Maxie Younger
Purchase Gray Sun Vol 2 at Bandcamp.
Lim Giong - “念 (Recite)” (Pure Person Press)
“念 (Recite)” by Taiwanese musician Lim Giong is one of the most striking compositions I heard all year. I have a bad habit of sloppily interchanging “track,” “song,” “tune,” and “composition” in my writing, but “Recite,” a semi-official sequel to one of Lim’s early works for film, feels longer than its 5+ minutes, uncoiling along a subtle and sublime operatic arc. It’s also operational, a ritual with a purpose. Lim’s a very spiritual person, and religion suffuses his music insofar as his work has always been motivated by a desire to reflect Taiwan’s aural specificities—tinny horns blasting at temple fairs, rural train crossings, hummed folk prayers, breakfast stall gossip — in a way that “localizes” its distinct culture. But the street is abstracted away in “Recite.” It sounds more like a recreation from scratch of sounds that have been internalized over a lifetime than a sonic mirror turned outward.
Encased within a solid, effective if stark arpeggiated synth edifice, “Recite” is mostly Lim’s voice, words that he’s carried for so long they’re inseparable from him. It begins with a call to the immortals from traditional Taiwanese opera, delivered by Lim in dramatic glissandos, then dwells on a sturdy recitation of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, a prayer he’s recited daily since childhood. The track’s title, 念, is a character that appears in various permutations, comprising part of the words for idea (念頭), thought (觀念), opinion (想法), to read (念書), to chant spells (念咒), to recite scripture (念經). As a composition, “Recite” also seems to glide between noun and verb, subject and object. Even for listeners lacking this linguistic context, “Recite” conveys a sense of seriousness and devotion in its earnest, incantatory directness. Though Lim had a solid early-2000s career as a club DJ and producer, and remains active as a film composer, these days he’s receded to the countryside and rarely releases original compositions unattached to a larger project, making this small piece of new work feel even more intentional and rare. —Josh Feola
Purchase A Pure Person at Bandcamp.
John Wall & Alex Rodgers - “Wrongfoot the Servants & Darkshop” (self-released)
‘Cubist’ was the first word that popped into my head when I heard “Wrongfoot”; the first few seconds shudder violently into existence—a birth—skidding between warped chords and time-stretched percussive blasts, one moment collapsing the stereo field into a focused, centered beam of energy and the next exploding it beyond its suddenly narrow limits. Far from frantic and frenetic, this music moves at both a glacial and hyper pace; while shattered drum-hits fly by at warp speed, tendrils of sound snake their way upwards to the surface, only to be submerged once again in a roiling sea of snaps and thuds. Moments after Alex Rodgers’ AutoTuned voice comes crashing in, the piece takes a thrilling left turn, taking it from the best ‘computer music’ has to offer to something else entirely: suddenly there is stillness, a beautiful drone, carried by waves of Rodgers’s words (“Spare them the shit / Make them a bulwark / Spread across the mats and slices / Over the blood and mulch and bones”). Then—it’s over. “...The dark shop.” Enormous, life-affirming music.
“Wrongfoot” sounds instantly recognizable, loaded with connotations (club sounds, AutoTune, ‘electroacoustic’ glitch work), but somehow also utterly alien; the sources (materials and techniques) are at once cleanly obliterated in the process of abstraction and also preserved—they live on in the final product, grounding it, against the tempting impulse to categorize this music as purely ‘abstract’ or ‘illegible.’ Even art this opaque has a clear origin story, and that story should be told—through the art itself. Here is where the still admittedly shaky cubist analogy still holds water: Wall doesn’t strive for an absolute ‘total abstraction’ here, but rather a decisive, tactical fracturing of reality, of the world as it exists—“Wrongfoot” lives not in the realm of the Spirit or the twelve-tone row, but, well, on earth, just as distinct objects can still be perceived in cubist works. But far from flattening his work into some kind of didactic, ‘representational’ or ‘figurative’ document (or a cynical, metatextual ‘suturing’ of materials with little interest in formal beauty or unity), this rootedness only strengthens its impact, pushing us—through the art itself, not through a nonsensical press release and bombastic PR campaign—to truly think about the conditions from which this music emerged, and the conditions into which it is emerging.
