The Collective<\/a>, and album that found her rasping free-associative poetry over production that blurred brainrot rage rap with experimental noise. It was a brilliant reinvention at the dawn of her eighth decade, an album where what could have been a gimmick \u2014 haha Kim Gordon rapping on Playboi Carti type beats, haha \u2014 yielded thrilling, rewarding music. In a fragmented flurry of consumerism, sensuality, and toxic character sketches, Gordon’s stint as a pseudo-emcee captured something salient about our hollowed-out society. Also, it slapped. How could this improbable exercise result in a creative statement this substantial? And where would Gordon go next?<\/p>\nOn PLAY ME, out this week, she treads similar ground but certainly doesn’t run in place. Paired once again with producer Justin Raisen, her closest collaborator since launching her post-Sonic Youth solo career with 2019’s No Home Record, Gordon once again spends much of the album holding court over hip-hop beats. PLAY ME is not a mere accessory to The Collective and by no means a retread. The albums are best understood as equal companions. They’re in conversation to the point that The Collective opener “BYE BYE” is revamped here with a new assortment of free-associative hot-button lyrics to close out the tracklist as “BYEBYE25!” Yet Gordon frequently ventures beyond the common parameters of hip-hop here, and even some of the rap beats she chose represent different sides of the genre.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The title track makes that clear right away. “PLAY ME” opens the album with moody booming bass, regal\/funky horn samples that drift through the track like pollution in the city skies, and slow-rolling boom-bap drums verging on trip-hop. “Play me makeout jams,” Gordon’s trembling voice begins, continuing the sexual role playing that popped up on the last album. “Turn out the lights\/ Neon cowgirl\/ You like Easy Rider\/ ’70s hippies.” The skittering “SQUARE JAW,” with its threats of a sucker punch and its command to “put your lips together,” keeps threatening to break out into a drum ‘n’ bass break; instead we get some wordless staccato “ah ah ah ah” that shows Gordon still trying out new vocal techniques at this late date. The playacting resumes on the single “DIRTY TECH,” where Gordon steps into an office environment to beckon the boss “I like it when you talk dirty tech to me” over a chintzy keyboard-based loop something like interdimensional “Hotline Bling.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our creeping tech dystopia is one of Gordon’s pet topics here, and not just the way it has invaded the corporate space. She name-checks Substack and 3D printing on the ominous, bass-bombed “SUBCON,” one of many songs on which her lyrical stream of references feels like drowning in a social media feed, where so many alarming and amusing components are juxtaposed without context. “They wanna go to Mars,” she sings, gesturing in Elon Musk’s general direction. “And then what?” The spooky trap lurch “BLACK OUT” finds declaring, “I’m the queen of your heart\/ Ace of your spade\/ You don’t trump me\/ I trump you,” right after moaning “AI, AI” in Auto-Tune.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As with The Collective’s “I’m A Man,” the topical flashes may strike some listeners as overbearingly blunt. But Gordon sells them with the same unflappable conviction and charisma she’s been delivering on record since the ’80s, and like so much of the best art, she keeps her precise meaning slippery enough to get you thinking rather than telling you how to think. Not that many people will be struggling to interpret “POST EMPIRE” when Gordon dryly intones, “Love what you’ve done with the empire,” but her quick-and-to-the-point language keeps her protest music from tumbling into Facebook-lefty polemics and braindead sloganeering.<\/p>\n
Gordon’s engagement with rap production remains surprisingly fruitful, but some of the best moments on PLAY ME are the ones that break from the mean. “GIRL WITH A LOOK” smears ethereal keyboards over a brisk, upbeat rhythm track; I can imagine Ezra Koenig singing dainty melodies over it, but Gordon’s cries and bellows carry it somewhere entirely different. Similar bleary, droning propulsion kicks in on lead single “NOT TODAY,” probably the most Sonic-Youth-esque track here (think “Jams Run Free”), another scramble of sensuality and capitalism that lives up to its own half-serious dictum: “Make it feel so good.”\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Perhaps most noteworthy, at least for the way it connects Gordon’s past to her present, is “BUSY BEE.” The track’s collage of thunderous noise includes drums by Dave Grohl and pitched-up dialogue snippets from an episode of MTV Beach House hosted by Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz. “Hey didn’t you used to be in a band called STP?” Gordon asks, teeing up Cafritz for the reply, “Yeah, those boys are lucky that we broke up before they got big or they’d have a lawsuit on their hands.” Threaded in alongside Gordon’s current aesthetic and lyrical fixations, the blasts from the past are a reminder of just how long she’s been doing this.<\/p>\n
