Sunday Songs – 11/5/23

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

Did somebody order a monthly blue period double-dipped with Peter Gabriel? Because you guys are not gonna believe what showed up on my doorstep this morning…

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 11/5/23

“The Tower That Ate People” – Peter Gabriel

COME AND GET IT! TWO FOR ONE PETER GABRIEL DEAL! TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!

If there’s a vaguely overarching theme for this week’s songs that I can throw together, it’s that Peter Gabriel gets so much weirder than people give him credit for. I suppose that’s the curse of any musician whose earlier hits get the spotlight while the later, more experimental parts of their career go on the wayside in terms of engagement, but are as full of life and creativity as anything else they’ve produced (see also: David Bowie, Kate Bush). To be fair, we’re so used to aging artists that continue to pump out more of the same in hopes of keeping the fire of fame going (say, what’s going on with The Rolling Stones lately?), but equating aging to a decline in musical artistry is shallow either way. Again: I just saw Peter Gabriel a few weeks back, and here he is at 73 delivering some of the most spectacular performances—both visual and musical—that I’ve seen from any musician on stage.

The album, 2000’s OVO, is technically his soundtrack work, and was conceived for a multimedia show that ran in the Millennium Dome for 999 shows in that same year. Gabriel’s work on it interfered with his next album, the criminally underrated Up, which ended up coming out in 2002, a year after it was set to be released. The through lines between the two are clear; “The Tower That Ate People” (good god, what a title) has an industrial, almost Massive Attack-like crawl to it, propelled by a looped guitar riff. Gabriel’s voice comes out as a shrouded growl, making it all the more convincing when he opens the song with “There’s a bump in the basement/there’s a knocking on the wall.” The electronic grinding as he sings of “the pumping of the pistons” makes the music swell. It’s a clanging machine, but it never loses an ounce of that cinematic, Peter Gabriel touch—especially not the prolonged silence after he declares “We’re building up/Until we touch the sky,” letting everything fade to lumbering, echoing footsteps. I can only imagine what the stage show was like. I’m jealous that I wasn’t one of the lucky few who got to see this live on the i/o tour, because can you imagine the feeling of this reverberating straight through your ribs?

“We Looked Like Giants” (Death Cab for Cutie cover) – Car Seat Headrest

THEY’RE BACK!! THEY’RE BACK!!!! So what if it’s a cover—it’s a perfect fit.

Even without as much Death Cab for Cutie knowledge (much less about the album that they’re commemorating—before this, all I knew was the title track. Owie.), it’s easy to see that pairing them with Car Seat Headrest was a fit as perfect as puzzle pieces sliding together. Despite “We Looked Like Giants” being a cover, it feels like the whole song is harkening back to the Teens of Denial glory days, with its crashing guitar breakdowns and angst so dense you could squeeze it out of a dish towel. The lyrics feel even more like it was made for them—”When every Thursday/I’d brave the mountain passes/And you’d skip your early classes/And we learned how our bodies worked.” Certainly makes…every single song from Twin Fantasy make more sense. Even without the slam of an intro that the original version boasts, the tension and momentum that Will Toledo and company bring to this song fills it with the nervous energy that has defined the band for so long—it’s a song teetering on its tiptoes, balancing out both arms as it contemplates the edge. Toledo’s signature, honeyed wail takes the song to dizzying heights, making the collision course back to Earth as the final seconds plunge into silence all the more riveting. I always get all sappy about Teens of Denial and all of the memories of listening to it the summer before I started high school, and this song brings all of the good parts of that back—slip this before “Fill In the Blank,” and I wouldn’t even blink. Leave it to Car Seat Headrest to toe the line between an unchanged cover and one that makes the cover all their own.

“The Family and the Fishing Net” – Peter Gabriel

I’ve done it. I’ve finally surmounted the task of going through all of Peter Gabriel’s albums (minus his soundtrack work). Peter Gabriel summer has come to an end. Peter Gabriel 4: Security was the last one for entirely arbitrary reasons, but it’s fantastic—and a lot creepier than most people give it credit for.

Take this song. Immediately, it sonically calls back to “Intruder,” with its ominously creeping instrumentals, off-kilter chanting and an unsettling chorus of flutes that open the song. Slowly, you start to process the lyrics, and the chill starts creeping down your spine. “Icing on the warm flesh cake?” Yep. Mom, come pick me up, I’m scared. But if you take just a quick look through, you can see the true genius of this song—I was super curious about the meaning, and I was floored by the concept behind it.

