Tag: The Whole Love

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs – 5/31/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

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

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

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/31/26

“Huey Newton” – St. Vincent

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

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

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

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

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

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

“Greta” – Cate Le Bon

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

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

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

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

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

“I Might” – Wilco

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

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

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

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

“Advice & Vices” – Chelsea Wolfe

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

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

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

“New Muscles” – mary in the junkyard

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

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

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

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

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/30/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: new music from 2025—both released this year and overheard before a Soccer Mommy show.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/30/25

“Triumph of a Heart” – Björk

I’ve finished the Sonic Symbolism podcast, and all it’s left me with is a rabid desire to do a deep dive of the rest of Björk’s albums. Medúlla is enticing as it’s the next one chronologically (even though I’ve given up on listening to her albums chronologically), but also because of the uniting concept behind it. Inspired by primal, prehistoric imagery of motherhood, family, and storytelling around campfires, Medúlla was constructed almost entirely from the human voice. Aside from some synths and piano, it’s almost all a-capella, but not in the way that you’d think. Each voice becomes percussion, scattered onomatopoeia, and rising tidal forces that lift something primal from your soul. And every possible voice ends up featuring on this album—Tanya Tagaq (throat singing), Rahzel, Dokaka (beatboxing), and Mike Patton (deep backing vocals that Pitchfork described as “demonic”) all feature in the varied vocal tapestry. I ended up being too busy to write about “Pleasure Is All Mine,” but that song, in its simultaneous feminist ode and playful toying with women’s capacity to be selfless, really does succeed in digging into something innate, almost instinctual within me.

In concept, “Triumph of a Heart” is almost as ridiculous as the music video. (Fun fact: Björk’s cat husband in this video spawned the “I should buy a boat” meme from way back when.) Forming the percussion of the song, alongside Dokaka’s melodic beatboxing, is what can only be described as restrained raspberry noises and sounds that are almost akin to somebody who’s only heard a cat once trying to make cat sounds. Yet it all works in such a familiar yet alien synchronicity that comes together in a way that only Björk can make it. The track is an ode to how music can make you feel and the joy of dancing, a pleasure shared since early humans were able to whack sticks together and harmonize around the fire; maybe it’s an obvious choice for this album, but using only bodily instrumentation is the perfect medium to explore the visceral nature of music and dance, the way that it sometimes vibrates your soul: “The nerves are sending shimmering signals/All through my fingers/The veins support/Blood that gushes impulsively towards/The triumph of a heart.” I always see such sentiments of people undervaluing the arts, even as they consume it by the truckload and think nothing of it; it’s not a viable, useful profession, more fodder for AI and mindless listening. It’s so easy for us to forget that art in all its forms, the same as the need for medicine and food, is innate to us, and has been since we were gathered in the shelter of the first fires.

As a bonus: here’s some behind the scenes footage of the recording of “Pleasure Is All Mine”:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Binti – Nnedi Okorafor – this novella also falls into that merging of preserving cultures that have survived for thousands of years and alien technology, and it blends into a bizarre, delightful trilogy.

“Honey Water” – Japanese Breafkast

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) sadly fell under the She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She curse on this blog, which roughly translates to “I wanted to write about at least 2-3 of the singles, but they all ended up landing on weeks where I didn’t have time to write.” Shame, really, because “Orlando in Love” and “Mega Circuit” were silk-drapingly romantic and creepily artful, respectively. Now that I’ve listened to the whole album, at its best, it embodies those qualities, oscillating from semi-autobiographical, tragic stories to some of the more fictional songwriting that Michelle Zauner drew on for Jubilee. She simultaneously leans into the notion of the “sad girl” while critiquing the fact that women are so often pigeonholed into this description (see the title), embroidering her own dramatic melancholy with orchestral arrangements and references to Greek mythology. Though it wasn’t always successful and the end dragged (see: “Men in Bars,” an faux-earnest, ballad-y duet with…Jeff Bridges? Huh?), For Melancholy Brunettes was, for the most part, an artistic leap that was a good 75%-80% successful in its feats of daring. It acknowledges its place amongst the traditionally emotional role of female musicians, but also acknowledges the light that peers in through the cracks (see: “Here Is Someone”—for maximum enjoyment, transition it with “Frosti” by Björk).

