In June, I hope to see long-time indie pop favorites Tennis on their farewell tour. The husband and wife duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore are calling it quits after an impressive run.

The pair made this statement regarding the end of their time as Tennis:

It became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band … We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things.

It sounds like a standard, almost corporate-like goodbye message. When they were promoting their just-released 7th album Face Down In The Garden, though, they were a bit more candid about the challenges they had faced.

The inspiration for new work came while we were still on the road touring Pollen. We felt a clear pull to write new music, but ran up against a series of bizarre setbacks. We blew tires and lost an engine. I developed a chronic illness. We took a doomed voyage that culminated in an attempted robbery at sea. Fragments of songs that first arrived like gifts from the universe later refused to be completed. Our days were awash in major and minor crises that dragged the album out endlessly.

Touring would seem to be particularly difficult under some of the circumstances they described. They have certainly toured prolifically. I was supposed to see them at the Haw River Ballroom when Covid-19 came along and spoiled those plans and many others. It also sounds like there were plenty of problems to interrupt the progress of making an album.

“At The Apartment” is the first track on Face Down In The Garden and it sets the mood for the rest of the album, which hits a melancholy note fitting for the band’s send off. The video is a live version of the song recorded, you guess it, in an apartment. It features frequent Tennis collaborator and one of my favorite indie singers, Molly Burch, on backup vocals. This may be the closest thing we get from Burch to new music.¹ Of course, this may be one of the last few videos from Tennis, as well.

Tennis - At The Apartment (Live) (YouTube)

For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in a cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.

It wasn’t until later that I found out there were some strong tracks on the third official record from the band. “1979” is a well-loved classic. Even Pavement covered the song, and they had their own song with the lyrics, “I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a f**k,” referring to SP.

Billy Corgan’s voice on studio recordings can sound as sweet as honey, but rarely comes off the same way live. It can be a bit shocking. I remember Smashing Pumpkins performance on SNL after the release of Siamese Dream. As soon as the vocals came in on “Cherub Rock,” I found myself thinking I had somehow been deceived by the uncanny magic of studio wizards.¹ The delivery had an abrasiveness that, while not absent in the official album recordings, was placed more deliberately in certain spots. Compare the studio version of “1979” from the video to this fairly recent performance of the song on the Howard Stern show.

The video for the song features teenagers in their element — living bundles of chaotic energy, pure recklessness, unconstrained lust and spontaneous violence. Corgan, sporting a wispy mustache, surveys the scene from a car, with a mixture of delight and passive detachment.

Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 (YouTube)

Upon discovering the new single from Yvette Young (via Instagram of all places), I was immediately reminded of Sophie And Peter Johnson. The breezy sophistipop certainly merits easy comparisons. Then I realized that Young did vocals for Brothertiger’s mesmerizing cover of Sophie and Peter Johnson’s “Torn Open.”

Young is a member of the math rock outfit Covet but her solo work here is far from the tightly wound calculus and strange time signatures that are markers of that genre. Though Young’s guitar solos on “Always” have jagged edges that contrast with the shimmery polish present in the rest of the song’s components, most of the instrumentation is pure dream pop. With reverb so wet it will remind you of summer days at the pool and synthetic-sounding drums, the song calls to mind Softer Still’s Nuances LP. Like that band’s output, Young’s new track could be mistaken for an artifact of the 80s, but the preponderance of very visible tattoos in the video leaves no doubt that this is a contemporary affair.

Yvette Young - Always (YouTube)

Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio friendly songs like “We Built This City” (some might say the song was pandering — the shoutout to all the cities hasn’t aged well). Following that popular anthem in the track sequencing was “Sara,” a ballad at a time when that was almost a separate genre within a genre. Rock bands used to touring arenas had their slower, more romantic songs interspersed with the more upbeat anthemic fare on their records.

The rocker vs. the ballad dynamic was perhaps never more obvious than on hair metal albums. The rockers were dangerous, lecherous and debauched while the ballads were tender and romantic. The ballads were always fewer in number, but reminded fans — especially those of the female variety — that even the baddest boys (the ones with most Aqua Net and makeup) had a softer side.

Noble Oak’s “Eveningstar” is a balled in the rock tradition. Like Starship’s “Sara,” the song has an sophisticated urban sheen with its immaculate mix of keyboards and guitars. The lyrics flirt with unabashedly straightforward metaphors around love and loss. Lines like “the memory of you becomes a shining light, when you were in my life,” would have sounded perfect in the earnest and overdramatic eighties.

Noble Oak - Eveningstar (YouTube)

The creative forces behind Ginger Root have a concept for a show featuring one actress (it’s all they had the budget for). Their Japanese protagonist changes looks and activities often to keep people of the world glued to their sets. In the end, it seems, what suits her best is rockin' out.

The song “There Was A Time” itself has a breezy 70s feel, with a healthy dose of tropicalia in the mix and a smidgen of psychedelia. There is a warped cassette haze on the whole track that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heyday of chillwave a little over a decade ago (this could be due to the Toro Y Moi influence). Ginger Root’s mastermind, Cameron Lew, describes the project as “aggressive elevator soul.” “There Was A Time” is a fun listen and matches the rest of the currently available tracks from the upcoming Shinbangumi in style.

Ginger Root - “There Was A Time” (YouTube)

Shinbangumi by Ginger Root will be released on 9/13/2024 by Ghostly International. The cloud vinyl version includes a pop-out paper building!

The song for this video is from 1984, but the video was shot just recently. Originally not a huge seller, "Plastic Love" by Mariya Takeuchi has been growing in popularity over the last 40 years. It fits in with the 80's Japanese genre, city pop, and has come to be a defining piece of that style of music. Jason Morehead describes city pop as "a slick blend of jazz, pop, and funk that emerged during Japan’s economic boom in the ’80s and celebrated an upscale, cosmopolitan lifestyle." I like to think of city pop as the cousin of sophisti-pop, which arose in the UK around the same time period, has the same elements of new wave, pop, jazz and soul and matches the polished to a sheen production of city pop.

"Plastic Love" the song has all of the sonic staples that made Japan a neon-permeated fantasyland in the 80's. The video has the neon, but also a nod to the 70's (dig the disco ball) as well as a high-end contemporary feel to it.

Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love (YouTube)