Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: bright green to match the verdant buds sprouting on the tre—oh, god, not again, WHY IS IT SNOWING…
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 4/21/24
“Questions and Answers” – The Apples in Stereo
Note: this isn’t the official music video (there isn’t one), but it is in my eyes. Somebody just put this song in the background of videos of their cats in 2009. And they’re some friggin’ cute cats. I miss the days when YouTube used to be a simple, wholesome place…
I would have talked about this album…oh, a good three weeks ago, but I stubbornly made several color palettes that didn’t match Her Wallpaper Reverie at all, so I’ve regretfully withheld from it until now. Somehow, it was only the second Apples in Stereo album that I’ve listened to all the way through (the first was Travellers in Space and Time, but that was ages ago, so this felt like the first), and it’s just about the jangliest, summeriest (glad that’s actually a word) album I’ve heard in ages. By then, Robert Schneider and company had carefully chiseled their craft so that everything sounded like either a lost Beach Boys demo, some kind of space-age, robot dance break, or somewhere in between. (You’d be surprised at the commonalities between the two. They make it work.) You’ve got the cut-and-dry indie, almost Pavement-like “Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend)” on one end, and “Drifting Patterns,” a thicket-dense, borderline anxiety-inducing instrumental that sounds like it should be playing in the entry hallway to the space exhibit in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on the other, but there’s no sense that either are out of place; strung together by a sprinkling of instrumental bites that clock in at less than a minute long, Her Wallpaper Reverie just feels like a showcase of the exact range that The Apples in Stereo are all about.
“Questions and Answers” stood out as a favorite for me—it’s squarely on the “we’re making the jangliest jangle-pop song known to man and we cannot be stopped” side of The Apples in Stereo, but you know me. I’m eating it up. It’s such a shame that Hilarie Sidney, their longtime drummer, left the band in the first place (but it’s understandable, given that she’d just recently divorced Schneider), but I find myself wishing that they’d lent her more opportunities for her to have lead vocals (see also: “Sunndal Song” and “Stay Gold”). She has a command of her voice in such a similar way to Schneider that they both could fit into any song he wrote; they both have a nasally quality that never grates—it just would feel weird for an Apples in Stereo song to not be nasally sung, somehow. But in this case, Sidney was the better choice to lead “Questions and Answers”; as much as I love Schneider, I can’t quite see him getting quite the same vocal sway and tightness that Sidney brings here. Maybe that’s because I’m having trouble envisioning him singing in the same key that Sidney is singing in, but I swear that “Questions and Answers” wouldn’t be the same without the way that she stretches the vowels in “moon” out like taffy in the hot sun or her unrelenting devotion to this song’s impressively airtight rhythm.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – the bounciness of “Questions and Answers,” plus all of the references to moons and star maps, would fit right into Chambers’ cozy galaxy.
“Yesterday’s World” – Circulatory System
Yup. Sorry. Get ready for some more Elephant 6-posting this week. Sometimes the urge just overcomes me.
Elephant 6, in terms of its bands, tended to cross-pollinate quite a bit: chances are, if you take any given band from there, at least three members of said band will have been in or formed other bands on their own, also in Elephant 6. Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel fame was, for a time, in The Apples in Stereo, as was Bill Doss (rest easy), who was half of the brains behind The Olivia Tremor Control. It branches inwards infinitely. Circulatory System was an offshoot of The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by Will Cullen Hart, and…I hesitate to outright call it Olivia Tremor Control 2: Electric Boogaloo (2 Tremor 2 Control), because that really isn’t a complaint on my part. We need more bands like The Olivia Tremor Control, and we need more of their sense of…well, fun. “Yesterday’s World” is glee cleverly disguised as a serious, psychedelic shredder. Yes, you’ve got the churning guitars, but woven in between them is a chorus of young kids (who faintly go off-script in the background), a quivering assembly of woodwinds, and marching band-like drums towards the end. With the lyrics factored in, I can’t help but think that these childlike elements were stirred in to nail in this desire: “Yesterday feels/Feels just so far away/From these days.” At the age that I’m at, I’ve been frequently grappling with the same thing; now, more than ever, I am both physically and chronologically distanced from the freedom of youth, but there’s also the