Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: another whiplash lineup here, buckle up…at least you can boogie a little bit before the crushing weight of seasonal depression and/or a doomed relationship gets to you.
Enjoy this week’s review!
SUNDAY SONGS: 7/19/26
“Glass Mountain Trust” – Mark Ronson & The Business Int’l.
More little Madeline lore: Record Collection dominated my elementary school music taste. I haven’t revisited the whole thing, but every song feels nostalgic even if I don’t remember it as clearly. Mark Ronson assembled a disparate team of Avengers for this album (Simon Le Bon, Q-Tip, Rose Elinor Dougall, Spank Rock, and Boy George are just a handful of them), but the result is a surprisingly cohesive collection of pop songs. Chances are, that’s owed to Ronson’s talent as a producer—the glossy, neon sheen he applies to these songs make them feel like a machine all his own—he has a very distinct synth sound on this album. “Glass Mountain Trust” was one of the ones that I’d forgotten about, with D’Angelo serving as the lead vocalist. Even if you took away the metaphor of the glass mountain, the electronic atmosphere of this track feels glassy, all shiny and transparent. From D’Angelo’s rippling vocals to the drum machine that seems appear and disappear in thin air, “Glass Mountain Trust” proves Mark Ronson’s innate ear for intricate pop music.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Red Star Rebels – Amie Kaufman – “Formidable, the structure surrounding me only looks/I bust right through the glass, one attempt and that’s all it took/I wanted to remain feeling safe, but it just can’t sustain me/It feels more like a trap, gotta break out, won’t let it contain me…”
I’m nearly done listening to all of Björk’s discography (and if I keep at it like this, I should be able to finish it all before her new album in 2027, EEK), but I’m pointedly afraid of listening to Vulnicura. I know it’ll devastate me. I just need to rip off the bandaid. “Lionsong” already guts me on every single listen, and I know that it’s objectively not the most brutal song on that album, so I’m already cooked. “Stonemilker” seems to be one of the more toned-down songs on the album, but it’s no less emotionally vulnerable. Björk’s dissection of the dissolution of her relationship with Matthew Barney is as raw as the open wounds she describes in the lyrics; her plaintive pleas for connection and understanding carve a rift in the notes themselves. But it’s the central metaphor of trying to connect as being as fruitless as “milking a stone” that drives home the emotions—there’s a lingering sense that their relationship is destined for failure, and she knows it. It’s a six minute lament of futility, the final toss of an anchor before it gets lost in the stormy waves.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine – “A juxtapositioning fate/Find our mutual coordinates/Moments of clarity are so rare/I better document this…”
Even in some UK publications, the impact of Supergrass on Britpop goes woefully understated, especially post-“Alright.” They were crafting album after album of some of the tightest British rock tracks time after time, with a mind for experimentation and a devoted admiration to the great British rock bands of years past. But if there’s anything that they’re hardly acknowledged for doing, it’s making a killer opening track. I mean, come on—“In It For the Money?” “Moving?” Dude. If I had that many genius album openers up my sleeve, I’d be able to die happy. “Za” deserves a place among those ranks as the cinematic opener to Life on Other Planets. What starts as a spacey synth that belongs at the beginning of a documentary about the universe unfolds into a classic rock ballad, with electric guitars arm in arm with sci-fi keyboards. Sure, there’s not much going on the lyrics department, but “Za” was built to indulge in instrumentals, not lyrics. It’s the perfect introduction to the album, which swerves in all manner of rock-adjacent directions, but wasn’t afraid to explore the outer space of Supergrass’s musical capabilities. It’s a classic.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “Love/I see it in lies/It shines like the winter sun/So why don’t we get it on…”
“Gronlandic Edit” – of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? came out around when I was in kindergarten. I remember my dad playing it pretty early on in the car, and when I first heard “Gronlandic Edit,” my tiny, barely-grown mind was just enraptured. Something about that chord progression cracked something in half in my brain like a geode. I wanted to hear “Gronlandic Edit” over and over. Looking back, it was a sign of things to come that this toddling five year old who liked pink, Zoboomafoo, and stuffed pigs was also fixated on an of Montreal song. Pretentious music taste foreshadowing? Depressing music foreshadowing? Gay foreshadowing? Probably all three.
