Week of 6/9: Laura Stevenson, Food House, BabyTron, Turnstile
Our weekly dose of song reviews. One from each host. Four very different sounds.
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.
For this week’s edition, we write about songs by Laura Stevenson, Food House, BabyTron and Turnstile.
Food House — “Butterfly Knife”
Eric Bennett:
I feel fairly confident saying Food House is my favorite hyperpop act. What draws me to them is what drew me to the sound in the first place. It’s bright, chaotic, imaginative pop music. I enjoy both Gupi and Fraxiom’s solo output, but when the two come together, it combines Fraxiom’s inspired insight and perfectly augmented vocals with Gupi’s blinding instrumentation and puts both over the top. The group’s new single “butterfly knife” feels sonically apace with the songs on last year's self-titled debut, but sees them leaning harder on creating an earworm. The chorus is massive and hypes me up without fail every time I hear it. While you might have to look the lyrics up, they are full of personality and nuance as the group trade verses and explore the sudden and messy end of a relationship.
“Our time alone is tightening, it's shorter than it might seem / And I'm just looking after myself / You should do the same before you go and do this shit to somebody else.”
A lot of Food House songs are like this. Not only are the lyrics buried beneath layers of wonderful distortion, but the song itself also moves a mile a minute, and trying to keep up with it can be a minor challenge. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Laura Stevenson — “State”
Miranda Reinert:
Laura Stevenson is a songwriter unlike any of her contemporaries and I’m sold 100% on this album already. I’m partial to an angrier version of her on songs like “The Wheel”, but “State” alternates between exhausted fragility and pure rage at a level unlike anything else on her previous albums. The wall of guitars that swell around her voice at the chorus really just works for me. The music video of a woman breaking shit works for me. The final lines of the song “A shining example of pure anger / Pure and real and sticky and moving and sweet” are delivered with perfect restraint. Everything I could say about that song could just be summed up in that one line and when I listened to it for the first time I went back 45 seconds to experience it again. Then I did it again.
Pure and real and sticky and moving and sweet. I cannot wait to hear more of this album.
BabyTron — “Cheat Code 2”
Michael Brooks:
I know that it’s only June, but it seems highly unlikely that there will be a mixtape this year with a better name than Luka Troncic, the latest from Detroit rapper BabyTron. And make no mistake, Luka Troncic is as bizarre as its title suggests, an hour of outlandish one-liners and surreal production that flips samples from The Office and SpongeBob SquarePants and turns them into something else entirely. Album opener “Cheat Code 2” sets the tone for the rest of the project as BabyTron drops lines like “On the dark web punching like I’m Oscar De La Hoya” and a plethora of NBA references (“Smoking Gary Payton put my lungs in the fucking glove.”) Listening to “Cheat Code 2” is an absolute blast, it’s kind of like watching an NBA Playoff game from a Reddit stream if that stream was being broadcast from an alternate universe.
Turnstile — “Mystery”
Eli Enis:
I’ve been waiting for a minute now for Turnstile to make the album that isolates hardcore kids. The Baltimore crew were on the precipice of crossing over into whatever’s left of the alt-rock zeitgeist on 2018’s Time & Space, but if the album they’re likely dropping later this year sounds anything like “Mystery” then this will be their make or break moment. Personally, I don’t care where this record takes them. If their loyal leagues of stage-divers take to the gooey melodies and bright tones and basically treat them as they would a raucous pop-punk band, then hellyeah. But if longtime fans who think they’re too cool for Angel Du$t think they’ve lost the plot, and actually cool teenagers who exist in the fertile liminal spaces between rap, pop and rock fall in love with it (which seems to be what they’re vying for), then that also rules.
I just want more Turnstile that sounds like “Mystery.” They’ve never been the heaviest hardcore band on the block and they have plenty of bouncy jams in their repertoire to soundtrack pits for the rest of their career. Give me that risky, for-broke pop-rock shit in a hardcore shell. No one does it better than them (see: “Blue By You,” “Moon” and now “Mystery”) and frankly, it’s hard to think of a band from this world who’ve consistently excited me for as long as Turnstile have, and that’s because of songs like “Mystery.” Best band, can’t wait for more.