Wall cites one Mr. Bill as a sample source, a self-described “leader in the audio production world for years” who mostly seems to make garish dubstep sample packs. This seemingly bizarre decision perfectly exemplifies Wall’s fundamental philosophy: what is seemingly ‘new’ is not new, but rather assembled from the scattered debris of history and cultural production, always building off of what is already there. Any perceived ‘newness’ comes not from some kind of divine “summoning” of sound from the abyss (or from, say, code written from scratch, a deceptive way to feign abstract ‘originality’ while sidestepping the context and tradition from which that language was built, or the fact that millions of lines of code have been repeatedly written ‘from scratch’ to produce the same handful of tired sounds), but rather from recontextualizing, rearranging, fragmenting and manipulating this debris (whether in the form of technique or actual sound material), which in turn produces certain ruptures... and so on. It’s already been done, so why not steal it?
There are admittedly many works that could also lead to this perhaps obvious conclusion; but “Wrongfoot” stands out for its unwavering commitment to music. “Wrongfoot” reveals the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of Wall’s work. On the one hand, there is a deep pessimism regarding art and cultural production: this work seems to indicate that everything has already been recorded, played, performed, copied, co-opted; we in 2020 are left with the rubble, reduced to sifting through Mr. Bill’s discography for samples, constantly asking ourselves, “What now?” On the other hand, there is a deep optimism: Wall’s work points towards the twists and turns of cultural and technological history that led—through, yes, Mr. Bill—to this singular, discrete work; everything has already been recorded, played, performed, copied, co-opted—YES—and this is only the beginning, something that can transmute shit to gold. There is nothing ‘new’—that is precisely where the new emerges. —Sunik Kim
Purchase v03b-[ds.nla] at Bandcamp.
Masahiro Sugaya - “Au. Pt. C” (Longform Editions)
The first time I put this on to listen to it, it didn’t register to me that I actually had any music playing. I was writing my blurb for the Kero Kero Bonito song that’s also in this issue, and the fact that I was humming the tune was enough to drown out all the sounds in the first three minutes of the record. When I pulled my media player up to queue up the album only to realize I had already done so, I laughed so hard I woke my cat from a deep sleep. This was going to require some more attentive listening, I realized, so I turned the volume up and stopped doing things. I was feeling a bit stressed and needed a breather anyway, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to take a moment and collect my thoughts.
I love Masahiro Sugaya’s work. His most celebrated release, a work for theater which was his first to be released on CD (his prior releases only exist as still hard to find cassettes), is an understated work of flowing liquid beauty that stands alongside the best works by Hiroshi Yoshimura and Haruomi Hosono’s Hana Ni Mizu. I’m divided on how I feel about the repackaging and selling of Japanese new age music through means such as the Kankyō Ongaku compilation. On one hand, it feels like a predatory grab at a previously untapped market of people that listen to this stuff on YouTube as a sleep aid. On the other, the renewed interest in these great artists facilitate things like Longform Editions having Inoyama Land and Masahiro Sugaya make brand new music.
The Inoyama Land edition sounds like a true blue work in the vein of what they’ve done in the past—which is, of course, fantastic—but this Sugaya piece sounds like nothing I’ve heard from him before. It’s more minimal, more experimental, more surprising, and in some ways maybe even more beautiful. I had the volume cranked way up because I was expecting it to be quiet the whole way through, and a loud portion about a third of the way in made me jump sky high; I woke the cat up again. Sugaya could have given us more of what I guess we’re now calling “environmental music,” and I would have been happy with that, but instead he went his own way with this cocktail of microsound and field recording. “I am interested in unclear image,” Sugaya says. “I am interested in unclear meaning, too.” Whatever this means, I’m interested in it too. —Shy Thompson
Purchase Au. Pt. C at Bandcamp.
