Week of 10/10: Kassie Krut, Tucker Zimmerman, Ken Carson, PJ Harvey
This week, Eric rides for Kassie Krut, Eli beams about Ken Carson, and friends of the show Konstantinos Pappis and Elliott Duea join the fold.
This week’s newsletter introduces the writing of some good friends of ours. As we revive the blog, I (Eric) am trying to bring in writers that we (the hosts of Endless Scroll) like and enjoy reading. Often, these are people we have on the podcast because, similarly, we like discussing music with them. Today, we bring in Konstantinos Pappis, the music editor of OurCulture and guest on our most recent episode, and Elliott Duea, one half of the great blog Even Better. You can find more of their work here and here, respectively.
Kassie Krut - “Reckless”
Eric Bennett:
When Palm announced their breakup in June of last year, a part of me was sad to hear it, but part of me was relieved. I have fond memories of watching their rise. My college radio past self even once took a ride down to Bard College with a then-friend to see them play with Girlpool at SMOG, a venue-space-slash-garage on the storied campus where the band had first come together, that show came before they released Rock Island, which remains my favorite Palm release. The next year, as they toured that record, I saw them play an Albany, New York, basement with Spirit of the Beehive and Horse Jumper of Love. People considered it a stacked bill then, and it would be even more so today. At both shows (though it was a teased new song at the Bard show) they played “Composite.” Glitchy but melodic, cacophonous but intelligible, “Composite” is easily the song I liked best from them. I hoped it could be a path forward for what came next. After a four-year wait, Palm released Nicks and Grazes, an album I received with excitement, but cooled on pretty quickly. Something had changed in the intervening years, and I made peace with their absence before I knew I’d have to.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve grown more and more aware of Kassie Krut, the side project of Palm’s Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert. I’d seen the name printed on flyers for gigs that I’d considered going to in the abstract, but in reality just skipped, so I didn’t have to travel to New York. They’ve seemed like a band I would have the chance to get on board with eventually, but not then, not there.
Well, now that the dust has cleared from Palm’s breakup, Kassie Krut has taken center stage, and folks, I am extremely on board. The single they dropped last week, “Reckless” isn’t exactly in the poppy, Animal Collective-esque lane of “Composite,” but it might be something better. With its opening drums that invoke “Fuck The Pain Away” and vocalist Eve Alpert’s enticing deadpan, “Reckless” is a rich, clubby electroclash dream. There are a lot of very cool moments in it, but perhaps my favorite is the last thirty seconds when the feverish synths fade out in unpredictable, haunting waves. It's a fitting end, like a bus slamming on the brakes and skidding a hundred feet forward before coming to a stop.
Tucker Zimmerman - “October Mornings”
Konstantinos Pappis:
This Friday, California-born artist Tucker Zimmerman, who is 83 years old and now based in Belgium, is releasing his eleventh studio record and debut for 4AD, Dance of Love. Lovely, intimate, and endlessly inviting, the record was produced by and performed with labelmates Big Thief, who lend the songs the kind of rustic warmth we’ve come to expect from the band. Adrianne Lenker, who duets with Zimmerman on many of the songs, released her fifth album earlier this year, and, at 33, is only a few years older than Zimmerman was when he released his debut full-length, Ten Songs, in 1969. He continued releasing albums through the next two decades, but as he focused on different forms of writing and his recorded output slowed, his music fell into relative obscurity.
Not much was written online about Ten Songs until it was reissued in 2015 (which happens to be the year Big Thief was formed), but its influence shines through: Lenker referred to him as “one of the greatest songwriters of all time,” an inspiration you can trace in her lyricism, the cosmic weight she affords to the everyday. David Bowie, whose frequent collaborator Tony Visconti produced the album, placed it on his list of his 25 favorite albums. Having spent time with a good chunk of Zimmerman’s discography in the leadup to the new album, though, Ten Songs might be the record that provides the starkest antithesis.
Zimmerman described Dance of Love as “little hums that perhaps might lift us all above our daily worries and fears.” Far from a little hum, Ten Songs is haunted, wordy, and at times theatrical in ways that are very much steeped in worry and fear. The baroque-folk of ‘October Mornings’, which I’ve picked out partly for its timeliness, though relatively charming, would still sound entirely simpler and more peaceful on the new record. But beneath its mystical eloquence is a love for beauty beyond language, the kind of sobering, natural magic that requires no artistic medium. “The open night is hanging/ Mind-cloud posters from the universe/ The stars are moaning for a double/ Then explode from loneliness,” Zimmerman sings. Dangling down on earth, a different kind of electric dance is still and constantly unfurling: “like the sky, like the leaves, like a butterfly.” You can hear it echoed in Dance of Love’s ‘The Season’. It just doesn’t sound like a labyrinth anymore.
