Category: Sunday Songs

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/24/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: sit down, kiddo. Soon you’ll be a mature adult, so your father and I have decided that you’re ready to learn about the (acid, lady) birds and the bee(tle)s.

…why are you leaving?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/24/24

“Dissolved Girl” – Massive Attack

Like Odelay, I’ve very much screwed myself over when it comes to this album; as my brother was showing this song to me in the car (thank you, by the way), I talked to him about the album, and after we talked about all of the songs I’ve heard off of Mezzanine, we concluded that I’ve…basically listened to the whole thing, save for some of the apparently duller songs and some instrumental breaks. Oops. My brother’s advice was to go through the album in its entirety anyway, so I’ll still take that advice. Eventually. The Sisyphean album bucket list persists.

I have a special soft spot for songs that sound like their album art. Most of the tracks on Mezzanine have a similarly creeping feel, but “Dissolved Girl,” to me, feels the most like Nick Knight’s photograph of a shiny, almost glistening stag beetle; the initial photo was taken by Knight at London’s Natural History Museum. Minus the pincers, it almost looks like the exoskeleton of a xenomorph—also a fitting image for the creeping feel of some of Mezzanine’s tracks. Much of the album retains that prickly feel of looking at the fine hairs adorning the beetle’s legs, but this song, especially the intro, captures it best. I can almost imagine that same beetle in captivity, scuttling around across a blank canvas in erratic patterns, like a shot from an old nature documentary. Its antennae twitch, it pauses in thought, then scuttles off into a corner again, only to emerge a few seconds later. Looking back, I’m ashamed that I completely missed that fact that this track was also featured in The Matrix. Granted, I was also so caught up in the glorious cheese of that movie that there wasn’t much else to focus on except for a) that one absolute monster of an H.R. Giger fever dream scene, and b) the fact that Keanu Reeves can barely act (sorry, dude, I’m sure you’re a nice guy). But like the stag beetle’s shell, that sleekness blends in with the landscape that the Wachowski Sisters crafted all those years before. I’ve tricked myself into thinking that there were raindrops or dewdrops on said beetle’s shell, but no—it was a trick of the light, and a trick of the music. “Dissolved Girl” runs over your skin like frigid water and catches all the colors of light like an oil spill, darkly alluring in the dapples patterned across it. Sarah Jay Hawley’s voice isn’t just sultry—it’s a puff of rasping steam from a rusty teakettle, blossoming into strange clouds as it’s swallowed by synths and guitars that were made for dramatic entrances and nothing more. It really is dissolving, but it seems to reform itself every passing second, an ouroboros of electronic deja vu.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Fifth Season – N.K. Jemisin – the lyrics don’t reflect the connection so much as the feeling of it does—uncertainty, circularity, and deja-vu abound.

“Acid Bird” – Robyn Hitchcock

Note to any aspiring songwriters who may come across this post: I accidentally typed “acid birthday” into YouTube while looking this song up, so there’s a good song title right there. It already sounds ten times ickier in subject matter already, but…it sure is a song title.

Robyn Hitchcock seems to have been planted in the rich, fertile soil of ’60s musical inspiration from the start. Listen to any of his songs from his solo works or from one of his many groups over the years, and that bright, whimsical jangle always pops out of the woodwork. But before I saw him back in January, I found out that he’d played several short shows where he only played sets of Syd Barrett covers, and the comparison clicked instantly. Personally, I’m glad that Hitchcock took the good parts from Barrett’s legacy and never went off the deep end, but if there was ever a perfect fit, the two’s musical and lyrical styles were practically made for each other. There’s no doubt that plenty of artists have found drugs to be an outlet for imagination, but it’s always temporary; I never mean to make light of addiction and the very real consequences it can have on a person and their loved ones, but every time I hear about any of these instances, it’s a short-lived outlet. We know where it tragically led Barrett (rest easy) and many other artists of his time, but often, these things have been discovered have always been dormant—maybe it was the drugs that exposed them, but that kind of creativity lingers in all of us. We all have different ways of finding it, and all we can do is learn to live with it carefully—the very things that we perceive as opening it can destroy it just as quickly. At least we can look to Hitchcock as an example—it seemed he knew early on that his wild creativity was at the wheel, and he’s managed to preserve it for decades.

That kind of easygoing, ’60s feel is etched all throughout his decades-long, insanely prolific career, but some of the earliest notes of it, to me, can be found in his first solo album, Black Snake Diamond Role, and in particular, “Acid Bird.” Aside from the unmistakably sixties jangle of it all, from the lazily swaying chords to the way that the guitar is almost made to sound like the limbo between a guitar and a sitar. And like the entirety of Hitchcock’s career, this song is full of oddball wordplay, entirely nonsensical, but somehow sensible, in the sense that, having seen him live, he had every intention of putting these words together in this exact order. It’s unmistakably late ’60s psychedelia—I can hear the lyricism of Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and the instrumentation of…well, probably any late ’60s Beatles song you can think of, and yet, it couldn’t be anybody else but Robyn Hitchcock. Going even later, I’ve always thought of his wordplay as so much like Marc Bolan, like he has access to some bizarre fantasy world that can only be described to us mortals in words that don’t fully make sense when strung together in the order that they are. I’m just glad that Hitchcock has dedicated his career to mapping it in all of its hills, valleys, and acid birds.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Crane Husband – Kelly Barnhill – a hazy, eery crawl between genres, steeped in slipshod tapestries and sinister birds.

“Barley” – Water From Your Eyes

If you laid out all of the elements of “Barley” bare, it would fit a pretty common definition for really pretentious music. You’ve got your discordant synths, you’ve got your avant-garde, nonsensical lyrics, you’ve got some off-kilter guitar riffs for good taste, and you’ve got disaffected vocals courtesy of Rachel Brown, who sounds for all the world like they did not want to be there. But this song feels more in the vein of play than construction—the minimalism and freeform feel of it all feel like just that: freeform. It feels like this song was conceived in 5 minutes tops, and I’ve grown to enjoy that quality about it. I keep bringing up Beck in this post for reasons unknown to me, but the technique of Water From Your Eyes (or, alternatively, what sigma male gymbros call tears) seems to be similar: stick a bunch of parts together with a bit of synths and Elmer’s glue, then create the most earwormy eyesore you’ve ever heard. I say “eyesore” only because it’s the best word that comes to mind—it doesn’t sound pleasant, and yet, it sounds good. Between Brown’s vocals, the hectic instrumentations, and the urgency of it all, “Barley” feels like the squirming child of Guerilla Toss and Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)“—drolly sung, but full of lyrics that could be prophetic, and as jagged and crawling as all get-out. I’d never thought I’d compare those two, but that’s the beauty of this song—it’s a strange, stiff chimera of a song, and I love it and all of its jerky, weak-kneed beauty.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Aug 9 – Fog – Kathryn Scanlan – a similar connection of loose bits and bobs, this time in the form of poetry made from what remained of a stranger’s diary that Scanlan found at an estate sale.

“Ladybird” – Jim Noir

HE’S BACK! Well, he never really left, and was doing some incredibly impressive things while he was “gone,” but he’s back to serving up EPs via Patreon (as always, support a fantastic independent artist if you’re financially able! It’s worth your while!).

Before the switch from monthly EPs to releasing the excellent record Rotate as half of Co-Pilot, a lot of the EPs he was putting out were starting to feel thinned out; even at the beginning of the project, many of the tracks were throwaways that he later polished up, but as time went on, some of the whimsical, lighthearted creativity that he’s known for seemed to have bled out somewhere down the line. The last few EPs felt a little hollow—the last thing I’d expect of Jim Noir, the same mind that could make a song about putting off going to the store to get tea (if there was ever a more British concern) into a sunny, ’60s-flavored synthfest. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was saving his musical time and energy for Co-Pilot during the weaker run of EPs (justifiably so, I mean, God, what a record), but I did miss the more creative tidbits. It seems that some time away has given him time to shake things up, and now we have Ladybird – EP, which I can happily say is a delight! I found myself particularly drawn to the title track; there’s still a hesitant restraint about it, but it has every hallmark of a catchy Jim Noir tune—cymbal heavy drumming, humming vocals, and of course, bleep-bloop aplenty. Gotta have that good bleep-bloop. The background is decorated with sounds that almost ring like a submarine’s radar, and the rest of it hums with buzzy energy, nervously scuttling about like the insect it’s named for. It’s hesitantly bouncy, with eyes that seem to dart about every few minutes before ducking behind the nearest door. I wouldn’t call it his masterpiece, but it gives me hope that this could be the start of the album that he’s been teasing for…almost two and a half years now, I think? If Rotate is all we get, then I’d certainly be happy, but I find myself wanting another win for Jim Noir. It’s what he deserves.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Binti – Nnedi Okorafor – “I’m surrounded by things I’ve never needed so much/I’d rather give it away instead of finding it’s not enough…” right there, huh?

“Spun” – Chelsea Wolfe

As I’m writing this, it’s been about a day since I saw Chelsea Wolfe a second time for the She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She tour. Insufferable crowd and headache-inducing opening band notwithstanding (2/3 times that I’ve seen shows at this venue, the crowd has been gross and disrespectful, so…hopefully not a curse), she and her band put on an incredible show; obviously, nothing’s going to compare to my first experience seeing her at the Stanley Hotel, which is about as goth as one can get even if Wolfe isn’t present, but what this show had going was the fact that one of her songs was performed whilst some kind of trick of the light made her look like she’s standing astride some kind of fiery, inter-dimensional portal. What I’m trying to say is that she absolutely brought down the house. As usual.

Somehow, I thought that “Spun” would be on the setlist, and I listened to it a handful of times before the show, but…I guess I remembered wrong? It wasn’t one of the songs I was sorely looking forward to seeing, but I do feel a little silly now that the song I’ve picked for this week is the one she didn’t play. Well, any excuse to talk about Chelsea Wolfe is a good excuse, so here we are. Seems I need to add Spun to the album bucket list, since almost everything off of it has been nothing short of arresting. “16 Psyche” was the first song from Spun I heard, back when my tender, 14-year-old brain was as impressionable and soaked up melodramatic lyrics like a sponge (listen, there’s nobody else who can deliver “my heart is a tomb/my heart is an empty room” but her); now that I’ve seen it live, it’s one of her most captivating tracks. But “Spun” is captivating in an entirely different way; where “16 Psyche” takes a nosedive into cloak-billowing wails and drama almost immediately, “Spun” has the pace and feel of mold crawling up the walls. Staunchly on the more metal side of Wolfe’s brand of goth-metal (I promise I’m not stringing buzzwords together, that’s just her brand), the industrial drums and guitars march like a legion of robots summoned from hell, armor cracked as they trudge through the flames. Fleeting moments of said drums speeding up provide a cliff for the instruments to dive off, then leap straight down into the lake of fire, a tenuous equilibrium shattered when you least expect it. “Spun” prowls with its hackles raised, poised to bolt from a history best left in the flames: “I lift my eyes, I slow my gait/And I never wanna see you again.” But the final breaths of “Spun” are exhales released from a clenched chest, fittingly whispered by Wolfe as though she’s speaking in tongues: “And all and everything or nothing.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Genesis of Misery – Neon Yang – the title already sounds like something that Chelsea Wolfe would name an album, but even if that weren’t true, this novel is chock-full of fiery forges, prophetic madness, and the voices of angels (or are they?)

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, Uncategorized

Sunday Songs: 3/10/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Don’t let the black color scheme full you—we’ve got a mostly joyful bunch, and if not joyful, at least upbeat. This week: what happened when I listened to Apple Music’s “Love” station on a whim, things that are wholly good and pure, and reflecting on the things that made middle school survivable.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/10/24

“After Hours” – The Velvet Underground

The story of “After Hours” famously goes that Lou Reed wrote this song, but knew it was too pure and innocent for him to possibly sing, so he enlisted Mo Tucker, the Velvet Underground’s drummer, for the task. As much as I love Lou Reed, he did the world a great service by not singing this song—in his hands, there’s no doubt that it would’ve felt like some kind of melancholic “Perfect Day” prequel, but at least he was self-aware enough to realize it. And there’s nobody more fit to sing it than Tucker. Her voice is beautiful, but it’s the voice of someone who rarely sings, if at all, and sings softly when she does. But that’s exactly the kind of voice that “After Hours” calls for. It’s a bashful, rosy-cheeked song, the kind that shyly peers out from behind the curtain to watch the bustling city below. There’s an embarrassment to it, but not the kind that makes you wince—it’s a diary confession written as the last threads of light are fading from the sky, the last pure thoughts filtering out of your brain. It’s so simple, and yet that’s why it digs at such a unique place in my heart—it’s not quite universal, but it’s just the kind of special to nestle up against me like a drowsy cat. There’s practically no end to the influence that The Velvet Underground has had on rock music, but I feel like “After Hours” is overlooked in that aspect—without it, where would the glorious pantheon of wistful women and their acoustic guitars come from?

Bonus: because somewhere down the line we collectively recognized that this song is best performed by female drummers, here’s a performance by Meg White of the White Stripes:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Heartstopper – Alice Oseman – another pure, sweet morsel of tenderness.

“Broken Man” – St. Vincent

It’s happening. IT’S HAPPENING. IT’S HAPPENING!!!

All Born Screaming? Uh, yeah, I sure am. The squeal I let out at 7 A.M. when my mom shared this new single could probably be heard through my whole dorm. I’m just glad that my RA didn’t catch on. After a solid month of teasing, first with the ceremonial removal of the Daddy’s Home blonde wig, then with throwbacks to her performance of “Lithium” with the surviving members of Nirvana at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (to the people saying “oH, shE’s sO oFf-KeY” about this one: did you all just forget how Kurt Cobain sang, or what?) and her performance of “Krokodil” at Coachella in 2012, we finally have the St. Vincent rock album that we’ve always wanted. I’ve gone past the point of trying not to hype myself up for this one—somehow I feel like it’s not gonna be another MASSEDUCTION incident, because everything about this album— the aesthetic around it, and its collaborators (Dave Grohl on drums in this track, and Cate LeBon featuring on another)—feels like it’s going to rock. Annie Clark always seems to have a clever, cheeky album title up her sleeve, but All Born Screaming has to be one of the harder ones. And the album art…well, yeah. Let’s get the elephant out of the room—it’s great album art, but the timing was…not good, as it came just days after Aaron Bushnell self-immolated to call attention to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. (Rest in power. Chip in where you can.) But at the same time, there’s no way that Clark or her team could have predicted that kind of thing. I really don’t feel like she’s at fault here—it’s bad timing, sure, but none of us can be expected to foresee everything in the news.