Adrianne Lenker - “Ingydar” (4AD)
As best as I can describe it, Big Thief’s music hits all the sweet spots: the woodsy and mysterious nature of Fables of the Reconstruction, which R.E.M. left behind when they started eyeing that sweet buck; and the foggy hangover mornings of The Notorious Byrd Brothers that the Byrds abandoned when they started making country rock. Big Thief are plenty capable thanks to the sturdy rhythm section of bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia, while guitarist Buck Meek adds sweet, flat vocals—like an even softer Ira Kaplan—while his guitar subtly takes songs in different directions. But I don’t think anyone would argue with me that Big Thief’s not-secret weapon is frontwoman Adrianne Lenker, and while her songs in Big Thief sound like quiet ruminations of the impending apocalypse, her solo songs sound even quieter.
A lot of publications have celebrated “Anything,” the song with the most direct hook on her album (“I want to kiss-kiss your eyes again”) on their own songs list, as part of the unspoken rule that a lot of pubs abide by: best songs must be singles. For my money, “Ingydar” is even more special, a pre-chorus comprised of unique rhymes and images—and each pre-chorus different than the last as if that weren’t enough! There’s a chorus that encapsulates the strangeness of early R.E.M. and The Byrds: “Everything eats and is eaten / Time is fed.” I’m immediately won over by the song when it reaches its first pre-chorus, but the string of images it provides is what really sticks in my head: “His eyes are blueberries, video screens / Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers from books half-read” (a lesser poet would’ve probably gone with “from books I've read,” whereas this line now calls to mind an entire library of books that Lenker is meaning to get to but likely never will). That little stanza makes “Ingydar” play like a love song, and then the chorus hits of unstoppable time feeding on everything, and it renders every preceding lyric ambiguous.
There have been great strides in indie artists to make their music more cerebral, dating back to the pre-millennium tension and questioning the domestic bliss of surburbia in the late-80s and ’90s. It took until Lenker to really get to the heart of the issue, which is that far too few of popular music’s lyricists are actually poets, and far too few song lyrics can stand up as poetry on their own. Give me a book of these “Drying blueberries” and “Minneapolis schemes”; give me these songs in a book of poems. Until then, give me songs. —Marshall Gu
Purchase songs at Bandcamp.
Mica Levi - “Pain” (self-released)
Mica Levi’s first solo LP, Ruff Dog, is beautiful—a taut punch of cicatrized guitar distortion and muffled, echoing vocals that split apart into crushed granules of white noise. Compared to the tensile, dreamlike orchestral soundtracks Levi has composed for feature films such as Under the Skin and Jackie, Ruff Dog is nightmarish, like the final throes of a negative thought spiral: it thrashes, it wanders, it shrieks. “Pain” is a standout of the tracks on offer, a bassy squall of strums and tinny drum machine beats fronted by Levi’s deadened voice. Their murmurs morph into an aggrieved howl before suddenly breaking off, transitioning to a skeletal, throbbing guitar riff. As I listen, I think about the ways in which memories become distorted, magnified, saturated over time; “Pain” feels like a refraction of every dingy house show with blown-out speakers I’ve had the misfortune to attend without earplugs on hand. It embodies the charm, the fear, the intensity of relentless, immediate expression; it’s a bathroom stall wall that’s more permanent marker than paint, with Levi’s scrawl filling as many of the remaining blank spaces as it can. —Maxie Younger
Purchase Ruff Dog at Bandcamp.
