Staff Picks 2020: Frank Esparros
By Frank Esparros, Contributor
This is just a list of my personal favorites, it doesn’t have to be the best--I don’t have any real authority to judge that--save for an AP music theory class I took in high school in which I believe I got a 3. But I like music, and even though the soundtrack to my year was Disintegration by The Cure, Joy Division’s Closer, and Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, I still squeezed some new releases in.
Molchat Doma “Monument”
Anyone who has clicked around Youtube for more than five minutes has come across a “Russian Doomer Music” playlist, and if you’ve clicked on one, you’re probably familiar with recent Sacred Bones signees Molchat Doma. Despite being from Belarus, the band is a mainstay on these playlists. They are the quintessential example of the doomer music and aesthetic that has grown so popular in the West.
The Youtube algorithm has no doubt helped the band rack up millions of views in a short time, but maybe there are other reasons why this particular post-punk band (and these Russian Doomer Playlists) have achieved such success with the contemporary youth—particularly among Gen Z, who use their song “Sudno'' in various memes and TikToks. Like the Doomer (a portementu of Doom and Zoomer), Gen Z doesn’t have much to look forward to. With a lack of job prospects, widening economic inequality, and massive social alienation, is the U.S not beginning to resemble a post-Soviet Russia? Even Molchat Doma’s home country of Belarus has broken out into massive social upheaval much like the U.S with its BLM protests.
The music video for Monument’s second single “Discotheque,” finds Molchat Doma surrounded by statues of historical figures—Lenin, Stalin, Thomas Jefferson etc.—in between sweeping shots of dilapidated Eastern European housing projects and deserted streets. In the background of these cityscapes a skyscraper-sized octogon flashes colorful lights, as if there’s a nightclub inside and the denizens of this now-abandoned city are all in attendance. The harsh reality of the world shown outside is quelled by the hedonistic impulses found in nightclubs, or the temporary escapism offered by modern technology.
Inside this anachronistic discotheque plays Molchat Doma’s Monument.
At the start of the music video, they show the same symbol that is on Monument’s album cover: a monument of the North Korean Workers Party rather than the expected USSR hammer-and-sickle insignia that Belarus had once flown. The North Korean Workers Party symbol—which contains the traditional hammer and sickle of other Marxist-Leninist parties—notably adds a calligraphy brush, representing artists and the intelligentsia as well as industrial and farmworkers.
Molchat Doma is back to Goth basics: dancy drum machines, echoing guitar lines, prominent synths, baritone vocals, and straightforward bass serving as their foundation. Their lyrics, when translated, are characteristically gloomy. But even in Russian, the feeling is pervasive. With their sophomore album Etazhi, the ragged face of post-millennium malaise was given a soundtrack, and with Monument it has its sequel. Monument is the sound most emblematic of 2020—as long as we are hurtling towards the apocalypse, we might as well have a dance party.
Microphones “Microphones in 2020”
Phil Elvrum once seemed fascinated by death. He mystified it like a 19th-century aesthete in many of his early songs. After the passing of his wife Geneviève Castrée, however, one could hear his deeper and more painful understanding. Death wasn’t the release of one's spirit into the cosmos or the gentle whisperings of a Pacific Northwestern breeze; it was more the pain of throwing out a loved one’s toothbrush, or the moment an Amazon package ordered by his late wife arrived. He states this bluntly in the title of the opening track of his 2016 album A Crow Looked at Me: “Death is Real”. A Crow Looked at Me was released under the name of his other project, Mount Eerie, and was a careful examination of these moments. It was poetic, confessional, and painful.
With Microphones in 2020, Elvrum made the bold decision of returning to the moniker that he retired in 2003. He also made an even bolder decision of making this album one long track, using these 40 minutes to reflect upon the seemingly insignificant moments of his life and career, like leaving the theater after watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or seeing Stereolab in concert.
Elvrum started making his music with tape loops and ambient soundscapes that were almost tactile: there was the hissing of a cassette tape or the creaking exhales of a chord organ. These noises reappear at certain intervals on this album too, often overpowering the strummed chords that make up the skeleton of the song before fading away entirely.
Life is a series of isolated events we try to form into a cohesive narrative, but perhaps there isn’t always one to be found. Some moments slip through our memory as if they never happened, and sometimes the mundane stick around, for whatever reason. The Microphones project has always been about finding meaning in the everyday, whether it be a Stereolab concert or a toothbrush. Microphones in 2020 is no different At the end of this 40-minute track, Elvrum puts this idea into words: “Anyway, every song I've ever sung is about the same thing: standing on the ground looking around, basically/If there have to be words, they could just be: now only and there's no end.”
Special Interest “The Passion Of”
Special Interest seems as if they actively refuse classification; they sound like Lydia Lunch one second and German gabber the next. They’re a new breed of no-wave. In 2020, we have a whole new arsenal of synths and MIDIs to fuck around with until achieving the perfectly discordant mess of acts like DNA or Mars.
Whereas no-wave originated as a response to the crime-riddled, derelict (and enviously cheap) New York of the 1970s, Special Interest hails from New Orleans. 2020 New Orleans isn’t in the best shape. The roads are so filled with potholes they are borderline unusable; 15 years after Katrina there are still boarded-up houses and empty lots where homes used to be; It has one of the highest crime rates in the U.S. One could certainly draw comparisons of New Orleans to the apocalyptic New York of yesteryear.
Although Special Interest is creating some brand of no-wave, it doesn’t sound trapped in nostalgia. There is something undeniably modern about it—something assured and confident. The Passion Of is more layered and abrasive than their last album, 2018’s Spiraling. Special Interest has only been around for a couple of years, but they know who they are and they know what they’re doing.
Honorable mentions
Yves Tumor “Heaven to a Tortured Mind”
First time I read about COVID was probably late-February. I read an article about how this new virus from China was found in New York. I was on the train, maskless and listening to the first single from Heaven to a Tortured Mind, “Gospel for a New Century''. I couldn’t get the phrase “Virus Style'' out of my head. I kept repeating it to myself with same cadence as RZA saying “tiger style” at the beginning of “Wu-Tang Ain’t Nothing to Fuck With”. I cheekily made a playlist called “Virus Style'' later that day. The opening track to the playlist was “Gospel for a New Century''. Little did I know....
Nick Cave “Idiot Prayer (Live at Alexandra Palace)”
Nick Cave sits alone at a piano in a deserted Alexander Palace. He performs some of his most famous songs stripped back so that his outstanding lyricism is giving the bulk of the attention. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds official Youtube channel started this livestream around April where they would broadcast Bad Seed’s music videos and live performances 24/7. I left that on in the background for weeks.