Category: Sunday Songs

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 7/5/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: in honor of the 250th anniversary of our glorious, flawless United States of America, I’ve concocted a color scheme that pairs well with the sickly algal green of the Reflecting Pool. God bless America, or something. Worry not: there’s enough women, queers, and people of color to give half of the White House a stroke. D.E.I.!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/5/26

“Lost Boys” – Phoebe Bridgers

SHE’S BACK!! SHE’S BACK, THIS IS NOT A DRILL! LOST WEEKEND COMES OUT THIS AUGUST!!!

Returning to music—and the public eye—was always going to be a tall order for Phoebe Bridgers. In the absence of new music since 2022, her fame has unexpectedly skyrocketed. It’s so bizarre to think that when I got into her music in 2019, she was on par with artists like Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, or Jay Som in terms of recognition, and now she’s selling out arena shows…whiplash, for sure. Opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour was likely the turning point. Either way, when she finally came back, there would be an inevitable torrent of naysayers and unwarranted speculation. I almost still can’t believe that she’s back.

Most of my thoughts about “Lost Boys” coalesced while I was listening to it on repeat while making a grilled cheese, which feels strangely fitting—here’s a song with themes of immaturity and not wanting to grow up, and there I stood with the ultimate kid’s menu dinner. (At least it wasn’t American cheese and white bread.) But the doubts kept swirling around in my head. Is the production too polished? Are the horns and tempo too much like “Kyoto?” Was Punisher the only trick up Phoebe Bridgers’s sleeve after all? Sure, I maintain that the production feels on the unnecessarily slick side (damn you, Jack Antonoff). And it does ring similarly to “Kyoto.” But “Lost Boys” feels like being invited into something new. It feels like the lulling into a false sense of security before the sound of Lost Weekend unfolds in earnest.

Yet even if it wasn’t, “Lost Boys” would be a worthy addition to Bridgers’s catalogue. The “Kyoto” comparison is apt because they have that same quality of feeling like a reckless sprint—both to escape something they should’ve confronted long ago. Imagery of fantasy and escapism melds with Bridgers’s usual structure of very modern vignettes—these lost boys are emblematic of the kind of escapism she longs for, but she’s equally damaged by being in the company of that amount of emotional stuntedness and immaturity. It’s a bittersweet concoction, made all the more so by the effortless shifts from whispery reflection to the raw-throated count-off before the final chorus. “Fun” isn’t the word I’d normally describe Phoebe Bridgers with, but I can’t help but feel a rush of excitement every time I listen to this song—there’s something ecstatic about it amidst the uncertainty. Maybe it’s the fact that both Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus quietly contributed backing vocals. Either way, “Lost Boys” is a strong start for Bridgers’s long-awaited return.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? – Temi Oh – “To another life/Where they make you cut your hair/Impatient with a rifle and your papers/Weightless, but not scared…”

“All My Loving” – Jim Noir

Jim Noir’s new album, The DLC Tapes, is now available exclusively on Patreon and Ko-Fi! If you’re financially able, I highly recommend this album alongside Programmes for Cools.

After all this time…not one but TWO Jim Noir albums this year! We truly have a bountiful harvest on our hands. Alongside Programmes for Cools (now available on all streaming platforms), Jim Noir has released The DLC Tapes, an album of 13 more songs previously released as part of the Jim Noir EP Club. (This song is technically a double-dip that I featured all the way back in 2022, but it was well before I even started writing these posts. If any song deserves it, it’s this one.) From the start of the Programmes announcement, I was holding out hope that “All My Loving” (originally from EP 7) would make the cut—it was one of the best tracks from his entire run of EPs, a delightful piece of catchy, ’60s-indebted jangle-pop. Granted, the changes from EP 7 to The DLC Tapes are minimal—mainly just the production—but it was exactly what I was hoping for. “All My Loving” was already a prime example of just how neatly Noir has carved his niche over the years—it’s proof that his craft has only gotten better as the years have gone by. The cleaner production amplifies the cheery, dreamy mood of the track—the harmonies, the starbursts of space-age synth, and the warm organ all get their flowers with this fresh coat of polish.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Cybernetic Tea Shop – Meredith Katz – the lyrics are minimal, but the electronic, cozy feel of this track wouldn’t feel out of place in a tea shop run by robots.

“I’m a Fool to Want You” (Frank Sinatra cover) – Mitski

If there’s any artist who genuinely baffles me with the unexpectedness of their cover choices, it’s Mitski. Case in point: for the 10th anniversary of Puberty 2, Mitski released an extended edition that included two extra covers: one of One Direction, and one of Frank Sinatra. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Mitski was throwing darts at a board with all of the most popular artists of the past 70 years and covering whatever they landed on. But both of these covers—yes, also the One Direction one—show off the many different facets of her artistry that frequently show up in her original music. Her cover of “Fireproof” has notes of her more straightforward rock days, especially from Bury Me at Makeout Creek.

“I’m a Fool to Want You” is almost the exact opposite. Accompanied only by grainy, droning synths, she turned Sinatra’s swell of big band strings into some of her most desolate-sounding music. The comparison that immediately came to mind was This Mortal Coil’s cover of Syd Barrett’s “Late Night”; both are incredibly sparse in their instrumentation, letting both of their vocalists unnervingly tremble to their hearts’ contents, and shining a spotlight on the more abjectly dreary parts of the lyrics. The latter part is more applicable to “Late Night,” but Mitski’s interpretation “I’m a Fool to Want You” turns a lovelorn ballad into something weighed down with deep-seated shame. Without the backing of an orchestra and a chorus of voices, “I’m a Fool to Want You” becomes almost unbearably ominous and lonely…in typical Mitski fashion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Salvation Gambit – Emily Skrutskie – there’s a very “dark, ominous, abandoned spaceship” atmosphere that Mtiski creates with those droning synths.

“Sea Life Sandwich Boy” – Horsegirl

On the subject of songs that take me back to high school…

“Sea Life Sandwich Boy” occupies a brief but distinct place in my memory: sometime in the winter of 2021, during my senior year of high school—the start of my eventual Horsegirl awakening. This song will always be arm-in-arm with The Beatles’ “Oh! Darling”—I was listening to both of them on repeat at the time. It’s very indicative of Horsegirl’s early days—a very ’90s sound, a random, jokey title unrelated to the song, and vocals buried in grainy effects. No band starts out in their prime, but I’d say that Horsegirl started out damn near close—”Sea Life Sandwich Boy” could have easily been a standout on Versions of Modern Performance. Swimming in airy harmonies and precise riffs that make each note flicker like stars cut out of paper, “Sea Life Sandwich Boy” was an ambitious single for the band, but one that pays off to this day.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Amelia, If Only – Becky Albertalli – this is a very high school roadtrip playlist kind of song—exactly what this novel is.

“While I’ll Keep Writing Songs for You” (feat. St. Vincent) – Mon Laferte

Sure, this is Mon Laferte’s song, but it seems like a sign that St. Vincent is almost done ripping holes her tights and setting things on fire. Laferte and St. Vincent collaborated on “Tiempos Violentos” (“Violent Times“) off of Todos Nacen Gritando, her Spanish translation of All Born Screaming; There, Laferte delivers a visceral scream that rivals Annie Clark’s, but “While I’ll Keep Writing Songs For You” is worlds away from the battered rage of Todos Nacen Gritando. Instead, Laferte and Clark’s voices form harmonies that are nothing short of soul-warming—they’re seriously such a match made in heaven. “While I’ll Keep Writing Songs For You” is a somber, sleepless ballad about trying to cling to a static, depressed lover who barely seems to respond to her affection. Clark and Laferte’s wordless preludes almost say more than the lyrics, purely plaintive as though they’re trying to get the last word out in the emptiness of space. Laferte’s music video feels laser-attuned to the feel of the song—her she is, all dolled up and surrounded by flowers in her shopping cart, but the world beyond her borders on colorless.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Our Wives Under the Sea – Julia Armfield – “Will we ever be ok?/You left hair in the shower again/Why don’t we laugh instead/There is no need/To argue over stupid things/You are still depressed/While I’ll keep writing songs for you…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/28/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: sort of doing a 180 on Let’s Dance, and reverting to my high school self via Stranger in the Alps.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/28/26

“Virginia Plain” – Roxy Music

Seeing old photos of Roxy Music always cracks me up…5/6 of them look goofy as hell in all that leather and animal print, and then there’s Brian Eno over here casually serving enough looks to feed a family of four. Good god, I don’t think anybody’s gotten that closet to valiantly fighting male-pattern baldness and winning. The receding hairline fought hard, but damn if Brian Eno wasn’t fighting just as hard.

Okay, maybe I should go easier on the other members of the band, because “Virginia Plain” reminds me of why I love early ’70s glam rock so dearly. This song is just immaculate. It’s at that perfect, Ziggy-era moment in time right before glam fully broke into the mainstream. It’s all swagger, sheen, and pure skill—it’s a blast, but this song feels chiseled and streamlined to a meticulous level. Most of the Roxy Music songs I’ve heard instantly recall The Rocky Horror Picture Show to me, and Bryan Ferry’s seductive vocals feel so proto-Frank-N-Furter—I’d be surprised if Tim Curry didn’t take a few cues from him for his performance; the lyrics are classic glam as well (“You’re so sheer/You’re so chic/Teenage rebel of the week”). Phil Manzanera’s acrobatic guitar work soars, but it effortlessly shape-shifts from classic, guitar-based rock to electronic freakouts in mere seconds, leaving the space between the two eerily natural. I can’t imagine being alive in the ’70s and hearing Brian Eno’s space-age keyboards get unleashed in “Virginia Plain”—it would’ve cracked my mind in two, for sure. Some old British guy in 1972 definitely had a heart attack watching this. But to me, “Virginia Plain” embodies the best of glam rock: a sound that was meant to send a shock to the system, but pushed boundaries creatively as well as socially. It’s all shiny, leather boots and smudged eyeshadow, full to the brim with hard-earned confidence.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

You Sexy Thing – Cat Rambo – I know this series is called Disco Space Opera, but…it’s just the vibes. The overwhelming vibes.

“Would You Rather” – Phoebe Bridgers

CW: domestic violence

Unfortunately for you all, the pharb sleeper agent that’s been inactive since about 2023 has been reawakened. You’ve been warned.

