Futureproofing #6: Here In The Kitsch

As I listened to the (great) Jessica Pratt album for the 99th time, I couldn't help but wonder: were we actually moving towards a future, or was time really time and time again?

Cindy Lee, 2024, colorized

This week, two of the most important (to me, anyway) end-of-year lists dropped—Pitchfork and RA—both of which were remarkable for the selections in their upper echelons. From Pitchfork’s (well-deserved) love of Cindy Lee and Jessica Pratt, to RA’s wholehearted embrace of nu-mnml via Huerco S., throwback IDM from Gyrofield and ‘90s hardgroove from Skee Mask, all of these records are unmistakably—in fact unapologetically—backwards looking. They try on scenes and sounds from decades past like a well-loved pair of big E Levi’s in the back of a thrift store.

This was something of an epidemic in 2024. There was no escaping the ‘60s in any discussion of Jessica Pratt’s amazing Here In The Pitch, even if that narrative was unfairly restrictive of the music—she’s not 70 years old, nor is she some spooky messenger from the past. Huerco S. discusses his Loidis project as a purposeful revival of minimal techno and microhouse. And Cindy Lee’s two-hour juggernaut Diamond Jubilee was luddite in execution as well as sound, released only as a download on Geocities and a stream on YouTube. (As of October, it’s up on Bandcamp, too.) Music-wise, it’s an excavation of ‘50s doo-wop, R&B and mid-’60s heroin-rock freakout. Reverb is employed liberally like cobwebs in an attic, both obfuscating and enhancing the sound. But as much as it paid tribute to obvious touchstones like The Velvet Underground and The Ronettes, Diamond Jubilee also feels like a yearning for much more recent time: the heyday of Vivian Girls and early Best Coast, a time when all you needed was a guitar, a reverb and delay pedal and GarageBand to become a world-famous musician.

And there’s what’s remarkable: the retro era first outlined by Simon Reynolds is now eating itself, and we’re seeing trends from 2005-2008 come back into focus. All of this could be disconcerting. Is this the return of record collector rock, where artists wrote dispassionate but pitch-perfect genre exercises? Why was so much music also clothed in the powder-coated textures of shoegaze, even in electronic music? And why was dance music more retro than usual (as chronicled recently by Shawn Reynaldo), reviving early ‘00s prog, early ‘90s jungle and late ‘90s downtempo. How and why were the fake sugar high of last year’s ubiquitous pop edits replaced by wistful memories of Sarah McLachlan and Dido, or reserved Detroit techno chords and pads?

Ultimately, I don’t really find this trend negative because of two core factors: emotion and earnestness. (A dance music “shift” also noted in more detail by Reynaldo.) Kitsch and ironic detachment is out, teardrops on your guitar are in. There’s feeling in this music, not just rote memorization and cheap nostalgia. Take Huerco S.’s incredible RA Podcast as Loidis, which he says focuses on “sensuality”—the music is stripped-back, but also incredibly warm, like the music you might imagine people slow-dancing to at a spaceship prom in 2090 (never mind that a lot of the music is almost 20 years old). So much of the prog house revival is overtly gushy, and sentimentality is rife in the ambient and downtempo scene, from James K’s remarkable come-up this year to artists like Ben Bondy who mix (dashboard) confessional emo singer-songwriter material with fuzzy ambient music.

Then there’s Cindy Lee, whose Brill Building pastiche conceals a deep unease, and Jessica Pratt’s eerie folk, which is as Vashti Bunyan as it is James Taylor as it is Brian Wilson as it is Devendra Banhart. But it’s not really any of those things, and it’s not just ‘60s music either—for every moment of Pet Sounds-style baroque adornment (“Better Hate”) or Philies Records orchestral pomp (“Life Is”), there was just Jessica Pratt, alone with her guitar. Everything else is embellishment.

Pratt’s “World On A String” is one of my favorite tracks of the year, largely because it embodies Huerco S.'s criteria: “restraint, subtlety and sensuality.” The nylon strings ring loud and clear, the Mellotron-y strings float in the background like a cloud of perfume, and the big chorus lands with the startling but understated impact of a tap on the shoulder. For all the talk of old Hollywood and the Mansons and a bygone era, Here In The Pitch isn’t a product of the ‘60s—it’s the product of a stellar singer-songwriter who uses a familiar language to weave sophisticated and brief sound poems that are more otherworldly than ‘60s-worldly. (Jessica Pratt make an album longer than 28 minutes challenge.) If it sounds ghostly and yearning for better days to you, maybe that’s your problem, and to couch it in those terms robs the sometimes beautifully direct lyrics—as on “The Last Year”—of their power.

It might seem odd to celebrate what reads as “retro” music as the best of 2024, but that’s also dismissing the real creativity that goes into it. This music isn’t about nostalgia, nor do I think it has anything to do with our troubled times, or fashion trends, or anything like that. Instead, it’s people expressing themselves through old, often unfashionable forms in an era when the history of any microtrend, scene or place is available in a few minutes to all people at any time. It’s easy to find an era or style to become individually obsessed with, and it’s just as easy to make it your own. I’d sooner call the similarities between Cindy Lee and Jessica Pratt a coincidence than a trend. And the lauding that comes with both? That’s because they’re just good records.

This is not record collector music. It’s existing-in-2024-and-enjoying-the-bounty-of-art music. We complain about information overload a lot, but how about just sitting back and enjoying it?

I’ll be posting my own personal best records of the year later this month, after I’ve had more time to think about it. For now, I contributed to several of the Pitchfork lists: albums, songs and electronic music. I think the lists are remarkably diverse without feeling schizophrenic, and Cindy Lee at #1 is a sound decision that I wholeheartedly support. If you haven’t heard Diamond Jubilee, then here it is. It’s worth setting aside two hours for. Then go to Here In The Pitch.

