Twenty-Twenty-What
Shopping and Katie Dey
Hello. Happy 2021 to all who observe.
No book review this time, but Sansei and Sensibility is great if you’re looking for a short story collection.
All Or Nothing by Shopping
I’ve heard Shopping described as dance music for punks and punk music for people who want to dance.
The band’s 2020 release, All or Nothing, sounds like it could belong in any of the last five decades, although it doesn’t feel stale. The songs feature tuneful melodies over disco rhythms and prominent, beating bass lines. Synths add a sort of glow to the sound and work to support the steady pulse of the drums.
The songs on All or Nothing are about being an anxious person trying to navigate relationships and survive the workforce grind, with lyrics that examine the push and pull of the political and personal. “Expert Advice” conjures images of nervous boredom in an office with fluorescent lighting. “Initiative” demands “Why can’t you show some initiative?” with steadily elevating urgency.
On “No Apologies,” which features one of the best bass lines I’ve heard in a long time, Rachel Aggs sings:
This time it’s useless
We're never gonna fix this
Disintegrating
I can't think about anything
voicing frustrations that could be aimed at an individual or a system or, most likely, both.
Choruses of Shopping songs have lyrics that could just as easily be a crowd chanting to the tune of your own thudding pulse. The repetition and layering of voices work as emphasis but turn into hypnosis, with Aggs’ and Milk’s companiable voices egging each other on, alternating between echoes and provocation.
One of the things that makes this album such great dance music is the way the songs build, the anticipation of the moment where everything comes together and at the same time is flying in every-which-direction. Even when things get bleak, the sparkling energy compels you to move, to sweat and dance.
I look forward to the day I can dance at a Shopping show.
[From where I’m sitting it seems like there’s more than enough room to read and panic over both]
mydata by Katie Dey
The violin swells on the opening track on Katie Dey’s mydata belong in a movie montage: maybe watching a student get ready before school, feeding her dog, pedaling on her bike as viewers can take in the provincial town where the stage is set. Excellent walking around with headphones music, is maybe a less obnoxious way to phrase that.
I love string arrangements in contemporary music, but their use can easily slip into false grandiosity, building some kind of expectation/tension that is never realized or fitting in a song like faux wood siding slapped on the walls.
Dey’s work doesn’t make strings an afterthought. Parts of it remind me of Kate Bush, the way they can work as punctuation to heighten drama. Dey has crafted tracks with the strings’ warmth in mind, blending them with the tech drums and her pleasingly ghostly, autotuned vocals. I use “ghostly” intentionally here, as opposed to “haunting” or “eerie.” The subject of many of Dey’s songs is human connection because of or despite technology. Her voice works like a specter over the synth and tech-distortion, the same way work or relationships can exist in zeros and ones, but have limited physical form. Like Bjork, Dey treats vocals on tracks like an instrument, sometimes centering them and sometimes blending syllables into other tones until you can’t distinguish one from the other.
At times you can’t tell what is created digitally and what is recorded traditionally, a blurred line that mimics the blurred lines she sings about. On “darkness:”
i wanna be a far out satellite
so i can hear your brain waves coming
or on
embracing through window frames
i am warm by her username…tangled in internet
playing fake instruments
singing each other songs
dragging our bodies along
While deftly exploring the value in these connections, Dey also writes about the limits and the difficulties. The track “happiness” opens with the lines “i want love/ i’m not above it,” and goes on to describe physical longing:
lay your body
on my body
i can hold you
breathe my breath
kissing your neck
The music flutters over sounds of longing, resulting in an engineered balance.
Pictured: me pretending I’m at a shopping show
What should I check out next? And, as always, let me know how I can do better.
Thanks for reading! See you later.