One of the hallmarks of early Phoebe Bridgers tracks is that they often had male duet partners who were an odd fit, vocally—they’re all good singers, but their vocal ranges and styles run counter to Bridgers’s style (see also: “Garden Song”). I think that was the initial reason that, when I first listened to Stranger in the Alps back in high school, that I was turned off from “Would You Rather”; Conor Oberst duets with Bridgers in the chorus—he’s objectively a talented singer, but his nasally voice just does not mesh with Bridgers. The same can be said for the music video, directed by Phoebe Bridgers’s younger brother, Jackson Bridgers…her penchant for gallows humor aside, what’s Conor Oberst doing with that stupid grin on his face while lip-syncing along to “in a suicide pact with our family and friends” at 1:53? Read the room, my dude…

But as with several songs on Stranger in the Alps that didn’t grab me on the first listen, “Would You Rather” only gets better—and more devastating—with each listen; her best instrumentation sounds like watching embers from a campfire become stars in the sky, and the delicate plucking at 1:05 is one such beautiful moment. According to Bridgers, “Would You Rather” was inspired by a mix of events—her childhood home burning down and her brother being suspected as the culprit, as well as an undercurrent of domestic violence; even for someone so usually candid about her experiences, I’m not surprised that neither she or the song has divulged any details of the latter. Sometimes the only way to be vulnerable is to always have the safety net of metaphor—to protect yourselves and the ones you love. Yet at the heart of it seems to be their bond as siblings: the chorus of “Come to find out/I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end/We found our way out/Of the suicide pact of our family and friends” emphasizes the lifeline that they’ve built with each other in spite of the strife that surrounded them growing up. There’s a bedraggled, burdened hope to it; despite the sense of being trapped by family, their mutual connection is what keeps them afloat in the end.

If you or a loved one is/has been a victim of domestic violence, click here for a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Where Sleeping Girls Lie – Faridah Àbíké-Íyímíde – “Come to find out/I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end/We found our way out/Of the suicide pact of our family and friends

“Without You” – David Bowie

I owe you an apology, Let’s Dance (1983), I wasn’t familiar with your game.

It’s easy to think of the album as David Bowie’s sellout pop album, the one where he cast aside all the pretense of experimental daring and weirdness that he’d built up with the Berlin Trilogy and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), not to mention the infamous “David Bowie Straight” magazine cover for an accompanying issue of Rolling Stone. Here’s the thing: yes, it is a pop album. But it’s not as if Bowie wasn’t making pop music for a significant portion of his career in the ’70s. Sure, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was stranger than most things on the airwaves, but it was pop. This was just his ’80s pop record, and like the albums before it, Let’s Dance has so many enduring hits to spare. Sure, it’s more sparse than some of his other albums, and there’s clearly a few afterthought tracks that were just made to make it complete, with its slim eight-track, 40-minute runtime (lookin’ at you, “Shake It”). But let’s be real: it’s hard to measure up when the first track on this album is “Modern Love.” Come on.

“Without You” is often regarded by critics as one of said afterthoughts to beef up Let’s Dance. I get where they’re coming from. For a songwriter like David Bowie, the lyrics are…well, yes, even as a fan, it’s a bit bland. But I feel like a three-year gap between releases after a powerhouse like Scary Monster (And Super Creeps) justifies it. Anybody would have to recharge after that. But “Without You” feels like Bowie’s take on a slow, yearning pop song, and he hits it out of the park. Strung with guitar flourishes that glimmer like string lights, “Without You” is a warm and wistful yearner, aided by the rich, graceful deepening of Bowie’s voice as he aged into his forties. Is it as instantly memorable or well-constructed as “Modern Love” or “Let’s Dance?” Maybe not, but it’s a damn good pop song.

As a bonus: even though they’re two distinct songs, Perfume Genius also has a great song called “Without You,” and for what it’s worth, it’s a good pairing with this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “Just when I’m ready to throw in my hand/Just when the best things in life are gone/I look into your eyes…”

“5AM Waltz” – Men I Trust

5 a.m. really is the perfect hour for this song. “5AM Waltz” is woozy in every sense of the word. Awash in reverb, the first two thirds feel like you’re stumbling around the kitchen in the middle of the night, trying to find the light-switch; it’s almost enough to feel directionless, but the directionlessness feels fully intentional. There’s lots of hyphenated genres that you find hints of—trip-hop, dream-pop, indie-pop—but whatever you’d call it, “5AM Waltz” is downright melodic and atmospheric, an exercise in crafting something memorable from less than two minutes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Floating Hotel – Grace Curtis – fitting background music for a giant hotel in space, right?

“Oochy Woochy” – Graham Coxon

Chances are, if you haven’t listened to a ton of Graham Coxon’s solo work (like me), this song won’t give you a good idea of how his sound generally is. “Oochy Woochy” doesn’t sound anything like the frenetic, anxious indie-rock that he usually writes. But I think it’s proof of him being one of the members of Blur who was most willing to take risks with their sound, and it translated instantly when he had more creative freedom. I mean, this is basically a jazzy saxophone loop with a hip-hop-inflected beat. The lyrics amount to only “Oochy woochy/Yeah, baby,” with the later drawled like James Acaster. And it’s so fun. It’s the perfect walk-on song. That prolonged silence at the beginning allows the full force of the saxophones to bowl you over, and from there, it’s just such a fun, carefree groove to get lost in. Even the little quacking sounds punctuating the beat are strangely natural. He’s got range.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Killing Spell – Shay Kauwe – the ideal soundtrack for plunging into a crowded ballroom…somewhere in a post-apocalyptic L.A. with magic and murder running amok.

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/21/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, and Happy Father’s Day! At least half of the music that gets into these posts is from my dad, and sharing music with him is one of my favorite things, so thank you 🩵

This week: does anybody remember that Instagram account that was just toilets with threatening auras? Introducing my million-dollar idea, “Brian Eno songs with threatening auras,” which totally isn’t niche and would gain so much traction.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/21/26

“Primitive Painters” – Felt

This one was a way-homer for me. I think it took me at least until a few months ago to really appreciate this song. When I was a kid, I remember my dad playing this in the car, and I think it just had that fatal combination of having droning vocals (Lawrence’s voice still isn’t particularly my cup of tea) and being over six minutes long. Perfect recipe for me zoning out and daydreaming about being in some fantasy world until it ended. Strangely, even when I’d just graduated from high school and my Cocteau Twins awakening had freshly happened, “Primitive Painters” still didn’t click for me.

Again, still not 100% on board with Lawrence—his voice has a very droning quality, and apparently he and Felt took a lot of influence from Television and Tom Verlaine, somebody else whose voice I also can’t bring myself to like. Everything about “Primitive Painters” is objectively so gorgeous that it’s easy to forgive. That guitar tone in the intro is so crystalline that it sounds less like a guitar and more of what I imagine how things would sound inside of a cracked geode. The dreamlike lyrics, according to Lawrence, spoke to “wanting to be in a select group…imagine groups of really cool kids hanging out in galleries, not pubs. That was my sort of conception,” which I never would’ve gathered; his visions of fire-breathing dragons and ships on empty seas would’ve lead me elsewhere. But it makes the defiant chorus of “you should see my trail of disgrace” even more defiant, becoming a confident flagpole planted in the dirt declaring allegiance to your own individuality. That brings us to what I think is the best part of the track—Elizabeth Fraser makes everything better, and her enchanting voice elevates “Primitive Painters” skyward.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Unexploded Remnants – Elaine Gallagher – “I just wish my life could be strange as a conspiracy/I hold out hope but there’s no way of being what I want to be/The dragons blow fire, angels fly, spirits wither in the air/I’m just me I can’t deny, I’m neither here, there nor anywhere…”

“Driving Me Backwards” – Brian Eno

The other day, I was talking to my brother, who had finally listened to Here Come the Warm Jets on a plane ride. He didn’t like it as much as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, which baffled me, until I remembered that he was listening to songs like this. This song could feasibly make me go apeshit if I was 30,000 feet in the air.

Terrible way to sell “Driving Me Backwards,” I know. I used to skip around it whenever I first listened to Here Come the Warm Jets too. But it came on shuffle recently, and it was flat-out hypnotic. From such a simple skeleton—Brian Eno built this song on “only three chords, each different from the other by only one note”—blooms what might be his most densely-packed and foreboding tracks. It really does feel downright menacing, what with said three chords played like a dirge on an out-of-tune piano. Robert Fripp’s guitar zips like blips of radar, but on the steady rhythm of the repetitive piano, it feels like you’re being marched to the edge of a cliff. None of the lyrics on this album have a ton of structure, and yet combined with the atmosphere of the song, I get this image of the most dreaded possible scenario of meeting the parents: in my head, it’s this ’50s-style nuclear family (“Meet my relations/All of them grinning like facepacks”) and the girlfriend they’re giving you permission to date traps them too (“Now I’ve found a sweetheart/Treats me good, just like an armchair.”) That repetition, something Eno used to all sorts of effects later on in his career, makes “Driving Me Backwards” feel like you’re being pinned to the wall, but agonizingly slowly—whoever’s doing it is making every second of anticipation sink it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Saltcrop – Yume Kitasei – “I try to think about nothing/Difficult, I’m most temperamental/I gave up my good living…”

“Television” – IDLES

I still adore IDLES, and I feel like only something drastic will change it. But “Television” makes me sort of see where people are coming from with the criticism, because it’s basically the punk equivalent of this. And you know what? I’m completely on board. I think it’s so wonderful that IDLES has made a name off of having an aggressive, angry sound and image for the band, but making it into a Trojan horse for some of the most genuine and uplifting music out there. Self-love is very punk, after all, if you consider that, like Joe Talbot details in this song, that it’s tied to capitalism—companies want to make a profit off of you feeling inadequate and not looking like whichever models are in at the moment, and to reject that consumerism is very punk. It’s all worth it just to hear Talbot yell “LOVE YOURSELF!” in a tone usually reserved for wrestling announcers.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Chameleon Moon – RoAnna Sylver – “If someone talked to you/The way you do to you/I’d put their teeth through/Love yourself!”