Back to the song…I need to be stopped. Somebody needs to hold me back…or, at any rate, somebody should’ve held me back on the Thursday morning when “Broken Man” came out, because I listened to nothing but that song from approximately 7-11 A.M, and I had to go about three days before I could listen to it again. I’ve learned nothing. But now that I’ve ridden the initial high, I’m reveling in the new direction that St. Vincent has started to go towards with All Born Screaming. Most of the comparisons I’ve seen wind up somewhere in the neighborhood of Nine Inch Nails, P.J. Harvey, and Rage Against the Machine, and I can see all of those, especially with the former two—the industrial grind of Trent Reznor and the feral, growling vocals of P.J. Harvey are wound all over this track. Like the album art, it’s painted in the colors of ashes, still hot to the touch and rough between your fingertips. Clark has toed this line more often than not (see “Krokodil”), but we’ve gotten an album where she’s fully embraced her heavier side—one that she’s always had the capacity for, but somehow bottled up before throwing herself into All Born Screaming, the first album that she produced herself. It oscillates smoothly between hectic, metronome-ticking pop, uncomfortably sung from inside of a steel crate as she taunts the listener with her head peering out of the lid. It feels like a callback to the frenetic, pent-up energy of her self-titled record [slides Anthony Fantano glasses up the bridge of my nose], but with even more fury—every other lyric feels like a spit-laden taunt: “Who the hell do you think I am?/Like you’ve never seen a broken man?” With each verse that goes by, every word is spat with more intention, more vitriol, swerving between her silky, whisper-vocals to a full-on, sweat-drenched growl as the song closes. And this song’s breakdown is one of the most exciting of her songs in recent years; crashing in with Dave Grohl’s legendary drumming, you can’t describe this song with anything other than “fiery”: it’s a primal scream of a song, burning, biting fervor engulfed in flames. And I can’t help but get excited about the choreography in the music video—as flames dance across her neat, white button-up and slicked-back ponytail, her arms play a game of “the floor is lava” with her torso, jerkily twisting to avoid some point of contact. An eagle-eyed YouTube commenter compared it to her choreography for “Rattlesnake,” and…oh god, now I’m way too excited. Daddy’s Home is the best of her more recent work, if we’re going post-self-titled [slides glasses up even further] but…don’t do it. Don’t give me hope.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gearbreakers – Zoe Hana Mikuta – industrial landscapes abound and all-around badassery to spare.

“Red’s Ok” (from Hellboy II: The Golden Army) – Danny Elfman

Fast-forward to 8:20 for “Red’s Ok.”

Hi. Gonna try and be calm about this one. As calm as I can be when I feel the raw, untamed power of my middle school Hellboy hyperfixation coursing through my veins. The deluxe edition of the Hellboy II soundtrack showing up on my Apple Music suggestions on an unsuspecting Sunday morning was certainly a kick in the pants that sent me hurtling back to 2017 at alarming speeds, and I have yet to reach terminal velocity.

I don’t know what prompted the release—last year would’ve been fine, given that Hellboy II turned 15 that July. Who knows. Just up and popped out of nowhere. But man, I am so glad that it did. Having this expanded edition just goes to show how many gaps were left out of the original soundtrack, even if many of them (including this song) are under a minute long. I’m convinced that there was some kind of rush in putting together the original soundtrack, since now we know that the random tidbits that didn’t seem to come from anywhere that were tacked onto the end of “Finale” were, in fact, two alternate versions of songs that were almost used in the troll market scene. Again: who knows how that happened. But now, the score feels as whole as ever—those short-and-sweet tidbits fill in the crucial gaps, the silly, almost jazzy flourishes to plump up some moments of witty banter (of which there are many), fleshed out a soundtrack that’s cemented itself in the nostalgia catalogue of my mind. “Red’s Ok,” in particular, is the wonderful variation on the tasteful electric guitar motif, shown just as we see Hellboy emerging from the wreckage of a car he’s just landed on top of, wielding the Good Samaritan in the film’s most honest-to-god movie poster moment. And we get the full, 7-minute long cut of “Where Fairies Dwell.” I was born in the right generation. Born too late to see the rockstars I like, born too early to explore space…but born just in time to be able to listen to “Fuck-Used”. Bless.

My good feelings towards Elfman himself have started to fade after the allegations that came out last year, and this doesn’t change that, but I can’t deny the talent that went into this soundtrack, as well as the countless others he’s crafted over the years. Admittedly, his work has become so entangled in my life that, even though I’m all for theoretically separating the art from the artist, the truth is often far more complicated than putting the allegations in one box and their art in the other. I don’t necessarily know if it’s a personal flaw that I can’t detach from people that easily (lord knows I haven’t been able to listen to Arcade Fire as often as I used to without feeling a little moral revulsion). It’s not like J.K. Rowling’s transphobia and other prejudices manifested out of thin air directly after she wrote Harry Potter. And yet, I’d be the world’s worst liar if I denied how dear this film is to me. 13-year-old me saw this and saw an image of found family, of freaks who banded together in a world that was bent on destroying them, of freaks showing affection and forgiveness towards the world and each other, and it stuck. It did something to me. It showed me a possibility of a future that I could live out. At least it’s just the soundtrack in this case, and not the film itself. That’s all safe. I don’t even want to entertain the notion of Guillermo del Toro having any metaphorical skeletons in his closet, because given what the guy’s house looks like, he definitely has some plastic ones lying around. But it seems like he’s the type to keep it to that.

So I’ll be excited for the middle schooler in me. When this came out, I painted my nails and listened to this as they dried, remembering that there was a part of me back then that should be cherished—the one that didn’t care what anybody thought, and the one that watched this movie at least once a month.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie – Guillermo del Toro – yeah, this was the obvious pick, but what else was I gonna do? Put in the movie novelization? Imagine swapping out “Dr. Manning, suck my ectoplasmic schwanzstucker” for “Manning, you’re a jerk.” Unconscionable.

“POP POP POP” – IDLES

It’s been almost a month since TANGK was released, and I find myself drawn to it over and over again, simply because it’s so IDLES in a way that I haven’t seen from them. Like I said when I talked about “A Gospel” back when the album was released, it’s a beast that’s half old and half new, but brimming with the same ethos of kindness with a hard-edged sound. While “A Gospel” and “Grace” were the album’s pinnacles of vulnerability, “POP POP POP” just seems like the place where Nigel Godrich went nuts—it feels like IDLES trying to make a Radiohead song, but never once does it feel like a blatant imitation. It has an angular, jerky smoothness to it, with the combination of synths that buzz like a hive of insects with Joe Talbot’s voice—the lyrics aren’t screamed like he tends to do, but with a dry, disaffected drawl that signals irony, but knowing IDLES, it’s a sign of bare sincerity just as any other bellow he lets out. On the inside, the lyrics are similar to most of the material on this album—a shield of kindness against a wave of hatred: “Strong like bull/Vulnerable (vulnerable)/Keep my people up/That’s my tool.”

But there’s something resolute about the way that “POP POP POP” is delivered—it’s almost like he’s drawing not from a place of repeating himself, but convincing himself of his mission. I’ve seen a fair amount of people in internet music circles roll their eyes at IDLES for acting like their lyrics are more radical than they are, which…I halfway understand. A lot of their subject matter in their music isn’t exactly new in terms of political fodder to spin into music. But is there really anything new, political or otherwise, that you can write a song about? I find myself thinking of Audre Lorde and her essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” where she states that “…there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean on Sunday morning at 7 AM…[while] making war, giving birth.” I get why people are put off by IDLES seemingly acting like their ideas are new (I’ve never gotten that impression, but that’s just me), but personally, that was never what was radical about them—it’s their approach to kindness. It’s unclear whether this is the exact criticism that may have spawned “POP POP POP,” but the final verse, chanted like a prayer as the hive of synths descends into a buzzy, Kid-A maelstrom, feels like Talbot convincing himself of the message that he and the band have always pioneered: “Imposter, imposter, living in my head/Am I the spider in your bed?/A dead canary and a thief for a king/A cheerleader valiant/But I will sing about love, love…” And as his voice gets overlaid, the final chant that rings out is the tagline for the later track “Grace” and this album’s tour: “love is the fing.” It feels like reassurance in a sea of self-doubt, a reminder of a message to be held dear, a mission statement lost in the mist but found again when it came time to look back and remember why they created it in the first place. And as with the ending of this song, what persists is four essential words: “love is the fing.” You look back into all of the mess that your creativity has taken you, and what you find at the center is the love that motivated you to create in the first place.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Kindling – Traci Chee – I just reviewed this one, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind, but the last, more distorted lyrics made me think of these characters and their struggles to grow out of their trauma and persist—”Imposter, imposter, living in my head/Am I the spider in your bed?/A dead canary and a thief for a king/A cheerleader valiant/But I will sing about love, love…”

“Just One Look” – Doris Troy

The other day, I decided to listen to Apple Music’s Love station on a whim—I was drawing before bed, and I wanted something new to listen to. It ended up having mostly hits, some misses (one of the hits was “After Hours,” but I’m honestly concerned about the fact that there was…an Elliott Smith song on there? Not the weirdest Apple Music pick, but I don’t know if that screams “love”…), but it was the reason that I stumbled upon this song, which I am so grateful for. Scratch that—I’m grateful, but more than anything, I’m more surprised than anything that I’d never heard of her before then, given the company that she kept: she was first discovered by James Brown, and later collaborated with everybody from The Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd (she contributed backing vocals to Dark Side of the Moon, my god…). With all that, a musical based on her life, and a number one hit, you’d think we would be hearing more about her, but alas, nope. Whether or not that’s just another testament to how history treats Black women or the fact that she stepped away from the mainstream music industry after the ’70s is up in the air, but either way, I’m glad the Love station brought me to her.

I’ve always had a soft spot for that late ’50s-early ’60s soul. As much as I laud other artists for having intricately crafted lyrics, sometimes, it’s simplicity that wins out—and that was exactly what labels like Motown were the best at producing. Artists like The Temptations, the Ronettes, and others feel like they’ve distilled love—one of the most complex human emotions—down to its barest essentials. Every song becomes something so tender and universal that it feels like a warm blanket for the soul. Along with the rich vocals that often came with it, and you’ve got one of my favorite musical soft spots—I’ll take shreddy guitars any day, but sometimes, all I need is some wholesome love. That’s exactly how “Just One Look” feels—brimming with warmth, and the perfect tempo for slow-dancing in the kitchen. Only seconds into the song, and you can hear exactly why Troy’s fans gave her the nickname “Mama Soul”—soulful is the only adequate word to describe her rich, soaring voice. Combined with the air light touch on the piano keys, and I’ve got another comfort song in my collection—there’s something to be said for simplicity.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

DC: The New Frontier, vol. 1 – Darwyn Cooke – the lyrics for this song are so universal that they could cover any kind of romance, so instead, I went for the time period; the late ’50s-early ’60s setting of The New Frontier is settled right in the same era.

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: 3/3/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: spring green for March, old dogs, and the consequences of the fact that at least 90% of my friends are gay and their music tastes rub off on me.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/3/24

“What Are We Gonna Do Now” – Indigo De Souza

This just in: the sad girl kool-aid has never left my system, and it likely never will. Buckle up.

“What Are We Gonna Do Now” lives squarely in the liminal space of uncertainty, as the title implies. It feels like the tense opening to a film; I could just be stuck on this imagery of the line “and we’re still on call with the nurses,” but I can’t help but imagine an opening shot panning out from the slow spikes of a heart monitor, slowly letting out beeps as Indigo De Souza’s voice gently drips like an IV with that lingering, trailing question: “what are we gonna do now?” Almost everything is gradual about this song, as if the verses were frozen in time: a picture of a person standing on the street while snowflakes suspended in midair decorate the space around them. De Souza’s voice dips and dives into nooks and crannies that only a cat could fit into, army-crawling through the shadows as she describes the wear and tear of a relationship in the middle of turmoil—not necessarily on the verge of a fracture, but in the middle of the storm that they aim to push through together. Exhaustion and frustration tinges it (De Souza’s delivery of “and I’m never cooking up what you’re craving” remains one of my favorite parts of the whole song), but it’s never the kind so intense that would throw their love out the window—it’s the determination of trying to find out exactly how to fix things, and scrabbling around, searching for answers in desperation. Like the ebb and flow of love, the instrumentals swerve from a near standstill to a rousing, guitar-driven chorus and back to quiet again, but after the first verse, nothing is the same; it has the same kind of barely-contained chaos of songs like Wilco’s “Via Chicago” and Mitski’s “The Deal,” with a sense that the anxiety of making amends and grasping for solutions. As De Souza’s airy voice rises like she’s gasping for air after emerging from the ocean, trembling drums and tambourines slip in and out of time, ever so slightly off-kilter and teetering, like one sneeze would send them all into disarray. Unlike the former two songs, though, it never fully gives in, but the unraveling is always at the back of the song’s mind, like an overflow of fearful thoughts as they try to pick up the pieces, but a sense of deep-breathing control as De Souza picks themselves back up.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come – Jen St. Jude – one of the few apocalypse novels that really makes it a mission to focus on the human aspect.

“Lord Only Knows” – Beck

Full disclosure: I definitely ruined this album for myself. I knew it was going to be a good album, and it 100% is, but I’d already listened to about 3/4 of it, so there were no surprises left. All of the songs I remembered were already favorites, and the ones I hadn’t yet discovered weren’t as instantly classic as the others (sorry, “Derelict”). But that’s on me. Maybe on my parents for playing it so much in the car over the years, but mostly on me. Whoops.