How long will she keep doing this, specifically, though? Gordon\u2019s recent run has me thinking back to Sun Kil Moon\u2019s mid-2010s releases Benji and Universal Themes, when the pre-disgraced Mark Kozelek radically altered his songwriting and performance style, trading out yearning slowcore melodies in favor of diaristic talk-singing. The approach was indulgent but also often powerfully moving \u2014 and then Kozelek ran it into the ground, to the point that it felt like self-parody when he released an album called This Is My Dinner. Long before extensive misconduct allegations exiled him to the fringes of the music industry, a significant chunk of his audience had stopped paying attention because they were bored.<\/p>\n
With that creative decline in mind, several more albums in the mold of The Collective and PLAY ME could easily sap the electricity out of a creative turn that, so far, has been such a pleasant surprise. Despite its satisfyingly ramped-up guitar assault, “BYEBYE25!” may be the sound of this idea running its course. Hopefully it’s also the sound of the circuit being completed. I’m heartened by the theory that the two tracks work as parentheses on this phase of Gordon’s career \u2014 a signal that, unlike Kozelek, she’s wise enough to move on before a fresh idea gets stale. Having dropped two stunning late-career works upon us, I expect she’ll forge ahead into her next phase. That said, if these records have taught us anything, it’s that Kim Gordon is not beholden to our expectations, and when she flouts them, the results can be delightful.<\/p>\n
PLAY ME is out 3\/13 on Matador.<\/p>\n
Other albums of note out this week:
\u2022 The physical release of Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds’ Mutiny After Midnight
\u2022 James Blake’s Trying Times
\u2022 Elucid & Sebb Bash’s I Guess You Had To Be There
\u2022 Alexis Taylor’s Paris In The Spring
\u2022 Sweet Pill’s Still There\u2019s A Glow
\u2022 Anjimile’s You’re Free To Go
\u2022 Jack Harlow’s Monica
\u2022 Morgan Nagler’s I\u2019ve Got Nothing To Lose, And I\u2019m Losing It
\u2022 The Notwist’s News From Planet Zombie
\u2022 The Orielles’ Only You Left
\u2022 Tinariwen’s Hoggar
\u2022 White Reaper’s Only Slightly Expanded
\u2022 Bruiser Wolf’s Push & Paint
\u2022 Cut Worms’ Transmitter
\u2022 The Black Crowes’ A Pound Of Feathers
\u2022 Bill Orcutt’s Music In Continuous Motion
\u2022 Shop Talk’s Shop Talk
\u2022 Mt Fog’s Every Stone Is Green
\u2022 Fotocrime’s Security
\u2022 Lamb Of God’s Into Oblivion
\u2022 GRRL’s Beetle
\u2022 Will Graefe & Spencer Zahn’s I Envy Light
\u2022 LANY’s Soft 2
\u2022 Ora Cogan’s Hard Hearted Woman
\u2022 NO\/M\u00c1S’ No Peace
\u2022 Art School Girlfriend’s Lean In
\u2022 TRAITRS’ Possessor
\u2022 n0trixx’s A Catalogue Of Madness And Melancholia
\u2022 midori jaeger’s \u2018(Un)planted\u2019 EP
\u2022 Jason P. Woodbury’s Jason P. Woodbury And The Night Bird Singing Quartet
\u2022 Brigitte Calls Me Baby’s Irreversible
\u2022 Magnolia Park’s Nights After VAMP
\u2022 Soft Machine’s Thirteen
\u2022 The Scratch’s Pull Like A Dog
\u2022 Mary Ocher’s Weimar
\u2022 Haute & Freddy’s Big Disgrace
\u2022 Crack Cloud’s Peace And Purpose
\u2022 Shoreline’s Is This The Low Point Or The Moment After?
\u2022 Chris Lippincott’s Angel In A Jetstream
\u2022 Foy Vance’s The Wake
\u2022 Bound In Fear’s A Mind Too Sick To Heal
\u2022 The Sophs’ Goldstar
\u2022 Powerplant’s Bridge Of Sacrifice
\u2022 Bentley Anderson’s Valence
\u2022 Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy’s Dying is the internet
\u2022 Hetta Falzon’s Henrietta EP
\u2022 VASSI\u0141INA’s i.par.ksia.ko
\u2022 Cat Clyde’s Mud Blood Bone
\u2022 UNITYTX’s Somewhere, In Between\u2026
\u2022 Dead Air’s World Wide Villainy
\u2022 Lia Pappas-Kemps’ Winged
\u2022 The Fray’s A Light That Waits
\u2022 Flowers\/Ghosts&Echoes’ Flow\/\/\/\/State
\u2022 Sweet Petunia’s Foggy Mountain Mental Breakdown
\u2022 Delphine Dora’s l’ineluctable pulsation du temps
\u2022 Unchosen Ones’ Divine Power Flowing
\u2022 Sella’s Well I Mean
\u2022 Blessing Jolie’s 20nothing
\u2022 Votive’s An Infinite Capacity For Joy
\u2022 ladylike’s It’s A Pleasure Of Mine, To Know You’re Fine
\u2022 Jai’Len Josey’s Serial Romantic
\u2022 Steven Dove & Gian Battaglia’s scend
\u2022 Leven Kali’s LK99
\u2022 Chalk’s Crystalpunk
\u2022 Colton Bowlin’s Grandpa\u2019s Mill
\u2022 Quarters’ I HOPE THIS ISN’T THE END OF THE WORLD
\u2022 Wallie The Sensei’s Madd Dogg
\u2022 Close Enemies’ Close Enemies
\u2022 Steve Blanco’s Shadow Arc Suite
\u2022 Vicious Rain’s The Anatomy Of Surviving
\u2022 TRUEANDTRUE’s prayin\u2019 with the boys
\u2022 Struggle Jennings’ Last Name
\u2022 instant crush’s I’M SORRY I DIDN’T BITE MY TONGUE (Deluxe)
\u2022 Laurel Halo’s Midnight Zone (Original Soundtrack To The Film By Julian Charri\u00e8re)
\u2022 Rush’s Grace Under Pressure (40th Anniversary Edition)
\u2022 Jonas Brothers’ Friends From Your Hometown Live Album
\u2022 PUP’s Megacity Madness (The Official Live Recordings)
\u2022 Cashier\u2019s The Weight EP
\u2022 Cubzoa’s Cubzoa Vs Icebeing EP
\u2022 Sun Spots’ Dog Is Calling EP
\u2022 Amy Gadiaga’s BabyGoated EP
\u2022 googly eyes’ paint me like one of your fav american girls EP
\u2022 Cailin Russo\u2019s Don’t EP
\u2022 Hollow Suns’ Back To Dust EP
\u2022 Terrence Dixon’s When Stars Remember EP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kim Gordon could not be serious. Yet not only was she not kidding, she had taken a concept…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-527287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}