growing “get a job/move out/etc.” pressure of age and capitalism. Such a fun age. Time moved too quickly for me to grasp that those days wouldn’t last forever. I’m glad I tried to train myself at 18 into knowing that age doesn’t mean that the joy gets sledgehammered out of you the minute you become an adult, but it’s an ongoing process, and I’d be lying if I said that I’d mastered it. For now, all I can do is the same of what Circulatory System are doing: integrate those moments of childhood and freedom into my newly adult life. They have their chorus of smiling, jumping kids within their music, and I’ve got the battered copies of my favorite book series from elementary school on my dorm bookshelf. Yesterday’s world isn’t always out of reach, even as we must live in the world of the present. Keep the kiddo alive.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Psychology of Time Travel – Kate Mascarenhas – yesterday’s world has been reached…
“Jesus Came from Outta Space” – Supergrass
Seems that rock n’ roll, as a collective, has come to the conclusion that this is where Jesus has been chilling out all this time: as Robyn Hitchcock put it, “out on the rim of space.” Seems that Supergrass also came to the appropriate conclusion about how Jesus would feel if he were to see the state of the world as it is now: disappointed. (Remind me again of which part of the Bible told you to harass trans kids? Oh, you can’t find it? How strange…) At least, if anything, we can take this message with us, whether or not it’s delivered from Jesus or Gaz Coombes: “Love is all, love is tall, love is older than you/Love’ll talk, love’ll walk, love’ll speak up for you/Love’ll shake, love’ll wake, love’ll wake up with you.”
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The First Sister – Linden A. Lewis – I raise you: Jesus in outta space? (Sort of?)
Through only a handful of songs, it seems to me that Indigo De Souza has mastered the art of being really, truly, messy. It’s not just messy through a few sparing, self-deprecating lyrics about how far you’ve dug yourself into a sinkhole of misery. No—there’s some of that, but if there’s anything that her music does, it’s drag you right along with it, in all of its exhausted, cake-smushing glory. Riddled with aftershocks of a breakup, “Kill Me” crawls along the floor on its hands and knees, snuffling for scraps amongst the rubble, searching for something to hold onto. Oscillating between said “kill me” refrain in its handful of variations and a poisoned urge to crawl straight back to the person who caused all this strife, it’s a song, like “What Are We Gonna Do Now,” that feels like a frozen time capsule: minutes after the phone call that ended things, tear stained, dirty-clothed, and desperate—for answers, for comfort, and for reciprocation. It’s a raw-throated kind of desperation, but one that replicates the feeling of looking down at yourself in your grease-stained shirt and asking yourself what the hell happened to me? There’s a sardonic humor in the way that De Souza declares: “No one asked me/To feel this fucked up/But here I am, fucked up,” an exhausted chorus barking out the final “fucked up” along with her. “Kill Me” moves along like paint spilled on the floor, seeping into the floorboards no matter how much you try to scrape it out, muddying into an ugly mess of what used to be good colors into the woodgrain.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Something Like Possible – Miel Moreland – post-breakup exhaustion and misery that leads to blossoming growth—and new love.
“I Miss You(r Dog)” – Addison Grace
Following on my unintentional train from Lisa Hannigan’s “What’ll I Do” last week, here’s another lighthearted breakup song. Unlike Hannigan, it’s not so much laughing through the pain, but this one laughs more at an aspect of breakups that not enough songs talk about—the pets that get dragged into it. It’s a fact of life: sometimes toxic people have really lovable pets. They’re innocent. They didn’t have to get into this mess, but here we are. Granted, it is slightly weird that Addison Grace basically treats said dog like it’s a child that he’s battling for custody over, but it adds to the humor. It’s just a silly song through and through, from the bait-and-switch parentheses in the title to the purposefully placed sound effects (“I’m sure you told all your friends that you think I’m a [dog bark]”…ba-dum tsssss). And for all of the breakup songs wallowing in self-pity, sometimes all you can do in that situation is laugh and fixate on the silly parts. Or, if you’re Addison Grace, get it through to said ex that their dog deserves a birthday befitting a king.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Radio Silence – Alice Oseman – this one isn’t specific to this book, but more Oseman’s larger universe—given how much music seems to inform her creative process, this song is just begging to be included somewhere in it. Feels in line with her penchant for cheery but emotional indie pop.
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 