That’s not to say that Odelay is a bad album at all—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It makes me miss the old Beck, the one who didn’t scrub everything to an unnecessary polish, but instead made his music like a sculpture made from bits and bobs found in the junkyard—a bit of a tire here, an old, rusty car hood there, some nuts and bolts sprinkled on top for a finishing touch. It’s a collage, but not necessarily in the way that artists like De La Soul or The Beastie Boys make their collages: while their infinitely clever concoctions feel like they oil every sample into a unified organism of unlikely pieces, Beck’s method (for a while, at least) was to make every spare and found part stick out like sore thumbs, but so much so that all those sore thumbs eventually made a hand so absurd that it makes you think how does that even function as a hand? And yet it’s the perfect hand. There’s no other way that “Hotwax” would work without “I’m the enchanting wizard of rhythm.” In fact, the absurdity of all these samples make this mutant (no pun intended) record so memorable—nobody was doing it quite like Beck. Take this song, which starts out with a rasping scream, then descends into twangy and almost docile acoustic-guitar driven rock. It’s not the heat-waved calm that “Jack-Ass” (my favorite track on the album) exudes, but it’s got that same lazy drawl to it, every word curled at the edges like scraps of paper singed by a campfire. Odelay hadn’t yet reached critical mass of clever silliness that made ’90s-2000’s Beck so fun (that would be Midnite Vultures), but he had plenty of fun to spare—I always find myself laughing at the final lines that Beck sings as the track fades out like a car driving out of view, obscured by the wobbling lines of a heat wave: “Going back to Houston/Do the hot dog dance/Going back to Houston/To get me some pants.” You just can’t deliver the word “pants” with that much emphasis and have it not be funny. Them’s the rules. I apparently have the humor of a five-year-old, but evidently, so does Beck, and we’re all the better for it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Fortuna (Nova Vita Protocol, #1) – Kristyn Merbeth – all of the same lazy, summer-eyed charm, but make it space opera (as things usually are on this blog).

“New Slang” – The Shins

Whenever I go to write about The Shins, I always end up going straight for the purple prose. It’s like the way I get with Radiohead, except they invoke something akin to religious fervor in me. I’m too far gone. But there’s something about James Mercer and his perpetually rotating cast of characters that evokes the lyrical side of my writing. Perhaps it’s that part of me connecting to that part of him, because he’s certainly got songwriting chops for days.

“New Slang” has been lingering in my life for decades; I faintly associate it with a period sometime in elementary or middle school. I think it may have been at the end of a playlist I listened to frequently. The Shins are never all that far from my mind, but this was the perfect song to shuffle out of the blue, soft and smiling like an old dog with white patches threaded into the fur of its snout. And I ran right up to pet that dog—god, I missed this song. Hello, old friend. Mercer has long since mastered the art of the old heartstring-tugging acoustic song, and while its as hipstery as it gets, there’s a calmness to it, a serenity like no other. And yet, for all intents and purposes, it’s James Mercer’s equivalent of a pop-punk “I’m getting out of this town” song; the lyrics were inspired by his experiences separating from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the first iterations of The Shins had tried to take root. Disillusioned by a scene that he described as “macho, really heavy, and aggressive,” Mercer and company branched outwards, where their lyrical folk could have more meaning. “New Slang” was Mercer’s way of “flipping off the whole city,” as he described it (“Gold teeth and a curse for this town”), but there’s something beautiful in how quietly this song shoots its bitter middle finger. It’s not the jerky angst of separation that pop-punk lends to the subject, but instead the moment of looking back into the sunset, knowing that everything you’ve left behind is in the dust with the approaching night. Perhaps that’s where that serenity I feel comes from—the serenity of knowing that what’s in the past is in the past, and that it has no control over your life anymore. It’s underfoot, only tire tracks in the dirt now. You can’t help but feel a wave of peace at the thought.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Trouble Girls – Julia Lynn Rubin – while Lux and Trixie’s reasons for ditching their town are more complicated, there’s no less of a feeling that they’re giving it the finger the whole way out.

“The Gold” (Manchester Orchestra cover) – Phoebe Bridgers

Full disclosure: I hate the original version of this song. Hate it. It stinks of that kind of that faux-earnest, country-leaning pop that forced itself down everyone’s throats in the mid-2010’s like a contagion. If this weren’t obviously a breakup song, I know my music teacher would have made my 5th grade class sing this. I hate to relentlessly dog on a song, but also…Christ. This made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Phoebe Bridgers, on the other hand? A godsend. Leave it to her to make the original lyrics, some of which were actually good sound good, and not like they were being shoved down through the godforsaken Mumford & Sons strainer. I will give Manchester Orchestra (posers, they’re not even from Manchester…) some credit: “you’ve become my ceiling” is genuinely a beautiful lyric. But I just wish it wasn’t being delivered with that smarmy, offensive excuse for authenticity. Again: Phoebe Bridgers is our savior. She grounds this song enough to make the turmoil within it feel real. Never once did this song need belting, stadium-rock grandeur: it needed clarity, a sense of calm amidst the chaos, and a steady hand on an acoustic guitar. It’s got slightly more effects than Bridgers usually allots to a song of this tempo, but it hits the balance of flourish and that acoustic sincerity that she’s come to be known for. It’s a breakup song, but although some of those call for grandiose declarations of sorrow, some of them need time to sit in silence and wallow it in, and that’s exactly the treatment that Bridgers gave “The Gold.” I’ll just go ahead and pretend that she wrote it. Yup. Manchester Orchestra? Who is she?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Vinyl Moon – Mahogany L. Browne – similarly, this novel in verse deals with the fallout of a relationship built on mistrust.

“Caesar on a TV Screen” – The Last Dinner Party

Before I listened to the full song, I distinctly remember seeing a snippet of this song advertised somewhere on Instagram and thinking something along the lines of “god, this is pretentious.” And I stand by that. It’s still pretentious. But in context, it’s a good listen.

I’ve heard a decent amount of buzz surrounding The Last Dinner Party, usually falling in one of two camps: that they’re out to save rock and roll and bring it back to its glory days, or that they’re just…okay? The former argument, while I like it in concept, reeks of the kind of mentality that “modern music isn’t good anymore” because it’s not all Pink Floyd, which…okay, cool if you like Pink Floyd, but also…creative rock didn’t die as soon as Y2K hit? You just have to look a little harder now that rock isn’t the reigning influence on popular music anymore. In the modern day, we treat rock music like we often treat women: as something to be saved, when all along, it’s been doing just fine, thank you. I doubt we’ll ever go back to those days, and maybe we shouldn’t—there’s no way you can completely replicate a movement in its full, temporal context, and maybe that’s okay. I’m all for bringing back glam rock, but chances are, anything you try to resurrect is going to feel displaced in our modern day context. You can take inspiration from them, but personally, it’s a hard thing to recreate in all of its flesh and blood.

Which…seems like a good deal of what The Last Dinner Party are going for. Frontwoman Abigail Morris has regularly emphasized how much she and the band enjoy being pretentious (if having their debut album titled Prelude to Ecstasy wasn’t enough of an indication), and if that’s what’s bringing them joy, then all power to them! They’re talented musicians, for sure. Weirdly, the other two songs of theirs that I listened to just sounded like…any old indie pop song, which I kind of hate to say, but if you’re all about “saving rock n roll” and just putting out that, then I feel like you have to keep your mission consistent. But you certainly get that feel from “Caesar on a TV Screen.” As far as the structure goes, it feels slightly disjointed, but the more I watch the music video, I get what they’re going for—a song with a distinct, three-act structure, emulating the epic, Shakespearean twists and turns that inspired it. There’s loads of drama to spare, from the rush of strings in the third act to Morris’ impassioned howl of “everyone will like me!” at the song’s exiting flourish, like she’s brandishing a prop sword with every word. It’s dripping with that kind of theatrical, ’70s and ’80s drama—there’s Queen written all over it, and I can’t help but think that some of that drama was informed by Kate Bush. And…yeah, Freddie Mercury, Kate Bush, and David Bowie, the latter of whom the band have repeatedly cited as one of their primary influences, are probably some of the most colossal shoes to fill in terms of musical artistry. But there’s no doubt that The Last Dinner Party are a skilled bunch in their own right—and god, they look like they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exactly the kind of excess, maximalism, and drama that their band name implies.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strike the Zither (Kingdom of Three, #1) – Joan He – “When I was a child, I never felt like a child/I felt like an emperor with a city to burn” HMMM…

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: 2/25/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Took me this long to get to a blue period…it didn’t happened until almost three months in the year, but of course it’s the one that ends up having Faith No More and Kermit the Frog in the same breath. Duality of Madeline.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/25/24

“House of Self-Undoing” – Chelsea Wolfe

In an outcome that should be surprising to no one, Chelsea Wolfe’s new record, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, absolutely rocks. Dare I say it might be one of her best albums in years? Birth of Violence was a solid album, but I remember it having some lulls, but then again, I haven’t listen to it since its release in 2019. I haven’t listened to her entire discography, but I’ve never met a Chelsea Wolfe album I didn’t like, but there are some that nudge their way past the others to the tidal wave of goth revelry that she’s come to be known for. I’ve meant to review at least a handful of the excellent singles that came out of this album, but I remember specifically that “Whispers In The Echo Chamber” came out at a time when I got unexpectedly swamped…when there were a bunch of fantastic blue songs I wanted to talk about. Oopsie. No time like the present, amirite?

In terms of themes, Wolfe always has something poetic up her sleeve, whether she’s making the skeleton of her album out of Jungian analysis or Tarot. They’re all deeply personal, but She Reaches feels more intimately so; here, she grapples with separation of all kinds: from past relationships, from present systems, and from future pathways that her life could lead her down. But as she’s draining the gore of all the past messiness out of her system, she’s burning bridges and building her new phoenix of a self out of the charred remains. Back to “Whispers In The Echo Chamber,” where she declares “this world was not designed for us,” (GO OFF QUEEN), whispering like a mysterious necromancer into the ear of the magic-oblivious king. The album finishes on “Dusk” and its promises of “Watch[ing] this empire as it burns and dissipates/Haunted, on fire, on the wings that we create” (GO OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF), with Wolfe finally detaching herself from this lowly, undeserving mortal plane, and giving a final, cold look to us mortals before disintegrating into a cloud of vampire bats. God, I love her. With such stacked competition, I was grasping for a real favorite on the album, but I cannot stop coming back to “House of Self-Undoing.” After the triumphant declaration of independence in “Whispers,” the second track finds Wolfe extricating herself from the turmoil that she sought to free herself from (“In the house of self-undoing/I saw your face”). Most of the heavier tracks on She Reaches are heavy in the way of Wolfe’s goth dark theatricality and billowing cloaks, but “House of Self-Undoing” is pure rock, grinding with percussion like speeding footsteps and guitars smoother than hotel bedsheets. There’s a nervous, frantic energy that claws its way out of every note, just as Wolfe’s lyrics point to, as the boldness of separation gives way to the physicality of fleeing the old and bursting into the new. It’s the journey of clawing up through the earth and spitting out the dirt in your mouth, before your caked fingernails break the surface to find the sunlight.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1) – Tamsyn Muir – as much of a disappointment Harrow the Ninth turned out to be, I can’t deny how fun this book was. The general underworld/undead imagery is already fitting enough, but the themes of separation from a past life are the icing on the cake.

“Midlife Crisis” – Faith No More

The only proper way to describe “Midlife Crisis” is something along the lines of a feat of acrobatics. There’s so many twists, turns, and midair flips that this song executes one after the other that just makes you wonder about the mad scientist’s lab that it was surely cooked up in, because surely something bizarre and outside of human comprehension went into polishing this track to a shine. God, it just goes so hard.

Like Post, “Midlife Crisis,” over 30 years after its release, sounds like everything and nothing, but in this case, what a decent portion of the world of hard rock took from Mike Patton’s vocal acrobatics and spit out was…nu metal. Jesus. Urgh. I’ll dispense from my rant about why nu metal gets on my nerves since it’s more of a personal vendetta than one that has any kind of logical basis (listen, you try and do 50 push-ups at Tae Kwon Do while Linkin Park is blasting through the speakers), but they would’ve had nothing if not for this song. You can hear exactly where Korn got their Cookie Monster gibberish-vocals from on a single go-around on this song. What sets Mike Patton apart from them, however, is the range that he crams into these astounding four minutes; you’ve got said grimy Cookie Monster vocals, but just as quickly, he turns a corner into a soaring smoothness that makes you wonder if somebody slipped him the world’s most powerful cough drop in the time it took him to switch over. Going from those kinds of extremes so quickly and seemingly without breaking a sweat…if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is. And the scorn that this song radiates—”You’re perfect, yes, it’s true/But without me, you’re only you.” DAMN. Also, for the longest time, I thought that the line afterwards was “you’re menstruating hard” and not “your menstruating heart,” which…yeah, the actual line makes much more sense, but somehow, I feel like Patton seems like the type of guy to just say a line like “YOU’RE MENSTRUATING HARD 🗣🗣🗣🗣” with that delivery out of the blue. It was ’90s hard rock. Somehow, it works. Faith No More struck gold with this gift of a song, for sure.

…and I haven’t even gotten to the synth breakdown at 2:22. Good lord. Speaks for itself, really.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Invisible Things – Mat Johnson – scorn, grime and polish in equal measure, and a bunch of alien abductees recreating Trump-era American in a bubble city on Europa. Time to party, right?

“Sweepstakes” (feat. Mos Def & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble) – Gorillaz

I meant to talk more about Plastic Beach back in December when I first listened to it, but I can’t not come back to it, like most Gorillaz albums that I’ve listened to in full. (Maybe not Song Machine. Like…half of Song Machine. And not Cracker Island. Okay, the first three Gorillaz albums.) Besides being a sweeping showcase of both Albarn’s overflowing musical talent and the storytelling about a tech-invaded future and rampant consumerism, Plastic Beach, I think, is the first album that cemented their reputation for having a continuously stacked list of guest artists. I sincerely doubt that there will ever be another band to have Snoop Dogg, the surviving members of The Clash, and Lou Reed on the same album, and that’s not even because Lou Reed is no longer with us. The minute that I found out that there was a song that had both De La Soul and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals on it, my soul just about left my body. There’s just no band quite like Gorillaz in the way they can unite and fuse genres and appeal to so many without selling their souls. I fully believe that Gorillaz are the people’s band. The arty people like them. The pretentious music nerds like them. The jocks like them. The alt people like them. I have a distinct memory of these two bros in my senior year chem class going through their Spotify, and then one of them declared “BRO, THIS IS OUR SONG,” and I fully expected something absolutely rancid, but no. It was “Dare.” DARE. Gorillaz is one of the few bands that have something for everybody, and not in the way that people say that they like “every genre” of music. Albarn’s many strengths in this part of his life hasn’t just been the varied influences that he brings to his music, but the way that he gives them a chance to have their say—Gorillaz is an amalgam of so many gems from so many places, and yet, save for some of their newer albums, hardly any of it doesn’t feel like them.