“Lonely But Exciting Road” – FKA Twigs

I love a closing track that’s so clearly a Closing Track. Sure, a lot of the effort in it feels like it was put into being capital-A Anthemic, but for the most part, it works exactly as it should. Though I’m really not familiar with FKA Twigs and her work, she’s often lumped in with a lot of the weird women musicians that I admire—namely Björk, which makes sense, given that they’re both making boundary-pushing music that trends towards electronic. And nobody could be as weird as Björk, but like her, FKA Twigs is pushing through the embrace of exploring the adventure of being an individual and a trailblazer: “It might be heaven that’s coming my way/It’s gonna be a lonely but exciting road/And I’ll be finding myself on the way/It’s gonna be a lonеly but exciting road.” It’s such a beautiful sentiment, and the soaring, wordless section after the chorus reminded me of Kate Bush, another woman who paved the same path—it’s definitely got some “Cloudbusting” DNA in there. But for anyone, it’s such a hopeful sentiment, one that I’ve been trying to embody in the past few years, knowing that the path I’m taking with my life is unconventional, but wholly right for me. It’s so exciting that you forget about the lonely sometimes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Deep – Rivers Solomon – “So you make it up/In the hope that you’ll be something more than before/Be more than my mother was, no/Be more than her mother and her mother was/’Cause they say/’We gotta give to our children what we never was…'”

“Ex-Con” – Smog

At the worst of times, socializing feels like wearing a human suit; I’m hyper-aware of what I should say, what’s normal to say and what’s unacceptable, and the sheer effort of all that deflates me by the end of the day. (Being neurodivergent isn’t what it’s cracked up to be by people on TikTok, kids. I feel like neurotypicals are treating neurodivergence the way people threw around “anxiety” and “depression” in the 2010’s. Free me from this prison.) Bill Callahan seems to understand: “Whenever I get dressed up/I feel like an ex-con trying to make good.” “Ex-Con” is an upbeat track that belies a somber undercurrent of alienation beneath it—the paradox of feeling most at home alone in your room, but feeling the most out of place in the company of other people. The repeated final line about feeling “like a robot by the river/Looking for a drink” jumped out at me from the first listen, but it might be one of Callahan’s cleverest lyrics; to me, it speaks to the desire to be a normal, functioning, conformed person, but knowing that it would probably eat you up from the inside out. The water would probably short-circuit this robot if it were to drink it. The drink of water is just out of reach. “Ex-Con” is so poignant in that way—it’s such a gentle song, but it lays bare how the worst of isolation feels.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2) – Becky Chambers – “Alone in my room/I feel such a warmth for the community/Oh, but out on the streets/Out on the streets/I feel like a robot by the river/Looking for a drink…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/14/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: in a concerning reversion to the summer of 2024, I’m excessively yapping about Cate Le Bon and Cocteau Twins in the same post again.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/14/26

“Pitch the Baby” – Cocteau Twins

Buckle up, folks, it’s Cocteau Twins summer…again.

Heaven or Las Vegas never gets old. Four years later, and I still haven’t recovered from the moment that I heard “Cherry-coloured Funk” in art class in high school. There was no turning back. But I did cave and grab it on vinyl, and it was about time I experienced the album again. Once more, there’s not a bad song on the album, but surprises surface with every listen. Lush is the best word that comes to mind with this album; over the course of their discography, Elizabeth Fraser and co. had been defining their niche of atmospheric, worlds-within-songs shrouded in mist and mystery. Blue Bell Knoll was the first step in making each song feel like a world, but Heaven or Las Vegas, to me, is where those worlds began blooming with lifeforms. Every distinguishable word that comes out of Fraser’s gibberish fog feels like you’re being let in on a secret. Each listen makes you feel a part of their world, like they’ve given you a ticket to their far-flung, alien planet.

“Pitch the Baby” is one of those songs where the glimpses of the comprehensible words feel like this. Despite what all the memes associated with this song, nobody’s going full fastball special on a baby, not to worry. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite; though 99% of the lyrics are predictably murky, much of it appears to be addressed to Fraser’s then newborn baby: “I only want to love you/I’m so happy to get to care for you.” In spite of the turmoil leading up to this album’s release, Fraser claimed that her daughter being born gave her a sense of clarity, and that many of the tracks were “reputedly recorded…while holding Lucy-Belle in her arms.” Here, the circularity of “Pitch the Baby” feels like a cradle: it has this looping, dream-pop structure, but it’s always given me the feeling of something being shielded. It boasts some of Simon Raymonde’s funkiest, most iconic basslines, and the rapid bloop-bloop-bloop of the synths form Saturn rings around the track. It’s tantalizingly easy to lose yourself in, but in the end, the contained world it brings to life feels less like a song and more like a selfless act of love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Under the Earth, Over the Sky – Emily McCosh – “I only want to love you/I’m so happy to get to care for you…”

“Remembering Me” – Cate Le Bon

I keep gushing about Pompeii over and over again, but somehow I’ve barely touched on the aesthetics of the album! It’s so distinct and very Cate Le Bon—I love all of the imagery of statues and the emphasis on static poses (evoking the sort of frozen visions of past selves that becomes one of the album’s main themes), but the neon, avant-garde makeup and costumes too. I forgot how much I loved the music video for “Remembering Me,” which stands on its own well, but…if those opening shots aren’t a tribute to David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?” music video, then I don’t know what is. (If you need more evidence to support this, I suggest Reward‘s touching closing track, “Meet the Man.”)

I’m kind of baffled to this day that the second half of Pompeii didn’t hit me as much as the first, because “Remembering Me” hasn’t gotten out of my head since. I think on the first listen, it felt like it leaned too much into the ’80s pastiche. I think I was, once again, too wrapped up in “Dirt on the Bed” and such to really absorb this song. Now, it stands out to me as one of the more emotional tracks. Behind the catchy, weirdo synth-pop curtain is a story about stories—more specifically, the ones we tell ourselves. The more I listen, the more it feels like the scene in Barbie where Margot Robbie blurts out “Do you guys ever think about dying?” in the middle of a glitzy, sparkling party. Le Bon called it “a neurotic diary entry that questions notions of legacy and warped sentimentalism in the desperate need to self-mythologise“; for Le Bon, who had to face all of this while returning to her childhood home during the pandemic, it became a tug-of-war between the self that she was and the self that she wanted to be perceived as: “In the remake of my life/I moved in straight lines/My hair was beautiful.” The verses confidently strut, catwalk-like, as the pedestaled, false version of herself—stronger, more confident, more beautiful—before the chorus tears everything down. You can’t get any more candid about this than “Facedown in heirlooms.” Whew.

The rest of “Remembering Me” is full of just as many sucker punch lyrics: “I wore the heat like/A hundred birthday cakes/Under one sun/I didn’t need anyone/On my own luck/I arrived just to seat the choir/And bowled them over.” It’s the kind of vulnerability that gets more impactful with each listen—I’ve certainly gotten into those places where I’ve been so determined to be confident and self-reliant that I worked myself into a corner, and only asked for help when things had bubbled up and exploded in my face. Like it or not, we’re all caught between that image of ourselves and our real self. But hell, if Cate Le Bon wrestled this too, then maybe there’s hope for us too.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Calculating Stars – Mary Robinette Kowal – “I wore the heat like/A hundred birthday cakes/Under one sun/I didn’t need anyone/On my own luck…”

“Kingdom of Love” – The Soft Boys

“You’ve been laying eggs under my skin/Now they’re hatching out under my chin/Now there’s tiny insects showing through/And all them tiny insects look like you!”

I was nearly going to word this part somewhere along the lines of “there’s enough good Robyn Hitchcock lyrics to fill a book,” but then I remembered that there is such a book (It’s called Somewhere Apart, if you’re interested. I highly recommend it), and “Kingdom of Love” was included in it. Dammit.

I listened to an episode of Life of the Record about Underwater Moonlight last week, so for all the die-hard Hitchcock-heads out there, here’s almost an hour and a half of Robyn Hitchcock detailing the story behind the album in great—and often hilarious—detail. He often talks about the album as the product of him being a rather confused young man in the music industry, but if I could come up with anything as good as the lyrics I pasted above, I’d be set for life. Hitchcock words a lot of the love-adjacent songs on this album as being akin to demonic possession, which…I’m sure there’s a lot to unpack there, but we got some great songs about it. And you know what? I’ve been listening to this song over and over for weeks as I’ve been trying to play it on guitar, and if that’s not demonic possession, I don’t know what is. (That riff at the end of the chorus is burned at the back of my brain. Still a work in progress.) “Kingdom of Love” evokes the frenzied urgency of punk and pairs it with lyrics that recall a ’50s B-movie about alien invasion, all in service of this twisted, grotesque vision of falling head over heels. Hitchcock’s yowled declaration of “all I want to do is be your creature!” at the end of the bridge cements what makes Underwater Moonlight so wonderful: a distillation of the brash punk sound of the late ’70s, but with a weirdo slant that was all Hitchcock and co.

..AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Someone You Can Build a Nest In – John Wiswell – “You’ve been laying eggs under my skin/Now they’re hatching out under my chin/Now there’s tiny insects showing through/And all them tiny insects look like you!”


“Words” – Missing Persons

Unfortunately, you’ve all come to me in a very ’80s time in my life. I think I’ve come full circle back to where I was in elementary school, when most of my music taste consisted of Duran Duran, Erasure, and Madonna, owing to my mom. I never stopped liking all of those bands, but I think I just happened to be at the epicenter of Gen Z being oversaturated with highly-curated ’80s nostalgia…the impact (derogatory) of Stranger Things. But new wave is just that good though. At its best, new wave was such a sharply bold genre, with its sleek sound but alternative spirit. For a song like “Words,” a repeated exorcism of frustrations of repeatedly going unheard, it’s the perfect medium—how can you go unheard when you’ve got a voice like Dale Bozzio? Her theatrical vocal presence makes this entire song, belting, squeaking, and murmuring through the various stages of her anger. It’s all a perfect specimen of new wave, and no amount of time that passes will make it any less wonderfully catchy.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I Am the Ghost In Your House – Mar Romasco-Moore –
“I might as well go up and talk to a wall/’Cause all the words are having no effect at all/It’s a funny thing, am I all alone?”

“The Wedding Song” – David Bowie

I…

…okay, I get dangerously emotional every time I think about how much David Bowie and Iman loved each other. And still do. Shit, I need a minute, I’m on my period…just trust me on this one.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life – John O’Connell – you’ve been fooled, this is just a book recommendation that’s just even more book recommendations…either way, there’s some greats in here, and a peek behind the curtain of one of the most literary-minded rockstars in history.

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/7/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: happy pride from Damon Albarn, Queen Latifah, and Meg Duffy. Honorable mention to Brian Eno, whose outfits in the early ’70s slayed so hard that he deserves to be an honorary member of the LGBTQ+ community.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/7/26

“Battle” – Blur

In addition to healing my 12-year-old self, I have begun healing my 18-year-old self…by getting a painfully spendy copy of 13 from my local record store. These damn European imports!! Hey, I had a bit of extra money from graduation…I swear to god that vinyl had been speaking to me like the Green Goblin mask every time I went inside. It had to happen eventually.

