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.
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).
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!
The Bookish Mutant 