Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: were it not for me yapping about Horsegirl earlier this week, this post would be unfathomably long…sorry. Stick around for my rambling hitting concerning levels the minute I have more free time.
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 3/2/25
Since A Ghost Is Born got its anniversary reissue a few weeks back, I took the time to listen to the album in its entirety for the first time…surprising, I know! That being said, I’d basically listened to all but two tracks on the album, but I hadn’t gotten to listen to it all the way through in the right order. After a childhood being fed Wilco by my dad about as much as I was fed milk as a baby (both were nourishing and necessary for my development), only two tracks remained: “Wishful Thinking” and this track. It’s songs like “Less Than You Think” that make me remember how much of a poet Jeff Tweedy is. I don’t say that about every singer; in the abstract, music is poetry set to song, but it doesn’t often feel that way. In this case, it’s understandable that the poetry of “Less Than You Think” gets lost in the other masterpieces in Wilco’s catalogue. But it’s not just a case of an underrated track—there’s a reason this one gets lost in the fray so often. For three minutes, it’s any normal Wilco song—one of their sadder ballads, but standard Wilco fare…
…and then you realize that there’s 12 minutes left.
That 12 minutes is entirely composed of a shrill, grating stretch of electronic droning and background noise from the studio. To say that it’s excruciating to listen to, especially with the volume up after listening to the actual song part, is almost an understatement. It’s unpleasant in every sense of the word. Yet that’s precisely the point. Not to be the “🤓☝️ erm ackshually, this nigh-unlistenable 12 minutes of noise has a deep meaning that’s essential to the understanding of the song,” but…it does. It’s unlistenable because it’s meant to be unlistenable—Tweedy and the rest of the band used this song to recreate the experience of having chronic migraines, a condition Tweedy has had all his life, but was exacerbated by his painkiller addiction: “I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had.” Tweedy put “Less Than You Think” out anyway, knowing that it’d be “the track everyone will hate,” saying that “I know ninety-nine percent of our fans won’t like that song, they’ll say its a ridiculous indulgence. Even I don’t want to listen to it every time I play through the album. But the times I do calm myself down and pay attention to it, I think it’s valuable and moving and cathartic. I wouldn’t have put it on the record if I didn’t think it was great.” And he’s right. Being so experimental with this catharsis brings us so much closer to the experience than words ever could, as much as a master wordsmith as Tweedy is. Catharsis for a pain as profound as this doesn’t have to be listenable or tolerable to be worth putting out into the world—it’s catharsis, after all. Sure, I’ve skipped it every time I’ve listened to it since, but once again…that’s the point. We’re meant to sympathize with Tweedy’s pain, but even he admits that it’s not exactly easy listening. (Some absolutely diabolical individual in the YouTube comments called it “the best song to tee up on the bar jukebox right before you leave…” Satan, is that you?)
But that glorious, incandescent three minutes before you get the worst headache you’ve ever experienced? Deeply moving, in an entirely different way. They got me. They got me good with the sad bastard music. The piano is played with such a heaviness that you can only imagine it being played with lead weights strapped to each finger. Delicate taps of the dulcimer climb up an invisible ladder, each strike coinciding with Tweedy’s repetition of “Lightly tapping/a high-pitched drum.” And for a song that Tweedy knew would be an instant skip for most of his listener, he packed it with some of A Ghost is Born‘s most downright poetic lyrics:
“As your spine starts to shine
You shiver at your soul
A fist so clear and climbing
Punches a hole in the sky
So you can see
For yourself
If you don’t believe me
There’s so much less
To this than you think…”
Yeah, I pulled a Lisa Hannigan again. I’m tempted to just copy and paste all of the lyrics. Punches a hole in the sky? More like punches a hole in my soul, ow. Though the lyrics toy with the chaos of the universe and the clarity of realizing that maybe everything hasn’t been choreographed by a higher power, I can’t help but connect it with Tweedy’s migraines—all the talk of shivering and “Your mind’s a machine” sounds an awful lot how I imagine living with both migraines and addiction must feel: a cycle of dullness and excruciating pain, exposing how much of the brain has been devoted to going through the motions. As for the solemn resignation to atheism, it connects to that experience—it seems pain that immeasurable makes you either seek out or entirely swear off of religion without a happy medium. With or without words, Tweedy conjures a pain he had to exorcise from his person, yet is able to resonate if you’re willing to dig through the earth to find it. Sometimes you have to make art from agony in order to make the burden lighter, whether or not you give it to the world. In any case, Jeff Tweedy makes the pain worth weathering.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling – Lucy Frank – told in sparse verse, these two characters go through a similar pain as they work through chronic pain diagnoses in the same hospital.
Today, on: Madeline listens to Björk’s discography wildly out of order…we’ve come to Debut. It’s another one of those albums that I’d listened to about half of already, but it was just track after track of honed energy and happiness…seriously, this album couldn’t have come at a better time in my life. I think listening to Post about this time last year and Debut now feel aligned with my life in some way. A lot of Björk’s experience at the time was drawn from moving from Iceland to the UK in her late twenties, and being adventurous, putting out her feelers, and embracing the newness of it all, taking everything in (see: “Enjoy”). In some ways, I feel a connection to that kind of exploration. Now that I’ve shed most of the apprehension of freshman year (though definitely not all), I feel like I’m slowly beginning to grow into a new place, a new home, a new environment. I know I’m a little dramatic about that…I’m going to a college that’s less than an hour away from my hometown, so I can’t quite compare. But there came a time when I realized I was living in a whole new place, and I’d barely scratched the surface of everything in it. After the initial crisis, I’ve begun dragging my friends to whatever new place that I can find. Baby steps, but I’m slowly cataloguing new restaurants that I’ve tried. New routes to class. New coffee places on campus, now that Starbucks jumped on the DEI-stripping bandwagon. I’m not throwing myself headfirst into a new city, immersing myself in the early ’90s rave nightlife like Björk did, but I can’t help but connect to that apprehension, that excitement of really knowing you’re somewhere new, physically and emotionally. I’d do well to take it to heart the more I grow up.