Of course, I knew it was going to be worth every penny—13 is still in my top 10 albums of all time. This was the first time I’ve listened to it all the way through in years (I played it to death in my senior year of high school), and it’s one of those records that I wish I could erase my memory of and re-experience listening to it for the first time. I seriously can’t imagine how much of a shock to the system it must’ve been to Blur fans in 1999; Even after their self-titled album—a bitter plunge into grunge after their burnout from Britpop fame—13 was truly nothing like what they’d previously done. One of the reasons it sticks out so much to me is how uninhibited they all feel. The harmony of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, and Dave Rowntree continued to be as neat as a pin, but all four of them were bent on going into the most daring, experimental territory that the band had ever reached. By all accounts, all of them were…pretty miserable, unfortunately—a lot of 13 deals with the breakup between Albarn and his longtime girlfriend, Justine Frischmann, and tensions with Graham Coxon would lead him to leave the band a year later. Some of the stylistic deviations feel like middle fingers, like the jarring transition from the plaintive, heart-pouring “Tender” to the jagged howling of “Bugman.” You can’t tell me that wasn’t deliberate trolling on the band’s part. Yet even if it came from a burned out place, the experimental rebellion on this album left an undeniably positive mark on Blur’s legacy as a band.

“Battle” remains one of the more surprising tracks on the album. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes long, it’s the longest song on the album, but only by a single second—”Tender,” my favorite song from the album (and maybe of all time), is 7:41 long, while “Battle” squeezes past at 7:42. Like many of the unexpected twists and turns on the album, those tracks couldn’t be more different. The lyrics are pretty spare—the focus is on the sprawling, very sci-fi soundscape that unfolds over this song’s long runtime. What begins with a riff of dainty, spacey synth notes unfolds into an echoing, forming-and-reforming galaxy of sound. It really feels like you’ve been jettisoned into space at breakneck speed, watching the stars speed past. The deep rumble of Coxon’s guitar churns as Albarn’s voice, tweaked into oblivion with all manner of effects, seems to dissipate in real time. It seriously boggles my mind that this hasn’t been used in a big-budget sci-fi movie to soundtrack a tense dogfight in space. It’s eons away from the much more grounded, British social commentary that was their claim to fame in the mid-’90s, but that’s what makes it last to me. 13 was Blur breaking open the confines that the music industry had imposed on them, and “Battle” feels like all of that pent-up energy spiraling outwards into the potential that had always been incubating within them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Ancestral Night – Elizabeth Bear – the perfect soundtrack for an adventure aboard a mysterious spaceship that encounters its fair share of borderline eldritch beings.

“Born Under a Bad Sign” – Richard Hawley

I might as well admit now that I’ve been leeching off my brother and his girlfriend, who have been going through the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die list. That’s also how I got “Crosseyed and Painless” last month, although that was bound to happen eventually. Coles Corner, on the other hand, might’ve passed me by completely, even with my Britpop proclivities (he was a founding member of Longpigs and was a touring and session for Pulp for a time).

I only got a handful of songs from Coles Corner from my brother (he said some of them “got too Sinatra,” which makes perfect sense, honestly), but they’re all packages of British rock tracks that seem plucked from yesteryear. “The Ocean” was almost my pick this week, with its staggering, cinematic build, but I just keep returning to “Born Under a Bad Sign.” It’s a small wonder that this hasn’t been in a Wes Anderson movie, and not just because of their mutual connections with Jarvis Cocker—this seems like the exact kind of ’60s-inflected, slow ballad that would soundtrack Léa Seydoux wistfully smoking out the window, or something. The comfort that comes from “Born Under a Bad Sign” isn’t necessarily from the nostalgic air of it all. It just has this innate, warm texture, created by Hawley’s smooth vocals, that evokes being carefree and sprawled out in bed, fresh cups of rich coffee and day fading into night as you shut your eyes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Cybernetic Tea Shop – Meredith Katz – “Now you’re laying in the afterglow/And there’s something that she wants to know/Are you going be the one to say/You belong to me…”

“U.N.I.T.Y.” – Queen Latifah

Look, I’m not saying that this generation doesn’t have its fair share of fantastic, feminist artists—rappers in particular—but I maintain that some of these gen alpha/gen z boys and men have gotten too bold…they need to have the fear of Queen Latifah telling them “WHO YOU CALLIN’ A BITCH?” put in them, is all I’m saying.

God. So good. It’s so easy to see why “U.N.I.T.Y.” has become such an enduring classic for a myriad of reasons—its significance in a very male-dominated hip hop scene, it’s genuinely feminist message (no hollow girlboss anthems here), and the fact that it’s just so smooth and catchy. And I think the reason that it resonates to this day is because it calls attention to all of the ways that misogyny has infected society. It reminds me in structure of Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” in that it presents its initial issue, and in subsequent verses declares: “oh, you thought I was done? Nope, sit back down, we’re deconstructing misogynoir from the top down.” From offhand catcalling to domestic violence, “U.N.I.T.Y.” pulls the curtain on just how deep misogyny runs in society.

And it also resonates because nothing that Queen Latifah talks about here has gone away. Just as it was in 1993, women—especially women of color—are subject to the worst of society’s misogynist tendencies. The domestic violence remains. The objectification, name-calling, and slurs remain. Neoliberal feminism would have you believe that since women (occasionally women of color) can become CEOs and whatnot that misogyny has been solved. One look at the world at large would tell you the exact opposite. A queer, Black woman publicly calling out this in the 1990’s was a vital wake-up call, and it remains so to this day, 33 years later, in an age of widespread misogyny. There hasn’t been a time since “U.N.I.T.Y.” was released where it hasn’t been relevant. Plus, it’s just catchy. I’m warming up to saxophone samples here. Every element of this song is incredible.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

She Who Knows – Nnedi Okorafor – a story of strength, resilience, and one girl’s journey across the desert.

“Spinning Away” – Brian Eno and John Cale

You thought you could let your guard down again? Boom, get Eno’d, fuckers.

Like 13, Wrong Way Up has also been speaking to me like the Green Goblin mask whenever I go to my local record store, but not necessarily for the same reason. It’s way more reasonably priced, but I don’t want to buy it until I’ve actually listened to the album, y’know? But it’s Eno! And John Cale! “Spinning Away” keeps pushing me towards listening to it, and it’s convinced me that maybe warm weather is the perfect time to listen to it. Despite Eno and Cale purportedly wanting to kill each other while recording this album, both songs I’ve heard from Wrong Way Up (the other being “Lay My Love”) are nothing short of harmonious and enchanting. “Spinning Away” is also mostly Eno at the wheel; like “Lay My Love,” it has a circular, cyclical kind of groove that feeds into itself. The song seems to describe the process of making art—here, it’s an artist painting the sky, and it even references perhaps the most iconic painting of the sky of all time, Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The opening has to be some of Eno’s most evocative lyricism, and for him, that’s really saying something:

“Up on a hill/As the day dissolves/With my pencil turning moments into line/High above/In the violet sky/A silent silver plane/It draws a golden chain…”

How can you not picture such a vivid scene after hearing that? And every successive line creates such a vibrant image. I always picture those time-lapses of galaxies colliding once this song really kicks in. It’s so transportive. Describing stars as a “million-insect storm” might be one of my favorite ways space has been described in song. It’s an almost dreamlike narrative of both the painting and the landscape morphing (spinning away, even) as they scramble to capture the image. There’s an air of impermanence about “Spinning Away,” but the way Eno and Cale paint it feels nothing short of euphoric, with Eno’s wonderstruck vocals and Cale’s soaring strings. To me, it feels like a take on impermanence as a positive experience—it’s important to capture these fleeting moments in life, and it’s a privilege to see the world changing before you, even in the most minute sense.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Last Gifts of the Universe – Riley August – “One by one/All the stars appear/As the great winds of the planet spiral in/Spinning away/Like the night sky at Arles/In the million insect storm/The constellations form…”

“Aquamarine” – Hand Habits

I discovered this song unexpectedly after watching Fruit Bats’ episode of What’s In My Bag? recently. It immediately cemented itself into one of my hypothetical playlists that only exists in my mind…that being “songs that seem engineered in a lab to be featured in Netflix’s Heartstopper.” It’s that very specific, indie-pop, reverbed synth sound that makes that connection work for me. Those synths! “Aquamarine” skitters along with all manner of them, creating a controlled frenzy that darts all over the place. Brief guitar interludes make you feel jolted back to reality after waking up from a vivid dream before Duffy plunges you headfirst back into the sleepless, electronic dreamworld—fitting for a song with lyrics unsure of their direction in the wake of emotional devastation. It’s such a lush track, bottling the feeling of breaking into a run and never looking back.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester – Maya MacGregor – “Why can’t you talk about it?/I got used to being on the other side of truth/Now I never ask for details/Who the hell needs details?/When everything is burning/You light a fire on the grave…”

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs – 5/31/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

BEFORE I GET INTO IT: my longtime best friend has joined me in creating a book blog! It’s over on Wix, but it’s well worth migrating to another website to see her excellent book reviews. Go show Daisy’s Fables some love!!

This week: this one really feels like I’m a 12-year-old holding up my interests and talking at you about them, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/31/26

“Huey Newton” – St. Vincent

Sit down. I’m yapping about St. Vincent’s self-titled album again. You WILL listen. You subscribed to this blog, this is the price you pay…

I really haven’t changed since the age of 12, huh? It really makes pieces of my soul wither to see companies running with the joking “your inner child needs a little treat” expressions and turning the healing experience of becoming one with your inner child corporate. No, your inner child doesn’t need the new Starbucks drink, or whatever. That being said, preordering the 10th anniversary pressing of St. Vincent’s self-titled album was for me, but also my inner 12-year-old. As I sat there listening to it, I could feel her curled up inside of me like a chrysalis. I feel like I’m slowly becoming everything she wanted me to be.

But present me reveres St. Vincent as much as 12-year-old me did. Now that I’m older, it’s become one of those puzzle boxes of albums with new layers that reveal themselves every time you listen to it. (And that’s saying something, because I listened to it a concerning amount in middle school.) For me, this listen made me realize that this album is musically and thematically sound. There isn’t as much of a narrative to it as some of St. Vincent’s other albums, but throughout the many modern anxieties that she dishes out, there’s this through line of life being swallowed by the Internet; it’s meant to be more of a near-future thing, if her cult leader persona is anything to go by, but it rang true in 2014—and today. Clark wrote “Huey Newton” as a loose stream of consciousness song; the reference to the Black Panther Huey Newton is only relevant because of a vivid dream she’d had about him after taking a high dose of Ambien. For Clark, the lyrics are “tied to the next in a way that I don’t even understand…It has the feel of an extended Google search, and is set in the near future, after a long winter.” It is kind of a sonic doomscroll in the way that it pinballs from one disconnected image to the next. But you can see the intention of the artifice of the Internet that comes through in some of these images; “Fake knife, real catcher,” or “fuckless pawn sharks” evoke the ease of which people construct their identities even though there’s nothing behind the curtain. 12 years later, her image of a lawless internet populated by fakers and criminals has become even realer, with the blight of AI polluting what was already polluted in the first place. (For the record, I’m taking the line “Cowboys of Information” as the name for my purely hypothetical St. Vincent cover band.)