“Honey Water” was one of the standout tracks. I never thought of Japanese Breakfast as someone who could necessarily conjure up eeriness. Sure, she’s written plenty about all manner of unpleasant feelings, but I’ve never gotten dread as one of the most prominently featured ones. Zauner’s signature, breathy whisper takes on the feeling of a carnivorous plant laden with dew, ready to ensnare all manner of insects. Yet she’s not the one doing the ensnaring in this song—the narrative, toeing the line between fiction and reality, as her songs often do, speaks of an unfaithful lover repeatedly leaving her for someone else: “The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy/You follow in colonies to sip it from the bank/In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in/Insatiable for a nectar, drinking ’til your heart expires.” The dread that Zauner dredges up is more a kind of stagnation, the sinking feeling of seeing the inevitable unfold around you, and yet somehow feeling powerless to move—or leave. The closing refrain, as the guitars rise in a crashing, insectoid drone, echoes Slaughterhouse-Five’s famous tidbit: “So it goes/I don’t mind”; the narrator convinces herself that all of her partner’s unfaithful transgressions are a fact of life. That tired powerlessness is what makes the dread so palpable, the music swallowing her as she mutters the last repetition of her exhausted mantra.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in/Insatiable for a nectar, drinking ’til your heart expires…”

“God Knows” – Tunde Adebimpe

Remember how I was halfway chiding myself for hoping that Thee Black Boltz was just going to be TV on the Radio 2: Electric Boogaloo? Now that “God Knows” is out, I think that might honestly just be what the album is like regardless of expectations. “Magnetic” introduced us to a familiar, nostalgic sound full of energy, “Drop” was the point where Adebimpe seems to diverge, and now we’ve got “God Knows,” which sounds straight off of Nine Types of Light or even Dear Science. It’s giving me some perspective on how much Adebimpe made TV on the Radio—Dave Sitek constructed the scaffolding, but Adebimpe was the heart of it all, without a doubt. Balancing sharp acoustic strumming with synths that ripple and bubble, this track adds to “Drop” in the sense that both songs feel like they’re floating. It fits with the album cover for me—as Adebimpe clings to his geode island in the middle of an undefined void, he’s buoyed through it, like an ocean, propelled by nothing but the endlessly catchy hooks he’s been producing of late. “God Knows” stands out to me as the strongest of the three offerings so far—like “Magnetic,” it’s been sharpened to its tightest point to make indie rock tracks that wouldn’t be out of place 10 or even 20 years ago. Tunde is timeless.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “God knows you’re the worst thing I’ve ever loved/And you’re bad news/But we still got to have our fun…”

“Whole Love” – Wilco

Man, YouTube comments are so funny sometimes. I hope the Latina woman who posted “I love this white song, don’t tell my homegirls I listen to this” is doing okay and still listening to Wilco happily. Wilco really is the great unifier.

Here’s an album that I’ve probably listened to in full, but only remember about half of. The Whole Love soundtracked many a car ride to school or piano lessons and whatnot back in 2011. I even remember popping my dad’s borrowed CD into my old Hello Kitty CD player while I was playing with my Build-A-Bears in my room. That should give you a picture of the kind of hipster child I was, but I digress. The resulting tour was also the first time I saw Wilco—and my very first concert, at Red Rocks at the age of eight. So even if I haven’t mapped it out fully, The Whole Love was integral to my childhood, whether it was watching the music video for “Born Alone” on my dad’s old laptop (I distinctly remember saying that it “made my head spin”) or sitting on my dad’s shoulders on that summer night. Really, it boils down to my dad. Raising me on all that Wilco made me turn out alright, I think.