Onto “Sweepstakes.” This is one of the two Mos Def features on Plastic Beach (the other being “Stylo,” which was incredible live, by the way), and I’m frankly baffled that this one doesn’t get the attention that some of the other tracks on the album do. I’d risk it all to see this one live, especially if they actually bring out Mos Def and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble onstage. In the video above, Mos Def comes out in…basically an Abraham Lincoln getup, if we count the beard, announcing prizes like a slick auctioneer, before launching into the truly charged, energy-pumped vibrations of this song. Energized is the only word you can ascribe to this song, really. From the beginning, the drum machine thrums a beat that hiccups so deliberately that you can’t help but start jumping. Bringing these three creative forces together on the song was the perfect recipe for a classic—Albarn’s penchant for engineering iconic dance beats, Mos Def’s commanding gravitas that he brings to each lyric, and the creeping, tidal force of the Brass Ensemble as the joyous, urgent burst of horns emerge from the curtain of synths like the chestburster clawing its way out of Kane’s body. It’s a song that begs to be heard, meant to be blasted down the streets in waves of confetti and marching feet—and that’s not just because of the brass that commands the latter half of the song. And for a song about mindless consumerism, exploitation and the duping of the working class by the rich (“‘Who’s the winner?’ Said the dealer/Every player, ‘Yeah, me'”), the infectious triumph is the most intentional thing about this track. Only fitting that The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s track “War” would be used for the Hunger Games movies only a few years after this. You’re a winner!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Prime Meridian – Silvia Moreno-Garcia – telling the working class that they can do anything they set their heart to while the ruling class ignores them completely and colonizes Mars, anyone? Sound familiar?

…oh, wait. Damn.

“1000 Umbrellas” – XTC

Guess I just can’t stop listening to XTC, huh? In case you were wondering (because you totally were, I’m sure), “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” continues to have me in an unbreakable chokehold, but this one is good competition.

’60s inspiration can be found in almost any XTC song you can pull out of a jar, even if you ignore The Dukes of Stratosphear, which were just them under another name marketed as a “lost find” of the ’60s (and then ended up outselling any of their XTC records…ouch). For me, “1000 Umbrellas” immediately screams The Beatles, specifically in 1967—somewhere between Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. It’s pure theatre; even if the album, Skylarking, wasn’t a vague concept album, it practically begs for some kind of dramatic performance. Can’t you just imagine a scene of an aerial view of a bunch of pedestrians holding umbrellas in the rain, and Andy Partridge right smack in the middle of them, lamenting the loss of love as the rain pours down on him? Maybe the umbrellas morph into those pastel, spinning teacup rides as Patridge sings “And one million teacups/I bet couldn’t hold all the wet/That fell out of my eyes/When you fell out with me?” I particularly love how the orchestral arrangements seem to rise and fall, tilting just barely out of neatness and into delirium as Partridge wails, stumbling right along with the beleaguered strings section. On the heels of “Ballet for a Rainy Day,” the rain turns from the kiss of spring to cold, damp misery (a word that he frequently drags out like a ridiculed prisoner in medieval times) and like the swells of the orchestra, Partridge moans and wails like an actor trudging across the stage, the spotlight following him as he holds his broken umbrella against the downpour. I swear that this song needs a broadway-style, “It’s Oh So Quiet” music video—the imagery is jus too vivid for it to go without it.

And then we’re right back to having a jolly old time with “Season Cycle.” Duality of Skylarking.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Scattered Showers – Rainbow Rowell – messy love and a chance of rain.

“The Rainbow Connection” – Kermit the Frog

Yeah. Well. If you need me to pay for your insurance following this whiplash, I’ll fork it over. But this is more of a palate-cleanser, right? Guess I ought to keep you on your toes. Or maybe you just need a bit of a break from Mike Patton growling about your menstruating heart. Take a breather. Find the rainbow connection.

Honestly, this song came on here solely since I’ve been thinking about The Muppets lately, and how glad I am that I had such an absurd and clever slice of positivity in my childhood. There seriously will never be another creator quite like Jim Henson, but it’s worth it to take his felt-covered gospel to heart: to keep imagination and joy close to your heart, always, whether or not you have an equally whimsical puppet on your hand.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Any comforting book from your childhood – whatever made you feel good when you were younger should do the trick.

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: 2/18/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Welp. Back to the black and white (mostly) color palettes again. Oops. But ’70s David Bowie heals all wounds, right? Right?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/18/24

“Do You Want To” – Franz Ferdinand

From all accounts, it seems like Franz Ferdinand peaked at this album, You Could Have It So Much Better. But I feel like it’s understandable, on some level. You try to replicate something as iconic as “Take Me Out” or this, and you risk flying too close to the sun. Lightning can’t strike twice. Well, I guess it can, if you count this and “Take Me Out,” but…okay, three times?

This song. It’s so stuffed with infectious hooks that it’s practically a thanksgiving turkey. It’s pumping with allure and adrenaline, and not a single bit feels wasted. You hear the first 20 seconds and think “oh, that’s a great start to the song,” but lo and behold, every single band member pulls of their top hats to reveal a second, even more spectacular hook to propel it to unforeseen heights. And from that meteoric rise, “Do You Want To” feels like the most delightfully slick, guitar-driven gold mine of 2000’s indie rock. It’s a song that wrenches you by the hand into a nighttime world of leather jackets, impeccable hair, and shiny guitars. Lyric-wise, it’s nothing that the band hasn’t covered, but lyrics were never their legacy—the absolute sheen of it all overpowers the rest of it, and it’s the kind that you can keep on repeat for hours and never get tired of. For a few years, Franz Ferdinand seemed to have perfected that kick of leather-jacket, smooth indie rock, and even though it seemed to have burned out a decade or so down the line, for a moment, their talent was clear—and explosive. The only sin that “Do You Want To” ever committed was not having a third hook hidden beneath their other top hats—the last thirty seconds (“Lucky, lucky/You’re so lucky”) are just begging for at least one more burst of smooth guitar that sounds like it’s been fired out of a cannon. It’s such a frustrating ending. With that kind of buildup, how could they not be extending the song for a finale as glorious as the entrance? Either way, the three and a half minutes that we do have is joyous enough. Almost enough to make me forgive Alex Kapranos for permanently freezing his face in this expression for no good reason:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Vicious – V.E. Schwab – come to think of it, a lot of V.E. Schwab’s male protagonists fit a similarly charismatic and boundary-pushing (mostly in terms of magic and science, anyway), but this novel absolutely fits the slick, Franz Ferdinand vibe.

“Fascination” – David Bowie

Frustrated that “Do You Want To” ends right before it should theoretically go on for at least two more minutes? Fear not! At least David Bowie wasn’t afraid to make his timeless grooves almost six minutes long.

Welp. I don’t know how Young Americans wasn’t on my album bucket list already, but it sure is on it now. The iconic title track and “Fame” should’ve convinced me, but somehow it was “Fascination” that pushed me over the edge. It reminds me just what I love about the ’70s; the production is nothing but slick and slinky, full of vibrance and a groove that never even comes close to sputtering out for all five minutes and 48 seconds. God, the saxophone. I don’t usually find myself saying that about saxophones, but oh my god. It’s not a song that just makes you feel like dancing—you’re all but transported to a dance floor somewhere, amidst loose ties and sunglasses and warm lights bathing everyone’s faces. Strangely, the only thing that doesn’t scream vibrant or groovy is Bowie’s voice. The more you focus on it, the eerier it feels. Even though his voice was a decade or so from becoming as rich and resonant as he was later known for, it had thinned out even more so that he was in his youth. Young Americans was recorded during the height of his crippling cocaine addiction, and you can hear it in this song more than any other on the album. I could just be projecting, given how he was able to belt out the classic “ain’t there one damn song that can make me…break down and cry?” on the same album, but whether or not it was purposeful to add to the slick, sultry air of the album and his persona, it’s not a stretch to make. His voice often takes a back seat to the sheer power of the backup singers, and despite the seduction written all over “Fascination,” I can’t help but think of the exhaustion that eventually led him to pack his bags for Berlin in a few years’ time. No judgement, but it’s kind of the reason why I’m always a little suspicious of people who say that The Thin White Duke is their favorite Bowie persona. Iconic as all the others in both looks and musical output, but…I don’t know, it feels like a red flag that the Bowie you remember most fondly is the Bowie that was characterized by exhaustion, excessive substance abuse, and behaviors that he later condemned as a byproduct of the worst period of his life. I just feel like if that’s your favorite Bowie…again, no judgment, but calm down, you edgelord. You’re not impressing anybody. Music isn’t automatically deep just because the artist was at rock bottom when they made it.

Nonetheless, it is a truly fantastic, masterful song. David Bowie was just almost incapable of having an album without at least one good song, even if it was the more commercial ’80s albums.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev – Dawnie Walton – steeped in mid-’70s rock, I suspect the fictional music that Opal & Nev made was partially inspired by Bowie’s work around the same time.

“A Gospel” – IDLES

TANGK is a bizarre album in the best possible way. IDLES seem to have partially (but never fully, this is still IDLES we’re talking about) shed the punk sensibilities that they’re known for, and in its wake, Joe Talbot and company have gone on to explore uncharted territory for the band. Tracks like “Gratitude” and “Hall & Oates” prove that they’ll never stop being their aggressively positive selves, but TANGK has given them room to grow. How much of it we can credit to Nigel Godrich is up in the air, but either way, it’s a fascinating evolution.

Emotional vulnerability and healthy masculinity have always been cornerstones of the IDLES image, but never have they been so soft and bare on “A Gospel.” Looking back, the Ultra Mono track “A Hymn” feels like its spiritual predecessor, both in title and nature, but even then, this is the first time that IDLES have ever felt quiet. No screaming, no bass, no rasp roughening Talbot’s voice. “A Gospel” presumably finds Talbot after his recent divorce, solemnly wallowing in the aftermath: “Delete my number/I’m no more/Ignore my eyes, babe/They’re just sore.” (“I’m not crying, it’s just been raining…on my face…”) But true to IDLES’ commitment to love and mutual understanding, he harbors no ill will towards his own partner, gently offering solace and closure instead of the biting words that are all too common in these kinds of songs: “I know you better/I’m your half/Just tell me darling/And I’ll be your past.” It’s sad that it’s so rare that you find songs about relationships that aren’t malicious towards the partner in some way; in some cases, the other party is in the wrong, but we’ve had so many songs about conniving women (from men who are likely the problem) and whatnot that finding a song like this feels like a needle in a haystack. “A Gospel” seems to come, refreshingly, from a place of genuine remorse; you can feel the embarrassment in Talbot’s confessional lyrics, but they’re never overly self-deprecating or, on the other hand, aggressive. It’s a melancholy song, but it feels like the most amicable breakup song I’ve heard. Talbot has repeatedly said that the thesis of TANGK revolves around love, and although “A Gospel” takes it from a more distraught angle, it’s still love—being able to step away from a situation where you know you’re in the wrong, and encouraging a peaceful resolution.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Aurora Burning (Aurora Cycle, #2) – Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff – no spoilers, but I was distinctly reminded of a certain character after the fallout of a certain reveal near the end of the novel. Ouch.

“Virginia Woolf Underwater” – Chelsea Wolfe

No matter what Chelsea Wolfe album I listen to (you’ll definitely be hearing about her latest next week), it almost always makes me come back to some of the material off of Unknown Rooms. I adore Chelsea Wolfe’s shreddier, overtly goth style, but unfortunately, I drank the sad girl Kool-Aid long ago and I can never come back, so here I am, back at the acoustic album. There’s no doubt that Wolfe can wring out emotion whether or not she’s playing electric or acoustic. She’s at her best when she’s conjuring a swarm of bats from oblivion with a full assault of instrumentals, but the power always lingers. Like my favorite of her songs, “Boyfriend” (also from this album): naught but guitar and Wolfe’s ghostly rasp, it evokes the same rise of power and overwhelming emotion as anything else she’s written. In the end, it all feels cavernous.

“Boyfriend” is plenty bleak, but there’s something about “Virginia Woolf Underwater” that feels so much more so; although it’s just as sparse as any other track on this album, the discordant nature of it all ties the despair of it together, with off-kilter chords punctuated by a tambourine. Only later do the orchestral strings come in, but they feel just as cold as the rest of the song. Alluding to Virginia Woolf’s early death by drowning, the song feels as distorted as voices floating in the water. Wolfe’s voice drifts in and out of focus. The lyrics imagine Woolf’s state: “Everything you’ve owned is gone/Everything you know is wrong/Everyone you’ve loved has left/Everything you’ve touched is dead.” Given Woolf’s struggles with depression and trauma from the second World War towards the end of her life, it’s not a stretch to think that she was thinking thoughts along these lines. That’s what makes the song tragic, but there’s something touching about how Chelsea Wolfe was able to connect to her all these years later, and was moved enough to write her an elegy of sorts. It’s a cross-temporal love letter, a call through the ether to tell not just Woolf that she understands, but for others to relate to and know that they are not alone in their experiences. Only fitting that now, 12 years after the release of Unknown Rooms, that her newest album is titled She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. What better way to sum up Chelsea Wolfe’s brilliant career?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Godkiller (Fallen Gods, #1) – Hannah Kaner – this story similarly begins with Kissen, who has lost everything, and the novel follows her finding her purpose…with some killing gods on the side.

“Floating on a Moment” – Beth Gibbons

I feel like I should be more invested in the fact that Beth Gibbons is releasing a solo album this May. Then again, I still haven’t picked myself up and listened to Dummy, so I feel like that’s the top priority. The only thing keeping me from it is the Sisyphean album bucket list I’ve created for myself, so we’ll see when I get around to it. Soon, given that at least a quarter of it had me in a nearly unbreakable chokehold in early 2022.