Tisakorean - “Rocky Road” (feat. Father & YehMe2) (Ultra)
Over an uncharacteristically aggressive beat courtesy of YehMe2, Tisakorean showcases how his trademark wackiness can adapt to any situation. “She got that ice cream / I’m like ‘Can I get a lick?’” fuels the bouncy fun throughout, Tisa uncaring as to how bizarre his brand of rapping contrasts with the distorted 808s and screechy bass. Father shows up with a perfect guest verse on how he does not care about the perception of simping, selflessly giving to bad bitches in a grateful manner. It’s a natural pairing of jesters, swaying to and fro within entertaining rhythms to create one of 2020’s best collaborations. —Eli Schoop
Primpce - “The Librarian” (Syncro System)
In 2015, Alex Brownstein-Carter and Zach Sharp made a feature film called Chacing Pavements, a word-for-word adaptation of a romantic comedy script they found on a screenplay-formatting website. It was written by Paul G. Chester Alcanatara, a 16-year-old boy from the Philippines. Five years later, Brownstein-Carter returned to the screenplay for source material. Using fragmented passages from Chacing Pavements and The Librarian, a short screenplay also written by Alcanatara, he wrote the lyrics for the closing track on Primpce's sophomore album, Goodbye Marines and Hello Dad It's Son or Mr. Worm the Monster.
The other half of Primpce is David Sigler, a classically trained guitarist who was taking a 20th century music course when the instrumental for the “The Librarian” was first conceived, long before its lyrics were cannibalized. The song is far from the weirdest track on Goodbye Marines, but it’s the most harmonically ambitious. Drawing inspiration from the artists he was studying at the time—Scriabin, Stravinsky, Berg—Sigler wrote tantalizingly atonal guitar lines that dance around Brownstein-Carter’s vocal melody, furthering the sense of randomness inherent to lines like “belly lossy mid / fidget swirl whirligig.” Half a minute into the song, the song screeches to a halt for a haunting piano solo straight out of the serialist songbook, held together by some brilliant bass comping. Then, just after the minute mark, Brownstein-Carter rides back in on a maelstrom of guitars and a jittery drumbeat, a welcome rush of tonal harmony and a return to the Primpce universe as we know it. “We are just textmates and that is all!” he proclaims. Later, as he sinks into the manic groove that carries the song and the album to its conclusion, he bids farewell to his digital companion: “you smell so good / meeting adjourned.” —Raphael Helfand
Purchase Goodbye Marines and Hello Dad It's Son or Mr. Worm the Monster at Bandcamp.
Tricot - “Omae” (Cutting Edge)
Sometimes reality sinks in the heaviest when it’s put in the most obvious terms. For the case of “Omae,” Tricot drop the truth as subtle as a swing of a sledgehammer. “Ah, I have to live with myself every day,” frontwoman Ikkyu Nakajima opens the song with a much relatable groan. She spends the rest of the track telling her inner voice to just shut the fuck up, and the band’s wrestling-rock physically captures that kicking and screaming between the opposite, conflicting corners of her mind. If you needed a shot of something to let out pent-up frustration about the worst parts of yourself, “Omae” serves a full-on round in a brief spurt of time.
But while the rush of “Omae” offers incredible, if temporary relief, the song’s real focus is on confronting what remains after all the initial irritation dissipates. “Work or school / even if I ditch everything / I can’t take a break from myself,” Nakajima sings. “Sorrow and pain, sadness and frustration / there’s nothing I can do but sing.” I can yell all I want at myself in the mirror, though nothing is ultimately solved. I intentionally distract myself to procrastinate from coming to terms that I have to live with myself and my own actions. “Omae” drills down these facts in the most straightforward way whether I like it or not to slap me in the face and knock me some sense. —Ryo Miyauchi
Purchase 10 at any of these retailers.
Blue Öyster Cult - “The Alchemist” (Frontiers Music SRL)
Working on my own music often means that I don’t listen to much music apart from mine. When I do, it functions as background music, with little chance to really connect with a song in a real way. It’s not rare that what little gets my attention fits outside my sphere, and it’s quite common that I go to comfort music when needing to decompress from intense concentration with my own work. That this year was one of my most productive meant that a lot of interesting stuff went unnoticed.