“Entombed in a shrine/Of zeroes and ones” remains one of the hardest lines on the album, if only in delivery alone. “Huey Newton” switches from a more restrained, dreamy piece of indie synth-pop before launching a salvo of guitar shrapnel in your face at the 2:37 mark. Every line is spit as her signature guitars dissolve into glitch-like fuzz. It all sounds distinctly pixelated, aggressive in its assault, as though the false veil of the digital world is being torn apart by a virus before your eyes. The beauty of St. Vincent to me is that the layers on “Huey Newton” are present on every song—everything has digitized tree rings hewn into it, every one revealing something about the vibrant tapestry of this album’s dystopian, digital world.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Machinehood – S.B. Divya – “Entombed in a shrine of zeros and ones, you know/You know/Oh, with fatherless features/You motherless creatures/You know…”

“Greta” – Cate Le Bon

Cate! Le Bon! Cannot! Make! A! Bad! Album!

Genuinely baffling how one person can be this talented. Sure, there are weaker spots in her catalogue, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad Cate Le Bon song. I’ve just listened to CYRK, her second album, and it’s just as inventive as some of her later work, though quite different in sound. Before she crafted atmospheres from saxophones and synths, she had a more traditionally indie rock sound, but not without the unique lyrical and vocal touches that she’s always carried. CYRK as a whole is playful (fitting for an album named for the Polish word for “circus”), an adventurous branching-out into whatever struck Le Bon’s fancy. In spirit, it reminds me a lot of Björk’s early work, where she was just putting out feelers wherever she wanted, with only the intention to make daring music.

“Playful” doesn’t exactly describe “Greta” though. It’s one of the slower, more contemplative songs on the album; aside from the vaguely trumpet detour at the end, most of it relies on muted guitar and bass. For that reason, it came out of nowhere for me. What also came out of nowhere was how emotionally moving this track is; Le Bon softly sings of a subject with “eyes the size of lagoons/Dreaming wild” and whose baby days are “coiled up inside her like ribbons all tied.” It feels like she took a telescope and looked down at me as a child, my eyes turned skyward. There’s something about it that feels like a comforting lullaby, from the references to a child born in the stars to the slow rhythm, fit for gently rocking a cradle back and forth. It feels like an ode to every weird child who refused to let the weirdness get beaten out of them, no matter how hard the world tried. If I’d heard this as a kid, I feel like I would’ve found infinite solace in it, but now that I’m hearing it as an adult, it feels like a potent reminder to keep the child alive, to not let the ribbons of baby days get tangled or forgotten, and to remember that all of us are made of star stuff.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – “Observatories clocked you in the stars/They were holding you so dear/Greta, be good to yourself/You’ve always been here.”

“I Might” – Wilco

The Whole Love does not get the love it deserves. Fully acknowledging that I have a fog of nostalgia surrounding my head whenever I talk about this album, this album is severely underrated. I think the problem with Wilco’s discography is that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is such an obvious, career-defining best that it overshadows so much of the adventurous work that they’ve made in the decades since. And if we’re talking about adventurous, then we need to talk about The Whole Love, an unexpected buffet of Wilco’s classic alt-rock sound and explorations out into both the electronic and folk worlds. “Art of Almost” and “Sunloathe” really shouldn’t be on the same album in theory, but The Whole Love makes it happen.

This album was the first Wilco release I remember being…well, conscious for. I was in elementary school when it came out; I specifically remember my dad playing the album all the way through while driving to work and watching the Popeye crossover music video for “Dawned On Me” at the old studio where I took piano lessons. So even before I went through the whole album on my own, I’d already listened to the whole thing. “I Might” was one of the many songs on the album that remained in a nameless limbo in my memory as A Wilco Song That Certainly Exists, but I couldn’t put it to a concrete song. It sounds like your average Wilco song from the 2010’s, with its driving rock sound and cheery organs, but even though it’s not as full-throttle weird as “Art of Almost” (which comes right before it on the album…talk about whiiiiplaaaaash), it has the spirit of “let’s try everything, what’s the worst that could happen?” Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics are nonsensical and free-association (“Your sno-cone/And it’s piss and blood,” anyone?) and the chorus of “You won’t set the kids on fire/Oh, but I might” is…wild, obviously, but the more I listen to it, the more it feels like it’s a defiant statement of turning his past work—and people’s expectations of the band—upside down and destroying them. The Whole Love came out of its ashes, and to me, it’s still one of the most daring albums in their catalogue.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Obake Code – Makana Yamamoto – “It’s in the cards, oh oh/’Get Well Soon – everybody’/Do all lies have a taste?/Let it go, I don’t know, oh…”

“Advice & Vices” – Chelsea Wolfe

I’d forgotten about “Advice & Vices” since…at least high school, around the time I had my Chelsea Wolfe awakening proper and listened to The Grime and the Glow, her first album. Hearing a song like this brings up so many contradictions—I love it, but I simultaneously feel like it’s slightly distant from the music she’d become known for, and yet it feels so innately Chelsea Wolfe. It’s always been goth, but it’s not cloaked in quite the same foreboding atmosphere as much of her later work. The album is much more lo-fi, and yet you can already see the seeds of her signature style germinating; “Advice & Vices” feels like a more understated indie rock song, until you hear Wolfe’s muted ghostlike howls recorded at the very end of the song. Her voice is already strong here, and it’d only get stronger. But it’s like watching Wolfe fish in a frozen lake for what would become her sound; the ice is melting, and around it is what would become the iconic artist that I love today. She was always that good.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa – “I never listen to my own best advice, no/Like one thing leads to another/Like one heart bleeds for another/And everybody wants what they can’t have…”

“New Muscles” – mary in the junkyard

The cynical part of me is starting to think that mary in the junkyard (or their management) might’ve just been too good at picking singles. But the more optimistic part of me is starting to think that Role Model Hermit is going to be such a fun album. We’re at three singles now ahead of the album’s July release, and each one has been so different from the other—this is pretty much worlds apart from “Candelabra.” It’s also a very different song than I’ve expected from mary in the junkyard, and…I love it.

“New Muscles” is such an uplifting, confidence-boosting song. But from the more gloomy instrumentation, full of strings and percussion that sounds like somebody’s whacking a plastic bucket with a spoon, you wouldn’t think it. Yet it’s the perfect song for dusting yourself off and getting back on your feet. It’s all about emerging from a cocoon and embracing all of the possibilities of your new, stronger, and more healed self: “I’ve been getting up and getting out/Working out and working on myself/New muscles all over my back/New muscles all over my back.” It feels like the spiritual successor to Wilco’s “Kicking Television” in terms of empowering indie rock songs about self-improvement that totally avoid sounding corny. It has a playful element to it (“I will take you down with one finger”), but it balances the joking “they’ll never see the new me coming” attitude with a genuine, sparkling hope for the wonderful things that’ll happen once you start exercising these new muscles and putting that healing self to work. “New Muscles” came out at a very advantageous time in my life—I’ve been feeling some version of this song for a while, what with trying to claw my way out of a multitude of bad habits and becoming more independent in my life. It really does feel like emerging from a chrysalis, even though I know that I’ll probably be emerging from a number of chrysalises over the course of my life. For now, I’m taking this new self to better places. Here’s to flexing your new muscles.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Juliet Takes a Breath – Gabby Rivera – “Courage in my bones/I embrace the thunder and the lightning/I will make it so hard to forget me…”

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/24/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: inventive covers, timeless anthems, and some classic quirked-up white boy music.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/24/26

“A Mistake” – Fiona Apple

If we live long enough under the patriarchy, most of us women have the urge to permanently destroy something at least once in their lives. Once is generous, honestly…have you read the news lately? For Fiona Apple, who had been heavily scrutinized under the public eye and lambasted by music critics in the years leading up to When the Pawn…, the urge must’ve been constant. That’s why “A Mistake” feels so genuine. It’s a slinky, trip-hoppy track about breaking free of society’s expectation of a “good girl” and deliberately wrecking things, fully cognizant of the consequences but not caring in the slightest: “And when the day is done and I look back/And the fact is I had fun/Fumbling around/All the advice I shunned, and I ran/Where they told me not to run/But I sure had fun.” No matter if you act on it, Apple taps into that universal urge to raise hell after being boxed in and stymied by expectations of femininity (“I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?”), societal control, and an urge to just rebel, even if you don’t know what against. And then there’s the element of deliberately going against good advice—Apple’s trail of destruction, by her own admission, isn’t entirely justified, but there’s that constant, biting urge to defy well-meaning advice anyway. After all, “And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math.” It’s all wrapped up in a complex package, not always thoughtful, but from a messy, nonsensical place of rage with nowhere to go. Screeching guitars that give the effect of buzzing insects and a luscious synth loop to back it all up, creating a fully-fledged ode to giving into your most reckless urges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir – “So I’m gonna fuck it up again/I’m gonna do another detour/Unpave my path/And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math…”

“Crosseyed and Painless” – Talking Heads

This might be the moment where I finally, finally get into Talking Heads. My brother recently listened to Remain In Light and introduced me to a handful of songs from it; apparently, he’d also fully Mandela-effected the idea that I owned a Remain In Light t-shirt, so maybe I should just listen to it. So much has been said about the album: the fusion of rock, funk, and early hip-hop, the influence of Afrobeats, the early electronic instrumentals. And all of that’s there. But you know what strikes me immediately?

