The Retrographer, Issue 98 (January, 2 0 2 3)

February 01, 2023

Scree, Eyedress, Kevin Shields, Yaeji, Popstar Benny, Tony Shhnow, NewJeans, Fatboi Sharif, Roper Williams, Bruiser Wolf, Avalon Emerson, King Tuff, Andy Shauf, Lucinda Chua, Pink Floyd, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 98 (January, 2 0 2 3)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for January, 2 0 2 3 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Questions for the Moon”, Scree (Spotify / YouTube) – The first song from Scree’s forthcoming first full-length album distills each of the trio’s brilliances: Ryan El-Solh’s gorgeous melodies wafting up above Carmen Rothwell’s nimble bass and Jason Burger’s weather patterns of cymbal and snare. 

“HOUSE OF CARDS”, Eyedress and Kevin Shields (Spotify / YouTube) – Shields’s ear for harmony is unmistakable immediately, surfacing the same uncanny synths over 30 years ago for “Swallow” and 10 on “new you”. Few honors equal the presence of his collaboration.

“For Granted”, Yaeji (Spotify / YouTube) – Kathy Yaeji Lee has spun funky rhythms for half a decade now, but never has she adventured quite as widely as she does here, dropping into a binding refraction of drum and bass like a fever dream for less than thirty seconds before elevating into a stack of harmonies.

“All The Girls <3”, Popstar Benny and Tony Shhnow (Spotify / YouTube) – New Jersey club music sprints over a gossamer Mariah sample, a seismic assault threaded in angelic fabrics. Benny’s lyrics become another hammering rhythm across this song’s scant two and a half minutes.

“OMG”, NewJeans (Spotify / YouTube) – Like Ariana Grande’s “Be Alright”, there is a delicious plasticity to the sounds here; when the full group drops in, they stand for jilted lovers and hurt feelings like a security force.

“Po Pimping Do or Die”, Fatboi Sharif, Roper Williams, and Bruiser Wolf (Spotify / YouTube) – Delivered in the straightest newscaster voice for the maximum effect, there are just some great lyrics here: “Got the white girl in the trunk like Eminem fan stan / I’m from Michigan, we about the dividends / They see the magazine and forget what the issue is”.

“Sandrail Silhouette”, Avalon Emerson (Spotify / YouTube) – This song builds for almost a minute before any vocals whatsoever, but somehow proves itself a classic before the starting gun. Emerson is a DJ by trade, but here sounds like a generational pop star.

“Smalltown Stardust”, King Tuff (Spotify / YouTube) – This song, like Tuffy’s life story, stretches from garage origins, praying at the altar of Marc Bolan, to a new realization of brilliance, clearing the scuzzy fuzz away for an outro that survives on and on.

“Telephone”, Andy Shauf (Spotify / YouTube) – Of all of Shauf’s unique abilities demonstrated here (his ability to find chord tones in his melody, his love of woodwinds, his sweet upper range), none are more striking than his earnest longing, a lifelong condition that only brings solace.

“Echo”, Lucinda Chua (Spotify / YouTube) – Every sound is beautiful here, from the resounding piano, to the wavering Rhodes, to Chua’s intimated words, sometimes barely articulated, sometimes bending into blue notes, sometimes glowing with backing vocals.

One Album for January, 2 0 2 3

“Meddle”, Pink Floyd (Harvest, 1971) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Pink Floyd arrived at Abbey Road at the dawn of 1971 with no plans, only machinations. By September, they’d birthed their sixth album Meddle, the one that would introduce the huge, mind-expanding compositions that transformed the band from cracked, cackling freaks to the stadium-packing, multi-diamond, dystopian augurers who crafted sleek opuses that stretched to the horizon of the ensuing decade.

Meddle is not the emergence of the butterfly; it’s an x-ray of its chrysalis. Pink Floyd at once echoes the laughing madcap of its earlier albums, and foresees the soaring, sprawling, dramatic compositions which defined the subsequent works that lodged themselves into the bedrock of 20th century pop music from The Dark Side of the Moon to The Wall.

Bassist Roger Waters, guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist Richard Wright were once joined by Syd Barrett, the band’s founder. When Barrett was in the band, the group embodied unhinged mischief; Their music carried the signature germ of its sound, at once ominous and playful, paranoid and peaceful, discursive and hooky. Unlike later, it could be irreverent and pixilated, puckish enough for the deranged playground ditty of “Bike”, the droll ravings of “Jugband Blues” (which closed its album by asking “What exactly is a joke?”), or to once write about Lucifer, “that cat’s something I can’t explain”. Some of that sound was the swinging London from which the band emerged, but some was Barrett’s primacy as the group’s songwriter, and his particular appetite for deranged cheek amid the band’s defining predilection for exploring the time and space of music. They looked the part, too: A troupe of pixies in paisley cravats and floral blouses bridling cacophony, Sgt. Pepper’s Brain Damage Club Band. But Barrett’s regime didn’t last long. Barrett’s encounters with psychedelics tipped him into madness, and the band unceremoniously dropped him during their second album. 