Back to “Whole Love” in particular. The song already carries a metric ton of nostalgia for me, but it never gets old with any successive playing. As far as The Whole Love goes, it feels like one of the more accessible tracks—it’s classic Wilco, but with the artsy twist that the album presents. There’s a passage in Steven Hyden’s This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ and the Beginning of the 21st Century that talks about the significance of album openers setting the tone for the album as a whole. Hyden points to “Art of Almost” as an example—with all of the Thom Yorke-esque synth weirdness, it signals to the listener that this is gonna be the weird Wilco album. That experimental nature leeches into the most “accessible” sounding tracks—like this one. Even as Jeff Tweedy brings his gentle, acoustic sway into fruition, the background can only be described as fluttering—they jitter and judder like the freshly-dried wings of just-hatched butterflies, creating tiny fractals in the background. Yet even if you stripped that weirdness away, “Whole Love” would still be a classic—whether it’s craft or my nostalgia talking, there’s something so innately comforting about the layered harmonies, folded on top of one another like layers of fine fabric.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Heart of the World (The Isles of the Gods, #2) – Amie Kaufman – “And I know that I won’t be/The easiest to set free/And I know that I won’t be the last/Cold captain tied to the mast…”

“Get Away” – Yuck

This song played before Soccer Mommy came on when I saw her a few weeks back, and for a split second, I confused it for some Apples in Stereo song that I somehow hadn’t heard in my childhood. Turns out, there’s probably no Apples in Stereo song that I missed when I was a kid, hence why I didn’t recognize it. (Cut me some slack, it was loud in there…) Yuck doesn’t have the same electronically-oriented whimsy as the Apples in Stereo, but they seemed to branch off of the indie sound of the early 2010’s, with their synth-like guitars, ’90s distortion, and the nasally vocals of Daniel Blumberg. Those guitars were what made me nearly mistake them for the Apples in Stereo, but they’re clearly more students of, say, Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. But they had that sun-soaked, 2010’s indie aesthetic down to a science; even without the yellow filter on their music video, “Get Away” just oozes the sensation of a dream of being on a road with no speed limits while the sun beats down through the windshield. Even as Blumberg laments that he can’t get away, wrestling with negative thoughts, the track speeds along with a carefree freedom, kicking up gravel as it forges its own path. Certainly fits right in with Soccer Mommy’s sound too—she’s got an eye for good indie, that’s for sure….

…and so does the Academy, apparently? You’re telling me that this guy just won an Oscar for his original score for The Brutalist? That’s a connection I didn’t expect to make in this post…good for you, Daniel Blumberg!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester – Maya MacGregor – “Summer sun says get out more/I need you, I want you/But I can’t get this feeling off my mind/I want you, I need you…”

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: 7/14/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: would you like a nice sci-fi in these trying times?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/14/24

“Future Teenage Cave Artists” – Deerhoof

I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that we were all feeling apocalyptic in 2020. Fitting that Deerhoof would put out this album in June of that year, a concept album about teenagers making art amidst the collapse of society. Not intentional timing, I’m sure, but maybe too raw all the same. I wonder what it must have been like to listen to Future Teenage Cave Artists during lockdown, but what I can glean is from listening to Horsegirl; on their episode of What’s In My Bag? (worth watching for this and Sparks, The Feelies, and Brian Eno, among others), this was one of the albums that they picked, and drummer Gigi Reece shyly showed off that they’d stitched “Deerhoof” onto the flap of their book bag. So, besides thanking them for their excellent album, Versions of Modern Performance, thank you to Horsegirl for turning me onto this all-consuming song!

The title of Future Teenage Cave Artists reveals exactly what the concept behind the album is: during the collapse of society, cruelty and murder runs amok, but amidst all of this strife, a band of nomadic teenagers hold onto hope and make art. “Future Teenage Cave Artists” is that mission statement made manifest. The whole album was reportedly recorded entirely on laptops and phones (hence the iPhone/tardigrade hybrid on the album cover, drawn by Deerhoof’s vocalist, Satomi Matsuzaki), and I never thought such a simple act could have enhanced the song so much. The shaky, distorted quality of the recording sells the dystopian setting, like we’re not streaming music, but listening to it on some ancient, warped tape recorder leftover from the age of man. It gives it an almost uncanny quality, as though you’re holding onto the last vestiges of this music, and that the battery life on your device is going to run out at any second. It’s so urgent in its hope that I can’t help but play it over and over—amidst this societal collapse, every lyric is a declaration of defiance and purpose: “Gonna paint an animal on a cave wall/Gonna leave it there forever while empires fall.” Concept song or not, I didn’t expect this song to strike such a deeply resonant chord with me; not only does this society feel like it might collapse at any second, but even if it weren’t, we’re surrounded by people who lambast any kind of art as a career—what are you gonna do with that degree? Are you even going to make any money off of that? And in our capitalist landscape, I do have to get myself some money, but it’s separated the real purpose of art from art, the job—threading a piece of your soul out into the fabric of the world, and making art that reflects your image of the world, making contact with a well deep inside (and outside) of yourself. “Future Teenage Cave Artists” is a defiant ode to the lasting, breathless joy of making art—upfront and urgent, and running on an engine of joy. You can’t get a much better rallying cry than what Matsuzaki fills the jerky outro with: “try my sci-fi!”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