“Floating On A Moment” feels further removed from the trip-hop that Portishead was known for, opting for a more stripped-down form. Synths and samples have been exchanged for acoustic guitars and a choir, and the result is slow and gentle, like water trickling from the gutter. Admittedly, I expected something weirder from Gibbons, but I don’t not like this song—it’s good, but it’s not the kind of slow that’s always compelling (that would be Portishead). It’s good when you’re in the moment (no pun intended) and listening to it, but on the outside…I hate to say it, but it feels a little predictable? The fact that it’s track two on Lives Outgrown seems kind of bizarre unless the whole album is going to be this slow, or if it just has a slow start. What’s weirder is that “Floating On A Moment” is centered around the fleeting nature of time and staying in the present, and yet it’s so slow…I guess it could fit with the image of time slipping through your fingers, but this song feels anything but fleeting. If anything, it’s the slow drip of a memory recalled, an alternate reality pondered, a gradual crawl through the recesses of the mind. All that’s to say that this isn’t a bad song. For what it is, “Floating On A Moment” is as gentle as they come, something to have in the background. Again: I hate that I’m saying that about Beth Gibbons, of all people, but we don’t have the whole picture of Lives Outgrown. We’ll see what she’s got up her sleeve.

Even though the pervasion of AI art in music videos is maddening to me (at this point, it’s less about the fact that it’s AI and more that the “style” just looks objectively ugly), the AI elements of the music video for “Floating On A Moment” suit how the song feels; everything melting into a gloopy mess is a hallmark of AI animations at this point, but that kind of melting, combined with the real-life footage of Gibbons, melds surprisingly well with the slick, melting quality of the song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel – a quiet and understated but detailed vision of past, present, and future.

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: 2/11/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

Huzzah! No more black and white color palettes! Color has returned! And somehow, I’ve managed to cram way too many songs that I’ve had on repeat into a single post, so get ready for some rambly paragraphs. Also: music that changed the game (several games, in fact), people who really liked the ’60s, and me freaking out over an Instagram post that’s already over a week old.

Before we get into that, here are last week’s songs:

2/4/24:

Now, enjoy (oops) this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/11/24

“Read the Room” – The Smile

I already rambled about this song plenty on my review of Wall of Eyes from last week, but if you haven’t read that, take my word for it. “Read the Room” was half the reason I was excited for the whole album in the first place just because of how arresting it was to hear it live for the first time without knowing they’d been cooking it up. From that, I thought I was going to destroy my hopes for this song because I’d hyped it up so much, but no. It’s still hypnotic in every way possible. Just listen, okay?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – Moniquill Blackgoose – massive egos and magic rainbows aplenty, but this time in the form of gaslighting and colonial pressures surrounding Anequs, an Indigenous woman fighting to make her voice heard.

“Enjoy” – Björk

Finally. I’ve finally gotten around to listening to Post, and with every song I come back to, I keep hitting myself for not listening to it sooner. Not just because some of my favorite Björk songs (and no shortage of childhood nostalgia, courtesy of my parents and their wonderfully indie taste) were on it, but just because I’ve seen it held on so high of a pedestal for so long. Normally, that’s not a primary motivator for listening to an album unless I’ve had it recommended by someone I trust, but if it’s Björk, talent of talents, that’s being held on said pedestal, then why shouldn’t I? Now that I’ve listened to it, I’m struck by the feeling that Post sounds simultaneously like nothing I’ve ever heard and everything I’ve ever heard. Every song sounds so unique, and yet screams of everything that’s come after it, whether you’re looking at the world of rock, trip-hop, or electronic—a route that Björk took on this album when she felt that rock music held little opportunity for the experimentation brewing inside of her. And that experimentation was truly wild—wild in the naturalistic sense, in the sense that she’s always meant when she’s said that she isn’t necessarily inspired by the music of her native Iceland, but of the volcanic landscape of Iceland itself. There’s musical eco-brutalism rife in this album, a full-frontal fusion of the natural and the industrial that grinds together into something that feels both alien and familiar, but wholly captivating. Maybe eco-brutalism isn’t quite the right word—I’m sure there is a word for this, but the “brutalism” part, although it is distinctly industrial in some places, feels sleeker and more technological. Post feels like that picture of a bunch of bright green plants crawling out of the dirt, but they’re planted inside of the headlight of a car; both images are strikingly different from each other, but they were always meant to be distinctly harmonious without bleeding into each other.

“Enjoy” was one of the songs that I hadn’t heard previously, and now, I’m practically waiting on its every beck and call. I just cannot stop listening to it. With something so simple as a walking, looping synth to provide its chrome backbone, “Enjoy” becomes a kind of cyberpunk catwalk, a confident strut through metal and neon lights. It’s no surprise that Tricky (who Björk had a short-lived relationship with at the time) had a hand in this track; it’s got trip-hop written all over it, but even that couldn’t place it as anything but purely Björk. With brass blasts punctuating the spiraling web of synths thickening every note, it feels like the formula that she’s molded like clay for her whole career—taking two distinct things that would sound horribly out of place in the hands of any other artist, but in her hands, sound like they were made to mesh together, a cyborg chimera of spare and found parts. And through it all, Björk’s signature, growling belt rings like a cry of confidence, a declaration (of independence?) as she struts the cyberpunk catwalk, hungry for tactile sensation, branching her feelers out for anything they can grasp. Björk described it as “[being] greedy, to be eager to consume a city,” and “Enjoy” feels like nothing but riotous consumption, something swallowing whole continents in its wake in a search for something to feel.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Translation State – Ann Leckie – this novel features an alien character with a deep desire to experience the same sensations of other intelligent life that have been excluded from them; the overwhelming urge to seek out the tactile of “Enjoy” radiates through here as well.

“Chapter 8: ‘Seashore and Horizon'” – Cornelius

I’m a warm-weather creature at heart. I can’t get too warm, but I tend to come back alive once the sun comes out. I’m practically a reptile in that regard—I take any crumb of warmth that I can get, then I soak it up for the rest of the day like stolen nectar. Similarly, I find myself gravitating to sunnier, more summery music in these chillier, gloomier months. Here I am, looking out my window: all the trees are bare as can be, there’s half-melted snow sliding off the neighboring rooftops, and the ground beneath my feet is a mess of slush, dirt, and who knows what else. If you squint, there’s a tiny pocket of blue between the clouds, but it’s gray as far as the eye can see. But in these times, I turn to musical sunshine for my fix. I’m thinking back to last year, and that’s around the time when I was playing Fishbone’s “Everyday Sunshine” more often than not. Now, we’ve got some sparkly sunshine in the form of a trip to the beach.

Up until now, I only knew two Cornelius songs (“Mic Check” and “Smoke”), both collages of synth, samples, and brightly-colored, digitized sparkle. What I’ve taken away from looking into his background is that Cornelius (a.k.a. Keigo Oyamada), is, if nothing else, a student of The Beach Boys, to the point where he put a picture of himself dressed as Brian Wilson in the liner notes of Fantasma, the album where we get “Chapter 8.” Somehow, it never once dawned on me while listening to this song, but it’s like a sledgehammer in the face of Pet Sounds influence once you realize. This is literally just The Beach Boys if they had a few more synths and discovered sampling. And like what made Wilson and co. famous, “Chapter 8” feels like if warm sunshine over an endless, golden beach were channeled into just under three and a half minutes of music. Combined with the equally peppy powers of Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney of The Apples in Stereo, there’s no adequate words to describe this song other than carefree. You can almost see Schneider and Sidney nodding their heads in time as one strums an acoustic guitar, with animated sea creatures dancing around them. But what elevates the joy of this song is the way their high-pitched harmonies dance together, feather-light.

What a joyous, whimsical song! Sure would be a shame if…oh, for fuck’s sake, Cornelius did WHAT? Jesus Christ…at least The Apples in Stereo are good people…

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sea Sirens (A Trot & Cap’n Bill Adventure) – Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee – a brightly-colored trip into a fantastical world under the sea.

“The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” – XTC

Everybody’s weekly Apple Music replays should be generating soon, if memory serves, and I’m just waiting to see which spot out of the top 5 that this song has occupied, because it’s kind of a given that it’s going to be somewhere in there. It’s an inevitability at this point. As evidenced by this post, there’s no space left in my brain for important stuff to occupy, because it’s all been clogged with Björk, The Smile, and this for 2 weeks straight.

For XTC, it’s easy to see why. Andy Partridge always had aspirations of being a pop star, weaned on ’60s groups like The Monkees, whose style inspired his quirky musical career. And although he never got the Monkees-level fame that he’d always dreamed of (maybe that’s for the best? Who would want to have a fake show centered around you and then have to own up to not playing any of the instruments on live TV? Maybe that’s just me…), his pop craft is unmistakable. Their hits were more on the side of…well, ADHD, valium withdrawal, and poking sticks at God than “Daydream Believer,” but, as he frequently insisted, the music he and the other members of XTC was pop—it was just confined to the fringes, for the most part. “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” feels like it could have been the crowd pleaser at sold-out stadiums in some alternate universe where fawning girls had posters of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding in mop haircuts on their walls. It’s a tragic and biting song, but it’s got the command of a song made for people to wave their hands along, raised in prayer in a mass mourning for Peter Pumpkinhead. The song did, in fact, start out as a smaller version of that kind of pity; the Peter Pumpkinhead character was inspired by a jack-o-lantern that Partridge had proudly carved, then slowly watched rot day by day, which led him to not only pity the poor thing, but toy with the concept of a person who was purely good, and therefore, according to Partridge, “I thought, ‘god, they’d make so many enemies!'” And it’s easy to see—not to be cynical with it, but most governments despise the idea of Peter Pumpkinhead-like people simply because he’s everything they’re not—charitable, kind, and just purely good, and capable of letting every criticism bounce off of them (“plots and sex scandals failed outright/Peter merely said ‘any kind of love is alright!'”). The music video, which was later heavily edited for us Americans, didn’t just expand on the allusions to Jesus in the song’s final verse (“Peter Pumpkinhead was too good/Had him nailed to a chunk of wood”), but straight up recreates the JFK assassination. Not just a few references or anything, no. It’s literally just JFK’s assassination, complete with a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, a flashing image of Cuba superimposed onto a picture of a pig, and a weeping Jackie Kennedy sprawled out of the back of the car. Certainly a ballsy move, but not even the ballsiest move they made when it came to American audiences. If being memorable was the aim, then they succeeded. But even without it, “Peter Pumpkinhead” has pathos in spades, the kind that brings people to their knees.

Hooray for Peter Pumpkinhead, indeed. He’s got my vote, but I feel like we already established that he’s not the kind of guy to run for public office, so I’d just shake his hand.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Last Human – Zack Jordan – being the last human in the galaxy tends to make you too many enemies, even if you don’t deserve it. Also tends to happen when you’re a teenage girl.

“The Party” – St. Vincent

Oh god. God. Help me. St. Vincent wiped her entire instagram and posted a video setting aside the blonde wig from the Daddy’s Home tour H-E-L-P. HELP ME. I AM NOT OKAY.

Through my unceasing hyperventilation, I’ve come back to some of her older genius through a scattered few songs from her (slides on hipster glasses) sophomore album, Actor, and its timeless gateway into the singer and guitarist that she’s become. It’s uplifted the quirky art-pop of Marry Me into something sharper, at times more sinister (“Marrow”), and at times more heartfelt (“Laughing With a Mouth of Blood”). Only two years into her solo career, and she’s already got a full brass section at her back, but even that couldn’t stop her as a singular, meteoric force; Actor proved that she had the plentiful talent to command a room and supercharge it with artfully jagged energy, always lingering on the edge of ecstasy and fear. Compared to some of the other tracks, “The Party” isn’t necessarily the captivating explosion of some of the other tracks, but it’s still an explosion in its own right. Like “Laughing,” it’s more downtempo both in instrumentation and lyricism; for the glut of the song, Annie Clark is only joined by spare drums and specks of tasteful piano chords as she wistfully recalls tired companionship with someone as a party winds down. There’s a kind of delirious drunkenness to it as Clark watches her subject fade through her fingers in the form of scant memory: “I licked the ice cube from your empty glass/Oh, we stayed much too late/’Til they’re cleaning the ashtrays.” Lines like “oh, that’s the trouble/of ticking and talking” are straight out of the cheeky, red-lipstick mannerisms of Marry Me, but as the song unfurls like a creature hatching from an egg, it’s a concentrated specimen of her growth in the years since. As her voice fades out of lyrics and into chorus, joined by a choir rising like fog, it feels like she has her finger lingering over the button to unleash chaos, a nuclear release of creativity. Drums skip beats and fade out of line, synths blip and crackle like they’re struggling to hang on, and Clark and her chorus rise from the waves like Aphrodite rising from the sea. For a section that occupies such a small space in the song, it crams so much dare I say cosmic fervor into only a minute and a half. If “Marrow” and “Actor Out of Work” are explosions, “The Party” is an explosion in slow motion, the kind you watch from afar as debris arcs over your head and flames balloon outwards into oblivion. It’s even more evident watching it unfold in Pitchfork’s Cemetery Gates series (why did they ever stop doing those, by the way?)—there’s no other way to hear the meticulous chaos, especially in its extended form, than in an old church, where surely, Clark’s talent reverberated through the walls like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

What I’m trying to say is that there is a right way to close out an album, and this is how.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Gilded Wolves – Roshani Chokshi – the image of a dying party and the faint, tender moments shared between the narrator and the unnamed character remind me of Séverin and Laila sharing a tense (but romantic) moment amidst magical glamour.

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: 1/28/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

Last Sunday Songs of the month, and…yep, more dreary colors. At least the actual weather is marginally less dreary. There’s still those gross piles of snow and dirt next to the sidewalk that just refuse to melt, but at least I can feel my hands now. Most of the songs aren’t nearly as dreary, I promise. Mostly upbeat, with some ominous instrumentals thrown in. Gotta keep y’all on your toes.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/28/24

“Sense of Doubt” – David Bowie

I’ve given up on listening to David Bowie’s discography in any semblance of order, since I’ve been listening to as much as I can on-and-off since I was about 12. But with every album I hear, I’m still staggered by the places that his experimentation took him, all the way up until his death. His creative juices truly runneth over, to put it lightly.