Weekly Listening

Sasha - Involver [2004, Global Underground]

Ha! You want to talk about nostalgia? Here’s something that probably no one under the age of 40 except me has nostalgia for, but it deserves another look in this year of deadly serious electronic music kitsch. And it turns 20 this year. Involver, though it came near the peak of progressive house’s popularity, is probably its jumping-the-shark moment. Or at least its Tales from Topographic Oceans. Featuring pop-leaning tracks all remixed by Sasha and blended together with a finesse and precision that makes Northern Exposure sound like a Grimes DJ set, Involver is unabashedly cheesy. Its heart is weighed down by big feelings, and its sleeve gilded in purposefully exotic threads from faraway lands. It’s the sound of globalization, of the sun setting on Ray Of Light and the optimism of the late ‘90s turning into post 9/11 escapism.

It’s also really catchy. From the pre-Rufus-Du-Sol-isms of Grand National’s “Talk Amongst Yourselves” (what a baseline!) to Felix Da Housecat’s endearingly glitchy “Watching Cars Go By” to the rippling trance of Spooky, Involver is like sitting down with a Black Forest cake and eating the whole thing yourself. There’s even a fucking Shpongle track. And it doesn’t suck! (Maybe that’s because it’s a Sasha remix.)

But everyone listens to Involver for one moment: the impossibly glitchy, unbelievably satisfying breakdown in Lostep’s “Burma.” On its own, “Burma” is an excessive but serviceable prog house tune with typically “Eastern” sounding vocals. Sasha straightens out the drums into a typical proggy breakbeat slam, pushes the cringey vocals to the extremes of the stereo spectrum and makes them more bad-trip psychedelia than Australian-backpacking-in-Vietnam-on-LSD psychedelia. Best of all is the lead, which doesn’t even drop until after five minutes in, and it’s a heart-stopping moment. Somewhere between an overdriven bell and a breathy gasp, the melody comes out in bits and spurts, a rhythm that sounds so much like a mistake that it must have been perfectly sculpted by hand. This is the Platonic ideal of prog house: grandiose, unnecessary and drop-dead beautiful. I’ve selected the very best moment for your convenience in the embed below.

96 Back - tender, exit [2024, SVBKVLT]

96 Back is an artist I could never quite put my finger on, someone who tries everything and generally succeeds at it, but could benefit from some editing and focus. And here they are on SVBKVLT, one of my favorite electronic music labels going, with a 43-minute album where everything clicks into place. It has smorgasbord of genres and guest vocalists that have defined some of the best electronic full-lengths of the year. There’s shuddering, post-Yeezus cybercrime (“Rubber Knife”), tender Hyperdub-style IDM (“Voices”) and emo tracks that call back to the heyday of Tri Angle Records with Drain Gang lenses (“Do Something To Forget”). It’s one of those dance music records that flies by in an impressionistic blur of styles and colors, and I mean that as a compliment. ‘90s electronica called—they want their 96 Back. (Oh, god.)

TYSON - Chaos [2024, LUCKYME]

A UK singer-songwriter who combines contemporary R&B with dance music styles past and present? Groundbreaking, I know. But TYSON is special. I’ve been following her since the beginning, and Chaos feels like the grown-up, tidy album she’s always been meant to make, even if it’s only 25 minutes long. Far from what its title implies, the album is luxe and unhurried—in fact, one of the best moments comes at the end of “300kHz (Low Frequency),” when the swooning R&B beat slows down and you can hear the seams in the drum sample for a tantalizing outro “Diet Pepsi” style. “Grunge” is a wonderfully woozy duet with Wu-Lu, and “Alien Romance” is a suitably weird track that sounds like a melted copy of Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” 12-inch. If that doesn’t make you want to listen, then I don’t know what will.

Quiet Husband - Religious Equipment [2024, Drowned By Locals]

On the completely opposite end of the musical spectrum, here’s a noise-techno album where all the tracks are named after drugs. Quiet Husband is the alter ego of Richie Culver, who makes slightly creepy but tasteful ambient music under his own name. Imagine a collaboration between Container and Merzbow, and you’ve got an incredibly glib comparison that doesn’t quite do Religious Equipment justice. The noise passages—like “Kratom” and “Antabuse”—are gloriously unpleasant, like Culver threw a handful of contact mics onto flaming pile of garbage, while the techno and industrial leaning tracks are captivating, especially the falling-apart funk of “Tamazepam.” Vocals appear occasionally, from his mother’s spoken-word passage to unsettling wails, and the up-and-down sequencing gives it a dynamism that a lot of noise albums lack.

Windy & Carl - Heavy Early & The Creation Of Venus [2024, self-released]

The legendary (to me) American ambient duo return after a hiatus and a lot of personal loss with an album they apparently felt compelled to make—the kind of music that spontaneously creates itself out of need. Here, that takes the form of two (nearly) hour-long tracks whose stillness is both cathartic and oppressive. It’s hard to imagine a passage of music more beautiful than the strummed guitar chords on “Heavy Early,” but repeated for 52 minutes, the tones become sinister before clearing up into resolution and then back into darkness. Almost nothing perceptible happens, just that guitar sequence painting over itself repeatedly until you’re no thoughts, head empty—is that what ambient music is supposed to do? “The Creation Of Venus” is a little more lively, an extended keyboard meditation that sounds like an artificial pipe organ playing an extended funeral song, channeling the tears and grief of all who have passed through its imaginary hallowed halls. You can hear that grief in the music, too, but ultimately Heavy Early & The Creation Of Venus is a record of redemption and recovery, the sound of making it through to the other side in one piece and soldiering on. What it lacks in the exquisite composition of their past work it makes up for in sheer emotional largesse.