Week of 11/10: Jonny Greenwood and Magdalena Bay
Eric is impressed by a song from the 'Spencer' soundtrack and Eli is overjoyed to find another shoegaze gem on a 2021 pop album.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Jonny Greenwood - “Crucifix”
Eric Bennett:
Over the weekend I went back to the movies. I used to go with some frequency, but I hadn’t been since February of 2020. With the company of some friends, I piled in to see Pablo Larraín’s Spencer. I’m one of the many people who will vociferously defend Larraín’s Jackie, so I had been chomping at the bit to see him adapt the life of another tragic cultural icon to screen. Spencer, as it turns out, is just as stylized and lovely to look at as Jackie, but it’s dizzying in a way that's closer to The Shining. One of the things about it that stuck out to me was its score, provided by Jonny Greenwood. While I didn't know beforehand that Greenwood was scoring the film, when I saw his name in the credits, it was a pleasant bit of news. I’m maybe a bigger fan of his scores for Paul Thomas Anderson than I am of his work in Radiohead. The score for Phantom Thread pushed that movie over the top for me, and there’s a similar success here. Greenwood's score for Spencer is unsettling. It’s stately and beautiful, but in the way that an old portrait on the wall whose eyes follow you is stately and beautiful. Only two songs from the score are available to the public at the time of writing, and the first of them, “Crucifix” is one of the most intriguing movements.
“Crucifix” plays over a strange montage of interspersed clips showing us Kristen Stewart’s Diana dancing by herself, or with her kids, and of her running. Stewart is dressed in iconic Diana looks from her life leading up to her divorce from Prince Charles. Behind the scenes, Larraín asked Stewart before filming each day to grab a costume and react naturally to whatever song he put on. That's what we’re seeing is Stewart dancing to Lou Reed, or Miles Davis. “Crucifix” couldn't sound less like either. Founded on the dissonance of its arrangement, the track sees a gloomy string section crashing down on a resilient harpsichord flourish. The repetition of that harpsichord, with its upward intonation, sounds like a persevering spirit, a beleaguered grin. It’s Diana, finding her footing, feeling confident, and running from the stifling family she's been ensnared within.
Magdalena Bay - “You Lose!”
Eli Enis:
About a month ago, Eric and Michael wrote about a song from Magdalena Bay’s new album, Mercurial World, in the pages of this newsletter. I don’t know if it was the peculiar name of the duo, a particular YouTube still that rubbed me the wrong way, or some other imperceptible negative reaction, but I didn’t feel like giving their music a shot until earlier this week. Yes, I kick myself often. The whole record is a delightful prop comic’s chest of bubbling, playful alt-pop that draws from Grimes and Kero Kero Bonito as much as it does the Cocteau Twins and Fleetwood Mac. It’s a really rewarding listen that I’ve been having a lot of fun digging through, but the song that caught my ear initially and that I’ve returned to the most is “You Lose!”
Over squalling synths and a drum machine that pounds so hard it sounds like it’s breaking apart at the seams, vocalist Mica Tenenbaum sings with a hushed murmur as if she’s saying things that she’s not quite comfortable uttering at normal speaking volume. By the time she gets to the chorus, she explodes with slightly altered versions of the same verse lyrics, letting a line like, “Your lips touching mine won't do,” whip out of her lips like a lashing tree vine. It’s got serious bite, and it really made me think about the most incredible song on the Halsey album from this year, “You asked for this,” which also happens to be a gnashing shoegaze banger buried in an otherwise dark, gauzy yet stark sounding pop record.
In the case of Magdalena Bay, “You Lose!” is the most emotionally gloomy and sonically battering moment on the whole album, and it’s really interesting to me that pop musicians from all over the map are turning to the tonal breadth of shoegaze to channel their angst into thick walls of sound. At this point, we’re really close to someone from this world going all in and making a full-on shoegaze-pop album, and personally, that’s the sort of shoegaze that I’m most looking forward to hearing. Stuff like the glary “You Lose!”, Halsey’s Paramore-ification of MBV streaks, Oneohtrix Point Never’s kaleidoscopic “I Don’t Love Me Anymore,” and of course what Spirit of the Beehive have been doing on their last two albums — not quite shoegaze but not quite not shoegaze — are giving the genre a fresh new face. I can’t wait to hear what’s next.