“Big Time Sensuality” embodies Björk’s absorption of ’90s house music while in London, and even though it’s far from the weirdest part of her catalogue, you can’t take the weird out of Björk. Even amidst the house beats behind her, you can’t erase the skyrocketing highs and growls that, even for her firs solo effort, were already staples of her vocal style. Despite what the title would have you believe, there’s nothing necessarily sexual about it, yet it retains the ecstasy you’d think it would have. This ecstasy, however, comes from a common theme on Debut: reaching out and taking risks to soak the fullest out of life: “I don’t know my future after this weekend/And I don’t want to.” Its heart is imbued with the rush of friendship, throwing your passion into your music, and independence in a few environment: Björk told David Hemingway that the song’s inspiration came from “[Creating] pretty deep, full-on love relationships with friends…I can be a coward a lot of the time and there comes a moment when I write a song when I get quite brave.” “Big Time Sensuality” throws itself face first into uncharted waters, all with a dimple-stretching grin. Björk’s already diverse vocal range embodies the chorus of “It takes courage to enjoy it/The hardcore and the gentle.” And the music video, directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, embodies that daring joy, with Björk dancing on the back of a truck bed driving through New York City, baring her grin for all to see.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2) – Becky Chambers – Lovelace’s journey of having a body, separating herself from her old identity, and being a part of the sapient world mirrors much of the eager excitement of Debut.
All the cool people like Wire. I’m not saying that to assert that I’m [snaps fingers] hip (that alone proves that I’m really not). It’s more that if you rattle off any creative, clever band from the past three to four decades, they all name Wire as an influence–Sonic Youth, R.E.M., and Soundgarden are just a handful of people touched by their music, and you can hear their genealogy in grunge, hardcore punk, and even Britpop. (Heavy on the Britpop. See Elastica’s “Line Up,” one of several songs that Wire took Elastica to court over claims of plagiarism.) Want proof? How about Wire playing with Jon Spencer and St. Vincent back in 2015? See what I mean? They’re the great uniters. All the cool people like Wire.
For all intents and purposes, Wire left their more punk sound behind with Pink Flag (see “12XU”), trading it for a minimalist, synth-dominated sound on Chairs Missing. To my ear, it sounds like the musical equivalent of brutalism; to the touch, every texture is rough as concrete, but every edge is sanded down to absolute straightness. Graham Lewis’ thick bass dominates the sound, rippled through with guitars, handclaps, and a wall of synth so dense that it becomes more percussion than the actual drums. I can’t help but hear some leftover punk not in the sound, but in the lyrics. Houseflies don’t sound particularly punk at first glance (nor does Graham Lewis’ apparent thing for writing about winged insects on this album)—they’re more for being stepped on by a pair of massive docs than the subject of a song. But yet, this simple animal becomes so deeply punk: “I am the fly in the ointment/I can spread more disease than the fleas/Which nibble away at your window display.” At its core, punk is has always been about disruption, whether that’s in the abrasive quality of the music or grating against the establishment. A fly is a fundamental nuisance, a tiny speck of a creature that, as the song says, spreads disease so easily, ripping up the threads in the fabric of something pristine and perfect. No matter how many swings you take at them with a flyswatter, they always come out, reproducing rapidly…just like disease, and just like resistance. Even with the dry intonation of the lyrics, it reads to me as a deeply proud song, a finger crossed behind the back and a smirk on the face as the time bomb counts down its last second. It’s a promise, and it’s a declaration of purpose: disturbance.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Countess – Suzan Palumbo – “But there’s an air-pellet hole/I can crawl through to you/I am the fly in the ointment/I can spread more disease than the fleas/Which nibble away at your window display…”
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
If You Still Recognize Me – Cynthia So – “In the morning, when you’re sleeping/I can’t wait and I can’t wait to compromise…”
How does it feel? How does it feel for those of you with the right names to share a name with a Cocteau Twins track? For all of the Loreleis, Amelias, Beatrixes, Ivos, Carolyns, etc…do you realize how lucky you are?
Out of all of the Cocteau Twins songs I’ve heard, “Amelia” is one that embodies their general qualities the most, taken almost to an extreme. Regardless of whether or not I could hear the lyrics even if they weren’t nonsensical, they’re sunken so deep into the production that they become a kind of fog-like mist. The unmoored, bass-less flow of the track reminds me of something off of Victorialand, a record where bassist Simon Raymonde was notably missing. Liz Fraser’s vocals are as textural as ever, uttering a whole menagerie throat-fluttering bird calls amidst a barrage of gated reverb that descends upon you like the patter of heavy rain on a windshield. Next to some of their other tracks, it feels slightly less cohesive—the intensity of the gated reverb, reverb’d into high heaven as it is, doesn’t completely mesh with the airiness of the vocals or the other instrumentation. Somehow, it’s almost comforting—the Cocteau Twins stand out to me as a band who truly found their niche and stuck to it, digging in their heels to make that niche as unique and them as possible in the most artistic and adventurous way. Weirdly, it comforts me that it took them time to get their rhythm down, and even then, their earlier steps still blow me away. “Amelia” certainly does—the sheer variety of vocal styles that Fraser layers over one another is proof that even on a record that the band famously hated, their nascent talent couldn’t help but shine in its own way.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Meru – S.B. Divya – I can only imagine that the experience of being a god-like Alloy and floating in space sounds something like the Cocteau Twins.
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!
The Bookish Mutant 