These are the current tracks I’m spinning obsessively over here this month. Because I am low on words, and even lower on energy (thank you, depression)-I am sharing these songs instead of my thoughts…I’m sure I’ll be back to writing actual entries here soon, but mostly, I am currently sick of myself. (3 weeks of being hydrocodoned out of your gourd and lying in bed by yourself will do that to a gurl, ya know.) Cue up a not-trying-too-hard sign off….Settles on deuces. Throws up 2 fingers.
Eat Your Young- Bekon’s Choir cover of song by Hozier
In recent months, I’ve discovered how much I actually enjoy Hozier’s music. I never really liked the track Take Me to Church and had kind of written him off. Upon doing a deeper dive of his catalog, I’ve been taken by the mention of various mythology and literature in his lyrics… covering everything from Orpheus/Eurydice to Dante’s Inferno. When his song Eat Your Young came out, it was hard not to think about the satirical essay A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. (For the uninitiated, the “modest proposal” was for starving Irish people to sell their young to the rich to be eaten.) I’m unsure if that is the inspiration for this track–but after hearing the lyrics, it wouldn’t surprise me. However, Hozier’s song is soulful and packaged slickly in a way that hides the unsettling content found in the lyrics. This choral arrangement, however, slows things down & is lowered in a pitch that makes the whole song unnerving and turns up the creepy factor…with the main vocals sounding distorted and almost inhuman. (The way the choir sings “legs have swung” still gives me the holy shit shivers.) The darkness of this choral version mixed with some of the more unexpected modal chord changes has been curled up in my ear for a few weeks now.
A Child’s Question- PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey is one of my favorite female artists…(Between you and me, ever since I saw a video of her at Glastonbury in 1995, performing Long Snake Moan while wearing a skin-tight, hot pink bodysuit & playing a tambourine, I have questioned my sexuality.) Her album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea was the soundtrack to my early 20s…But the last several years, she has been diversifying her artistic contributions…doing more with writing than music. Until now. This album is sentimental and beautiful and haunting, seemingly the creation of an artist taking inventory of her life. While her lyrics are as enigmatic as always, this song strikes me as an ode to her childhood, describing the sights in nature of where she grew up…and referencing someone singing Elvis’ Love Me Tender. Her voice is sonorous, while there is a trance like quality to the patting of the drums that doesn’t so much as support the melody but drag it behind it through the woods. Synth is used successfully to create a weird droning atmosphere. PJ, it’s good to have you back.
So You Are Tired- Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens holds a special place in my heart. His music came to me at a time when my life was crawling around the gutters, not really feeling capable of getting back up. The year I discovered how much I loved his work, I spent a lot of time in my car just driving—trying to run away from myself, my trauma, the end of my relationship with my ex and my desire to end my life. There were 2 albums I kept spinning in my half-dead ’99 Subaru Forester…Both these albums felt like they were stories about coming to the end of one’s rope…one album, ending with death, the other ending with hope and acceptance. The first album was Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats. The second album was Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens. Carrie & Lowell is one of the only albums I can listen to all the way through from start to finish, multiple times in a row. It is beautiful, haunting, sad, hopeful and just so fucking encapsulates the emotional experience of being a human grieving loss. Sufjan’s follow up albums started to veer into more experimental electronic music. I’m a girl who needs melody, counterpoint—so his recent albums have not been for me. However, this new track that was released for an album coming out in October is everything I have come to love about him as an artist. Gossamer thin vocals full of vulnerability. Guitar and piano and strings….Harmonies threatening to break wide open, like a storm from a cloud. They lyrical content hints at heartbreak… (I was a man still in love with you/when I already knew it was done) …and Sufjan has proven time and time again, that he is at his best when in a state of despair. It is so reminiscent of his Carrie & Lowell era sound, that I can’t help but be excited about what is in store with this upcoming album.
The Alcott- The National
The National is the band I listen to when I want to know there is someone out there sad as me. Just like when I watch My 600 lb Life to convince myself I’m not THAT fat or watch Hoarders to convince myself that my house is not THAT dirty…this latest album from The National convinces me that I’m not THAT sad. Many of the tracks chronicle the end of the lead singer’s marriage—and even though I hate to take pleasure from another’s person’s pain—the divorce is pure gold in terms of the art being created from the devastation. It is even able to make Taylor Swift palatable. (I fucking hate Taylor Swift. This latest tour of that talentless hack has infiltrated my YouTube shorts on the daily and I do not get the people who basically use their love of her as a personality replacement….However, the 2 songs she has done with the National/Matt Berninger are the only 2 songs where her feeble, thin voice doesn’t drive me to distraction. If her voice was a food, you’d fucking starve.) The dirge like piano, the counterpoint from Taylor Swift…the autobiographical lyrics about wanting the person back after it’s all too late….Gaaaah, it is a KICK to the emotional taint, man…with steel-toed boots.