This year and its turmoil were good for new music; trying times require new approaches and this year has shown new and vital music, but the song that has grabbed the most in this past quarter is by a daddy rock band, Blue Öyster Cult. BÖC have been dragging their feet as a repertoire band for the past couple of decades, and their last album was unfocused and uninspired to say the least. Nothing led audiences to expect they’d release a good album this late in their career, but history shows us that old timers can still have a few tricks left and The Symbol Remains manages to check all the boxes for fans and casual listeners alike. The strongest track on the record is “The Alchemist,” a song in which the band applies all their trademarks (hard rock mixed with psychedelic rock and pop with a veneer of occultism and hermetic symbolism) into a single epic.
I suppose at some point the band realized that bands like Ghost were making money out of their brand of music, and so they decided to set the record straight one last time. Of course, the preposterousness is always there with this band, so a lot has to be taken at face value, but “The Alchemist” scratches every itch I still have for this type of sound, and the existence of this album feels like a triumph in an age when the very notion of a rock band seems superfluous and outdated. Mind you, BÖC are outdated, but in a sweet way that feels inspirational. This is a song that tells you that it’s OK to indulge in nerdy conspiracies about a sinister figure pulling the strings throughout history, and having that dressed in gloomy but never-depressing riffs. They play with the utmost conviction, knowing the exact sound they want. Rock and Roll is dead but its ghost can still rock my socks when done with gusto and chutzpah. This song reminds me of a time in which people were afraid that they were going to hell for listening to Black Sabbath and Venom, and this naivete is comforting in 2020. —Gil Sansón
Purchase The Symbol Remains at the Blue Öyster Cult website.
Kero Kero Bonito - “It’s Bugsnax!” (Iam8bit)
Kero Kero Bonito’s Bonito Generation is one of my favorite records. There are few albums that I feel encapsulate my personhood so effectively— it’s fun and cute, a bit smug at times, and occasionally cloyingly emotional. Bonito Generation defined my 2017, and I still come back to it pretty often. “Try Me” is my reminder to pat myself on the back for being, all things considered, pretty cool and good. “Break” has often given me reassurance that it’s okay to stop working so hard so often and enjoy doing nothing. My mom has no idea how much she owes “Hey Parents” for a majority of the times I’ve picked up the phone to call her. And “Picture This” reminds me to put a microscope to every small moment that I enjoy—which is at least partially the reason I write about music.
“Picture This” is pretty much one of my favorite songs, but I played it to gosh darn death. The day the single dropped, it was the only song I listened to. I’m pretty easily susceptible to burnout, and I try to “save” my favorite music so that I don’t get tired of it so fast, but sometimes I can’t help myself—so it’s been a good long while since “Picture This” has been in regular rotation. Fortunately for me, Kero Kero Bonito’s song they made for the video game Bugsnax is pretty much the exact same song. It’s hilariously beat-by-beat similar, to the point where you could probably look at the waveforms next to each other and notice some similarities—they’re even almost the same length.
Their newest album, Time ‘n’ Place, is good and all—it’s home to another of my all-time favorite songs, “Only Acting”—but it sheds a bit too much of what I loved about Bonito Generation for me to really get into it. “It’s Bugsnax!” is a flash of that version of Kero Kero Bonito I listened to day after day for almost an entire year. But honestly? The song’s just a total earworm. The day Bugsnax came out I tried to watch a stream of the game, and while it looks like a great time (and is responsible for one of the greatest video game character designs, Bunger), I ended up tabbing out of it to listen to the song on repeat instead. —Shy Thompson
Purchase “It’s Bugsnax!” at the Iam8bit website.
SAWA - “Tenshoku Katsudo” (Spacy)
It’d be an understatement to say SAWA knows her way around a 2010s idol song. While the singer-songwriter began putting out her own post-Perfume electro-pop tunes a little before the 2010s idol explosion, she also wrote songs for other acts from the boom years such as Especia and KOTO. The arcade-pop music of “Tenshoku Katsudo,” the title track to her new album, certainly fits alongside tracks by the latter; the gonzo music video wouldn’t be out of line to promote a record by the former group.