Ken Carson - “Overseas”
Eli Enis:
The other day I told someone that the way I feel listening to Ken Carson is how I imagine parents feel when they gaze into the eyes of their newborn baby. I kind of wish I was joking. I don’t know what it is about the Playboi Carti protege, but every time my favorite songs of his come on I feel this weightless fluttery sensation in my chest. The burdens of everyday life are lifted from my shoulders. Any negative emotions I’m carrying with me during that day molt away. That's a physiological reaction that only my favorite albums of all time are able to conjure, but I’ve felt it every time I’ve listened to Ken Carson’s “Overseas” since it dropped this spring. In fact, I’ve only grown fonder of the song over the last couple months. I went through a breakup in early August and haven’t really felt “normal” or emotionally stable since. Both “Overseas” and Carson’s 2023 album, A Great Chaos, have been emotional buoys to me in a way I never could’ve possibly imagined when I fell ass-backwards into enjoying Carson—a sort of Zoomer anti-hero to the millennial arch-villain of Atlanta rap, Future—last October. A year onward, I now have to seriously contend with the prospect of Ken Carson being one of my favorite artists ever -- and consider what that says about me as a listener, a critic, and a near-30-year-old man.
I think what I love about “Overseas” in particular is its gleeful celebration of emotional incoherence. The beat sounds like spooky parlor music for a rage-rap haunted house, beginning with macabre piano chords that sound like they're played by a top-hatted skeleton fingering the keys with blurry speed, reverberating so loudly that it rattles the glass libations lining the perimeter of the room. It’s so foreboding and vampiric, but then Carson comes in rapping about jet setting to Amsterdam, getting the soul sucked out of his dick, and bluntly telling the cops what he’s smoking on—“weed”—with the confidence of a high-school miscreant whose own dad is the superintendent. All of the dark, angsty atmosphere of the music is juxtaposed by sophomoric rap flexes, but every few bars, Carson offers a flashbang glance into his wounded soul that prevents him from ever sounding like a cardboard cutout.
The passage arrives in the middle of the verse, a few bars after Carson quips, “my dick her Nyquil I’m ‘bout to fuck this bitch to sleep.” Suddenly, he’s thinking about how far he’s come in life, but also what he lost along the way. “Your neck ‘gon freeze,” he tells his teenage self. “Don’t change a thing,” he advises a younger, less confident version of the arena-filling Carson. Then the emo confession he may not have planned on revealing slips out: “I wish I could go back in time to meet you way before I did.” He raps it with a stream-of-conscious breathlessness, and then quickly papers over it with a redundant assurance of his future wealth. As if he was scrounging for something positive to say instead of dwelling on this figure who may not be in his life anymore. He spends a few bars laying on more boasts, and then he makes an attempt at humor that always makes me twinge. “The last bitch I broke up with slit her wrist,” he raps, and the intervening beat of silence feels like an hour until he swoops back in with, “I’m trollin, I just treat her like she no longer exists.” I never know whether to laugh or let out a pitiful, “aw, buddy” when he says that, and when the song ends with the bass booming and the synth swooning like an auto-tuned chickadee call, it sounds both mournful and triumphant. Same, man.
PJ Harvey, John Parish - “Black Hearted Love”
Elliott Duea:
I saw PJ Harvey, arguably my favorite artist, for the first time on Sunday. With Polly Jean sitting at just north of 1,100 scrobbles on my Last.fm, the many hours I’ve spent with her music has put me in a position of being able to identify each song she played on Sunday within a couple seconds of its beginning. In other words, I would crush a PJ Harvey round on the game show Beat Shazam (now I’m wondering if host Jamie Foxx has a favorite PJ Harvey track?) But there was one song that when the band began to play, I found myself in a place of total unrecognition, turning my head to the side like a confused canine.
The song was “Black Hearted Love”, the opening track from the lone release of Harvey’s that I never got around to, her second joint album with John Parish - 2009’s A Woman A Man Walked By. The performance was a highlight of the night despite my unfamiliarity. There’s something special about falling in love with a song as you’re witnessing it live, your first encounter with it being in its truest and most vital form.
The Harvey-Parish records almost serve as a PJ Harvey mixtape, showcasing her versatility musically and vocally, with a laxed looseness that she rarely gives to her more polished solo works. “Black Hearted Love” is a straight up rocker featuring a razor sharp riff that screeches over the rhythm guitar’s deep chugs. Harvey has scarcely flexed her rockstar frontwoman chops since 2007’sWhite Chalk, but she brings the swagger here, particularly at the 2:30 mark as she pleads, “I’d like to take you, I’d like to take you to a place I know.” The vocals are mixed about evenly with the yelping guitars, and it sounds as if Harvey’s fighting for her voice to be heard amidst the noise. I’m glad I put off this album because I've fallen in love with an old PJ Harvey song when I didn’t know that was still possible. Even better that it was in the flesh.
So glad this is back!