Honey, I Shrunk The Wiz

10/14/2021

1. Anna - N​.​Y​.​P​.​D. 南洋派對
   A roiling black monsoon cloud stalking in from the South China Sea, scintillated through with spears of jagged heat lighting.

2. Pool Hopping - Illuminati Hotties
   There’s a wicked sense of humor boiling barely below the surface of IH’s best tunes. You get the sense—can almost hear it in her vocal affectations—that Sarah Tudzin is singing through a snarl. She’s got supreme command of the ‘90s/early aughts commercial radio rock tropes that define her Day-Glo sound, and she gets that the most interesting way of invoking those textures in 2021 is by leaning into their creepy artificiality; the way they wallpaper over something rotten and pernicious.

3. Roman Dub - Harry Mudie
   Scenes of an Edenic suburban subdivision. Rows of fraternal twin ranch style homes. The immaculate geometries of their lawns and driveways. Trees trimmed to within a razor’s width. Not a bough out of place. Blue skies that singe the retina. Inky red mulch that you can smell in your throat. The frenzied yap of a lapdog. The crash of a dropped dish on a tiled floor. What fucked up horrors hide within this plastic paradise?

4. 기대어 잠든 아이처럼 Like a Sleepy Child - Sanullim
   We can indulge in a little bit of fingerpicked, sotto voce soloist stuff every now and then. It’s perfectly harmless in moderation. Of course, there’s always the risk of overdoing things—you start growing out and shaping your fingernail plectrums for the optimal pluck, wearing knit beanies indoors, unseasonable corduroy, t-shirts with overly relaxed necklines, that kind of thing. Nothing wrong if one keeps their consumption temperate, but if you have a friend or loved one who suddenly gets really into learning how to play Blackbird or something, it might be time for an intervention.

5. To Be Sad - Lael Neale
   I just wanna make every single sad girl in the world smile. That’s why whenever I see a woman not smiling, I tell her how much prettier she would be if she “gave smiling a try.” Then invariably the woman insists on giving me her phone number, and I say, “No, no, seeing your face light up with that movie star smile was all the gratification I needed.” This happens to me every day.

6. Allegheny - Rachika Nayar
   Nayar’s transitory electric guitar arrangements bespeak a painterly tenderness. They’re less songs and more atmospheric essays on color theory.

7. Under the Rolling Moon - Ducks Ltd.
   Back when me, Glizz, and the Bear were doing the college thing, we’d sometimes get boozed up and venture off to house parties way out in these leafy residential areas—the kind of houses where you assumed the kids living there got the rentals through some family/friend connections because otherwise there’d be no point in living that far from campus.
   

   And sometimes, when we were out at these house parties, after we’d had our fill of stolen beer and salvaged liquor, we’d get the bright idea of saving the skrilla we’d spend on a car and walking the couple miles back to the apartment in the dead of fucking night.
   
   And sometimes on these walks, if we were just the right amount of drunk and there was just the right amount of North Florida autumn in the air, I’d run my fingers through some Spanish moss, look out at the unknowable life that stretched before me with something like optimism, and get a feeling in my root chakra that I also feel, if only vaguely, when I listen to this here song by the Duck guys.

8. Sticky Thumb - Hether
   If you’re gonna have a song with multiple tempo changes, you’ll ultimately have to decide which of your multiple tempos you want the song to play out on. A lot of songs will feint toward a downtempo denouement and then come back in with a piledriving up-tempo payoff. This can work, but it does induce a specific kind of physiological response. Like a dessert cappuccino. Always a delicious idea in theory, and very often a lovely experience, but always carrying the threat that the rest of your night will be all palpitations and palm sweat.

   
   In Sticky Thumb, Hether’s Paul Castelluzzo elects to go with the slow tempo outro, with the added twist that the song’s steady groove dissolves into noodly dissonance. This provokes its own kind of bodily reaction, like, say, a post-meal milkshake: a decadent wind-down that will have an unpredictable and potentially destabilizing affect on your gastrointestinal system.

9. sing about love - Fousheé
   Absolutely giant news for the FouHive: Fousheé can finally sing about love again! Skin on dewey, asses on juicy, and Fousheé singing about love again. We are EATING ladies!!!

10. Dimona (Spiritual Capital of the World) - Tonistics
    Oh, you didn’t know that Dimona is the Spiritual Capital of the World? Let me guess, you didn’t do too well on your AP Human Geography exam? Wait… you weren’t even in the honors class!? Yikes… you should really think about cracking a book, or at the very least buying a fucking map. I can’t handle the emotional labor of educating you about Dimona, the Spiritual Capital of the World. Do the work, honey!

⛺