But, of course, in order to generate said creative juices, one must stimulate creativity and poke at your comfort zone. That’s how many of the tracks off of “Heroes” were born, with help from Brian Eno and his “Oblique Strategies” cards, which he designed as a way to provide musicians and artists with challenges on creative projects. The two each selected a card as they were making this track—Bowie drew “emphasize differences,” while Eno drew “try to make everything as similar as possible.” Seems like a frustratingly clashing set of cards, but I suppose that’s exactly why Eno made the deck and the first place. And, of course, if anybody could make these two concepts mesh…of course. It’s David Bowie, what can’t the man do? The result is “Sense of Doubt,” which feels like it was made to soundtrack the classic “dark and stormy night”—I can practically see bolts of lightning crackling behind the pointed spires of a looming castle as clouds bulge and darken in the distance, bellies full of thunder. Even with the chunky, brighter synth chords that punctuate this soundscape, nothing can make this song sound anything other than ominous; the piano chords feel like something out of a classic horror soundtrack, there’s a faint buzzing overhead that almost sounds like planes in the distance, as though war is imminent, and there’s a squeaky-door creaking that was first just the sound of a pick being dragged across guitar strings, but was later imitated by Bowie with his own voice. Somehow, the mime performance (see above) that Bowie performed to this song brings an entirely different sense of foreboding (never thought I’d say that about mime)—he repeats a gesture of moving his hand, gently rubbing his fingers, like something’s slipping away from them—sifting through the ashes of destruction wrought by his hand; what was sown has been reaped. “Sense of Doubt” echoes like a slick cavern, leaving you to wonder exactly what’s lingering in the darkness, because something is definitely waiting to strike.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Flowers for the Sea – Zin E. Rocklyn – the rain-soaked creeping dread of “Sense of Doubt” would fit right in with this brand of cramped, uncertain horror on a boat full of people you don’t fully trust (including your unborn baby).

“Heirloom” – Björk

It’s been about a year since I first listened to Vespertine, and I’ll continue to die on the hill that it’s a perfect winter album. Every song has the texture of newly fallen snow, and even amidst the frigid temperatures (the kind I’m sure she’s very familiar with, what with being from Iceland and all), it makes you see the glimmer in the gray sky and the diamond sparkle of snow when the moon shines on it. It’s cold, but not in an unwelcoming way.

Next to some of the other tracks on the album, “Heirloom” doesn’t stand out as a major highlight (but to be fair, it’s hard when your competition is “Cocoon”), but it’s so oddly sticky that you I couldn’t help but let it loop when it came on the other day. It doesn’t have the same immediate power as some of its sisters—in fact, even though I will always praise Björk and her endless fount of oddball creativity, but my first thought upon re-listening to this one was that the plinking drum machine and the single, off-kilter synth chord sounded like the times I was fooling around with random buttons on my keyboard when I was seven. Even for her, it’s discordant in a borderline sloppy way, but of course, it doesn’t take her long to turn the car around and craft another successful track. Once the full forest of synths and low, reverberating hums tangle everything together, it feels like the cohesively strange Björk I’ve come to know. Her lyrics are always arcane poetry (or…pagan poetry, even), but even though this one isn’t as dense of a story, there’s still a fairytale-like lilt to the way she rambles about “a recurring dream”; like the album’s undercurrent of body heat amidst winter’s cold, the warmth radiates from hazy dream-images—”I swallow little glowing lights/my mother and son baked for me/During the nights/They do a trapeze walk/Until they’re in the sky.” I almost get a Studio Ghibli-like image of the glowing lights, as if they’d have little pinprick eyes and smiling faces like the warawara from The Boy and the Heron.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Wide Starlight – Nicole Lesperance – this time, a mother’s “trapeze walk into the sky” is no dream, and it leads Eli to freezing and unexpected places.

“You and Oblivion” – Robyn Hitchcock

I had the incredible privilege of seeing Robyn Hitchcock on Friday night, and I’m now convinced that he’s some kind of cryptid prophet. Between most of the songs, he’d go on for a while about CDs and salami or vampires or whether or not there was a goldfish in his glass of water or his belief that the population of Britain consists of ghosts (“that’s how Brexit happened”), and that was honestly half the fun of the show—never once did I know what was coming, and it was hilarious. The other half of the fun was how immensely talented Hitchcock is as a musician—you don’t get the sense from much of his recordings, but there’s no doubt that he’s under-recognized as an incredibly skilled guitarist. My dad had been saying it over and over, and I believed him, but it was cemented when we saw Hitchcock with just an acoustic guitar strumming out whimsical hit after whimsical hit. Some of his playing bordered on the speed that I’ve only seen with Flamenco players. He’s hardcore.

In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best song to pick since he didn’t even play it on the setlist, but I’m trying to be honest about what I’m listening to (and also trying to fit this color scheme), and it’s still a lovely song. Structurally, it’s very simple—only about three chords top, and it hardly ever changes, but it has the quality of rolling hills, a comforting curve that stays soft under your feet; each strum is an anchor, a signpost on a flat, endless road. But as with every Robyn Hitchcock song, his whimsical lyrics always steal the show. This one calls to mind graying, autumnal images—after all, “All of the colors ran out/’Round mid-November-o.” I’ve certainly got…a multitude of questions after the “I remember your locks/And your virginity” (wh…why is that what you’re fixating on, my guy), but…[ahem] that aside, every graying vignette plucked from the depths of memory fills this song up like a gothic scrapbook, full of dancing dresses and dead leaves.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Lost Girls – Sonia Hartl – “This is the month of the dead/Leaves on your Ouija board” already conjures up some images similar to this book, but this one also has the kind of romance that cements itself in Holly’s mind—vampirism does that to a gal.

“Lose Control” (feat. Ciara & Fat Man Scoop) – Missy Elliott

Skip to 4:35-5:34 for “Lose Control.”

I watched part of this year’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame performances for two reasons, and two reasons only: Kate Bush (filled in for by St. Vincent) and Missy Elliott. Neither of them disappointed, especially with the absolutely showstopping, infectiously joyful, and meticulously arranged medley of songs that Missy Elliott and her backup dances performed. The video here doesn’t show it, but the official recording (you can stream it on Hulu) has a moment where the camera cuts to Annie Clark just completely slack-jawed at the whole spectacle, which is the only appropriate response, frankly. It’s glorious. And it’s because of this performance that I remembered that “Lose Control” existed. Setting aside that it’s an impeccably crafted and performed hip-hop song, I forgot that I even knew it in the first place because…well, I didn’t know that I knew it. The very second it started, the realization hit me like a freight train.

It’s the triangle song. It’s the dancing triangle song from those memes from early 2020.

MUSIC MAKE YOU LOSE CONTROL! MUSIC MAKE YOU LOSE CONTROL!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Song of Salvation – Alechia Dow – I feel like this kind of infectious dancing is just kind of asking to be associated with a fun space opera centered around rescuing a space DJ.

“Wanting and Waiting” – The Black Crowes

Now that I’ve gotten more into some of the history of the band, it…seems like a minor miracle that The Black Crowes have reunited, what with the band having been something of a ship of Theseus with members coming and going for decades, as well as the multitude of hiatus periods and the most recent breakup, many of which resulted from various feuds by brothers Chris and Rich Robinson. Either way, it was recently announced that the two seem to have buried the hatchet (for now) and have started making new music!

Like several bands I’ve come to love now, it took me a while to warm up to The Black Crowes; they were fairly ever-present in the speakers of my family car when I was a kid, but I remember being put off by the Southern rock twang (though I was far from being able to use those words at age six) when I first heard them. And even though I’m still not a twang aficionado, I can appreciate more country-leaning music (not fully country though, I’m not sure if I’ll ever dip my toes that far into the pool), and I know a foot-stomping earworm when I hear it. It seems like these years apart have not dulled the classic Black Crowes formula; other than the subtle, aging of Chris Robinson’s voice, “Wanting and Waiting” could have been plucked straight from the mid-’90s. Time has served them well—they’ve only sharpened their ability to craft a catchy rock song that’s full to bursting—there’s no shortage of instrumental flurries working in this machine, from the very country organ flourish at the beginning to the choir chanting “blood on fire” as the song triumphantly stomps to a close. This one’s a crowd-pleaser in the making; I’m not sure if I’m a big enough fan to want to listen to the rest of Happiness Bastards in full once it comes out, but if the rest of it is anything like this song, it’ll be a hit.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Hunger Makes the Wolf – Alex Wells – I feel like a fair amount of Black Crowes songs would fit with the Western-inspired aesthetic of the novel—it has that same scrappy, confident vibe to it that makes you want to stomp your feet.

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: 1/21/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

The fact that all of January’s color schemes have been somewhat dreary is a complete coincidence, but it fits with all the dead foliage, snow, and misery outside. One of the suckiest months, without a doubt. But this week is more fun, at least: throwbacks of all kinds, British Invasion remnants, and my 6th grade hyperfixations coming back to haunt me.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/21/24

“Rattlesnake” – St. Vincent

Last week, I was overcome by the urge to re-listen to several of my favorite albums. The urge was mostly just me going through Hunky Dory and part of Aladdin Sane on David Bowie’s birthday (happy 77th, wherever you are on Mars), but I decided to put off the first new-to-me album until I got back to school. (More on that next week.) So, for the first time since…oh, probably middle school, I listened to St. Vincent’s self-titled album in full—my third favorite album of all time, only beaten out by OK Computer and Hunky Dory in my book. I have no doubt that I’d give it the same praise had it not been this way, but St. Vincent is just one of those albums that’s been such an unmistakable part of my life that it’s practically embedded in my genetic material. I played this album into oblivion back in middle school, and it’s impossible to pull out a single memory I have tied to it, since it’s painted the landscape of the time when I was 11 to when I was about 13 so distinctly. Car rides, plane trips, afternoons clutching my iPod—Annie Clark was always there. Somehow, I also used to be able to listen to music while playing minecraft, and that album (along with Hunky Dory) was the soundtrack to many a sloppy house dug into the side of a hill. But now, after so many years of growth, this album remains as truly glorious as my younger self thought it was. Not a single hair out of place, and not a single note that isn’t pumped with energy and fervor. Every soaring, jerking guitar solo still sends me into the stratosphere, and every bloody-lipped turn of phrase never fails to light up my brain. There’s just a sheer power that shakes the earth with every song; even in the quieter moments, you can’t help but be hypnotized by the chrome world that Clark created. The robed, silver-haired persona that Clark took on during this era was self-described as a “near-future cult leader,” and I’ve always liked that aspect, but I can’t help but fully understand now. I usually think I’m a levelheaded person, but I’d join that cult, no questions asked. This brand of exhilarating power puts me under a spell every single time. It’s still crazy to me that there were a whopping five bonus tracks beyond the initial 11. They must’ve had to physically restrain her from creating the most masterful pieces of music and throwing them all on the album on the first go. We weren’t ready.

Way back in 2014, “Rattlesnake” was the first song off of this album that captured me. (“Birth in Reverse” came soon after, and for some reason, it took me longer to grow on “Digital Witness,” but now I adore it to death as much as the others.) At this point, I’d gone all the way into clinging onto St. Vincent’s music like a leech. For this song in particular, it was in no small part due to the fact that it clicked into my middle school WondLa hyperfixation perfectly (see below), and at age 12, there was no higher praise that I could give a song, however abysmally I misinterpreted it. There have been many such songs over the years, but for once, my analysis of this one wasn’t all bad—the comparison still works. “Rattlesnake,” like its namesake, is prickly all over; from the opening synths to the burning, angular guitar riff towards the end, which was apparently so intense that she sliced her finger while recording it in the studio. It’s jagged like lightning—if you could touch this song, it would snap back at you with a jolt of electricity. And as Annie Clark recounts an autobiographical experience of a “commune with nature” in the middle of the desert, her breathless verses brim with beads of sweat and uncertainty as she turns tail: “Running, running, running, rattle behind me/Running, running, running, no one will find me.” In between the heatstroked repetitions, Clark hides one of the many golden lines on this album: “I see the snake holes dotted in the sand/As if Seurat painted the Rio Grande.” God, if that isn’t a stellar image. Like a feral cat, “Rattlesnake” brims with fear and flexing claws, skittish and ready to bolt at the slightest wrong move. It’s a song that palpably crackles with unbridled energy, unleashed from desperation and the desert heat.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Search for WondLa – Tony DiTerlizzi – low-hanging fruit here (for me, at least), but for once, 6th grade me was onto something. It’s hard to find a song that fits this book better than the progression from “Am I the only one/In the only world?” to “I’m not the only one/In the only world.” (Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah, ah.) Healing my inner middle schooler.

“You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” – The Beatles

I’ve always wondered what the Help! album cover is supposed to mean—if I squinted, I thought they were spelling out the letters to “help” (Paul’s pose does look a bit like an L, but none of the others look like the right letters…); as it turns out, Robert Freeman, the photographer for the album cover, originally intended for them make the positions for spelling out “H-E-L-P” in flag semaphore, but he scrapped the idea since he thought that the Fab Four were distinctive enough no matter what pose they were striking, so he just had them…spell out gibberish in flag semaphore. The more you know.

Everything written about the versatility of the Beatles can’t be understated, but the more I listen to some of their earlier music, it’s clear that the kind of wild creativity that defined them was already gestating before they started getting into their more experimental period. Even if this is more of a tribute to Bob Dylan’s highly influential style than anything, they’ve still managed to make it so unmistakable Beatles. It’s one thing to be able to create a nice, downtempo folk tune with some scattered flutes and tambourine here and there, but even in such early days, the rhythm of “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” is so salient that you can’t help but be bobbed by it like a bottle floating over the sea. The whole song has the sway of a flimsy wooden boat on the ocean, gently pitched up and down by the waves with every strum of the guitar. John Lennon’s wavering, raspy inflections are jutting and precise in all the strangest places, but that’s part of what makes this so memorable—it’d be easy to record a cover of this with a flat voice inflected with enough melancholy to sell it, but there’s an enchanting storyteller’s waver in every word. It’s the kind of song that could draw a crowd through the woods—added with the image of the four Beatles standing shoulder, I imagine a slowly expanding crowd circling around them as Lennon sings “Gather ’round, all you clowns/Let me hear you say/Hey! You’ve got to hide your love away…”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Into the Heartless Wood – Joanna Ruth Meyer – “you’ve got to hide your love away” takes it pretty literally, but the both the melancholy folk sway and the uncertain, forbidden romance match this gorgeous modern fairytale.

“Come Lie Down With Me (And Sing My Song)” – Elf Power

We regret to inform you that I’m still riding the Elephant 6 high, even though I haven’t even seen the documentary yet. I’ll get to it eventually.

