oxytocin

Feb 05, 2022

I liked Billie Eilish’s most recent album fine. I avoided it for a bit (not too hard, given my listening habits these days I have to actively seek out popular stuff, and I’m mostly content to lose touch instead), guessing from the marketing that she was making a Lana Del Rey-esque turn, which, honestly, LDR has never done much for me but good for her. Once I finally listened to it I learned I was wrong and was struck by some of the trip-hop and 90’s alternative sounds I found in there. “OverHeated” is the song that made me finally listen to the album; it reminds me of Massive Attack (“Paradise Circus” especially) and maybe some Timbaland productions. But the sound that stood out to me the most was on “oxytocin”, which reminds me of Curve in a very particular way. So here’s a playlist that has “oxytocin” followed by “Dirty High” by Curve and we work from there.

Curve started off in the early 90’s as a shoegaze act with a more anthemic style than usual for the genre; Doppleganger has some guitar sounds that bring to mind U2 more than My Bloody Valentine. By the late 90’s they had dropped most of the guitar fuzz and incorporated more electronic sounds in the way that many bands of the time did, but importantly they were very good at it. The cool kid take (and how I first heard of Curve, from some other college radio guy) was that everything Garbage did Curve did first, and while I don’t think that’s right, they’re definitely making the same sort of music. Come Clean is an excellent album, and I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t actually hear it until the late 00’s. Consider this an invitation to listen to more of their stuff.

Most of the rest of the playlist is in the same rock/electronic grey area as those two songs. A Ladytron song that repeatedly invokes the witching hour and feels made for that time, a bass synth groove kept to a medium pace and guitar stabs that feel like streetlights shining through your car window as they go by. “Push It”, by Garbage and “Are You The One”, by The Presets bring the energy up with songs meant for a dancefloor, but the kind populated by people with heavy eyeliner. As an aside, the video for “Are You The One” is somewhat unsettling in subtle ways, playing around with digital artifacting and other weird low-tech hijacking of your visual cortex:

The last few songs bring in an industrial flavor underneath it all, a little heavier bass and more insistent (but slower) drumbeat than what came before. All that moving from before must have tired you out a little, sink into the end of the night as the lights go down.