This Is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – two lovers bent on making a mark in a world where individuality is all but gone.


“Sit” – Japanese Breakfast

Having the pretentious music taste that I do, I remember when Jubilee was everywhere in the summer of 2021. Persimmons, Jeff Tweedy covers, and rave reviews as far as the eye could see. Back then, I had a faint memory of hearing in interview with her on NPR sometime in middle school, but it was ultimately the combination of Jeff Tweedy’s cover of “Kokomo, IN,” my mom’s deep-dive into Michelle Zauner after reading Crying in H-Mart, and a friend’s video of Zauner playing “Paprika” with a massive gong on stage to finally give this storied album a try.

“Paprika” remains my favorite, but “Sit” came out of left field; in all of the shining praises of Jubilee, I never heard anybody talking about it. With its almost shoegazy distortion, humming and throbbing like a swarm of restless cicadas, Zauner’s voice pierces the haze like a lighthouse though the fog. Every lyric is spoken like a final message communicated from an ethereal barrier between dreams, the last words of a stranger your brain fabricated while you were sleeping that will haunt you for weeks afterwards. And like a haunting dream, Zauner sings of the memory of somebody that has clung to her with the strength of burrs, no matter how hard she tries to shake them away: “It’s your name in my mouth I’m repeating/It’s the taste of your tongue I can’t spit out.” They walk through her life with all of the transience of a hologram, a trick of the light that appears in every corner, in unexpected places with unexpected people. And what perfect instrumentals to meld with this; any sense of clarity only comes when Zauner is faced with the reality that she’s “caught up in the idea of you,” but as soon as it dips back into painful reminiscence, she’s consumed by the buzzing distortion, closing her eyes as she’s pulled back into the undertow of memory and fantasy. It’s a track with more weight behind it than most people seem to give it credit for. You can’t lift its impenetrable, stinging fog—the fog is the point.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost, #1) – C.L. Clark – “Caught up in the idea of someone/Caught up in the idea of you/That’s done too soon…”

“Sometimes” – Erasure

I’d posit that there’s almost no queer experience that is entirely universal, as the queer community is as multifarious as the identities that it encompasses. But one thing that I think most queer people can relate to is looking back on their life before coming out and thinking how did everybody not know I was gay? How did I not know I was gay? There’s an embarrassing amount for me, including but not limited to lesbian Barbie weddings and a pair of blindingly rainbow running shoes I wore almost daily in 6th grade. But the fact that I had such an extended Erasure phase when I was about 8 or 9…yeah, there’s no heterosexual explanation for that. That CD of Union Street that I briefly kept in my room and played on my Hello Kitty CD player was probably the first to catch on. The gays yearn for the synths.

I have nothing but admiration for Erasure, not just as queer icons, but for being so consistent in their musical exploration. Well…exploration probably isn’t the right word, since they’ve been making variations on the same sound since 1986. But never once has it seemed like they’re doing it out of trying to feel young or reliving fantasies of when they were at the height of their popularity. Andy Bell and Vince Clarke are just artists that were built for the late ’80s—nowhere else could they have flourished so vibrantly. The drama. The synths. The yearning, my god. They’re not just from the ’80s—they are the ’80s. They’ve been acting like it’s the ’80s for every single decade since, never once hopping on trends or changing their sound because they know exactly what they excel at. Listen to any song they’ve put out in the past 10 years, and it’s clear that they’ve still got it. But the cosmic alignment that placed Bell and Clarke in the late ’80s was beyond fate—nowhere else could you have “Sometimes”, with its lovelorn pining…and Andy Bell dancing in the pouring rain with a soaked white t-shirt. Does it get any better than that?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Lost Girls – Sonia Hartl – angst, queerness, romance, and ’80s holdovers. (And vampires.)