Duet- Penny & Sparrow
I heard this song after hearing that my ex’s cousin lost her 37 year old husband unexpectedly…They watched tv and went to bed and when she woke up, he was already gone. (Later they found out that he had sepsis and hadn’t known it…it enlarged his heart and he just…died.) I heard this song later that day and it immediately made me think of Chris and how heartbroken I would be to lose him like that. The strings in this song are like a symphony of cricket at summer’s end. There is that same mournfulness to them as they play behind the vocalists. While the strings are lovely, I think when the whole thing is the most powerful when it is finally just stripped down to the 2 voices at the end. Like the whole world has fallen away from them, and there they are standing at the edge, facing each other. I’ve seen you & I know you & I’m not going anywhere.
Icarus- Ben Thornewill
I love the band Jukebox the Ghost. It is hard to listen to many of their tracks and not feel like you’re at a big singalong with your best friends. They have also shown ability to write heartbreaking fare as well, though. Their lead singer, Ben Thornewill, proves he can do this on his own as well with this track. While a capable pianist, no doubt, the real focal point on this track is Ben’s beautiful soaring vocals. The sincerity with which he plaintively sings, “So just don’t leave me” is enough to break the hardest of hearts. While the main focus is piano/vocals, there are some really nice moments where the string bass has a running line in the background that grabs my ear.
Barbaric- Blur
Like PJ Harvey, Blur was a favorite band in my early 20s. Alex loved them. We owned all their albums and would try to make each other laugh by imitating Damon Albarn’s exaggerated Cockney accent on Parklife. We used to love their videos—the Universal, Country House & Coffee and TV sticking out as favorites… We followed Damon’s post-Blur projects as well—enjoying both the Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad and the Queen. Imagine my pleasant surprise when Blur actually put out a new album this year… and my even PLEASANTER surprise when it sounded like the old Blur. There is a magic on this album in the way Blur manages to make the emotionally gutting sound joyful. This song stuck out to me, because as I listened all I could think about is how much Alex would’ve loved it…from the opening jangle of Graham’s guitar to the chorus of numerous tracks of Damon’s sleepy voice to the cutting lyrical content. (I know Alex would’ve loved the lines: “All of us carry trauma/And in lieu of an explanation/I will pour oil from the cup/On the pyre of abdication…” and the unexpectedly almost sunshiney way the band sings it. Even though he’s gone, I still know him so well.) It makes me unfathomably sad to hear things that I know he would love, that I also know he will never get to enjoy. I guess it’s up to me to enjoy it enough for the both of us at this point. Consider it done, Al. Easy.
Bug Like an Angel- Mitski
Despite threatening to quit music in recent years, this critically acclaimed artist isn’t out of the game quite yet…While I was surprised to see that she had released new music, I was not surprised to see it was brilliant. I can’t even tell you the ecstasy my ears felt the first time the choir kicked in on this track. (And the way the initial listen/watching of the video made me actually fucking weep…something about the old drunk lady just trying to grasp onto anything to stay upright, making a mess all the same-while everyone watches…familiar feeling both metaphorically and literally.) While the guitar and Mitski’s vocals are beautiful but unassuming, the lyrics carry the heft of the weight in this song. And maybe I feel the heaviness, simply because the lyrics of this song feel like they could’ve been written by the darkest secret parts of myself… “When I’m bent over, wishin’ it was over/Makin’ all variety of vows I’ll never keep/I try to remember the wrath of the devil/Was also given him by God.” There have been so many dark days in my life where I have felt that same thought keenly…And yes, Mitski, sometimes a drink does indeed feel like family…but so does a well written song.
Clean Slate- The Mountain Goats
You know my music lists always have to have a Mountain Goats song or a Lana Del Rey…luckily they’re both prolific musical acts. This song sounds like it oughta be on the soundtrack to United States of Tara or some indie film from the mid-2000s about a teen trying to survive a dysfunctional family with an overpowering matriarch. I don’t know. That’s what is in my head. This song is neatly scored with those sweeping strings and polite horns with that perky little piano motif…Again, another album I’m looking forward to hearing in October.
Struttin’- Thumpasaurus
I’m not really sure where to start with this. Maybe you should watch the video first, then come back and we can talk about the assless chaps…the buttocks being used as percussion…the honky tonk old-timey piano sound, mixed with the runs on the flute…the ridiculous lyrics delivered in the most ridiculous affectation by the overly confident lead singer…the homoerotic undertones of the video. I’m sorry, but this is fucking brilliant in the dumbest of ways. And it probably only works because the band is in on the joke. There is just no way to hear it without it putting you in a good mood. I literally cannot listen to this without smiling. Try it. I dare you. My friend, Shannon & I have both requested for this to be our entrance music at gatherings with friends…but people always say, “That’s not a thing.” Pffft. BUT IT SHOULD BE. Ok, fine… but only because I’m in love with your strut.
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