#Youtube serpentwithfeet better ears full#
#Youtube serpentwithfeet better ears series#

These are all bands who flourished in the previous era of American conservatism, and are thus presented as proof that punk rock is gonna suck for the rest of the decade.

2” proves they haven’t lost any of their urgency, though it’s fueled by alternate energy sources-the confrontational dissonance of Liars, Animal Collective’s primeval percussion, Arcade Fire’s propulsive populism. Surely, the band’s sunnier outlook on a “ Taoist love record” would come at the expense of the raw anguish and incapacitating intensity responsible for Home Like Noplace Is There’s status as the zenith of 21th century emo. If the nudity on the cover of Goodness didn’t freak out Hotelier fans, the smiles did. “But something one day just told me that I needed to put this out-I thought this would take me to the next level,” she said. At the time, she was already making local waves with an icy freestyle over Nicki Minaj’s “Chiraq” beat, and wasn’t even sure what to do with “OOOUUU” when she finished it. “I wanted to be drunk while I recorded it,” she said in an interview with Genius. “Yo, bro, I think I had too much Hennessy … I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little smizz, I’m a little drizz,” she says on the intro, and she really wasn’t lying. “OOOUUU” was a street-level hit in New York before it broke nationally, rumbling out of cars all over Brooklyn, and the neon afterglow of its beat and M.A’s drunken swagger vividly evoke the sticky nights of summer 2016 in the city. Yes, she just said “Headphanie.” Yes, the song sounds a lot like “Hot Nigga,” by her fellow young Brooklynite Bobby Shmurda-and if you didn’t already notice by the end of the song, she’s got a line about “getting shmoney” to point it out for you.

#Youtube serpentwithfeet better ears series#

“OOOUUU” isn’t so much a song as a series of gauntlets, thrown down bar by declarative bar in Young M.A’s disconnected flow. At some point, if you’re lucky, you’ll start to feel like one again.

Sometimes, when life is at its bleakest, the best you can do is put on a pleasant mask and perform like a human. Aside from some light shouting and dubby delay on the chorus, the music, too, is unfailingly polite, accenting Parquet Courts’ wiry sound with an elegant Mellotron solo.

#Youtube serpentwithfeet better ears full#

On “Human Performance,” he scales back the assault while chronicling the dissolution and aftermath of a once-happy relationship, unspooling slow dactyls and trochees, revealing an almost Elizabethan syntax: “Those pristine days I recall so fondly / so few are trials when a life isn’t lonely.” The mannered delivery suits the subject matter, which has the narrator going on living after a devastating loss, though he is beset by tremors and a sink full of dirty dishes. In many of his band’s best-known songs, Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage sounds harried and frantic, cramming as many syllables as possible into a given line, piling up a narrative with detail after telling detail. The final crescendo is as satisfying as a good shit. “All my life I thought I’d change,” Olsen laments, repeatedly. “She came together like a dream that I didn’t know I had,” she sings, piecing it together in the opening verse in the second it’s a plea: “Show me the future / Tell me you’ll be there.” By the end, she’s certain she knew this all along: “I want to live life, I want to die right next to you.” “Sister” climaxes in an exhilarating guitar solo that builds, then releases, then builds again. The lyrics are an epiphany about a lost, unfulfilled love that you realize along with Olsen. It’s a gradual ascent, like a day’s climb out of a hangover fog-a “Let the Beat Build” for guitars. But the magic of “Sister,” one of the standout tracks on Olsen’s My Woman, is that it’s impossible to do anything but listen to it all the way through. Releasing a nearly eight-minute track as a single is a bit like publishing 8,000 words on the internet and expecting everyone to read it start to finish.