Unlike bands like the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power’s music usually doesn’t grab me instantaneously; there’s no denying their creativity, but it doesn’t often click with me the way that the other Elephant 6 bands do. Typically, I’ll just like the song, listen to it two or three times, and forget about it. Next to the raucous energy and whimsy of their compatriots, they seem more reserved. Reserved isn’t always a bad thing for me, but with the company they’re in, it seemed like they would have had something brighter to offer. “Come Lie Down With Me (And Sing My Song)” is similarly reserved, but it has an atmosphere that most of the other Elf Power songs I’ve listened to lack. Even if there wasn’t a mention of “rain on the sea,” this song is one of the rainier songs I’ve ever heard, practically the distorted gray of a windowpane streaked with falling rain. The acoustic, folksier approach is steeped in a strange, distant melancholy; the lyrics feel innocent enough—invitations of love in hidden spaces—but I can’t help but feel a sense of unease lurking in the background. It has the same eery air that a lot of age-old folk standards have, like something passed along during the Great Depression and whispered on the biting wind. It gives me the same lingering unease of a Syd Barrett song, like it wanted to be whimsical and innocent, but couldn’t deny some hidden darkness. And even if I’m not fully on the Elf Power bandwagon, there’s no denying that this feeling is a difficult one to replicate and successfully pull off.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Depths – Nicole Lesperance – rain on the sea, vague discomfort looming large.

“All Nerve” – The Breeders

It’s always fascinating to see the exact ways that a talented singer’s voice changes as they age. The inevitable deepening, and often thickening, that comes for everybody, but just like how each of our voices are unique, each voice changes uniquely. There’s David Bowie’s voice expanding its horizons, deepening like an incomprehensible chasm until it began to quiver at the edges, the soft, sonorous rumble that’s slowly crept into Damon Albarn’s voice as he’s reached middle age, and the whispering rasp that laces the edge of Kate Bush’s voice in her most recent recordings.

For Kim Deal, it’s like some sort of invisible bottom has opened up, making her voice thicken like firm cake batter after a good round of stirring with a spatula. It feels strangely compressed, like most of the airiness has been squeezed out, leaving the back of the throat emotion to clamber through the crawlspace that’s been left behind. But what age never left behind for any of the Breeders was the youthful, reckless spirit that seems to have defined them. This could’ve easily been written back in the ’90s and been an alternative hit, but it works just as well as it worked six years ago. Age has not dulled the spitfire sensibilities of their songwriting—”All Nerve,” as both the title and the album suggest, is just as sparking and feral as much of their other catalogue. The stripped down instrumentation, mostly just bass, sparingly plucked guitar, and faint drums that linger at the corners of your eardrums, make the lust and desperation all the more lusty and desperate. The bare-bones feel of it all, for the first minute or so, at least, add to the feeling of gathering up all you have left—be it physical belongings or strength—to race across whatever wasteland lies ahead to see “you/Especially you.” And it’s just like the Breeders to add the song’s repeated sucker-punch of “I won’t stop” just as the guitars come crashing down like rocks on the highway.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Skyhunter – Marie Lu – desperate love in wartime, the feral kind with bloodied steel wings.

“Sunny Afternoon” – The Kinks

Not to bring it back to Britpop, but I’m bringing it back to Britpop. The oft-quoted difference between Blur and Oasis was that Oasis aimed to be the next Beatles (which…even if their music was any good, that would still be presumptuous), but Blur was more interested in delving into the quirkier side of the British Invasion era, namely the Kinks. And even though I’ve been hearing The Kinks in the car from a young age, the more I listen to them, the more I realize just how much Blur gleaned from their lyrical style. The minute I heard “Sunny Afternoon,” I just realized that this was “Country House” before “Country House” was a thing. Chronologically, I guess it’d be the “Country House” sequel after the character’s dissatisfaction blows up and he loses everything. Also fits with “Charmless Man” quite well.

Setting aside my recent habit of listening to music with even the briefest mention of sunshine to get myself through the January doldrums, there’s such a unique texture to “Sunny Afternoon” that pervades in so many of the artists that they influenced, Blur included. There’s a lingering taste of the hottest days of the year, squinting your eyes through the sunlight as the warmth bakes your skin. Maybe a lingering taste of lemonade, something sweet…I guess an ice cold beer, in this case, but overshadowing the summer sweetness is the knowledge that this is all that the narrator has left, now that “The taxman’s taken all my dough/and left me in my stately home.” It’s not full melancholy, but a sarcastic imitation of it that’s only there to humor the narrator—enough to hammer in the point that…yeah, whoever this dude is, he probably had it coming, even if he did lose everything. Yeah, “All I’ve got’s this sunny afternoon,” but I suspect that whatever your (ex) girlfriend told her parents about that “drunkenness and cruelty” wasn’t entirely baseless. The whole song is just “awww, you poor baby, you can’t sail your yacht? Go cry about it.” “Sunny Afternoon” has a sly sort of playfulness, the kind that makes you imagine the narrator imagined as a cartoon character, moping onscreen as you pass The Kinks themselves. (The camera would pan over to Ray Davies, who’d do some kind of silly, exaggerated frown as this rich dude slips on a banana peel, or something.) And amidst all this, you’ve got some of the prettiest harmonies I’ve heard on a Kinks song in the chorus—”Lazing on a sunny afternoon” sounds like it’s misting away like droplets of water coming out of a sprinkler, gently dissolving in the heat.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Chosen and the Beautiful – Nghi Vo – usually, most of the books here are ones that I’ve enjoyed, but sometimes, there’s no denying the way a book and a song pair, even if you didn’t enjoy the book. This one wasn’t my favorite, but it’s a retelling of The Great Gatsby, so you can see where the “dissatisfied rich people losing everything” thread comes in.

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: 1/14/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

I…whoops, well, I forgot to mention this last week, but I’ve been writing Sunday Songs for a year now! This experience has given me a ton of room to learn about both myself and how I write about music (lesson #1: I should not write these posts in a single day), but I hope you all have enjoyed it as much as I have been. And I think the book pairings make it more fun, so I hope you’re all getting something out of them as well.

TRIGGER WARNING: one of these songs addresses abortion, so if you find this triggering, skip through the section on “Bellyache.”

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/14/24

“The Girl Who Fell to Earth” – Gaz Coombes

To begin this post: shoutout to a) musician parents who create the most beautiful pieces of music in honor of their children (David Bowie set an unattainable precedent for that kind of thing, as he regularly did, but it doesn’t negate everything else), and b) parents who wholeheartedly support their neurodivergent children. The latter is a low bar, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t reach it. So thank you firstly to my wonderful parents, and also thank you to Gaz Coombes.

I’m in the opinion that Gaz Coombes is severely under-appreciated; I’m guessing a lot of people mostly remember him from Supergrass, and what they remember of Supergrass is “Alright,” which, of course. It’s a fantastic song. (Also proof that the Clueless soundtrack was nothing but bangers.) But there was so much creativity and joy that was branded into the rest of Supergrass’ career, and that extended far beyond to Coombes’ more recent solo career. I’m still newish to it, but even from a handful of songs heard over the course of a decade or so, it’s clear that he just cannot stop making incredible songs, whether it’s a one-off covers album with fellow Supergrass bandmate Danny Goffey (maybe all that creativity was reserved for the music, because…man, there’s something weirdly uncomfortable about naming your band the Hotrats…) or the solo albums he’s steadily been putting out since the early 2010’s. They aren’t all hits, but when Coombes hits it just right, it feels like a call to arms, even if it’s lyrically different. There’s always a chugging, purely rock rush, an instantly swelling gravitas he brings to his best works, whether its the echoing call of “Long Live the Strange” or the instantly palpable urgency of “Detroit.”

“The Girl Who Fell to Earth” captured in my heart like the latter two songs, but not necessarily in the same way. There’s no assault of rushing guitars and choir on this one, and that’s not what it needs. It’s much quieter, and deeply tender that hit a note that I wasn’t expecting it to hit when I saw the title and my lizard brain went “oooooh ehehehehe space” and clicked on it on a whim. It scratches a highly specific, primal itch that not a lot of songs manage well. It’s one thing to make a song about being an outsider and making a song that caters to outsiders—I eat those up regularly, mark my words. But songs about loving an outsider—giving them care and appreciating them in spite of what others see as flaws—claw into my heart more deeply that I’d care to admit. No, it’s fine. I’ll admit it. I am not only deeply weird and proud of it, but also deeply sentimental. I walked into this song like Wile E. Coyote walking straight off a cliff, hovering in midair, and then dropping to the unfathomable, unforgiving depths below, only to come up with a comically large bruise on my head. (“Oh, look! There’s a large triangle of Swiss cheese in the vicinity! Surely there will be no strings attached…wait, where’d the sun go—”) There’s a reason I played “Beautiful Freak” by Eels into oblivion when I was in middle school. I wasn’t subtle. (Neither was my habit of watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army about once a month.) As much as later middle school me tried to fashion myself as somebody who wasn’t reliant on anybody (it was easier to do that when I had mostly shitty friends), I feel like a fundamental part of being an outsider is wanting to see yourself elsewhere—enough that it doesn’t become mainstream again, but enough to know that you’re not alone in this incomprehensible mess of a world that wasn’t made for us. I was a softie at heart, and that has never changed. It doesn’t matter what kind of love it is—we do want to be loved, in the end, somehow. And it’s made even more precious when you grow up and think that the world will never love you back. Every kind of love can be applied to this song, similarly to “Beautiful Freak”—it’s a universal arm around the shoulder to anyone who has ever felt othered, a clarion of warm acceptance towards the complexities of being on the fringes. (This song was apparently featured in a show called Modern Love, so they seem to have taken it the romantic way.) But knowing that Gaz Coombes wrote this about his autistic daughter makes the tenderness in my heart balloon even more than the initial emotion of that first listen. It gives me hope, to say the least, that there are people out there who are wholeheartedly accepting neurodivergent children in a world that still highly stigmatizes autism, among other conditions. Not that I ever thought that Gaz Coombes was horrible before this, but I respect him so much more not just because “The Girl Who Fell To Earth” exists, but also that he’s giving his daughter the childhood she deserves.

To all the girls who fell to Earth: you’re not alone.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron, #1) – Ashley Poston – off topic, but it’s crazy to see how much Ashley Poston has taken off in the past few years! This will always be my favorite book of hers, but I’m so glad to see that she’s finally getting the acclaim she deserves.

Some sort of sci-fi romance was always going to be the pairing for this song, but the minute I heard “warrior child”…yup. Step right up.

“Rocket’s Tail” – Kate Bush

If you told me to guess the artist of a song that’s unexpectedly emotionally soul-vibrating but was literally just inspired by a cat, I’d immediately guess that Kate Bush had made it. She doesn’t always hit it for me, but when she does, I just about collapse. Of course she just saw her cat being a silly little creature and decided to squeeze the most primal emotion out of it. Just for kicks and giggles, y’know?

Just like she made the grooviest song about getting transformed into a kite against your will (at age 19, no less), she somehow got one of the only (mostly) a capella songs that makes me really feel things from “I’ve got a cat named Rocket and he’s cute lol,” basically. Like most of her songs, what’s on the surface isn’t necessarily what matters; it would have been 100% on brand for her to intentionally write a song about strapping a canister of gunpowder to your back and becoming one with the rocket, but what Rocket the cat apparently inspired her was the fleeting joy in spontaneity—to her, ”there’s nothing wrong with being right here at this moment, and just enjoying this moment to its absolute fullest, and if that’s it, that’s ok, you know. And it’s kind of using the idea of a rocket that’s so exciting for maybe 3 seconds and then it’s gone.” That alone would have made for an excellent song, but there’s nothing like the chorus that opens the song—the harrowing, wavering harmonies of Trio Bulgaria, for whom Kate Bush partially wrote the song to showcase their voices, transport me back to some early, Pleistocene state. I feel like I’ve been summoned to hoist up my spear and join my clan to take down a mammoth, or something. Bush just generates that effect with many of her harmonies—the songs that I love most of hers are the ones that tap into the urge to drop everything, grow my hair long, and sprint through the woods in a flowing, white dress. (see: not to be That Pretentious Music Person, but my favorite song of hers, the B-Side “Burning Bridge.”) The harmonies she concocts, whether or not it’s her singing, are incredibly effective on that front. I would’ve bought into all of this song if it was all that it was, but of course, Kate Bush, being Kate Bush, knew that the only thing better than “Rocket’s Tail” was “Rocket’s Tail” with the most glorious guitar solo kicking in right at the moment the rocket launches. Performed by Dave Gilmour, no less. That’s how you make a song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Deep Sky – Yume Kitasei – the pure, emotional resonance of “Rocket’s Tail” lends itself to this song—can’t you imagine this song playing between vignettes of Asuka’s crisis on Earth and the launch into space?

“Bellyache” – Echobelly

Ever since my Blur Breakdown™️ back in mid-2021, I’ve been grasping at all of the Britpop I can get my hands on. (Well…not all the Britpop. Not to be That Blur Fan™️, but every Oasis song I’ve hear just make me seethingly angry. Also, I can’t shake the gut feeling that both Noel and Liam Gallagher look like they’d call me every applicable slur without hesitation.) Granted, Blur has mostly dominated my extended Britpop Breakdown™️, but I’ve dabbled in a fair bit of Pulp (probably concerning how many times I listened to “TV Movie” back in 2022) and Suede, and I’ve been neck-deep in Supergrass and Super Furry Animals since I was old enough to comprehend music as a concept. Part of what most agree defined the genre was social commentary—specifically on British life, as the name suggests, but for at least until it became more of a tabloid battle of the bands mess, that was the foundation that albums like Parklife (AAAAAAAAAAAALL THE PEOPLE) and songs like “Common People” (I haven’t seen Saltburn yet but I’ve heard about the Pulp joke…genius) were built upon. But even though said commentary was appropriately potent and often as clever as can be, there’s only so much you can do with it in a genre that was fronted by mostly white men. I’ve yet to get into the more women-fronted faces of Britpop (Elastica and Sleeper and such), but Echobelly caught my eye not just because it was women-fronted; again, in a sea of mostly white men, here was a band fronted by Indian-born Sonya Madan, and featuring Debbie Smith—a Black woman—as one of the band’s guitarists.