“Vows of sacrifice (vows of sacrifice)/Headless chickens (headless chickens)/Dance in circles (dance in circles)”. It sounds like the makings of a cult. But Peter Gabriel specifically created “The Family and the Fishing Net” as a wedding song. Vows of sacrifice? For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Headless chickens? Could just as well be serving a roast dinner at the ceremony. Dance in circles? We’ve all done that at a wedding or two, haven’t we? That’s where the lyrical genius comes in—it’s not just that he’s subverting Western wedding imagery and making it sound like a cult ritual, there’s a level of exoticization that he brings to it that makes it clever in a conscious way that lines up with his worldly sensibilities. It feels like a response to every song that’s ever demonized and exoticized ordinary (and often sacred) rituals of indigenous people around the world. And given that much of this album has that worldly ethos (see also: “San Jacinto,” “Wallflower”), it’s a perfect addition. As much as I tend to rag on old white guys, Peter Gabriel should be one of the paragon examples in writing songs—and any kind of writing—outside our worldviews, just for the simple fact that he cares to listen about people’s lived experiences. It’s not just writing about some strange, foreign goings-on that he witnessed in his travels—Gabriel took the time to make sure that he understood and uplifted the people and cultures that he encountered. That’s what makes this song feel so important—he recognized the detriment in writing songs from an ignorant distance, and used that aspect of the history of Western music to create one of the creepiest—and most clever—songs in his catalogue.

Also, to the anonymous YouTube commenter who said that she wanted to have this play when she walked down the aisle: I salute you. I’d pay to see that.

“She Plays Bass” – beabadoobee

So it turns out that the she who plays bass is beabadoobee’s actual bassist, and…yeah. They’re aren’t romantically involved, but that still has to be bizarre to be playing bass on a song about yourself. At least all parties seem to be okay with it? Knock on wood that beabadoobee’s backing band doesn’t get into any kind of Fleetwood Mac funny business.

That aside, here’s another entry into my thesis that beabadoobee makes the perfect music for teen rom-coms. From her 90’s-inspired Space Cadet EP (hmm, wonder why there’s a song called “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus”…), it’s an ode to yearning, longing, and bright, shiny guitars. Bea Kristi described the song as “a Cure rip-off,” a description that she admitted to Robert Smith himself when they met at the BRIT awards back in 2020. Either way you want to describe it, there’s no denying the brightness of it—despite the black and white cover of the single, “She Plays Bass” is rife with neon colors and cartoon stars. I halfway get the Cure bit—definitely more like “Friday I’m in Love” or “Let’s Go to Bed” than their other music—but what I do get is delightfully guitar-driven indie longing, sparkling and starry-eyed. If “Glue Song” plays in the end-credits of said rom-com, maybe this plays as the intimidatingly cool love interest is introduced. Just a thought.

“Black Hole” – boygenius

What? You thought I was gonna shut up about the rest after talking about “Powers”? You fools…

“Black Hole” is an easy song to have on loop—it’s part of the 3/4 of this EP where every song is freakishly hypnotic, but they’re all around two and a half minutes long, so they just suck you down with them forever, like water sucked down the sink drain. Or…maybe, something else? Mayhaps…a black hole? But the black hole in this song is a more recent revelation—”You can see the stars, the ones/The headlines said this morning were being spat out/By what we thought was just/Destroying everything for good.” The black hole in question is a fascinating one: caught by the Hubble telescope in early April of this year, NASA observed that this supermassive black hole was leaving a trail of stars in its destructive wake that stretched over 200,000 light years long. It’s the perfect, beautiful moment to write a song about. Hopefully this bodes well for me because I’m taking an astronomy class next year: I’ve always struggled with astronomy in school previously, but it makes me tear up that we live in a universe that we will never fully know everything about. That there will always be new things to discover about the vastness of space and the world around us and beyond us until the day I die.

Back to the song: it’s poetry. More specifically, it’s two separate poems. Julien Baker takes the reins in the first poem, with her musings about looking at the stars. The gently clattering electronic instrumentals sound appropriately starry, with the hum of synths leading into Baker’s voice, then transitioning into a tinny, ascending scale on a keyboard just before everything shifts. This is the second poem. It feels like the camera has whipped around as the drums and synths intensify, panning around to Lucy Dacus as Phoebe Bridgers lingers just out of the frame, opaque camera shots flickering at high speed over them as the camera zooms in on their faces. Hearing Dacus take the high notes and Bridgers taking the low, the opposite of their normal range, is an odd treat—it makes Bridgers’ voice seem like a ghost, barely there unless you really pay attention, while Dacus acts as the piercing lighthouse beacon cutting through the fog. All of their lines are enchantingly neat, spaced apart like they’re all collected in separate bins. Apart from the initial confusion (and fleeting clunkiness) of the first two lines (“White teeth/black light/White tee/brown eyes”—”teeth” and “tee” sound way too similar, especially when preceded by the same adjective), I’ve been eating up the emotionally-charged precision of it all. As each line is cut off the chopping block, the drum machine thrums on, just as meticulous as the delivery of each lyric. And I am nothing if not a sucker for songs on an album (or an EP, in this case) that transition into the other as though they’re the same song. Especially with this and “Afraid of Heights” being so short, it feels all the more like a single song. Pure artistry.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!