Yet even after his departure, Barrett haunted Pink Floyd. They’d write repeatedly, album after album, about madmen, idiots, lunatics in the hall, unnamed figures they wished were here, any number of synonyms and pseudonyms for the void left by Barrett’s shocking decline. Barrett was far from the only musician to suffer mental illness in the blazing spotlight, but he was most certainly the most elegized. These threnodies found many forms, in the ensuing years, from the most grandly ambitious to the humblest.

Meddle continues its predecessor Atom Heart Mother’s vast, track-short format of six songs at 46 minutes. Its first five are standard length for the band, and the album’s closer, “Echoes”, consumes its entire second side and, at 23 minutes, half the runtime. Of those six, two follow the earlier format of the band: “Seamus”, with a dog singing over a blues progression, is related to the devilish playfulness of earlier songs like “Corporal Clegg” and “The Gnome”. The other, “San Tropez”, is less of a trifle, and even presages the vicious fat cats of Wish You Were Here’s “Have a Cigar” and Animal’s “Dogs”, but with humor that would be henceforth extinguished in the band’s repertoire. These songs have elsewhere been referred to as “humor tests”, intentional acts of absurdism to challenge the listener’s expectations for a rock album and demonstrate the ridiculousness of the material and creative freedom the band possessed to make whatever they wanted. Such jocund commentary is tolerable but inessential and juvenile; more impressive would be the band’s endeavors to meet the scale of tools at their disposal rather than parody them.

Two more, “A Pillow Of Winds” and the unimpeachable “Fearless”, sit in a pastoral mode the band had previously developed on songs like “Green is the Color”. The latter stands out in the band’s catalog; as patient, ascending, and unbothered as the song’s alleged fool, a striver who endeavors to climb a hill against the doubts of the clerics, magistrates, and regals who doubt and disapprove of him. All its figures are featureless, its tale told in Gilmour’s calm, dulcet voice, its characters as expressionless as the slaughtered holy innocents of medieval painting. It is closest musically to Led Zeppelin’s third and fourth albums: An eerie evocation of northern English folk wrought in open tunings with volume-pedaled electric guitar streaking above like cirrus clouds.

Meddle’s outliers are its opener and closer. “One of These Days” begins the album with the sound of wind and the ricochetting thump of Waters’s bass through a Binson Echorec delay pedal. It is almost entirely instrumental, save Nick Mason’s garbled threat, “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.” It builds and mounts, a fully collaborative composition, pedaling off its core B minor chord to an A only occasionally before gravitating back again. The double-tracked bass, layered guitar, and screaming organ rattle above Mason’s driving kit, rumbling like the drums of war; Gilmour’s slide guitar groans and whirrs into motion like the machine that would be born on Wish You Were Here. It churns and then suddenly dissipates, atomized, into the eiderdown of “A Pillow of Winds”. The album transpires in other modes but its reverberation was to return.

At its opposite is “Echoes”, the odyssey that closes the album. Unlike the improvisatory psychedelic chaos of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’s “Interstellar Overdrive”, the communally-written “Echoes” plays through carefully composed acts, symphonic, narrative, and indicative of the music to come. Its iconic opening motif, a crystalline ping flashing through the song like a lighthouse in the world’s final storm, returns again 16 minutes to signal its close. If heard as an echo, the frequency with which that ping reverberates suggests an enormous space, soon filled with whole regions of music from the band’s future. Three minutes in, the band takes on the mournful altitude of “Us and Them”; Seven minutes in, they find a funky groove like The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Any Color You Like”; 14 minutes in, the piece has evolved beyond recognition, taking on only eerie thrumming and the howling of the wind; Minutes later, the lighthouse ping has returned. Waters’s lyrics echo their old studio stablemates the Beatles, pulling “Inviting and inciting me to rise” from “Across the Universe” (“Sounds of laughter, shades of life are ringing through my open ears, inciting and inviting me”). Ideas that would be refined later on Animals, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall poke out for the first time too, sprouts winding their way from Meddle’s freshly-laid soil.

Because of its progeny, Meddle is sometimes speculated to be a concept album. The Dark Side of the Moon focused on the descent into madness; Wish You Were Here chronicled the music business crushing humanity; Animals recounted George Orwell’s 1984; The Wall became an entire feature film unto itself. It isn’t one, at least not obviously. But it scaffolds for the form being born; lays its musical foundation, occupies an expanse fit for the ideas the band – and especially Waters – would hatch over the ensuing decade. It contains the fundaments of the stories to come, their core ingredients, the structure that could bear their massive weight and ambition. And just as presently, it included the pieces the band had to leave behind, even if their architect would haunt them thereafter.

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