For my first ever Select Frequency (a weekly playlist of ten songs chosen by one of the amazing staff writers here at gatekeep!), I decided to… wait until the last second and then throw out all the notes I had been taking in a sudden and ill-timed fit of passion and crankery! So, no themes no masters, the following ten tracks are good songs I think I can talk at length about— nothing more, nothing less. Let’s fuckin’ DO THIS!
The Flaming Lips - “Slow Nerve Action”
Electric Light Orchestra - “Calling America”
Mastodon - “North Side Star”
Upper Wilds - “Roy Sullivan”
Motion City Soundtrack - “Worker Bee”
Out Hud - “How Long”
Hardrock Striker - “Motorik Life (DJ Sprinkles’ Mountain of Despair)”
Joanna Wang - “Fancied by a Celebrity”
The Ragga Twins - “The Killing”
The Replacements - “Androgynous”
The Flaming Lips - “Slow Nerve Action”
From Transmissions From the Satellite Heart // 1993 // neo-psychedelia
Though the kool kids all rightly sing loud the praises of 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic, the second and final Flaming Lips LP to feature eccentric, sensitive guitar god Ronald Jones before he vanished into the sunset never to grace the stage again, today I’m in the mood to shine a little love on their first release with Jones, 1993’s Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, and specifically its woozy, heartbroken finale “Slow Nerve Action”. The Lips have dealt in melancholic reefer fantasies for each and every one of their forty two years on this nation, but here those fantasies run headlong into reality in a way they never quite did after the band managed to make a proper career of ‘em. The blaring, overclocked guitar riff that seems to ooze over the track, the fuzzy stomping caveman drums, and the mournful vocal delivery paint a harsh scene of loser burnouts hanging out doing nothing, watching their friend pretend she has an invisible dog. Then, this friend grows up, moves on, gets a job cuz times got hard. Because the loser burnout lifestyle is kind of a luxury, right? A way to keep being a kid into your 30s and beyond. Not something afforded to women who mow their own lawns. Wayne Coyne seems to realize, for a moment, how good he still has it, and how hollow that is- now all us vegetables can waste our time on someone else…
Electric Light Orchestra - “Calling America”
From Balance of Power // 1986 // synth pop
Jeff Lynne was a creature of the seventies, through and through. That was what gave ELO’s 1981 magnum opus Time its rich retrofuturist pathos, imagining a man from the 80s beamed a century into the future as Lynne struggled, and ultimately failed, to come to grips with the lightspeed evolution of pop around him. 1983’s Secret Messages was more shitpost than album, and by the time Balance of Power rolled around, the band was plainly out of steam, releasing what was essentially a glorified Jeff Lynne solo album to little acclaim and a quiet breakup. But WAIT! What if I were to tell you that Jeff Lynne is, in fact, a remarkably talented pop songwriter, and that Balance of Power is actually a pretty good showcase of this? “Calling America” is an airtight synth gem about a girl who flies off to the USA, presumably to pursue dreams of stardom, leaving ol’ Jeff trying in vain to stay in touch over the phone. The keen sense of technological alienation that animated Time is on full display here, and the first bridge especially is a marvel of poetry that rolls clean and smooth off the tongue and conveys both straightforward meaning and layers of metaphor: talk is cheap on satellite / but all I get is static / information, I’m still here / redial on automatic…
Mastodon - “North Side Star”
From Cold Dark Place // 2017 // progressive metal
A belated rest in power to the inimitable Brent Hinds, a man who I always felt a sort of kinship with as a non-metalhead amongst metalheads. Hinds, originally a banjo player raised on country and old-school psych-rock, spent much of his tenure with Mastodon straining against the confines of the heavy metal genre, pushing the band into spacier, more melodious territory with each release. I was introduced to Mastodon with their hooky, trippy 2014 release Once More ‘Round the Sun, an album I have for eleven years now maintained is far better and more interesting than any critic gave it credit for; their next album Emperor of Sand was much more concertedly conceptual and prog-influenced, and though I ardently defended