To this day, “Gronlandic Edit” retains that enchantment that first snagged me when I didn’t have the words to describe it. I recently revisited it thanks to Kevin Barnes’ episode of Life of the Record about Hissing Fauna, which was, admittedly, a real downer. They explained that song after song, they were holed up in their ex-wife’s hometown in Norway trying to turn their depression into something upbeat just to feel something. Indeed, “Gronlandic Edit,” which starts off with a hypnotic, funk-like bassline and electronic claps, begins with a description of Barnes sarcastically singing: “I am satisfied hiding in our friend’s apartment/Only leaving once a day to buy some groceries/Daylight, I’m so absent minded/Nighttime, meeting new anxieties.” Sometimes you make bleak-sounding music to articulate your bleak feelings, but if you’re Kevin Barnes, you try to dance the seasonal depression away. Whatever the case, “Gronlandic Edit” remains infectious—the immaculate construction of the chord progression of the chorus somehow makes a string of notes into a key that bottles the deep-seated yearning residing in Barnes’s heart. Their layered harmonies rise as though in prayer, dismissing of organized religion and yet simultaneously desperate for something to pray to in order to anchor themself through their disarray. (It’s a common theme throughout Hissing Fauna—just see “A Sentence of Sort in Kongsvinger” and its prayers to “a saint nobody has heard of.”) It’s a self-deprecating cocktail about outer and inner concerns, especially the biting barbs he directs at himself in the lyrics about the “faker indie star” (yowch, give yourself a little credit…).
It’s no wonder that Barnes doesn’t look back on Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? fondly. The whole album is an unforgiving chronicle of self-loathing, parenthood fears, marital tension, and seasonal depression. And yet there’s a reason why it’s held up for so long—it’s some of the most meticulously crafted indie pop of the 2000’s. There’s always some beauty to be found in the darkest of times, even if you have to force it out of yourself just to see it.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “Daylight, I’m so absent minded/Nighttime, meeting new anxieties/So am I erasing myself?/Hope I’m not erasing myself…”
“Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” – The Magnetic Fields
When “Andrew in Drag” gained traction on TikTok last year, I was surprised that a lot of people took it seriously—not as a song poking fun at the confines of heterosexuality and masculinity, but as a tragic tale of a repressed, closeted man who could never fulfill his queer desires. I kept thinking to myself: wasn’t the jokiness obvious? Were the lyrics—full of rhyming innuendos and dick jokes—not enough to clue people in that this song wasn’t at least partially silly?
Sure, it’s TikTok, the place media literacy goes to die, but then I remembered—I used to think that “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” was playing it straight too. Stephin Merritt is a trickster and frequently sarcastic in his songwriting, but he’s written his fair share of sincere songs (see: “The Book of Love,” which is about as genuine as you can get with a love song). And then I saw The Magnetic Fields on the anniversary tour for 69 Love Songs, where they played this song—and explained that it was a parodic, Sonny & Cher-style duet about a couple who hate each other’s guts. When I first heard it in high school, it just depressed me—and that’s saying something, given that my musical diet at the time primarily consisted of Car Seat Headrest, Radiohead, and Sparklehorse. But it struck me as so achingly tragic: this woman built her whole life around her husband, only for him to only respond “yeah, oh yeah” to all of her darkest fears about him, and then he murders her? It sure is bleak.
But after that revelation at the live show, “Yeah! Oh, Yeah”‘s sarcasm is blatant. A lot of it was evident in the performance, where Claudia Gonson’s mischievous grin and Stephin Merritt’s drier-than-dry delivery of each “yeah, oh yeah” gave the song’s intended nature away. “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” is full of mockery, from the playground “ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” of the chorus, to Merritt’s exaggeratedly villainous portrayal of the gold-digging, murderous husband. The more Gonson’s fears escalate, the funnier each utterance of “yeah, oh yeah” gets—it goes from simply confirming that the husband isn’t in love with her anymore to “would you really kill your wife? Yeah, oh yeah!” It’s all very camp—it’s hard to expect anything less from The Magnetic Fields.
BONUS: Suki Waterhouse, an avid Magnetic Fields fan, recently performed a duet of “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” with Stephin Merritt, and she does a pretty solid job at Claudia Gonson’s part:
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane – “I thought if we lived apart/We could make a brand-new start/Do you want to break my heart?/Yeah, oh yeah…”
That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 