Brian Eno. This just reeks of Eno. I mean, he obviously produced this album, but his rhythmic influence is so clear. “No One Receiving,” one of my favorite songs of his, is very Talking Heads, and he’d worked with the band on several albums at that point. But the frantic, anxious rhythms of “Crosseyed and Painless” and the chirping electronics are so Brian Eno. (He also provides backing vocals on the chorus, and Byrne’s certainly got some “King’s Lead Hat” in the delivery.) Maybe I just love it because of the Eno by proxy. But I feel like that would be a disservice to David Byrne and co., whose unique touch seems to have made Remain In Light so iconic. First off—oh my God, Tina Weymouth’s bass playing is nothing short of phenomenal. Once she finds the groove, she grabs ahold and never lets go. I think Byrne is what separates this from Eno in the end—though they share the same kind of angular energy, Byrne’s seamless shifts between desperate crooning in the chorus to frantic, anxious proto-rapping in the bridge: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living with their insides out.” That’s just nothing but David Byrne, as is this song’s spirit, in the end. Eno bolstered it, but the sweaty-palmed sprint through a state of alienation is nothing but Talking Heads.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon – “Nothing there/No information left of any kind/Lifting my head/Looking for the danger signs…”

“Modern Girl” – Sleater-Kinney

I hate to say it, but the strongest memory I have of hearing “Modern Girl” was hearing Sleater-Kinney play it live while co-headlining with Wilco about five years back. They did the classic “this is our big song, sing it with us!” thing and tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus…and only a handful of people did. Yeesh. Probably some of the largest-scale secondhand embarrassment I’ve ever felt. But they’re plenty successful, well-known, and presumably happy with their lives, so I can’t imagine that one (1) crowd in Colorado not singing along with them made much of a dent on their egos.

Nonetheless, “Modern Girl” is one of the songs I took away from that setlist all the way back in 2021. Despite the painful mix on the version I have (once it gets loud, it gets crunchier than a bass-boosted meme from 2018…somebody remaster this already, Jesus 😭), it has the same staying power. It’s an anthemic, gradually building story of mounting emptiness; every verse, happily sung until bitterly screamed, scrambles for meaning in a world of artifice. There’s a void (a donut hole, if you will) at the heart of “Modern Girl” that fruitlessly gets filled by consumerism, mass media, and hollow love. It’s a sort of universal story of filling the hole in your life with all the plastic that TV advertises, only to find that “My whole life/Looks like a picture of a sunny day”—beautiful on the surface, but really just a flimsy piece of film in the end. Where you end up is sprawled out, floundering in the drowning tide of distortion that gradually swallows Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s riffs and harmonicas. Sometimes, all you can do when faced with the emptiness at the heart of your life is shout at it—and shout Sleater-Kinney does.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane – “My baby loves me/I’m so angry/Anger makes me a modern girl/Took my money/I couldn’t buy nothin’/I’m sick of this brave new world…”

“Company In My Back” (Wilco cover) – Cate Le Bon

Somehow, while spreading the gospel of Cate Le Bon to my family, I completely missed this cover, which my brother thankfully found. Wilco Covered, a limited-edition album only available on CD (and another big thank you to my dad for digging it up on eBay), was a real mixed bag, but this cover is a staggeringly good fit for both Le Bon and Wilco. “Company In My Back” comes from A Ghost Is Born, and Jeff Tweedy’s signature lyricism was already at some of its delightfully weirdest; “I attack with love/Pure bug beauty/Curl my lips and crawl up to you” is still one of the more memorable Wilco openings if we’re going by lyrics alone. Add in the wording of the chorus (“Holy shit/There’s a company in my back”) and some dulcimer, and you’ve got one of the more left field early Wilco songs out there. The original’s clattering percussion, like bug’s legs against tile, are equally so. It’s natural that Le Bon covered it, given her weirdo proclivities. Her moody lilt and agitated instrumentals fit in so naturally in her interpretation of this song. (I especially love the way she sings “They are hissing radiator tunes.” Pure magic.) This was recorded in 2019, and Reward has its footprints all over it, with blasts of saxophone to replace the acoustic guitars of the guitar. It’s such an excellent tribute, turning “Company In My Back” almost inside out while lovingly preserving the offbeat-ness of the original without sacrificing her own artistry.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – “You learn so slow, old radiant beauty/I’ll curve my flight…”

“I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses cover) – King Woman

What makes a cover good to me is when it captures the song’s spirit; like I just talked about with Cate Le Bon’s take on “Company In My Back,” it messes around with the instrumentals but retains Jeff Tweedy’s soul beneath it. Though King Woman’s take on “I Wanna Be Adored” doesn’t reach those heights (and how could it, with the original basically defining a good portion of the alternative/indie rock sound of the ’90s?), I think it succeeds in the same way. While the Stone Roses’ original dips into a dreamy haze, King Woman’s cover basically sounds like Stone Roses by way of Chelsea Wolfe. It’s longer and more drawn-out, with sludgy guitars and a thick, foggy echo clouding everything. Kristina Esfandiari shouts the iconic chorus as though into the mouth of a canyon, pleading into a cold void, a stark contrast to the speed at which it’s sung in the original. It’s an exciting take on this song—one that clearly melds King Woman’s style into the original’s beating heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Redsight – Meredith Mooring – the sludgy, doomy atmosphere of this cover absolutely fits with this tale of dark magic in space.

BONUS: In addition to Programmes for Cools, Jim Noir has just released The DLC Tapes exclusively on Patreon—or you can buy it on his KoFi! It’s another album of polished releases from previous EPs and outtakes. Here’s the reworking of “Scene 2”:

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/17/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: the inescapable march of time? Nah, no need to worry about that, let’s go frolic in a field, whee!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/17/26

“Dead Man Walking” – David Bowie

The above meme has been my experience with Earthling. You know what I’ve been doing while listening to Earthling? That’s right…knitting a scarf, otherwise motionless, while my brain is vibrating at a speed that could shatter glass. God, I love Bowie.

Earthling really was a shock to my system. Even as a seasoned Bowie fan, you know in the abstract how easily he was able to adapt to musical genres and eras without necessarily sacrificing his own personal core. But it’s albums like Earthling that make you remember this in earnest; he adapts to the growing electronic and dance subcultures of the ’90s amphibiously, as if it had been the air he’d been breathing all along. It’s all a mishmash of influences, and if you’re looking for a microcosm of it, look no further than the multitudes in “Dead Man Walking”; yes, it’s a meditation on aging on the surface, but to me, it’s a conversation between the past and the present, at heart; originally, it was meant to be a tribute to Susan Sarandon (who he’d worked with on The Hunger) and her film Dead Man Walking, but after watching a performance by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, it inspired Bowie to write about the contrast of these aging rock n’ roll legends and the vitality that the music still contained. The ties to the past increase tenfold with Jimmy Page’s connection—he offered the chord progression of “Dead Man Walking” to Bowie all the way back in the ’60s (he had already recycled it for multiple songs, namely “The Supermen”).

The frenetic, thrumming drum n’ bass of this track encapsulates how nonlinear this experience of time is—the past is constantly communicating with the present and future, creating a constant conversation, a kind of tangled subway map of years and people. Leave it to Bowie to create such a concise meditation in the form of pulsating dance—it feels like this song should soundtrack a high-speed speeder chase in some cyberpunk movie. And as if we hadn’t gotten enough twists, now throw in Mike Garson doing Aladdin Sane-esque jazz piano at the very end. Naturally. Up until the end, his manifesto was to keep everybody on their toes—including himself, it seems.

BONUS: here’s an excellent clip of Bowie performing an acoustic version of “Dead Man Walking” with Reeves Gabrels for Conan O’Brien:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Infinite Miles – Hannah Fergeson – “And I’m gone, gone, gone/(Gone, gone, gone spinning slack through reality)/Now I’m older than movies/(Dance my way, falling up through the years)/Let me dance away…”

“Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

A Globe of Frogs was, surprisingly, my first experience with listening to a Robyn Hitchcock project all the way through (not counting the Soft Boys); most of the tracks are excellent, but the average Robyn Hitchcock listening experience to me usually circles back around to “how does he manage to make this many good songs?” I swear that this is on the alternative-hit level of something like “Birds in Perspex” or “So You Think You’re In Love”—with how much indie airplay those two songs got, it’s baffling that “Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)” didn’t get it…okay, maybe it’s harder to sell a song with a title like that. But that doesn’t matter, right? Though it’s lyrically less weird than some of the other tracks on A Globe of Frogs, it distills Hitchcock’s undying love for the ’60s into a lovestruck, ’80s alternative track. It’s pure ’60s jangle all the way down (hence the Beatle in the title), breathlessly joyful; though that guitar brightness is straight-up Hitchcock, it made complete sense to hear that Peter Buck of R.E.M. also contributed his guitar skills to this album—it certainly has some of the same textures of Green, which came out around a year after A Globe of Frogs. It’s an encapsulation of the stages of love where you’re in so deep that nothing else matters—a plane could be crashing down in the studio, but we’re not there, are we? We’re in love, YIPPEE! God, it’s so delightful.

For the record, it’s an excellent duet. On A Globe of Frogs, he’s duetting with Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, but for most of the live shows I’ve seen recently, it’s been with his wife, Emma Swift. It was so sweet when I saw him back in February, and it’s just as sweet here:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle, #2) – Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff – tell me this wasn’t Auri and Kal frolicking around in the Echo while the rest of the galaxy was collapsing around them…

“Open Up” – Ratboys

It’s Wilco all the way down. I’ll just hear a song and like it, and bam. It’s just Wilco influence behind the Scooby-Doo villain mask.

For “Open Up” specifically, it didn’t hit me until I read frontwoman Julia Steiner’s interview about this song on Stereogum: “I love Wilco…They have records, Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which both have these track ones that are these expansive scene-setters for the whole album and consist of a sequence of verses interspersed with beautiful noise. So that was sort of the template that I was excited to try to work within.” The openers in question are “Misunderstood” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which…phew. That’s how you make an album opener, and it’s not exactly an easy act to follow.

Putting this in context makes me see exactly where “Open Up” gestated. Tinged with alt-country and led by Steiner’s vocals (which struck me as very Michelle Zauner, another Wilco fan), this track feels like An Opener. This is my first exposure to Ratboys, but already, I can see exactly where it takes shape; it’s got that slow, burbling build of a good opener that feels anthemic without giving everything about the album away. It never exactly gets to that “beautiful noise” that Steiner describes (no offense, but this isn’t “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” 2, but nothing could be, to be fair), but it’s got such a hold on that sense of catch-and-release, with teases of percussion and guitar that reel you in before the ending…well, opens up, no pun intended. Fitting, with the song’s thesis and chorus: “what’s it gonna take to open up?”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Failure to Communicate – Kaia Sønderby – “Pick all the locks inside our heads/It takes a while, in your defense/But I got lots of time/So what’s it gonna take to open up tonight?”

