Week of 10/24: Thin Lizzy, JADE, The Police, Klein
Week of 10/24: Thin Lizzy, JADE, The Police, Klein
This week Eric sings JADE's praises, Miranda welcomes back hockey season with a Thin Lizzy classic, Ethan Beck takes The Police, and Devon Chodzin explores a new freestyle from Klein and Polo Perks.
Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed last weeks lists of our favorite music of the decade so far. We’re back to regularly scheduled programming, and welcome writers Ethan Beck and Devon Chodzin in to write about some songs with us. Enjoy & take care of yourselves!
Thin Lizzy - “The Boys Are Back In Town”
Miranda Reinert:
[Disclaimer: This blurb was written a couple weeks ago before I got Covid and also before the NBA boys were also very much back]
The NHL regular season has officially and to celebrate I’m writing about the first song I heard during the first game I watched. It was a matinee presentation of the Seattle Kraken vs. the St. Louis Blues. I watched it at 3:30 in the afternoon and the song was, admittedly, a bit on the nose, but I’ve never truly considered “The Boys Are Back In Town” as a song.
Many jokes have been made about how it’s unclear who The Boys in question are. I guess they can be any boys you can dream up, including the boys on the ice that afternoon. As long as they’d be dressed up to fight at the bar and grill (have to assume Climate Pledge Arena has a bar and/or grill) after being away, those are the boys. Unclear where they were in the context of the song, but not much has changed. Mostly it doesn’t matter because the boys are back and we’ve got a great guitar solo to celebrate.
“The Boys Are Back In Town” is a song I think I’ve only ever heard in full just now to write this blurb and, like most songs in that vein, it feels way too long. In truth it’s not really that long, it just feels long because it feels like it should only be paired with a visual experience. It should be enjoyed 40% already over in the car with your dad. It should be enjoyed as karaoke sung by someone who thinks they know the verses but doesn’t really. It should be enjoyed sitting at the first game of the season (ambiguous). Maybe that’s disrespectful to Thin Lizzy and what they’ve given us here, but where would we be without the out of context 40 seconds of a hit? We need songs that live in this exact context. “Chelsea Dagger” is a terrible song, but it doesn’t matter because it rips for the 30 seconds it plays after a goal is scored at the United Center!
I’ve gained very little from trying to consider “The Boys Are Back In Town” as a whole. I guess I learned The Gaslight Anthem are referencing it in “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” but I didn’t really need to learn that. A fun fact at most.
Happy hockey season, folks. The Carolina Hurricanes beat the Oilers in overtime last night and the boys are back.
JADE - “Fantasy”
Eric Bennett:
If you’re someone who's been around me in the last few months when an aux cord, or the YouTube Roku app, for that matter, is present, you already know how drawn I am to the recent singles from JADE. While I was not a Little Mix fan, the handful of solo singles that Jade Thirlwall released this year have completely taken me by storm. “Angel of My Dreams” is one of the most inventive pop songs I've ever heard. An assemblage of what sounds like several different songs strung together and reanimated like a dancefloor-filling Frankenstein’s monster.
Her second proper single, “Fantasy,” is a glitter bomb of sex positivity that bolsters Thirlwall’s creative streak. The persona she adopts here is reminiscent of the sex pot disco diva act that Jessie Ware has been putting on for the last few years, and “Fantasy” sounds like an elevation of her sound. Every time the song veers into the sugary sweet disco that Ware makes, Jade is there to undercut it with a sung-rapped deadpan about all the kinky things that can make up your fantasy.
Just as exciting is the song’s David LaChapelle-directed video. Jade is a star performing on a sound stage full of dancers. It’s straightforward, couples are having fun, and being hot, with Jade at the center of all attention. Then things get darker (and funnier) as a witch crawls out from the crowd and hexes Jade and the dancers. Tragedy befalls them one by one, and Jade becomes Carrie, bathed in blood. It’s a great representation of how Jade’s music feels: deceptively simple until the twist sneaks up on you and your eyes open to the genius of it.