it from naysayers on release, it was already losing its luster by the time Cold Dark Place came around only six months later. Cold Dark Place culled three unreleased tracks from the Once More sessions and one from Emperor of Sand, and on first listen my mind boggled that such brilliance had ever hit the cutting room floor. “North Side Star” is a marvel, easily the best song Hinds ever recorded. It starts slow, witchy and atmospheric, Hinds’ pedal steel weaving through the composition like a lost spirit, and halfway through the song gathers itself up and unleashes a groove so irresistibly danceable that only Hinds’ signature hybrid-picked shredding can bring it back to something even resembling metal. Maybe if we look ahead / we can clear this wreck to the side…
Upper Wilds - “Roy Sullivan”
From Guitar Module 2017 // 2017 // noise rock
Dan Friel debuted his new band Upper Wilds with a couplet that, to me, still defines his entire oeuvre, before and since. On the band’s first single “Roy Sullivan”, over a thundering cacophony of drum machines and guitars, Friel intoned: “Something in my bones completes the circuit of each day / And I just keep on rising from the grave”. That’s his whole deal as a lyricist, right there: BIG big emotions, indomitable human spirits as perpetually-reincarnated phoenixes, the real-life miracles that inspire myth (the song’s namesake park ranger survived being struck by lightning on seven separate occasions). To boot, it speaks, in tone and delivery and accompaniment, to the far-reaching and fractious constellation of influences that would ultimately make Upper Wilds (as well as his old band Parts and Labor) such a rewarding-yet-frustrating project for me: The heartsome punk of Jeff Rosenstock (who showed up for guest vocals on Mars a year later), the irradiated guitar pyrotechnics of label/tourmates Lightning Bolt, the crushing riffage of ‘70s Sabbath (they covered “Hole in the Sky” in ‘21), and the wiry experimentalism of Robert Pollard. Put simply, the man can be hit-or-miss, but it’s no mean feat to hit this hard and this comprehensively even once. Count yourself lucky, one, two, three, four, five…
Motion City Soundtrack - “Worker Bee”
From My Dinosaur Life // 2010 // pop punk
You know what I blame for this horrid time-crunch I’ve inflicted on myself? The forty hour work week! Forty hours is way too many! Thank goodness for songs like “Worker Bee”: short ‘n’ sweet, raucous enough to give you a little jolt of adrenaline in the last leg of a shift, so surface-level lyrically that it becomes both unmistakable in its specific intent and universally applicable to any situation where you feel like you deserve a gold star, a GOOOOOLD STA-AR. Justin Pierre, emo-pop’s foremost expert on self-destructive behavior (and yes, that’s really saying something), can’t help but color even a song this victorious with rueful self-effacement: it went from no good to fucked up and over / a total distortion of lifelong disorder, but the music is too unrelenting to let him truly wallow, and his powerful voice rising to a confident SHOUT makes me feel like barrelling headfirst through some fresh open wounds myself. Forget having to say outright that “work sucks, I know”. The sugary sucker-punch of “Worker Bee” captures the soul-crushing drudgery of building a life for yourself and the ecstasy of finally getting to live that life. Let’s commence the winning.
Out Hud - “How Long”
From Let Us Never Speak of It Again // 2005 // synth pop
It’s a darn shame that time seems to be flattening the explosively fun 00s alt-dance scene to just LCD Soundsystem, its most sad-bastard export— especially when bassist Tyler Pope’s old band Out Hud was right off to the left when James Murphy was still green, with a small but potent discography of quirky, party-startin’ beats overglowing with time ‘n’ place flavor. For my money, Pope’s finest hour comes on Out Hud’s 2005 swan song Let Us Never Speak of It Again, with the absolutely bumping slap bassline he unleashes for “How Long”, the perfect anchor for the track’s buzzing, vibrant synths and infectious vocal chops. On that tip, also deserving of special mention is the lackadaisical twin-vocal attack of drummer Phyllis Forbes and cellist Molly Schnick, the latter of whom also revs up the track with a cinematic flourish. If you like your indie sleaze fresh, funky, and whip-smart, this is one to introduce to all your friends at your next block party.