“Wash” – Floor Cry

I feel like a part of me will always be nostalgic for that specifically 2010’s flavor of lo-fi dream pop that was everywhere when I was in high school. My friend knew exactly what she was doing sending me this in a café while it was actively raining outside—that’s the proper way to listen to these kinds of songs. It’s whispery and understated, but “Wash” is such a calming track. Propelled by its looped guitar and muted percussion, it really evokes that particular moment in time where the newest tracks weren’t afraid of sounding like yes, this was made with just me, myself and I with GarageBand in my room. Felicia Sekundiak’s vocals nearly drown under the mix, but for a song about feeling like you’re floundering in every way, it fits, whether or not it was intentional.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries – “Swimming/’Til the water started spinning/Now I feel it down in my throat/Heart’s too heavy for a lifeboat…”

“Lucidity” – Tame Impala

It’s songs like this that make me forget that Tame Impala is ostensibly…pretty boring now. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve just heard “Dracula” everywhere, and yeah, it’s mediocre, not much else I can say about it. But you know how I knew that Tame Impala had gone downhill? Around the time when Deadbeat came out last year, I heard the hippie baristas at my local coffee shop grousing about how terrible it was. The minute Tame Impala loses the barista demographic, he’s done for.

So it’s kind of a shock to remember Kevin Parker’s beginnings. “Lucidity” popped into my head the other day, and it feels worlds away from where he is now. With its chugging guitars and Parker’s drifting vocals, it’s a fantastic piece of psychedelic rock. Fuzzy and trippy, it manages to toe that ever-thinning line between ’60s worship and modern sensibilities, and while it does kind of stumble over the former line, it never makes it lose its potency. It’s very Beatles, but if a time traveler went and gave John Lennon a ton of new guitar pedals. It’s undeniable what made Tame Impala such a sensation in the first place—he hit just the right chord here.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Slow Gods – Claire North – “Lucidity, come back to me/Put all five senses back to where they’re meant to be/Oh it’s hard to tell, breaks down/There is a will, there is a way…”

Since this song 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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs – 5/10/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, and Happy Mother’s Day! 💐 My mom has done an immeasurable amount for me—introducing me to a good portion of the songs you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. I truly don’t know where I’d be without her support. 🩵

Since I’ve been gone for a few weeks, here are the graphics and songs from when I was taking a break:

4/19/26:

4/26/26:

5/3/26:

This week: In honor of Mother’s Day, the mothers are mothering. (Yes, I’m counting J Spaceman, I feel like if you make something as astounding as Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, he gets to be called “mother” this once.)

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/10/26

“Planting Tomatoes” – Lucy Dacus

Hot take of the day: Forever Is a Feeling would’ve been better if it had this track—and maybe “Losing”—on it. I get that “Losing” doesn’t exactly fit thematically, but sonically, it fits enough with the other tracks that it could’ve broken some of the monotony. Nobody asked, but my move would be to replace “Modigliani” with “Planting Tomatoes.” (But seriously, why was “Modigliani” the song that got the coveted Phoebe Bridgers feature?)

That’s the end of the hot take, but this might be another one: I feel like “Planting Tomatoes” might be one of Dacus’s best songs since Home Video. Forever Is a Feeling had some stunners, but composition and lyric-wise, “Planting Tomatoes” is truly something special. It takes her usual formula of stringing together perfectly-placed vignettes into something emotional. It’s more pop-forward, but in a way that feels natural to Dacus, and not trying to fit into a mold like some of Forever Is a Feeling‘s more forgettable tracks did. With reverb-drenched guitars that call back to her more indie rock days and tastefully echoing of her vocals, “Planting Tomatoes” is a breathless sprint through the realization that you’re living the life you once dreamed of—and everything that comes with it. There’s the starry-eyed ecstasy of being amongst friends and seeing the simple beauty in everything (tomatoes, holding hands with your friends, the view through a window screen).

Of course, it wouldn’t be Lucy Dacus without a trademark knife in the gut; that comes in the sparse bridge, but I think it captures something that comes along with trying to be more present: being present, but being distinctly aware of what you’ve lost while trying to be present. (“Livin’ in the moment/I can feel the moment passing.”) For Dacus, it’s the grief of losing someone that she wished she could experience the moment with; but her conclusion loops back to the chorus—the solution for all of these emotions, positive and negative, is this: “You’ve gotta live the life you’re fighting for/You’ve gotta live a life you would die for/But before then, I’ve got some ideas…” That hopeful ellipses of the chorus is where the joy of “Planting Tomatoes” lies: life is short, and yet, there is so much possibility in it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Bánh Mì for Two – Trinity Nguyen – “Hearing my friends laughing in the distance/I can’t help but laugh along without knowing what the joke is/Can’t help thinking that I am gonna miss this/Living in the moment, I can feel the moment passing…”

“Desired Constellation” – Björk

I’ve been toying with the idea that Medúlla might be my favorite Björk album. I’m not 100% sure. With some of my favorite artists (Bowie, St. Vincent, etc.), it’s easy to pick a favorite. The thing about Björk is that her albums, as varying as they are in sound, are almost all at the same level of being consistently excellent. I like some more than others, but other than the two I haven’t listened to (Vulnicura and Utopia), I really can’t say if there’s a bad Björk album. Medúlla has some slight weaknesses, but after two more re-listens, I feel like even the songs that didn’t hook me as much on the first go around (see: “Submarine”) are still excellent in the ecosystem of the album as a whole. I’m firm in the belief that emotional attachment should never be ignored in choosing your favorite albums, and if that was the only criteria, Medúlla would easily slide up there—I’ve spoken about it a fair amount, but knowing the background and goal of this album was to evoke a sense of prehistoric, primal kinship connection of family and feminine lineages and storytelling as a whole makes every listen so powerful. It makes me feel in tune with that sense of being everything that your ancestors—especially the women in your family—dreamed of, but also a sort of nonlinear sense of connection across time and space. Something about it is innately human—the acapella format makes you hear every hiccup and falter in the vocals. You do feel like you’re around the fire, nestling for warmth in the presence of your kin.

But I think the best endorsement of Medúlla now is that, after a while spent dithering at the record store, I bought it on vinyl even though it was $43, but I immediately started crying after hearing “Pleasure Is All Mine,” so it was worth every penny. (Jeez, is that saying obsolete now? Wow. “Worth every dollar” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

When I first listened to Medúlla about a year ago, “Desired Constellation” was nearly one of the songs I talked about initially; it’s still one of the standouts from the album for me. At first, it sounds like it has some of the only non-vocal instrumentals, but I was fooled—the electronic backdrop was created by sampling Björk’s vocals from Vespertine, and adding layers of effects, giving it the delicate, sparkling effect that you hear; more relevant to the song’s subject matter, it’s specifically of this line from “Hidden Place”: “I’m not sure what to do with it.” It has some of my favorite Björk lyrics, hands down: “With a palm full of stars/I throw them like dice (Repeatedly)/On the table (Repeat, repeatedly)/I shake them like dice/And throw them on the table/Repeatedly (Repeatedly)/Until the desired constellation appears.” It’s an intimate, hard-hitting exploration of trying to make order out of chaos, of picking up the pieces until they resemble something you can make sense of.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Saltcrop – Yume Kitasei – “It’s slippery when/Your sense of justice/Murmurs underneath/And is asking you: ‘How am I going to make it right?'”

“Candelabra” – mary in the junkyard

We’re now two singles into Role Model Hermit, and I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s shaping up to be promising. “Candelabra” leans more towards their earlier acoustic work, but it fits just as snugly with the sweeping “Crash Landing.” As it turns out, it’s a holdover from frontwoman Clari Freeman-Taylor’s solo career, all the way back in 2021; it’s clear she’s gained so much more confidence since then, and despite “Candelabra” being a soft and wistful song, you can hear the leaps and bounds Freeman-Taylor and co. have made in the 5 years since. Whether acoustic or with a full band, this higher-quality production has done wonders for their sound, making it sound cleaner without sacrificing any of their eerie, vulnerable atmosphere. And vulnerability is something that “Candelabra” is ripe with, a meta, half-whispered confession about the confusion of songwriting and intimacy: “I want you to know me through my songs/They’re so much cleaner than anything I could say” is bookended with “Frantically I wrote you a letter/One I knew I never would send/Write fast, write deep, write better/Nothing I ever write will be enough.” This self-deprecation keeps this understated tune afloat.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I Am the Ghost In Your House – Mar Romasco-Moore – “Don’t let me into your life baby/I hurt you enough as it is/Don’t let me under your skin baby/I’m full of false promises…”

“I Think I’m In Love” – Spiritualized

Musically, I might be reverting to a pandemic-era state. Normally, that’d be a cry for help, but by some miracle, the memories I have of listening to Spiritualized during the pandemic are actually very positive. They said it couldn’t be done…but also, I listened to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space for the first time during the very early days of the pandemic, so that’s why the memories never soured. This was the part of the pandemic where I’d finished my highly modified AP tests and was waiting for my preordered copy of Aurora Burning to arrive in the mail. I hadn’t gotten burnt out and depressed…yet.

But I think Ladies and Gentlemen is one of those albums that no bad situation could sour. It’s just a masterpiece, through and through, a masterclass in creating and maintaining an atmosphere, of slow-burn tales that unfurl like you’re adrift in space, held to your spaceship by the thinnest tether, but never lost completely. The amount of layers in each song, whether 3 or 17 minutes, makes each one feel like an entire expanse of space that J. Spaceman has personally mapped out and condensed into sound waves. And if we’re talking about slow burns, then “I Think I’m In Love” is one of the key studies of it on Ladies and Gentlemen. Of course, the sun-blinded haze of this song comes from the monotony of heroin—something that comes up repeatedly on this album—but the way that it unfolds from this dissociative state back into a colder reality once the high wears off is one of J. Spaceman’s most memorable compositions on this album. For the first two minutes, his airy self-harmonization makes you feel like you’re waking up from a dream, still bleary-eyed, unsure of where you are. Every effect from the guitar pedals makes the song glimmer, but once the song gets curb-stomped back to Earth, the bleating saxophones and steady percussion only add to the atmosphere, as densely-packed with sound as a rainforest is with flora. And cynical as it is, the lyrics in the last 2/3rds of the song are so painfully self-effacing, but sardonically clever:

“I think I can hit the mark/Probably just aimin’/I think my name is on your lips/Probably complainin’/I think I have caught it bad/Probably contagious/I think that I’m a winner, baby/Probably Las Vegas.”

