MIX XLI — Consuming the Amulet
Arctic Monkeys — R U Mine The Arctic Monkeys’ record AM is flawless. That’s just how it goes. It is one of those records that cements rock music as something that can timelessly spear the present to the past. It’s a record that can be listened to 10 years from now and give the same adrenaline charge that it did the very first time I heard it. This is a song driven by a riff that maybe without even knowing it, bands have been trying to discover for decades and will be trying to recreate for a century more. What really drove this track home for me was when I happened to catch a clip of the band playing this song on Austin City Limits and during that part in this track towards the end where all the instruments drop out and he talks about “a lone ranger ridin’ through an open space” and starts to slow down and pace his words to a smug slur, and he drags the notes out and teases the pay off until it all climaxes in this big avalanche that moves the song back into its standard pace. I got obsessed with this part and the showmanship of Alex Turner and watched a bunch of live clips of the band playing this part and it turned into a strange obsession not only with the song, but mostly with the way that the frontman absolutely commands the stage in a way that demonstrates maybe a love for himself just as much as a love for the songs that he’s written. Watching Turner slither and writhe on a stage is a sexual experience. It was enough for me to enter an absolute time warp, recalling that a friend of mine told me that he’d seen this band in 2018 and to message him years later and say, “I’m just here to tell you that I’m deeply jealous you got to see Arctic Monkeys play R U Mine? live.” He reveled in the jealousy. (YouTube)
The Progress — Paper & Ink I think The Progress is one of those bands that perfectly took the influences of the sad post-emo sound of Elliott and Sunny Day Real Estate and American Football and married them with the brightness of the Drive-Thru Records pop-punk wave and made something deeply special with the record Merit. I can’t hear many bands that are still mimicking and generating this sound without coming back to this record particularly. There’s a DIY aesthetic that surrounds this particular brand of music, a style that only sounds just right when you’re playing it in a basement or a church or a VFW hall. There’s that segment that starts around 2:15 where they’re strumming that same chord over and over and the cymbals are crashing again and again and I can feel the slates of the wooden church floor bending in time under the weight of the bobbing bodies, I can hear the groaning and creaking wood of the light smoothed stage giving as the band’s sneakers lean body weight into pressure points in the architecture. I’ve probably talked about it before, but one of the greatest live moments I’ve ever experienced was seeing Into It. Over It. in Philly at First Unitarian and Evan bringing out the dudes from The Progress to play a few tracks to close out the set. Absolute all-time moment for me. (YouTube)
Del Paxton — Koolwink This is one of those bands that would certainly be from one of those branching timelines that exist only because bands like The Progress did what they did. The clean guitar that opens this song up is a sound that I am an absolute sucker for. Especially when you drape a flat and sad unnatural note across it. That pattern right before the minute mark, that three-times dashed marching pattern is just the thing to make the little unhappy-dude-pit open up in little solitary whirlpools in the ‘pit’, right before that Weezer Blue Album inspired chorus/hook comes up with that falsetto note. We get a little spacy towards that final seventh of the track, with pedals filled with reverb and light cymbals, just enough to take us out into a pensive universe. (YouTube)
Fairweather — Slow to Standing This is my favorite band. It’s tough to specifically say anything to really sync where I’d like your mindset to be when listening to while listening to it (as I’m sure it would be for you to describe why you love your favorite band to me). That being said, their first record is iconic and so well-loved that it seems to be the knee-jerk reaction to throw on when you want to hear them. But the EP that followed is probably the strongest four tracks the band ever put together and it acted as an incredible jumping point from a kinetic pop-punk leaning, self-described hardcore record to then something like this which is far more sonically mature, far more rock-influenced record with deep thought mileage and parts that really let the instruments do the heavy lifting instead of the raw energy and the wind in the sails. This record has machinery. There was a particular pocket of the year last year where I was going through it, unable to drag two enormous parts of my emotional pipeline across a landscape and have the two meet, to move forward without feeling I was emptying myself out onto a pavement or into an ocean. The “Because it seems I’ve always known things change, they change. Just give it time. So the only consolation is the feeling that I’m going on anyway. Where motions slow to standing I’m building to indifference and dulled inside,” hit home and I think that became an anthem for me, even if in solitary silence. Listening to this song (and this record overall) really gave me a massive amount of respect for Peter Tsouras, the guitarist from this band. The way he stretches the strings to new places, to new sounds that he gets to pull in the midst of the songs is incredible. The bridge around 1:45, where we’re listening to the rhythm guitar pump a heartbeat in the background while a tambourine jangles with the beat is a nice little gap, but the moment where it sounds like the guitar yowls a directed feedback and bleeds out into the speakers as it echoes the rhythm and the vocal lead as it builds into the bright hook is such a massive identifier for his style. So many parts throughout this record stand out for me and they’re all just like that. There’s a final minute and a half of this song that’s like a gonging clock, a metronome of introspect, and its repetition is valuable. As the final part drones on, you can hear the other instruments drop out from the drums as they stand alone. You can almost hear the production of the song getting shittier, rattier, more metallic. It’s that kind of rust, that kind of decay that I was looking for. You can always start the song over. (YouTube)