The essence of a 2010s idol song, though, lies a bit deeper in “Tenshoku Katsudo.” Had this been released several years ago, the irony behind the song would’ve been more novel: while the track seems like it’s a charming if silly pop song from the music alone, SAWA sings about the serious, real stress of a draining 9-to-5 and how she wishes to start looking for a different job. “I want to switch careers and change my life / I want to find a job that’s worth doing,” she shouts in the chorus, laying raw, capitalist life woes on a sweet pop melody that’s fitting for karaoke.
I was initially taken back from finding such heavy, relatable talk in a place I usually associate as a form of escapism from those work-related issues, but what impresses me about “Tenshoku Katsudo” is how the juxtaposition of contexts seems rather normal from an idol-adjacent song in 2020. SAWA’s not going for irony. Times just have changed where she can just write a pop song about hating her job with no discretion as long as it’s got a catchy beat, ear-grabbing hooks and a good melody. —Ryo Miyauchi
Purchase “Tenshoku Katsudo” at SAWA’s website. There’s also a flash game.
Cakes Da Killa x Proper Villains - “Don Dada” (Classic Music Company)
True club music is few and far between. The legendary days of Masters at Work and Kerri Chandler have been lost to time in the public consciousness, but fortunately, Cakes Da Killa is the remedy to the problem. Over Proper Villains’s nasty beat, Cakes absolutely eats, giving us powerful flair and an unleashed sense of self. He picks up where he left off being a contemporary of Azealia Banks’s hip-house wave, contributing freshness and verve to club music that desperately needs them. “Might’ve fucked your mans / I would never fuck you” showcases the utter disgust Cakes has for anyone hilariously under his level. There’s a lot of musicians who are trying to create danceable hip-hop and/or rap-influenced house, but Cakes Da Killa bosses the intersection, daring any challengers to get on his level. I doubt we’ll see anyone comparable soon. —Eli Schoop
Purchase Don Dada at Bandcamp.
Holo Bass - “Pop on Rocks” (self-released)
Most people reading probably either won’t care or already know what a VTuber is, so I won’t spend too much time explaining it. If you’ve got even a passing interest in Japanese media you’ve doubtlessly seen people sharing clips, memes, fanart, and god knows what else of these computer generated personalities. While most people are (hopefully) staying home and being responsible during this pandemic, and the need to stave off boredom becomes an ever-present problem, it seemed like the perfect time for this emergent form of entertainment to arrive. It seems like an obvious logical conclusion that some people might want to try their hand at streaming but don’t want to show their faces, so it’s surprising that digital avatars took this long to become as normalized as they have recently. By having complete control over your appearance while still presenting some semblance of a “version” of yourself to your audience, VTubers tend to lean heavily into the performative aspect of entertaining and try their best to stay in the mode of the character that they’ve created.
Hololive—the talent agency that represents the most popular VTubers—launched an English branch three months ago. The response has been insane. Gawr Gura, the most popular of the Hololive English stable, is well on her way to 2 million subscribers, despite making her debut in only mid-September. The secret sauce to Hololive EN’s success, I believe, is that the previously untapped Western audience no longer had to rely on fan made content to experience this stuff anymore. Clippers and fansubbers work quickly and make Japanese VTuber content accessible for free—which is an incredible service and, frankly, takes a lot of skill—but nothing beats being able to catch a stream when it’s live and follow along. These streams have fostered a community that have kept a lot of people who have fallen down the “VTuber rabbit hole” entertained and feeling like they’ve got a place to hang out.
My favorite of the Hololive EN girls, by far, is Amelia Watson. Most Hololive members tend to be talented in some way or another—great singers, skilled artists, multi-lingual, or all of the above—but none of these apply to Amelia. She can’t sing for shit. Her jokes aren’t that funny. She rages at video games and bangs on her table. Her best content, for my money, is when she shares depressing stories about her seemingly terrible life, of which she has many. To put it simply, she’s relatable. She tends to be one of the most popular to make clips and fan content of, and this “remix” of her doing her damndest to stumble through the Dr. Seuss’s book of tongue twisters Fox in Socks set to a bassy beat is something I’ve probably watched 20 times in the past month. It’s a wonderful bit of fan content that was made to enshrine a memorable Amelia moment, poke fun at her a little bit, and maybe also be a pretty good song. It’s real catchy, at least. As an aside: I can’t read Fox in Socks very fast either. —Shy Thompson
Download “Pop on Rocks” for free here.