I mean…oof. And he’s got a whole four minutes full of these self-aimed barbs up his sleeve. But it really demonstrates the state he was in, musically and lyrically; the transition to drugged-out, blissful ignorance to astronomical levels of self-deprecation is just where he was at the time of the album, and honestly, with the rock bottom that he hit multiple times, it just makes me all the more grateful that we live in the timeline that he survived both of his near-death experiences, mostly due to complications with the drugs he was abusing throughout his life. And sure, we’ve got those debates about whether you need drugs to make an album as masterful as this, to which I say…dude, have you listened to Everything Was Beautiful lately? Sure, nothing can touch Ladies and Gentlemen, but it’s basically Ladies and Gentlemen with J Spaceman being clean and happy. Either way you look at it, “I Think I’m In Love” is a pitch-perfect study in Spaceman’s ability to make a song feel like an entire dimension in and of itself, a push-pull of dissociation and reality, like a slingshot firing in slow motion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “I think I’m in love/Probably just hungry/I think I’m your friend/Probably just lonely…”

“Down” – St. Vincent

Daddy’s Home is approaching its 5 year anniversary, and…I feel so old. I know that’s dramatic. But it has such a specific, comfortingly nostalgic place in my heart; I specifically remembering finishing my AP exams after slogging through the mire of online school, and walking out of the building knowing that I had a new St. Vincent album as a reward. Especially coming off of the heels of the deeply disappointing MASSEDUCTION, it was like being bathed in rays of sunlight. Nearly 5 years later, it holds up as a sonically consistent and pure fun album, despite its subject matter. It’s a sly concentration of “if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry,” especially when looking back at circumstances more messed up than you could’ve predicted. (For Clark, it was her father getting arrested and finishing out his sentence around the time of the album’s release.) It’s difficult to think of an artist who’s channeled an aesthetic so clearly—this is straight up early ’70s, and nothing but; the only pitfall is that, past this era, it almost feels wrong to hear her play tracks from this album live without the intricately crafted aesthetic and campy blonde wig. But I guess that’s what you get for committing to a bit this hard.

Daddy’s Home was anchored on a slew of excellent singles, and “Down” hasn’t lost its sheen nearly 5 years on. It’s got bite. Acerbic but righteous in its condemnation of a good-for-nothing abuser, every lyric is spit with triumphant venom. We’ve been inundated with vaguely feminist revenge stories in the past decade or so; It’s a real shame that a lot of stories about getting the upper hand on your abuser have become cliche, but I feel like it’s more the shallow idea of these revenge fantasies being labeled feminism by default that’s made a lot of mainstream stories ring hollow. Even Clark herself has said that “Down” is a revenge fantasy. However, I think the reason “Down” sets itself apart is the camp of it all—it realizes it’s playing into a cliche and a somewhat universal experience of wanting to get back at someone who’s wronged you, and Clark puts every ounce of performance into this character. Daddy’s Home is honestly a masterclass in tragic camp—it rarely takes itself entirely seriously, and that’s what gives it the edge. Plus, who could deny that guitar solo, delectable ’70s tone and all?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Camp Zero – Michelle Min Sterling – “Tell me who hurt you/No wait, I don’t care to/Hear an excuse why you think you can be cruel…”

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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 4/12/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: the ordering of these songs wasn’t deliberate, but either way, at least I’m easing you in with some bright, relaxing songs for spring before you get walloped upside the head. Apologies in advance. Also, in a twist of fate, the white guys are the DEI hires in this lineup.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 4/12/26

“Puddles” – Not For Radio

Another offshoot of my recent mini-foray into The Marías’s discography, Not For Radio is the solo project of their frontwoman, María Zardoya. I haven’t listened to enough of The Marías to definitively say what the key differences are—or if there are any prominent differences at all. I’m sure there are. But on the surface, the sound of Melt (no, not the Peter Gabriel one) seems ever so slightly tweaked. Setting aside the gothy, densely forested album cover, what stands out to me about “Puddles” is that the watery sound of The Marías has come up for air. “Puddles” is still woozy dream pop through and through, but it has a sharper, drier sound than most of María Zardoya’s other project. I don’t mean drier in terms of content—it’s as compelling as any Marías track as I’ve heard. I mean that more in the fact that it feels more terrestrial and leafy, but in less out-there terms, I think it veers more into more guitar-based dream pop, with sounds that are less drenched in reverb and more grounded. “Puddles” is an apt title for this track in that respect—still watery, but corralled by verdant dirt and sprouts.

Despite that, “Puddles” is as woozy and hypnotic as any of Zardoya’s other projects. Her signature, whispery vocal delivery feels like being sung to sleep, uttering secret, seductive promises as you drift off into dreamland. The Pacific Northwest-looking music video feels just right for this track, with gentle notes that peek out from behind curled ferns and moss-covered logs under cover of shadows. Once it grows louder and the sound intensifies into a barely-controlled chaos, I can almost feel the chord progression become Radiohead-esque (especially with the slightly sinister, electronic moans that appear towards the end), but the sensual, hopeful nature of this track prevents it from fully going into irrevocably depressed Thom Yorke territory. But honestly, as much of a Radiohead-head as I am, it doesn’t need to be Radiohead—it just needs to be María Zardoya.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Fate’s Bane – C.L. Clark – “Puddles and puddles, I picture us there/Walking in circles and talking in stares/I’m seeing double, I’m already scared/Scared of what losing feels after we dare…”

“Sunshine Soul” – The Gerbils

God, I love Elephant 6. They were practically creating whole swarms of nasally-voiced dudes who liked ’60s psychedelic rock in a lab and setting them loose, and we’re all the better for it as a society. I’m sure there are some weak links among the ranks, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of any off the top of my head.

I haven’t explored The Gerbils as much as some of Elephant 6’s more prominent bands (see: The Apples in Stereo, The Olivia Tremor Control, etc.), but just from this one glimpse, I can tell that the spirit of those bands rubbed off on them. “Sunshine Soul” is a fuzzy, crunchy package of sun-bleached jangle pop, indebted to the ’60s but that couldn’t have come out of any other era but the ’90s. The production is grainy and muddled, but like a lot of its Elephant 6 compatriots, it only adds to the scrappy, garage-rock origins of the label. Even with the unexpected references to sewage and brains and arachnids in the second verse, nothing could dim the sparkle of this track. It’s nothing short of a quirky, homegrown jangle pop song, and a perfect song to celebrate the sun finally peeking out.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries – “Your life, it’s only a record/Turning ’round inside my brain/My life is only a needle/Scratching grooves into your vein…”

“The Bug” – Crumb

I feel like Crumb could transform any human emotion—positive, negative, or neutral—into a soothing, calm song. They’re not exactly endearing me to cockroaches in that video, that’s for sure. (Here’s hoping that the gecko at the end ate it?) But for a song that seems to be about anxiety—or any kind of notion, memory, or thought that never leaves your head—”The Bug” never ceases to be laidback and gently glimmering. All of their songs are hypnotic to me on some level, but the electronic drumbeat that begins at about 3:08 puts me under a spell every time. Almost two years after AMAMA was released, “The Bug,” as with most of the tracks on the album, remains a perfect, condensed terrarium of Crumb’s newest sound. Their songs are tiny ecosystems to me, with all kinds of delightful critters crawling about the moss…maybe some bugs, even?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Taproot – Keezy Young – “We caught a fly/Reminds me of when I was some tiny child/Runs behind, but I can never see their eyes/Lost track of time…”

“Emily” – Joanna Newsom

Since the last time I talked about Joanna Newsom, my cousin ended up talking me into listening to Ys in full. It’s been at least two weeks since I’ve listened to it; honestly, I’m still chewing on parts of it, but it’s a lot more hard-hitting than I thought it’d be. Sure, there are parts that I probably just won’t fully get on board with (parts of it definitely get a bit too into “Dibbles the Dormouse Has Lost His Favorite Handkerchief [Movements I-IV]” territory for me), but to be fair, Ys is honestly quite a bit different than what I listen to on a daily basis. That could be why “Only Skin” was such a shock to my system. Listening to “Only Skin” kind of ruined it for me, since that’s still the best song on the album by a long shot, but there isn’t a single song that feels like an afterthought here. Even if I don’t mesh with every facet of Ys, I could just tell from the first handful of chords how much of a labor of love this album was. Not a moment on this album suggests that Joanna Newsom was ever messing around. Through all of its bardlike, folksy, and esoteric seasons, I really can’t say that there’s a lot that compares to this album. Kate Bush comes to mind, if in spirit more than instrumentals—I think I just love a weird woman, knowing that it took a ton of glass ceilings to break through the music industry as it is, both for Bush, Newsom, and so many others.

“Emily” immediately clues you into the fact that Newsom isn’t easing you into the record. You kinda know what you’re into the minute she opens the opening track with this: “The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow/Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh.” If you’re not down with that, you have about 30 seconds to jump ship, because she doesn’t let up after that. At 12 minutes long, this song is the second-longest on the album, and it’s emblematic of a lot of the atmosphere on it: intricate harp (and some jaw-harp), sprawling orchestral composition, and esoteric lyrics that feel like getting punched in the gut with an oven mitt embroidered with flowers and moths. (Another bit to add to my hypothetical list of song pronunciations that I love: the way that she sings “meteoroid” is so full of wide-eyed wonder.) I think what makes “Emily” hit so hard for me is the subject matter, somewhat obscured as it is; the Emily in question is Newsom’s older sister, an astrophysicist who imparted the wonders of the universe onto her more creatively-inclined sister at a young age. Some of the lyrics feel like twisting the knife in the gut, since I have a similar relationship with my brother—sure, it’s not a one-to-one ratio of science and humanities, since he’s obviously a writer and a generally very creative person himself, and I wanted to be a scientist as a kid—but the song’s scenes of following her sister through the woods remind me fondly of my own childhood, turning our backyard into some Darwinian expedition before we’d go home and make up creatures in our notebooks. And thankfully, like the trajectory of “Emily,” my brother and I have managed to maintain that closeness into adulthood. The melody rocks and quakes, similar to “Only Skin”‘s feeling of a boat being tossed across a stormy sea, as Newsom recounts what they have weathered together as sisters. What solidifies their harmony is a repeated chorus, a promise made to her sister, a unity of her love of science and Newsom’s love of music:

“Though all I knew of the rot universe were those Pleaides/Loosed in December/I promise you I’d set them to verse, so I’d always remember/That the meteorite is the source of the light/And the meteor’s just what we see/And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire/That propelled it to thee.”

Ow. Right in the fondly-remembered sibling relationships. Anyways…love you, Max.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Lost Story – Meg Shaffer – “The whole world stopped to hear you hollering/You looked and saw now what was happening/The lines are fading in my kingdom…”

“I Bet On Losing Dogs” – Mitski

[coughing, covered in sweat, in the fetal position on the ground]

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU—

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – “I bet on losing dogs/I know they’re losing and I pay for my place/By the ring/Where I’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down…”

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!