Chasing Fridays: Bassvictim, Mori, Operelly Q&A

This is the most concise Chasing Fridays I've published in a while. I simply didn't listen to very much new music this week. I've been grinding away in the shoegaze mines as I near the conclusion of my forthcoming book, and most of my energy for the last month has been (and for the next couple months, will be) put toward that. But don't get it twisted: if Bassvictim drop not one but two amazing new projects in a single week, you know I'm rinsing that shit in every spare minute I got. I wrote about their new EP this week as well as a new record from cloud-rocker Mori. Then, I interviewed the budding songwriter Operelly about her great new EP, her taste in Stereolab and Broadcast, her relation to cloud-rock, and a whole lot more. Onward.

Mori - El Niño Bola

One of the reasons cloud-rock feels like such a contemporary genre is because it's music that embodies the casual uncanniness of climate change. The erratic weather patterns that would've felt apocalyptically foreboding during my childhood in the 2000s (70-degree thaws in the Northeast during January, ​an 80-degree Saturday in March the week after it snows) have become ordinary features of everyday life. Seasons are blurring together and months that used to be gradual transitions from one extreme to the next (March and September, especially) are now sweltering and muggy. Wearing a t-shirt while walking by neighbors taking down Valentine's Day decorations or visiting a pumpkin patch in the blistering heat ​​​incite unique feelings of climatic dissonance, and I think cloud-rock's criss-crossing of icy starkness and humid blurriness captures it well.

At least that's how I felt while taking a sweaty, sunny walk to Mori's El Niño Bola in early March. The Spanish songwriter belongs to the Dean Blunt school of pop artists who not only sing through smog, but sound like their lungs have been reduced to half capacity by the surrounding haze, rarely raising their voices above a weary mid-range. "Oh, it's a sign of the times," he croaks in "Is It Forever," a brisk stupor through existential disorientation where Mori begs to be convincingly reassured of his youth. To believe that there's still time to change what, deep down, he knows is unchangeable. Mori's music is lower-fi and generally a few degrees warmer than the Nordic cloud-rockers. "Star" reminds me of an even blearier Horse Vision; acoustic strums carrying a perfect melody, squiggly synths interrupting it, and a shimmering effect on Mori's quaky falsetto that makes him sound like a humanoid beacon of light. Unearthly yet innately familiar.

The album's degraded textural palette evokes the new terrain those of us in historically wintry climates have to adjust to. The ugly patches of dead grass and clumpy mud that should be obscured by snow and frost, and almost feel voyeuristic to perceive before the crocuses bloom. The overcast skies backlit by a balmy sun that still sets by dinner time, creating a tear in the unnatural simulation of a long summer's day. Much like how our sun-starved bodies appreciate these meteorological wrinkles even as they inspire a deep unease, Mori's music is torn between numb acceptance and delusional optimism. "The hills, the wind, the sun/spell an image of the end," he laments in the album's best track. "But I feel good/even though I know I shouldn't." As I listen, I'm wearing shorts while looking out the window at my neighbor's snow shovel.

Bassvictim - ?

On March 4th, Bassvictim dropped possibly their greatest song yet, "Year of the Dragon," a mandatory yip-along made in collaboration with the bard of laptop twee, Worldpeace DMT. Two days later, Bassvictim surprise-dropped ?, a new "EP" (eight songs and 26 minutes is an album..) that's not better than last year's ind-twee-tronic transmission, Forever, but almost is. On these tracks, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman have taken yet another giant step away from the druggy "basspunk" that encompassed their first two mixtapes. They no longer make songs you can imagine yourself straining to hear with one nostril plugged in the bathroom stall, but songs you want to sing along to while jubilantly marching up a grassy hill and into the glittering sunset, while a gaggle of acid-soaked, baja hoodie-wearing college peers you don't actually know very well – but will be spiritually bonded with by the time morning comes – twirl and somersault in toe.

Bassvictim make music that sounds the way the cover of Oracular Spectacular looks. Idyllically free-spirited, aspirationally psychedelic, and, like gazing longingly at the artwork of a 19-year-old album that's imbued with the memories of a generation you enviously didn't get to experience first-hand, pathetically sentimental. "Don't Stop Me Now" is a bass-less Celtic romp adorned with bagpipes, flutes, downbeat hand-claps, tweeting birdsong, and drums that are walloped with a funereal gravitas. The fog machine haze that enveloped Manow in "Alice" has been replaced by campfire smoke that reeks of freak-folk earthiness. ?'s standout, "Sometimes I believe in God (Sometimes I believe in Me)," has a quaking bassline that rumbles beneath Manow's unintelligible yawps like a jailbroken massage chair. It's a dance song, it's an "electro-pop" song, but between the chipper chord progression and Manow's outside-voice cheers, it's hard to envision the track existing in any type of four-walled setting.

Bassvictim are obsessed with the concept of home on ?, titling tracks "Going Home," "Home," and, in case they weren't clear enough, "Home!!! (wake up)," an unfairly brief yet unbelievably emotive closer where a whole chorus of Manow's command her subjects to wake up, stand up, and return to their place of origin. It's a celebratory palate cleanse after "Babcia Jadzia," a loping, seven-minute scoot where Manow croaks and quivers about how much she misses her grandmother. It drags the project down musically, but I admire the heart in it too much to detract any points. That's what makes Bassvictim the most enduring and palpable band in their class of recession-pop revivalists. There's so much feeling in their music, so much spirit in their delivery, so much unabashed sincerity beneath their clout-damaged exterior. Darkness still haunts them, but Bassvictim have never sounded closer to the light than they do on ?.

Chasing Down

Olivia Austin
of
Operelly

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Operelly is the project of California singer-songwriter Olivia Austin, whose new EP *FLUTTERS AWAY* is out today via deadAir – home to Jane Remover, Quannnic, and many other artists who don't sound anything like Operelly. What attracts me to her music is that I don't know how to classify it. She's associated with cloud-rock stuff like Fine and Quiet Light, but doesn't convey that style's oneiric liminality. Operelly is more direct and songwriterly than that, outwardly hilarious yet also dainty and subtle. "When I tell my man I write all my songs about him, he doesn't seem very flattered," she intones without a fleck of guilt over a moaning accordion. That song, "Tell my man," reminds me of The Magnetic Fields, while others on *FLUTTERS AWAY* recall the motorik dream-pop of Broadcast, which is an influence Operelly has been very open about.

Overall, this five-song set, which follows last year's Handwriting Practice No. 1 EP, sounds like an artist rooting around several different styles in search of her own. She finds it on the best songs, "Under my bed" and "Tell my man," and it's tracks like those where I feel like I'm listening to a generational voice in the making. For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Operelly about fluttering away, the best songs on 69 Love Songs, her favorite lyricist, the best Stereolab and Broadcast tracks to play for a new fan, and more. Read the full interview below.