The Police - “Every Breath You Take”
Ethan Beck:
A few weeks ago, Sting took the stage for the last of three shows at Brooklyn Paramount, a beautiful new Live Nation venue that struggles with getting a good sound in the roomy, dance hall space. The Police front man has been touring recently as a trio, linking up with his longtime guitarist Dominic Miller and the touring drummer of Mumford and Sons to put together a greatest hits setlist. Despite the fact that many of those songs were initially devised in a trio arrangement, Sting’s set at the Brooklyn Paramount could have used a fuller lineup. To play “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” without piano betrays the crux of that hit, the bitter suicide note of “Can’t Stand Losing You” lost its edge in the Paramount’s warbly mix, and the cutesy “Englishman in New York” has always been exhausting.
But it’s hard to resist the tender chord changes of “Every Breath You Take,” which have always been an uncomfortable juxtaposition to the song’s stalker narrative. I quickly grew tired of the song’s cultural omnipotence as a young adult with a classic rock dad. In turn, the biggest shock of Sting’s set took place moments before the encore, when they launched quickly from “King of Pain” into “Every Breath You Take,” and 1983’s song of the summer felt relatively somber and muted. As Sting headed towards the “Oh, can’t you see?” chorus, the band didn’t swell or excite, letting his performance remain startlingly simple. The drummer didn’t even reach for the crash cymbal. The Police’s combination of pseudo-intellectualism and undeniable grooves has always compelled and frustrated me, but I left the show feeling won over by this rendition of “Every Breath You Take.” A pleasant surprise.
Klein & POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3 - “karmic freestyle”
Devon Chodzin:
London’s Klein and New York’s Polo Perks have already had banner years. This past summer, dropped marked, a guitar-driven, addling mess that I can’t stop coming back to. At a time when I’m starting to drift away from shoegaze, marked obliterates the typical gestures of shoegaze to make something rustier but similarly immersive. Sometimes, you need to look outside of shoegaze to get what it once gave you. marked stands out from her already off-the-deep-end discography, which flashes between deconstructed R&B, dance, or whatever she feels like making that day. Surf Gang alum Polo Perks’ collaborative album with FearDorian and AyooLii A Dog’s Chance is a conflagration that feels targeted to the musically online. Then, In August, Klein uploaded a video for “karmic freestyle” to YouTube; the video gathered steam before formally hitting the airwaves this past Friday in its full glory. It’s a cloudy mess that recontextualizes CASISDEAD’s “What’s My Name” into something even more twisted and foggy.
What’s fun about Polo Perks especially is that he can and will rap over nearly anything. Just this summer, a friend from Cleveland sent me “ROCKBAND TEES 08 DENIMS” with Current Joys; Perks raps over a pumped-up “New Flesh,” a song that friend remembered me being obsessed with in college. When I hear “New Flesh” now, I think of how easily in-awe I can be with anything jangly. Listening to the song in 2024 feels uncanny in a way I don’t necessarily like. That said, hearing it in this fresh context, upgraded with a jerk beat, unlocks the right jolt of nostalgia with a clear-eyed understanding that I’m gazing at the future before me. With the recent Current Joys album (meh) and “karmic freestyle,” I’ve had to go back to “ROCKBAND” at least twice a day. Polo Perks is one of those people who could take the meme-moment of sample drill and give it longevity by proving that going buckwild with sample selections is a feat of musical athleticism.
“karmic freestyle” is something totally fresh, something as unsettling as it is human (the Klein speciality, IMO); the track has a new brawn with Perks in the passenger seat. Klein and Perks have a similar urge to draw from disparate corners; Perks especially draws from 2000s and 2010s big alt rock and bedroom indie just as much as he draws from the sounds of tomorrow. What’s better: there’s more on the way. It’s nothing I saw coming and it’s become something I need more than anything.