SWANO5IVE. Ep5.

When beset by life’s arrows, Irish American families turn gloriously mawkish. I know because these are my people. At my father’s wake, my sister Janet belted out “Danny Boy,” the syrupy yet affecting Irish-ish air, best known as the soundtrack to a deadly Tommy Gun assault in the Coen Brothers’ gangster classic Miller’s Crossing. When Janet was done singing, it was as if she’s sprayed the crowd with 45 caliber emotions. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Ian McFarland’s “Irish Goodbye” works a similar magic. Rocking alongside luminous synthesizers and musique concrete blocks of sawtooth guitars, McFarland’s lyrics transform a term for a social maneuver – disappearing from a party without running through a gauntlet of goodbyes – to a deeper rumination about life’s passages and how we process them.

“No Irish goodbye/No lonely nights/You're the last thing in this town/Worth hanging onto”

With a measured beat and sprightly insistent piano, McFarland nods to early 2000s electroclash artists like Ladytron and 1970’s glam rock stompers like Slade. He balances that mid-tempo rock template with airy everyman vocals that pay tribute to Bowie’s acknowledgement of “ch-ch-changes.”

“Nostalgia from where we come from/Now that you're gone everything's come undone”

Words and delivery entwine in an unselfconscious whole, driving home McFarland’s message that opening up about vulnerability and longing for a loved one in not a sappy tunesmith’s conceit. It’s a tower of strength.

PawPaw Rod’s "Rainy"

With a bouncy funk bassline and skittering beats bathed in swaths of bright piano, PawPaw Rod’s “Rainy” evinces a laid-back cool that’s both timeless and up to the minute – Steve McQueen with hip hop cadences. With sharp sassy couplets, the Hawaii by-way-of Oklahoma City singer and rapper born as Rodney Hulsey relays his own origin story with ease and transparency:

“Nature doing what it do/Wintertime 94/Earthquake in LA/Oahu I was born/Little Rodney Capricorn/Look how far we came”

Hulsey’s affable vocal glides effortlessly over backing instrumentation that can best be called sun-dappled beach House, a mélange of insistent rhythms, sparkling strums of zither-like guitar and dulcet keys. Hulsey’s jaunty beachside romp takes a detour when his insouciant rap dissolves into warm and swarming harmonies on the tune’s catchy chorus.

“Outside on a rainy day/She get that shit together know it’s hot/She want the rain”

 It’s hard to imagine even a droplet of rain marring this perfect outing, especially when Hulsey’s playful recitative dives headlong into fantasy:

“Make a Nigga damn near wanna go put on a cape/Super hero/Hear me out tho/You like Louis Lane/Stronger than I realized”

Here, Hulsey’s homey details and emotional honesty ground even his wildest flights of fantasy in his good natured worldview. Hulsey will gladly be his Lois’s savior, as long as it’s cool with her.

Nomis’, Francis Mercier’s, and Salif Keita’s “Kabe”

Above a banging four-on-the-floor House beat, where timbales and talking drums enmesh and wheel like a skirl of blackbirds against the sun, a powerful ageless voice washes like waves against the beach, relentlessly yet effortlessly smoothing jagged rocks into sand. 

A collaboration between a critically lauded Haitian DJ and producer, a young French House mastermind and the revered “Golden Voice of Africa” and member of Mali’s ancient royal family, Nomis’, Francis Mercier’s and Salif Keita’s “Kabe” is the sound of dance floors pulsing, elements enfolding and continents crashing.

In a mélange of French and West African languages like Bambara and Malinke, Malian singer-songwriter Keita spins a wavering and ululating incantation, like a muezzin’s call to prayer from a minaret. This celestial music of the spheres is anchored by rolling kinetic rhythms, House music’s root chakra beat.

The hypnotic and propulsive backing track, a western hemisphere expansion on Kraftwerk’s cling-clanging “Trans Europe Express,” couples a polyrhythmic locomotive chug, stabbing percussive keys and arching spikes of synthesizer that speed up and slow down like a flywheel spinning loose and releasing an onslaught of kinetic energy. 

It may be impossible to determine which parts of the spiraling dance-floor Hadron Collider can be attributed to Parisian DJ/Producer Simon Sebbagh, better known as Nomis, and which bits belong to Mercier, but the sublime tension between Keita’s otherworldly contributions and the two beat masters’ machinations is both liberating and inspiring.

DANEXX’s “Thinking Bout You”

“New school modern beats for music lovers,” reads DANEXX’s YouTube page, and like the artist, their epithet is direct, to the point and accurate. The music producer, sound engineer and self-described “Wave Gad” (Dre: The Balu Flow) applies a clean, uncluttered and deceptively simple sounding approach to DANEXX’s “Thinking Bout You.”

Riding resonant Afro House beats and judicious shadings of contrapuntal percussion, DANEXX’s warm, fine grained voice unleashes a tumbling yet unhurried flow through a smoky musical slow-burn, detailing a hopeless romantic obsession in couplets that stream contrails of ghostly echo:

“Every other night when I’m down I’m thinking ‘bout you/Hoping that you’ll see what I’ll do/Whatever you need me to do baby oh”

Halfway through the tune, DANEXX’s straightforward pop construction goes subtly awry with clangorous notes of strident stabbing synths. It suggests that the circular thoughts fueling the protagonist’s sleepless night are multiplying and crashing into each other, tipping an obsessive reverie into dreamlike unreality.

DANEXX’s would-be lover never slips into insanity, but they never drop their obsessive thread either. As phrases repeat and shadow each other, the needy romantic’s voice grows muffled as hissing street sounds bring the track to an unquiet and unrequited close.

Jet Vesper’s “I Could be Someone Else” 

Riding the kind of funky, sort of jazzy reggae-inflected smooth R&B groove that animated 1970s  hits like Boz Scagg’s “Lowdown” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star,” Jet Vesper’s “I Could be Someone Else” also boasts the weirdest instrumental hook since 10 CC’s grating and mocking guitar lick on “Good Morning Judge.”

In this case, Australian singer-songwriter and producer Vesper employs a phase-shifted guitar vortex that swoops and whooshes like a friendly UFO’s tractor beam scanning the landscape amid flashing disco lights. The territory here is the laid-back 70s radio-land immortalized in Steely Dan’s “FM”, a topography traced by bouncy nonchalant funk bass, ribbons of smooth David Sanborn style saxophone and a fluttering cloud layer of Jet’s swooning intimate vocals. The inviting, almost cultish lyrics fit the hazy shades and suntan lotion “me decade” vibe to a T.

“I don't need to get to know you/Seems we've met in a past life or two/And if we lived a thousand more/I'd come back to you, I'd come back to you”

What makes this Curtis Mayfield-meets-Mayer Hawthorne pastiche work is the tune’s full, almost cluttered production which scoops up incongruous sounds, like a ringing alarm clock and purposely dated disco laser swipes, and subsumes them into the bizarre and amiable flow.