Hi! I’ve been very busy this carnival season because, now that we can have parades again, I joined the Krewe of Red Beans. This means I spend most of my free time right now hot-gluing beans and also my fingers. It’s like 50/50, in terms of beans vs. fingers.
Also: Krewe of Red Beans does a ton of important mutual aid work in and around New Orleans and if you value the culture the people here create, maybe you’d like to donate a few bucks.
Anyway, I’ve been doing more listening than reading lately. I have no Animal Collective takes, but if you liked their new album, please convince me to try it again.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this band
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when Wet Leg really got me. It was long before I heard guitarist Hester Chambers say, “OK everyone, hold on to your buttholes,” in the middle of their NPR Tiny Desk performance, or when I saw whatever’s going on in this music video.
Maybe it was when I heard “Chaise Lounge.” There’s just so much going on in their first single that it’s hard to resist breaking it down line by line, lick by lick. Here are the first lyrics Wet Leg released to the wide world:
Mommy, daddy, look at me
I went to school and I got a degree
All my frends call it the “big D”
I went to school and I got the big D
I got the big D
I got the big D
I got the big D
I went to school and I got the big D
If you haven’t just stopped reading to go listen to the band that started a song by letting mom and dad know they had sex, I’ll add that this is all delivered in Rhian Teasdale’s very British deadpan. That first sentence spans a solid 16 beats.
Over the driving baseline, we move on to a Mean Girls reference.
Is your muffin buttered?
Would like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?
They’ll later put their own twist on the joke — “Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?” — but not before giving us the hypnotizing chorus:
On chaise lounge, on the chaise lounge, on the chaise lounge, all day long, on the chaise lounge.
You’re just going to have to play it to hear what I mean when I say this is some kind of low-enunciation meditation mantra made possible by a British accent. The song is just three minutes and 19 seconds long but maybe you’ll find some kind of zen eternity in the chant and the rise and fall of the guitar riff.
We’ve got just four chewy little bites of Wet Leg right now and I’m on them like a cokehead on gum. In fact it’s tempting to verbally chomp on each of them right here, but no one wants the play-by-play.
The whole package, though — it’s sweet and sour and savory and salty. I’m charmed by the reverb-y chime of Chambers’ guitar on “Too Late Now,” and the moment when everything but the hi-hat drops out and Teasdale flatly tells us “Now everything is going wrong / I think I changed my mind again / I’m not sure if this is a song / I don’t know what I’m saying.” I’m hooked on the crunchy, downbeat-hammering insistence of “Oh No.” And I’m smiling when Teasedale sings, “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about when you’re touching yourself,” on “Wet Dream.” (“I got the big D” is not their only act of taunting in repetition. She repeats “touching yourself” five times, twice.) We don’t have the album or even an EP, but it’s a perfect little collection of songs to let play on repeat.
Wet Leg starts touring the U.S. in March and releases their album April 8.
let me tell you about this song
Yes, hello, my Mitski brain has logged on.
Finally, the entirety of Laurel Hell is at our fingertips and in our ears. I’ve said a lot about the singles in this newsletter so lemme just zero in on “Stay Soft” for a second.
This is some extremely Mitski shit and I think you should listen to it right now.
“Open up your heart,” she says, “like the gates of hell.”
Yes ma’am.
The trick of this song is how it’s soaring and wide open and vulnerable and the core message is “stay soft, get eaten, only natural to harden up.”
The tick of this album is that Mitski had decided to quit the music business, realized she was contractually obligated to make one more album, and instead of phoning it in, reinvented herself one more time and hit us with a series of arty interpretive-dance-ish videos and the line, “If you would just make one mistake, what a relief that would be.”
let me tell you about this cat
Cleo works at the garden shop and Cleo has had enough of you.
She knows you were in here yesterday bothering a different cat with your attempts to haggle. She is not coming down on the price of Happy Frog Potting Soil. This is a friendly independent local garden shop but that doesn’t mean they don’t operate under capitalism. Do you understand? Things cost what they cost.
Oh you want to speak to the manager? She’s the older woman behind the other counter in the Yankees hat. You can ask her about Mickey Mantle or you can complain about a cat. One option will get you a charming little joke about her sexuality and the other will save you 65 cents on the automatic rounding-up she normally does to feed the cats. Either way you’ll pay the full sticker price for that soil and Cleo will still sleep like a soft and perfect angel.