sugar water
I listen to an enormous amount of music and have extremely strong opinions and yet somehow manage to get very little practice talking about it.
What kind of music do I like? Well, the music I like, of course. What genre(s) do I listen to? I don't know. What artists do I like? I can tell you their names but I promise that's not going to clear things up. My very favorite artist for nearly five years has been VÉRITÉ, and I only know her music is "indie pop, electropop, or alternative pop" because I looked her up on Wikipedia, and also if people ask me who my favorite artist is, I usually just lie because I'm too embarassed to try to pronounce her name out loud.[1]
All of this is to say that I really don't know how to write this review, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway.
Maude Latour has been putting out music for over half a decade and I've been listening since 2019.[2] She'll release a single here and an EP there, and I've enjoyed most of it. If you made me choose, I'd say "Probabilities" (2022) is my favorite, but "Block Your Number" (2021) also deserves an honorable mention for a particularly clever line that lives in my head rent-free: "the irony of poor connection as we talk over FaceTime (what a metaphor)."
Play that song from high school
Class of '17
We used to scream all the words
Now I know what they mean
You put your makeup on
Six flights to the roof
Wave function collapse
When I'm looking at you
A relevant fact about me: I am a sucker for a good album. Not just an album with good songs; a good album. My mom is a massive Pink Floyd fan and I fell deeply in love with the idea of a concept album really quick,[3] but contemporary music so rarely obliges me. In lieu of a good concept album, I will absolutely take any well-constructed, cohesive album and be glad to have it.
There are a handful of things that I take as a good sign at the structural level, the major one being interludes (or prologues, or epilogues, or whatever) in the sub-minute range. Take Lil Nas X's MONTERO as an example: "THE ART OF REALIZATION" is twenty-four seconds long and has a little more than fifty thousand plays on Spotify as of today. For context, the next-least-popular song on the album, "LIFE AFTER SALEM" has over twenty-six million, a difference of three orders of magniture. "THE ART OF REALIZATION" is a song that cannot and does not stand on its own, but that's not a failure because that's not the point. It exists because the people who made MONTERO were thinking about the album as a unit, rather than simply a collection of individual songs, and consequently, they produced not fifteen discrete good songs, but one single good album.[4]
I was interested, then, in the fact that Sugar Water had a song called "7 (interlude)", but it's nearly three minutes, and could thus be a completely standard song with "interlude" tacked on the title. So I did what I do with albums for which I have only moderate hopes, which is to throw it on my current playlist and listen to the songs as they come up on shuffle. When I did, "7 (interlude)" in particular caught my ear, and it ended up being compelling enough that I decided to sit down and listen to the whole album in order.
Let me tell you: Sugar Water is a good album.
Some of what I liked were individual songs, especially "Cosmic Superstar Girl", which hadn't been previously released. But the remarkable bit was that the songs I hadn't thought much of as singles work incredibly well in the context of the album. "Too Slow", which had been my least favorite of the singles, has a kind of harsh sound to it that I hadn't much cared for in isolation; in the context of the album, though, it works beautifully, enough so that it's changed my feelings about the song, even when it stands alone.
The album is weird, but as I believe I've established, I'm totally here for that sort of thing. Incidentally, with regard to the weirdness, I came across this interview as I was trying to work out how to write this post, and seeing what Latour had to say about her work only made me enjoy it more:[5]
But I think my whole pop mission is always to prove that every genre can be pop, it’s just the mask you put on it. The sound is the final thing that it comes down to, but in its spirit, it’s just a poem. There are some rocky moments and there’s everything I love. That’s the through line of my sound: just me and my vibes. Everything that’s new here comes from believing that I can pull from anything in the world. I’ve made the sound is just me saying, “Yeah, I’ve been to the rave since my last couple of EPs.” (laughs) Like, “I’m dreaming, I love my rock life,” like, “Ooh, ’70s.”
I wanted it to be this trippy thing, pop disguised as pop music, but also, I love just pure pop that’s clean, cutting, and direct. And so yeah, it’s all those things.
It's a weird album, and a self-consciously weird album at that, and it's very effective. Latour is clearly doing odd things on purpose, which I'd respect even if it hadn't resulted in half so enjoyable a product. I have listened to this album three times in a row while writing this piece just now; it's just finished playing as I write this paragraph, and I'm debating whether to give it another go round before I head to bed.
Assigning ratings gives me anxiety[6] so instead I will say that Sugar Water is weird and competent and enjoyable all at once. Latour should be proud of herself, and you should give it a listen.
- My brother has this theory that the main reason people call Les Mis by its nickname so consistently is less that its full name is long and more that, as an English speaker, you sound like an asshole if you pronounce Les Misérables right and you sound like even more of an asshole if you pronounce it wrong; the nickname is the only good option. Anecdotally speaking, I can tell you that if I try to pronounce "VÉRITÉ" properly, nobody knows what I'm saying, and if I just say "Verity", I kind of want to sink into the floor, and there's no good nickname, so lying it is.^
- I have what might be called an archivist's temperment and it really comes out in my Spotify modus operandi: I make a playlist with the creation date as the title, I add and remove whatever songs I feel like listening to for about two weeks, and then I archive the playlist and make a new one. I have a playlist for pretty much every two week period since July of 2014, which means that I can tell you that I added Latour's single "Superfruit" to my listening rotation for the first time in late November 2019.^
- Of the five favorite albums I have listed on my about page, two are concept albums and a further two may not be concept albums per se but they certainly believe in their beliefs. The last one makes the cut because it plays with fado, a traditional Portuguese genre, in a way that pleases me (a sort of experimentation which incidentally serves as a sort of connective tissue for the album anyway).^
- Also, and this is so not the point, but if you haven't heard the radio edit of "MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)", you've got to. It is hilarious. It somehow manages to lose all the power and style and punchiness of the original while still remaining too dirty for the imagined children whom it might scandalize—truly the worst of all words. (It's a song that prominently features a blowjob and in the radio edit they won't even let the poor man say "cocaine".)^
- Latour cites Derrida and gives an explanation of post-structuralist thought for a lay audience; it's all extremely sexy.^
- Boy do I wish I were exaggerating; unfortunately, I am not.^