Bill Callahan & Bonnie “Prince” Billy - “Deacon Blues” (feat. Bill MacKay) (Drag City)
It might be gratuitous, but seasoned musicians giving into their most basic impulses is endlessly enjoyable. Middle-aged indie rockers like Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Bill Callahan doing a Steely Dan cover feels so self-indulgent, but it’s true to their charm that they pull it off with earnestness. Bill Mackay does the heavy lifting through his undeniable guitar playing, providing every dad with a sense of satisfaction as The Dan receives a cover that is worthy of their name. While Steely Dan straddle the line between irony and sincerity, love for them has never been as pronounced as it is now, so it’s dope as hell to see legends in the game clarify that, yes, these guys influenced us too. —Eli Schoop
Purchase “Deacon Blues” at the Drag City website.
Botox Bells - “Botox Bells” (Förfall)
Botox Bells’s self-titled CD-R is a quaint one-off from Arv & Miljö and members of Treasury of Puppies. It’s a modest release that, given its small run, feels like it was made as a Christmas gift for friends. Given how lonely the season is this year, the comforts provided in its 22 minutes are very much-needed: charming piano chords, buoyed by cozy creaks and a woman humming; the familiar noise of people huddled together, eager to talk despite the frigid air; a synth pad that blankets the listener, warm enough to feel like you’re aside an open fire. Even though my Christmastimes don’t ever really sound like this, it has the same spirit: the simple pleasure of friendly company, the contentment of being able to rest and reflect, the contagiousness of collective joy. If I look outside my window, there’s not a snowflake in sight; this piece helps me imagine what this time could’ve been. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Botox Bells at the Discreet Music website.
Will Silver - “We Can Talk (Supreems Remix)” (Nice Age)
For the past few days, Brooklyn has been covered in a kind of borrowed light blue and ice tray white; a blizzard with a center of frozen rain rolled through and left its piles. They’ve lasted longer than usual, maybe from lack of traffic and maybe because nature decided to throw us a blanket after a sleepless, dazed year. 2020 reminds us that coziness has a cost—all this comfort is at someone else’s expense—and this liberal self-recrimination isn’t a good look. But meanwhile I’ve been in Prospect Park almost every day, and yesterday I walked with some friends to meet another friend who rescheduled on the way before a different friend texted I’m ok feeling sorta sad and she joined me to meet a last group of friends building a fire for a birthday boy whose mother suddenly died recently.
Around me as I distanced from the people in my life, kids cried out with joy as they hurtled themselves down the low hills, sometimes resting on narrow plateaus and often rushing right over them to the next descent. They were all bundled and everyone had bought a bright orange sled. Neon rectangles with snubbed edges streaked across the white ice, their tangerine a kind of highlighted forerunner to the pools of cantaloupe light that would spill out of the streetlights when the sun went home. Some women I didn’t know brought orange quarters studded with cloves for the birthday hot toddies. They were lovely. We pulled paper plates of Santa’s face from the trash for kindling. I had too many, and then a little wine, and on the long walk home under the moon, had to piss in the frost-covered woods. With its crisp breaks and spiced-honey melody and Vince Guaraldi piano chords and twinkle glitter flurries and most especially its utter, shameless, euphoric melancholy, “We Can Talk” is the sound of all that, a little digital file of a snow globe of a moment in which everything feels like so much. —Jesse Dorris
Purchase “We Can Talk (Supreems Remix)” at Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading the forty-fifth issue of Tone Glow. You should drink a hot toddy right now tbh.
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