What I'm Listening to This Week

It’s supposed to be cold in Seattle this week. Pacific Northwest Cold, of course. We might get below freezing one night. The marine layer socked us in with fog. I spent the morning listening to music and avoiding meaningful work.

It was a good morning to put the new Lucy Dacus single, “Ankles” on repeat while I avoided meaningful work. It’s rare that a song can be this heartfelt, sexy (musically), and sexy (libidinally) all at the same time. Dacus has always been talented at evoking a kind of charming, honest wistfulness that doesn’t fall into the trap of being bashful. I’m usually not much for music videos, but Lucy Dacus and Havana Rose Liu are incandescent in this little vignette. It reminds me of the video for one of my other favorite Dacus tracks, “Addictions”. (Come to think of it, another song about longing and being unable to bridge a gap with possible lover.)

Musically, I’m surprised that the strings work so well in this song. Normally adding strings to a rock song only works if it’s a tasteful orchestra stab or little fill here or there. In “Ankles”, they give the verses body without taking over the whole composition.

Her new album, Forever is a Feeling is out the last week of March.

For the past couple of years I’ve been trying to temper my hopes for a full-fledged Soltero comeback, but it’s been hard to keep my hopes down with the release of two new videos in two months. But with the comment under the video for the new single “Something in the Night” that their new album is also out in March, my hype is now uncontainable (and, frankly, unsustainable). It’s going to be a hard couple of months of waiting.

It’s a far cry from the lo-fi accoustic era of Defrocked and Kicking the Habit that first got me hooked, but the heart is there. Complexity clearly hasn’t gotten in the way. The chill drums and slinky keyboard and guitar solos tie together what might otherwise be a jumble. This is the kind of song I want playing in the noir movie of my life when I when I finish my Scotch and walk out of the bar to be jumped in an alley.

Finally, I’ve been coming back to this CHVRCHES cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” I love this for two reasons. First of all, I will happily scrap to defend “Do I Wanna Know?” as one of the finest expressions of longing in modern rock music. Its working class sensibility and raw demonstration of how exhausting it can be to be fucked up over someone to the point where sleep becomes an impossibility and irresponsible behavior an inevitability.

I like this cover in particular, though, because it perfectly walks the line of reimagining the song in CHVRCHES own style without losing the cadence or melodic impact of the original. The brief interview of the band at the end is an interesting look into their process, which, on a second (third, fourth) listen, is evident in the performance.