Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Ex Hex: "Hot and Cold" |  |
- Ex Hex: "Hot and Cold"
- Angel Olsen: "White Fire"
- St. Vincent: "Prince Johnny"
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Posted: 07 Feb 2014 02:16 PM PST
Loose, confident, and just a little sly, "Hot and Cold"—our first run-in with Ex Hex, a new band from Mary Timony, Fire Tapes bassist Betsy Wright, and the Aquarium drummer Laura Harris—hardly feels like your typical debut single. Stands to reason, really: Mary Timony, late of Autoclave, Helium, and Wild Flag, has launched a band or two in her day, and at this point, she seems keen to nix the fanfare and break out the fuzzboxes.
The free-and-easy "Hot and Cold" doesn't exactly possess the shock of the new, but that doesn't matter: All it takes is one listen, and it already sounds like an old favorite. It's sheer glammed-out swagger, a feathered-hair-and-denim-jacketed stomper on the order of Sweet's "Fox on the Run". Over a strutting backbeat and a couple of chunky chords, Timony and a would-be suitor work through a communication breakdown: "You're acting like the foolish kind," she sneers, "Trying to talk to me through your mind." If "Hot and Cold" is any indication, Ex Hex might just prove to be the most out-and-out rocking outfit of Timony's career. Ex Hex: "Hot and Cold" on SoundCloud.  |
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Angel Olsen: "White Fire"
Posted: 07 Feb 2014 09:22 AM PST
A standout among the lower-key songs on Angel Olsen's upcoming album Burn Your Fire for No Witness, "White Fire" is paced and arranged almost exactly like the spare early music of another penetrating singer, Leonard Cohen. Think "The Stranger Song", or "Avalanche"—patient ballads built around a strong, solitary voice and guitar arpeggios that churn with the quiet intensity of water left on simmer. Like Cohen, Olsen's most striking talent is her ability to make rough, earthy-sounding music that touches metaphysical realms.
"If you've still got some light in you then go before it's gone," she sings near the song's end. "Burn your fire for no witness/ It's the only way it's done." The imagery is both vivid and yet impossible to keep on the ground, and Olsen's voice—an instrument that seems to get more powerful all the time—slips back and forth between the croaks of a friend in the passenger seat on a cold winter morning and a kind of angelic wheeze, disappearing into strata most people can't reach. It's a song that could've been on Olsen's stripped-down last album, Half Way Home, and yet she's stepped so confidently into her own since then that it's hard to imagine her sustaining a song with this kind of force until now. Angel Olsen: "White Fire" on SoundCloud.  |
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Posted: 07 Feb 2014 07:11 AM PST
Deploying singles with the thoughtfulness and tactical skill of a field general, Annie Clark has spent the time leading up to the release of St. Vincent to give listeners one last tour through the sounds she's spent the last half-decade exploring. "Birth in Reverse", a bundle of nerves and sparky, Spoon-y riffs, found Clark at her sharpest and most fierce, while "Digital Witness" couched future-shocked fear in a muscular, brassy bleat familiar from her 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Love This Giant.
New single "Prince Johnny" explores yet another side of Clark best represented by her masterful 2011 effort Strange Mercy, striking a fine balance between oblique lyrical wit, searing, impressive intelligence, and pop sensibility. It's a dense character study, a declaration of independence, and a vehicle for eerie choral chug, all at once—and while taking on just one of those identities would render the song fulfilling, Clark's ability to stuff it with all three without exploding is what makes her one of the most compelling artists working today.  |
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