048 - Introducing: Forever Grooves™
My newly-christened term for a long-recognized kind of tune that I humbly submit to the lexicon
Tonight I saw Unknown Mortal Orchestra, live and in concert, at Auditorio BB in Mexico City, Tunisia.
Jk, I’m in Mexico City, MEXICO! — AKA what all the cool kids say as CDMX. It’s kinda like ATL or ATX or PDX or OBX or KCMO… Let’s face it: all the cool places have a cool, all-acronym alias. It’s fucking rad as hell, and I’m just bummed that my hometown, New York City, doesn’t have one.
Side note: WTF is up with the Outer Banks? Has anyone ever been there? Is it a real place? Are Jews allowed?
Back to UMO and this show I just saw… I’d never seen these guys before. I didn’t know much about them, either. When Jewlie—who so generously joined me despite complete ignorance of their existence—asked if they were a Mexican band, I said, “No honey, they’re from California.”
They’re from New Zealand.
The audio mix wasn’t great, rendering the vocals largely illegible, but the four-piece orchestra rocked out pretty alright. Keyboardist slays. Guitarist’s got some shred. Bassist can slap. Drummer can drum.1 Off-kilter minor keys, angular chord progressions, and willfully weird choices add up to something I might even be bold enough to call “alt-psych jazz rock”—and claim full credit for when it goes viral on their subreddit.
They’re the pretty much the poster child for Bands I Never Would’ve Discovered Without Spotify. The almighty algorithm in her infinite wisdom—yes, the algo is a GIRL. A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL. Deal with it!!!—knew I’d dig their silky grooves and trancey vibes. And I do! I’ve been probably been served four or five UMO songs in my many years on the app, and I’ve pretty much fucked with all of ‘em.
One that I particularly appreciate every time it creeps onto my queue is called “Necessary Evil,” and lo and behold, the band played it halfway through their set tonight—just for me! Belly dancing along to that Turkish (Lebanese? Azerbaijani?) synth run and those steadily staccato-ing guitar and bass lines, the thought occurred to me: “This is a Forever Groove™.” I could groove to this forever. Throw it on repeat. Put it on a loop. Run. That. Shit. Back.
Then I got to thinking about other Forever Grooves™: songs that are not necessarily my favorite nor necessarily the best, but have some ‘je ne sais quality’ about them that I don’t think I would honestly listen to endlessly. More than eight immediately come to mind—“Groove Me” by Maximum Balloon with Theophilus London and “Golden Age” by TV on the Radio are glaringly absent— but I wanted to keep this post shorter than Eddie Gaedel (will anyone notice if I recycle a joke?). Besides, it makes perfect sense when you remember 8 is the infinity symbol getting up to piss.
IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER BECAUSE THEY ALL GROOVE SO HARD:
“Necessary Evil” — Unknown Mortal Orchestra
See above.
“Think I’m In Love” — Beck
This might have been the first Forever Groove™ I identified, before the term Forever Groove™ had even been trademarked. That bass line alone does it for me. Add in that piano, hammering like a carpenter on Quaaludes, and I’m dead.
“North American Scum” — LCD Soundsytem
Another longtime love of mine, I’m such a sucker for that sound, whatever the hell that is. Almost like a landline that’s been cut. It’s “Dial Tone rock”—look at me coining two genres in one night!—but whatever you want to call it, all I know is that I fuck the fuck out with it. In fact, I used this as the theme to my live talk show Running Late with Scott Rogowsky from 2011-2019.
“I Got The…” — Labi Siffre
The rare TWO-FOREVER GROOVE™ thanks to a song structure that feels like two entirely different songs smushed together as one. The first two minutes features a gnarly bass/guitar power line, served with a tall glass of bubbly ivories and a heaping side of funky 70s strings. The rest of the track is what you’ll recognize—from its pairing of cheeky, slinky keyboard/bass progression with crispy, syncopated snare—as the sample for Eminem’s career-making and culture-defining “My Name Is.”
“What You Know — T.I. (Honorable Mention: Roberta Flack and Quincy Jones)
Goddamn, this is everything to me. All due respect to the phenomenal original sample—which takes it sweet time to really get cookin’ —but in this millennial-frat-party anthem, T.I. kicks it up a notch.2 Simply put, this is where the cheese at.“Ante Up” — M.O.P. (with our without Busta Rhymes)
I lost my motherfartin’ middle-teen mind when this absolute monster mash first popped up on 106 & Park. There is no more hype than this type right here.
“For The Turnstiles” — The Be Good Tanyas
Taking a hard turn from hardcore hip-hop with this next bop, but the banjo-kissed, brightly brush-snared bounce in this Neil Young cover is equally as eternally listenable to me as the blaring, “Soul Sister, Brown Sugar”-borrowed horn stabs and brazen boom-bap of “Ante Up.”
“Tweezer Reprise” — Phish
How fitting to end here with the Mariano Rivera of live music, the ultimate show closer by the ultimate live band? It opens with a modulated twist on that familiar, tasty Trey riff—Forever Groove™-worthy on its own—and, in a departure from its antecedent, is joined by a boldly ascending piano and a steadily soaring guitar, creating an ever-accelerating, high-energy Forever Groove™ entirely in and of itself. Step into… step into… step into… step into…
DISCLAIMER: Look, no disrespect to these Unknown Mortals, but it’s hard to be coming off Phish at the Bowl and not instinctively compare the two—leading me to the carefully considered conclusion that there isn’t a single band on Earth that comes close to doing what those four elderly gentlemen from Vermont are doing.
This, of course, explains why T.I. was often referred to in the music press of the time as “Dirty South Emeril.”