The Good Side of Vibes Music
Sometimes you gotta just listen to music that sounds like a curtain blowing in a late-afternoon summer breeze, you know?
A couple months ago, I tried to explain what writing about music was to my son’s kindergarten class. Because this was kindergarten, and because I wanted to avoid telling a room full of 6-year-olds that a career path they probably weren’t even aware of before basically no longer existed anyway, my wife and I came up with an activity that felt like an approximation of the process of thinking about/absorbing/grappling with how music makes you feel. I made a short playlist and played the kids excerpts of a few songs. I tried to give them a range to react to: melancholy indie rock, deep, cavernous dub…you get the idea. While I played the excerpts, I asked the kids to write or draw in a small homemade zine how the songs made them feel. Some kids went abstract. A couple wrote short sentences. A lot of kids drew Pokeballs.
The playlist itself was short—I think it was like six songs total. After I did the presentation, some parents texted me asking for a link to it. They really liked the zines their kids had brought home, and the song that got the most traction was “Last Summer in a Rented Room,” an absolutely sublime bit of melancholy from the Reds, Pinks & Purples, aka the ultra-prolific Glenn Donaldson, who you may remember as the guy from Skygreen Leopards, a band that made freaky, humid psych-folk during the time when there was a whole lot of freaky, humid psych-folk being made (FWIW Skygreen Leopards were heads and shoulders above a lot of the bands they were mixed in with back then).
So many parents texted me or came up to me at school asking me about “Last Summer in a Rented Room.” I wasn’t expecting it, but I wasn’t exactly surprised either. The song—about the magic of being young and broke in San Francisco (presumably pre-tech boom)—has a Smithsian sense of melancholy and romance. You know the kind, it makes being bummed out sound so appealing it almost feels noble. Makes moping an attractive lifestyle.
Donaldson’s great trick, though, is that he’s met our streaming era where it’s at. Rather than releasing a couple great songs and then making everyone wait forever for more Donaldson pumps out Reds, Pinks & Purples tracks at a constant clip. He’s released two albums in 2024 already, and much like the evocative “Last Summer…” they all target the sad feeling of being young and invincible and full of promise and then meeting, but never succumbing, to the defeat of reality. I don’t think you need me to explain to you what a song with the title “Your Worst Song is your Greatest Hit” is about, but it is useful to know that it hits the same emotional notes as “Last Summer…”
Quite simply, there are already more Reds, Pinks & Purples songs than can reasonably be absorbed in a meaningful way, but it doesn’t really matter. The vibe supersedes all, but—and this is crucial—this is not “vibes music”!
Actual (read: bad) “vibes music” tends to be unwilling to commit to rocking the boat sonically or emotionally. It’s music that is evocative of every past era at once, without planting a flag anywhere. It’s frictionless. What Donaldson is doing is different: he’s sitting with uncomfortable moments of early adult hubris, overlaying them with tired wisdom, and repeating this songwriting method until his worldview feels like ours.
Speaking of vibes by accumulation… I’ve been listening, on near-constant repeat, to the Six Parts Seven’s Things Shaped in Passing, a 2002 post-rock album with exactly zero crescendos. Instead, it builds layers of evenness upon itself, exploring only a couple musical themes, and controlling our emotional response via an additional layer of guitar, some well-placed harmonics, etc. From the final paragraph of the 2002 Pitchfork review, by Brad Haywood:
Yet, although the parts are strong, the album as a whole still comes up somewhat short since each track approximates the tempo and mood of its immediate predecessor. It's as if The Six Parts Seven decided to write an absolutely perfect song for one occasion, then recorded slight variations on its theme eight times. As a result, I'd recommend you either take Things Shaped in Passing in small bites, or listen for a few tracks and let it dissolve into the background.
The context for this is somewhat negative, which makes sense to me given the time period. I was listening to a lot of music passively in 2002—usually while sitting on my computer on AIM or LiveJournal or cruising the Hip-Hop Infinity message boards or whatever—but I never would have thought of it as such. How could I? Background music was something I understood but thought I was “above.” At the time, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that music that iterated on a single emotional state could have its own value for the way it worked like memory: drifting in and out, coaxing a twinge of something from the fog of the past.