Hardrock Striker - “Motorik Life (DJ Sprinkles’ Mountain of Despair)”
From Motorik Life // 2011 // deep house
I can officially say that anyone whose knowledge of New York house iconoclast Terre Thaemlitz, AKA DJ Sprinkles, starts and ends with Midtown 120 Blues is MISSING OUT. Specifically, they are missing out on this fucking behemoth of a remix, taking Hardrock Striker’s well-titled Motorik Life single and expanding it into a cavernous dystopian dance-scape haunted by the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr. And don’t you dare brace yourself for ham-handed political didacticisms, either- this is REVEREND King we’re dealing with here, reanimated as the forceful, impassioned public speaker he was in life, still asking us to hew a stone of hope from the mountain of despair. Thaemlitz cuts and loops the speech to highlight the fear and pessimism lurking in King’s message, but far from souring the radical moral challenge he originally intended, the track seems to confront the despair we all feel in our own lives all the more boldly— all at 120 beats per minute.
Joanna Wang - “Fancied By A Celebrity”
From Hotel La Rut // 2024 // power pop
Joanna Wang’s sorta-kinda breakout hit record Hotel La Rut is apparently a concept album, but the concept seems to be a rapid-fire blend of disciplined genre pastiche and freeform absurdism, endlessly entertaining even when it’s scarcely coherent (the actual concept is adapted from a Kids in the Hall skit, so, yanno). In the album’s best moments, Wang is just lucid enough to wink at the camera and not one bit more: case in point, standout track “Fancied by a Celebrity”, where she channels prime Ray Davies as she relates a dream where she was, well, you get it. It’s an especially fun listen for me given how dull my own dreams tend to be; the most famous person I’ve ever been dream-fancied by is economist Gary Stevenson!
The Ragga Twins - “The Killing”
From Reggae Owes Me Money // 1991 // hip hop
We abide a healthy dose of nineties rave ‘stalgia on this here Substack, but it always bears repeating that ye olde soundsystem culture wasn’t all smileys and good times and vaporub 24/7. No siree, even the innocent ravers were not safe from the heroin chic that gripped the decade, and to combat this scourge on their community, junglist pioneers Deman Rocker and Badman Flinty put together an absolute rager of an SOS Band sample flip and rapped energetically over it about the dangers of “The big H”. It’s so wholesome and altruistic in concept that it could well have come off a little corny, but the sound of the thing is so raw and grimy and undeniably fun that it probably made for a much better anti-drug seminar than D.A.R.E.— better, for that matter, than anyone else without the stones to tell the kids they’re “better off smoking the weed”.
The Replacements - “Androgynous”
From Let It Be // 1984 // power pop
When I listen to “Androgynous” by the Replacements, I weep. Every single time. Gasping, shuddering ugly-sobs, running snot, the whole deal. I’m now past the point in my life where I can love a song just for bringing me to tears, so here’s why I do love it: Paul Westerberg was a boozehound cokehead miscreant, a lapsed Catholic bumming around Minnesota in a high school band he lied his way into fronting. He had never had a nice thing to say about anyone or anything. And in 1984, a year in American history every bit as fascist as Orwell ever feared, this fuckin’ guy sat down at a piano and wrote a tender, hopeful pop song about queer kids in the local punk scene. In too many ways, it remains as brave an act today as it was then. It’s not too hard to parse his rationale— Westerberg has always felt like a fuckup and a malcontent and he consequently has a natural empathy for outcasts of all stripes. It’s the way he forces a little optimism that always gets me, really: kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at the way you’re laughed at now. God, I’m choking up just typing it. By the end of the song, his more typical cynicism has crept back in, admitting that in the harsh eighties light of day, Dick and Jane will be forced back into their suffocating, restrictive gender roles, and it casts “tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?“ in a decidedly bittersweet light. The world Westerberg dares to hope for has never felt further away OR closer— his hometown of Minneapolis, at least, has since become a haven for LGBT Americans. We’ll get there, Paul. One wink at a time.