The Last Song That Made Me Cry
Phoebe Bridgers: “Chinese Satellite”
To celebrate the return of Phoebe Bridgers — whose first album in six years, “Lost Weekend,” arrives on Aug. 14 — I recently returned to the singer-songwriter’s haunting 2020 album “Punisher.” Bridgers released it at the beginning of that year’s strange and lonely summer, and I don’t revisit it too often for that reason: It feels like a sonic time capsule of an era that I don’t particularly want to remember. But when I queued up “Punisher” on my commute to the office a few weeks ago, I was instantly seized by its still-potent power — we’re talking goose bumps from the very first song. Before I knew it, “Punisher” had me dabbing away tears right there on the N train.
The particular song that wrecked me was “Chinese Satellite,” a stirring meditation on belief that’s full of Bridgers’ signature blend of dark humor and sudden emotional wallops. Bridgers is a razor-sharp writer and an expert chronicler of the absurdities and banal disappointments of modern life: “Took a tour to see the stars but they weren’t out tonight / So I wished hard on a Chinese satellite,” she sings. I love the way her vocal performance on this song swings between deadpan numbness and sudden surges of feeling. There’s something so vulnerable about her admission (in opposition to the more cynical loved one she addresses in the song) that she doesn’t judge those around her who believe in something larger than themselves — if anything, she’s jealous of them. The whole song is frighteningly good, but here’s the line that always destroys me: “You know I’d stand on the corner, embarrassed with a picket sign / If it meant I would see you when I die.” Oof! There I go again. Anybody have a tissue?
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A New-to-Me Discovery
A.R. Kane: “Crazy Blue”
I first heard about the pioneering and utterly bewitching indie group A.R. Kane only a few weeks ago, as I was making my way through a copy of the great cultural critic Greg Tate’s recently reissued 1992 essay collection “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” Tate devoted one of his 1988 Village Voice columns to the British duo — who, incidentally, coined the term “dream pop” to describe their impossible-to-categorize, phantasmagoric sound — and itsfull-length debut “69,” an album he describes as “where dub reggae meets its free-jazz and psycho-candy cousins.”
This mesmerizing lead track is as inviting a portal into A.R. Kane’s alternate universe as any song they ever released, but if you’re into it, I’d encourage you to dig deeper into their woefully underappreciated catalog. Next stop: “Up Home!,” the atmospheric EP they released just before “69,” which has had an enduring influence on the subgenre that would come to be known as shoegaze. (Though, as A.R. Kane’s Rudy Tambala put it in an interview two years ago, “seriously, your honor, it was not our fault. We never gazed at shoes.”)
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A New Song I’ve Had on Repeat
Kelela: “Linknb”
Intentionally or not, I hear an echo of A.R. Kane’s murky atmospherics in “New Avatar,” a freshly released LP by the R&B experimentalist Kelela that I’ve been listening to quite a bit. I love the way this album finds Kelela adding layers of reverb, distorted guitar and samples to her electronic soundscapes, giving tracks like this brooding tune a uniquely textured feel.