And even from the sparse handful of songs I’ve sampled from them, it’s already clear that Madan succeeded in her mission to highlight the areas of social commentary and topics that not just Britpop, but much of mainstream music in general, rarely shed light on. Not only that, but many of them weren’t just lyrically clever, but clever enough that they’re not immediately evident on the first listen. A first go-around at “Bellyache” seems like something about a relationship gone sour—the chorus’ repetition of “What do I care/what do I care now that it’s over” could easily point in that direction. Much of the instrumentation points to that kind of embittered bite—the clean guitars are undeniable, but all cloaked in a layer of scratchiness and grime that makes it feel as grainy and obscured as the background of Everyone’s Got One (an album title that was partially created to make the acronym “E.G.O.”). But Madan specifically wrote this song about a friend getting an abortion—the lyrics hit me right in the face the minute that I found that out, but it speaks to Madan’s songwriting ability; not only was this a pretty taboo subject to address at the time, especially as one of EGO‘s lead singles, but it transformed such a deeply traumatic experience into something that could fly under the radar when needed, but still retained the emotional weight needed to address it. Just because it’s not immediately evident doesn’t mean that it doesn’t portray the trauma of both Madan and her anonymous friend. It’s obvious that there’s no easy way to write about this subject, but personally, Madan’s method is as tactful a way that I can think of.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid – although the trauma itself is different from the song, this novel crafts a similar sense of unease and discomfort—and addresses trauma in a similarly clever way.

“Beehive” – Mark Lanegan Band

This is the last song I’d pick for a coming of age movie, but I just have such a vivid memory attached to it from when I was in middle school. I was with all the girls in my class at a friend’s house before the graduation dance, at the end of 7th grade. We were all having snacks in her backyard. It was probably mid-May, warm with the promise of summer. And I was on her swing set, swinging as high as I could, and all that was going through my head was this song. Not a firecracker summer yet, but pretty close. The manicured grass was damp and glowing with the light of the afternoon fading into evening. Middle school as it was, everything felt greener.

Even though “Beehive” has been coming back to me in waves since that moment when I was 13, I’d never seen the music video until then. I almost wish I hadn’t seen it, since the image that I have in my head of it is so clear; it feels like there should be gray walls in a dilapidated house, blinds being rattled in the wind from freezing wind, household objects flying like a tornado around a crouching, shadowed figure, and speakers crackling with lightning, like the song says. Basically like this scene from Legion. But the trailer park vampire couple fits in their own way. Let’s hope that they get back home before the sun comes up. Stay safe, y’all.

Somehow, I’ve mostly appreciated Mark Lanegan through his solo work—I distantly know about his work with the Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, but most of what I hold closest is from more recent albums like this. I always think of how strange it is that I felt the sadness that I did when he passed back in 2022—in the grand scheme of things, I really only know a handful of his songs, and yet the ones I do know have etched themselves so distinctly in the musical map of my lifetime, even in the most fleeting of memories (see also: “Carnival”). They weren’t necessarily the kind that helped me through dark times or lifted me up in the bright ones, but they were just so clear that they were uniquely there, like the kind of painting you see at an art museum that hangs itself up in your brain the minute you lay eyes on it. (It was also late February when I heard the news, freezing and slushy, and we were driving home from the airport, so part of the miserable air can probably be attributed to February™️ and the sensory hell of the Denver Airport. Neither are pleasant.) “Beehive” just has such a specific atmosphere to it that I can’t attach to any other song. Even if the background of the minimalist Gargoyle album art wasn’t that shade of light gray, it would instantly call to mind that roiling, warmish shade of gray of the sky brewing up a storm above a beach with churning waves carving fingerprints onto the shore. I remember it like I remember being in Boca Grande some years back, watching storm clouds churn into themselves above the graying ocean through the window of a hotel room. Lanegan’s gravelly, raw-throated rasp buzzes just like the bee’s nest in his head, making the imagery of “lightning coming out of the speaker” and “press[ing] my body against the window/In an electric storm” uncommonly vivid in my head. It’s a song worth dragging your chair up to listen to, no matter your experience with Mark Lanegan.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ones We’re Meant to Find – Joan He – not a lot of songs have the combination of sounding like a summer storm and crackling electricity at the same time. Not a lot of books pull off both either, but this one does.

“Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” – Arctic Monkeys

I sit at my laptop, pasting the link to this song into this post. I change into a tennis skirt, docs, and a striped top. You suddenly see the world with a slightly grainy filter. You can’t place the color, but something has shifted. Only two words come to mind: “Tumblr” and “aesthetic.”

I leave.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Stars and Smoke – Marie Lu – similar atmosphere of nightlife, late-night calls, and romance.

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: 1/7/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy first Sunday of 2024, bibliophiles! I hope the first week of the year has treated you well.

We’re starting off the year with: songs I’ve rediscovered from scattered parts of my childhood, songs that feel like childhood, and more song titles referencing Norway in a single album than anybody bargained for. Certainly not me. Only thought that Kevin Barnes only sprinkled them in three at a time.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/7/24

“Sink the Seine/Cato as a Pun” – of Montreal

I don’t know how it took me this long to listen to Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? given how much of Montreal dominated my taste in my freshman year of high school. Chances are it’s because Radiohead came along shortly after and I never recovered, but it’s still taken me an embarrassingly long time to come back to this album in its entirety. And yes, it’s pretentious as all get out—the album (as well as anything from of Montreal’s catalogue) is full of songs with titles like “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” and “We Were Born Mutants Again with Leafling.” (There is a song that’s over 10 minutes long in the mix, how’d you guess?) But aside from the in-built pro that you don’t need to put “of Montreal” after the song titles when you google them (I’d be hard-pressed to find another, completely original song called “Labyrinthian Pomp”), it’s pretentiousness that I can indulge in; there’s no denying that Kevin Barnes is showing off their literary/historical/etc. chops, but it’s both so clever and so catchy that there’s no denying the goodness in it.

Even within an album where almost every title warrants English class-level analysis (and then turns out to be not that deep half the time), there’s always time to dance. (Go back to “Heimdalsgate” and “Sentence.”) If there’s anything that Barnes has mastered in their prolific career, it’s how to make any kind of crisis catchy, be it religious, romantic, existential, or otherwise. I’ve lumped “Sink the Seine” and “Cato as a Pun” together because they’re essentially the same song, but I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all—although the album is made so that each song smoothly transitions into the other, the brevity of “Sink the Seine” and the underlying themes that bleed into “Cato as a Pun” make it a very singular narrative within the plentiful dirty laundry aired in Hissing Fauna. “Sink the Seine” starts out with an almost fawn-voiced Barnes searching for the person they once knew after distance has grown between them—I’m assuming the Seine they’re referring to is the river, but there’s a desperate drowning that they’re at first willing to do—the impossible task of sinking a river in their quest to find the past in a present form. But by the time “Cato as a Pun” rolls around—and, contrary to the people arguing on lyric websites here and there, is apparently just referring to someone’s cat named Cato—it’s much more bitter and up-front; now, the desperation has grown into wanting this person to “play with [their] head” just to obscure the fact that so much of a gulf has grown between them. Barnes has frequent, literary bangers when it comes to their usually purple prose-y lyrics, but there’s no denying that their talent is no less evident in their undressed lyrics—”What has happened to you and I?/And don’t say that I have changed/’Cause man, of course I have.” Efficacy in getting your message across isn’t a one-way street—just ask Kevin.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The First Bright Thing – J.R. Dawson – both of these songs combined bring the complicated relationship between the Ringmaster and the Circus King in this novel—especially the distance and plentiful mind games.

“Fluffy” – Wolf Alice

Nothing like a neutered cat to inspire a song, huh? Or at least the video, at any rate…either way, it’s funny. Pour one out for poor old Fluffy.

I may not be a fan of pop-punk (why does it even exist? It’s like they just said “let’s make punk commercial, even though that’s exactly what punk isn’t supposed to be”), but I’m still a sucker for a loud, screamy song about recklessness and breaking away from the mold. It’s the kind of music that makes for good additions to character playlists. This one’s gonna wind up on one of mine someday, mark my words. Up until this point, my introduction to Wolf Alice was through what seems to be the more disparate ends of their musical spectrum; way back in middle school, I got attached to their indie friendship anthem “Bros” through the radio (and what a joy it was to hear it again in season 2 of Heartstopper), and a few years back, I heard the much more refined, but heavier “Smile,” from their most recent album, Blue Weekend. “Fluffy” is on the heavier side, for the most part, and it feels like one of the better takes on the age-old “I wanna get out of this town” song (see again: pop-punk). It’s got none of the whine that usually comes along with the subject matter, and the jagged, bitter bite that it was missing all along. You really do feel like this song was born in a dilapidated junkyard, or even the rusty back alley that parts of the music video were filmed in. If anyone else did the sarcastic shout of “Sixteen/so sweet!” in the chorus, I’d roll my eyes without a doubt, but Ellie Rowsell gives it the raspy, pent-up rage that many a musician has been going for. And there’s nothing like pounding, crunchy guitars to accompany that. This is angst done right, for sure.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Salvation Gambit – Emily Skrutskie – the thrill-seeking lyrics, combined with all those crunching guitars, are the perfect fit for Murdock, this novel’s fiery protagonist, in both the past and the present.

“Where Have All The Good People Gone?” – Sam Roberts

Here’s another one I have to thank my dad for—somehow, I find myself missing this song, even though it’s finally in my ears after going so long without hearing it.

“Where Have All The Good People Gone?” was a distant drifter in my childhood—I swear that I have a memory gathering cobwebs in the back of my mind of hearing this song playing from the speaker on our old TV, back when we played our music from my parents’ chunky iPod. And I feel like even if I had known Sam Roberts’ name (and the name of this song) beforehand, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Poor dude’s cursed with one of the ultimate “just some guy” names aside from…I dunno, John Smith? When you google his name, this particular Sam Roberts, as far as his solo career is concerned, doesn’t show up until the 5th link. (At least his Sam Roberts Band shows up first. There’s that. Then it’s mostly a radio personality named Sam Roberts??) But it seems like he has plenty of acclaim in his native Canada, so I guess we Americans are most of the ones scratching our heads to try and come up with his name. Even this song didn’t pop out to me as familiar until I heard him sing the chorus—”where have all the good people gone?” And then it clicked. Random childhood memory that I didn’t even know that I’d stored: accessed. Elvis Costello was the comparison that immediately came to mind—it certainly has a much more distinctly 2000’s indie/folk-rock flavor, but lyrics like “Oh, the Milky Way/Has gone a little sour/The leaves dried and the flower fell away” or “The modern world is a cold, cold world/And all I meet are cold, cold girls” (maybe you’re the problem? Kidding, but…) just reek of that practiced tightness that Costello represents for me. But as opposed to the smart suits and sunglasses of Costello (or…the green shirts, even),”Where Have All The Good People Gone?” is all stomping boots, jean jackets, and patches of dust, and not in the country pastiche kind of way. It has no trouble feeling exactly how it wants to feel.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Anthem – Noah Hawley – this book is decidedly leagues more bleak and fatalistic than Sam Roberts seems to be, but at its core, it asks the same question: where have all the good people gone?

“Treehouse” (feat. Emily Yacina) – Alex G.

Somehow, this didn’t surface in the weeklong period in early 2020 where I ferreted through a few Alex G songs on a whim and then forgot about him. He’d always been a specter on my Apple Music—every time I went back to Car Seat Headrest, he was always lurking there in the “similar artists” bar. What I’ve listened to of his sort of gleans that comparison, but from the looks of it, his earlier stuff seems more reminiscent of Car Seat Headrest. Thus why I’m almost a little scared to get in too deep with his music, after the irreparable change in my brain chemistry that happened when I first heard “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” on the radio when I was 13. I’m an adult now, I doubt I can have that kind of pure, concentrated angst keeling me over without major consequences…

Yet in spite of all that, this song is one of the most calmingly innocent things I’ve encountered in the past few months. I don’t know how much of it is because Alex G himself isn’t fully at the wheel—all of the vocals are sung by Emily Yacina, and from my limited scope of Alex G, I feel like his flat, indie drawl doesn’t quite fit with the playful, childlike quality of this song, but I guess he recognized that enough to put this song in Yacina’s hands. Somehow, the bedroom construction of this song—nothing but synths and drums machines—distorts Yacina’s voice in such a way that she sounds like she has braces, which makes the song feel even more like a vignette of childhood—”What do you think of my treehouse?/It’s where I sit and talk really loud/Usually, I’m all by myself.” It makes me feel like there should be a slightly off-putting Tim Burton character (probably voiced by Winona Ryder) inviting you into her treehouse and playing games with you; it’s easy to get the feeling that the character in the song is eager to have any kind of friendship. It’s pure, but never in a saccharine way—it’s like someone put some footage from a home video into song, just kids running off into the woods and playing with sticks.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I love this part – Tillie Walden – like Jay Som, Tillie Walden’s style of beauty in simplicity lends itself to this kind of doe-eyed bedroom pop.

“Birds in Perspex” – Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians

I’m not about to rescind my statement about how of Montreal’s quirky song titles make them much easier to search on YouTube, but they’re not the only ones. Again, I ask: who else has made a completely original song called “Birds in Perspex”?

Over the past few months, I’ve been picking up Robyn Hitchcock songs here and there in an attempt to school myself before I see him at the end of the month (!!). Most of what I end up skimming around, save for his more recent material (he’s been consistently cranking out music with various bands and as a solo artist since the ’70s…absolutely prolific king), ends up turning up as some nostalgic tidbit from my childhood that I’d entirely forgotten about. Riffling about his catalogue almost feels like I did when I was a kid looking for bugs in the yard—there’s something odd and wonderful hidden under every rock. Take “Birds in Perspex.” I clicked on it on iTunes just because of the oddball title, but I didn’t expect for the full force of miscellaneous childhood car rides to come speeding back at me. Like my faint recollection of “Tender” before I heard it again in high school (for at least a decade, all I remembered was the “come on, come on, come on/get through it” part), the tiniest slice of the chorus had been bonking around in my head on and off for years—I recognized “Birds in Perspex” the minute I heard “come alive” in the chorus. Just like most of his songs, there’s a charmer’s whimsy about it that, it seems, has never faded with age; behind the glossy, folky strumming, Hitchcock immediately admits that “Well I take off my clothes with you/But I’m not naked underneath/I was born with trousers on.” Y’know. Just another day at the office. Presumably after a rather eventful encounter with Balloon Man. As the song goes on, it’s so bizarrely romantic that you feel like you’d be seduced if he’d written this song about you. Robyn Hitchcock has the kind of voice fit for a black turtleneck. a cigarette, and love notes stuffed with rose petals, but I’m honestly so much more glad that he stuck with his whimsical weirdo style.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Magonia – Maria Dahvana Headley – an equal amount of confident weirdness and birds to Hitchcock and co. Also, giant bats.

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!