“Annihilation” – Wilco

HOT WILCO SUMMER IS HERE!!! Well, it’s been here for about two weeks, but I’m stubbornly committed to these color schemes. But the weather right now is more akin to the Hot Sun, Cool Shroud we’re talking about, so there’s no time like the present. Urgh. I’m not sure much more of this 90 degree heat I can take…

Hot Sun, Cool Shroud – EP proves just how wildly versatile Wilco are. I can’t think of a single band active today that are not only as prolific as they are, but as consistent in quality—and creativity. The prickling apprehension and Nels Cline’s pipe burst of a guitar solo on “Hot Sun” feed straight into “Livid,” a chase sequence-ready metal instrumental that rockets through the air, ricocheting off the walls like a deflating balloon set loose, complete with a barrage of Galaga-like flourishes. “Inside the Bell Bones” has the quiet, uncertain clatter of frigid water dripping from a cave ceiling, and “Ice Cream” and “Say You Love Me” ground the EP to a more emotional conclusion.

But I keep coming back to the chainlink that ties all of these vastly different songs together—”Annihilation.” Next door to “Ice Cream,” it kicks off the second half of Hot Sun, Cool Shroud, returning to a classic kind of Wilco that tugs a particularly tender heartstring. Even if it doesn’t have the sheer gut-punch of “Say You Love Me,” it reminds me of the more grounded moments of The Whole Love. Unlike “Livid”‘s riotous tailspin, this track spirals through the clouds, kept afloat by the wings of love: “A kiss like this/Is endless tonight/This kind of annihilation/Is alright.” Jeff Tweedy’s vocals bring another lyric of his to mind, from 2019’s “Hold Me Anyway”: “light is all I am.” There’s not an oomph behind it, like his voice often has, but this song is so airy and urgent that it can’t be sung any other way. Tweedy described the soundscape of Hot Sun, Cool Shroud as “a summertime-after-dark feeling…All the pieces of summer, including the broody cicadas,” and that makes the lovestruck urgency of “Annihilation” make perfect sense: it’s a secret kiss under the boardwalk as the sun goes down, the lights of the carnival slowly dying as the setting sun sets the sky alight. In that moment, there is nothing but the moment, in all of its humid, breezy warmth.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Kindred – Alechia Dow – “We’re boiling angels/Let’s kiss for hours/Equal power/Let’s make it art/This kiss is ours…”

“Old Lady City” – Shakey Graves

I’d all but forgotten about “Old Lady City” since I first listened to Deadstock: A Shakey Graves Day Anthology, and it seems that…judging from the lack of lyrics anywhere (which on the internet, the manifestation of too many people with too much time on their hands, is a rarity), so did everyone else. Tough crowd. But it’s so unlike any other Shakey Graves that I’ve heard, not even on Movie of the Week. Shakey Graves has never been afraid of being spooky, but this is a kind of off-kilter eery that he didn’t stray towards until now, or however long ago this was originally recorded. Maybe it was too risky to put it on an album for this reason, but this grittier, spookier side is one that I thoroughly enjoy. With vocals by Buffalo Hunt (Alejandro Rose-Garcia’s wife), “Old Lady City” is a scorched, rickety ball of spikes, no edges sanded down. In between twisted strains of nursery rhymes, purposeful breathing, and Buffalo Hunt’s cartoon witch-like cackle, the lo-fi recording makes for a crunching, off-kilter interlude. Rose-Garcia’s vocals are almost nowhere to be seen, but they float in ghostly tendrils in between the splinters, burnt paper, and charcoal of this B-Side.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Library at Mount Char – Scott Hawkins – a raw and rickety story that’s more than its appearances let on, just like its protagonist. (Doesn’t hurt that the book cover matches the feel of the song too.)

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!