Hey Mercedes — Let’s Go Blue Bob Nanna is a genius of our time. Right off the heels of Braid’s breakup, he and other members of the band ended up founding Hey Mercedes, a unit that still used a lot of the angular guitars and strange drum patterns from their original band but in a fashion that was less aggressive and esoteric, instead erecting a positive and uplifting sound. I love the idea of this song being so upbeat and being about separating yourself from negative influences (or isolating those negative influences into their own spaces where they can’t reach you). The bass solo that continues to rumble forward as the abstract guitar lines start to erupt into a forest of hills and valleys in the true Nanna style is such a definitive style of the band’s sound. The huge sound of his drawn out “Hey” as the guitars use that same strange ocean of notes below to cast the buoy into cataclysm is so cathartic. “No room in my movie so out you go.”; “Love to see you gone.” It’s just so big and beautiful. (YouTube)
As Cities Burn — Admission:Regret I come back to this song when I find that I’m slumping into a state of deep torpor the color and consistency of pooled blood. When I’m leaning myself into the monotony of a one note life, a note leaned on with the deliberation of a drunk on a piano after last call. When I’m home, I’m rushing to a place to receive or achieve and then rushing back, small curlycued cycles of shallow life, this is when I turn to this song. And this is unfortunately pretty often. The song comes from an album that is deeply impactful for me in an emotional shift, an emotional reclamation of my Self and my Control in a situation I was struggling to claw my way from, and while this record is still one of my favorites (truly, deeply, one of those desert island records of which you can only pick three or five or ten), this particular song is the one that has carried with me the longest. There is a line in this song, one I’ve dedicated a lot of thought to, one I’ve reflected on art to reflect, one that I’ve chiseled into the lobotomous area of my skull, one that I’ve needed again and again. “So I hear there’s this whole world out there. But I’ve grown to love this bed too much to leave it. I keep hearing about this world out there. Come untie me from this bed, come untie me from the wicked things I love.” It’s enough to bring me to tears most times. The strange dual solo in the beginning of this song is so weird to me. It’s such an uncharacteristic go-to for the band. But man can these boys play. The sweeping… “breakdown?”… around 1:38 is so sick, the way the guitars bend and shiver, rattle and disintegrate. It’s right before the big quote I was talking about comes. And then the song enters its final transformation. (YouTube)
Every Time I Die — Dark Distance After having a spell of shaken faith as ETID dropped 3 or 4 singles leading up to the release of their final record Radical, I spoke with a friend about the album and while I had a lot of wet blanket nerves to share, I was optimistic though frozen with a nervous energy that they would break their streak of flawless releases. As a passage of tranquility, he offered simply this: “If I know you as well as I think I do, you’ll like the first track at the very least.” An hour and a half later when I had finally swallowed my pride, I had to let him know that I was overpowered with stagnant tears of joy and relief at the first track, this very one I’m sharing. And the line the coaxed this sense of overwhelming and breathless exultation was simple, final, definite: “Spare only the ones I love.” The rest can leave, can melt, can disintegrate, can perforate. While most of my fears and hangups about the rest of the record were somewhat founded for my taste, this song is one that I will drag with me through the swamp, leaving a plowed line of notice for all that was left behind. It is such a declaration of love for those that you keep close. This is the ETID that I will take with me to the grave. The final lines, “Give us our plague now, this time no Gods unless they’re women. Spare only the ones I love.” Are you fucking kidding me? Spiral me into a deep darkness and wrap me in this for asphyxiation. (YouTube)
Mewithoutyou — Gentleman A->B Life is a record that will always drip with a jealousy and a criminal obsession. It’s a record of deeply scorned missives, of misread signals and predatory creeping. It’s got sentiments that should make you clutch your confidence closer to your breast, something that should make you go over the fine print of some of the conversations you’ve had and to filter some of the messages you’re sending to the people who might not be able to digest the intensity of what you’re trying to say to them. This song is built on the foundation of lyrics just like these, so once you get through the grinding and heaving, take note of what’s being rained down on the song’s subject. There’s a desperation here that can’t be stopped by simple pleas. There was a time when this record was a gnarled reflection of a genuflection I was casting on the ribs of a mile of pews, a walk that I felt I had to bear, but one that had a million paths through which to exit. (YouTube)
The Black Queen — That Death Cannot Touch Man, this is just a cool goth song. It’s catchy as hell, a song built to dance to amidst steel and industry. It’s got darkness to it, something that makes almost all vision blur to slow flashes of deep purple. It’s so synthetic, so post-future. (YouTube)
Burial — Ghost Hardware Uh, so here comes an annoying statement: my first psychedelic experiences came from music. Truly, before I had given any thought to any mind-expanding drugs or experiences, music was always something that sparked my imagination for new visions, for new things, for outworld settings. The album this song comes from, Untrue, is one of those albums that I never knew could shape the visions that it did. It gave me a new sense of what electronic music could do. It gave me an absolute new bar for what music was capable of. I thought that the only types of electronic bands I would like would be more like Chemical Brothers or The Prodigy. Everything else sounded like house music or just like, hate to say it, DJ style bullshit. The way vocals are braided into the beats, the way there are undercurrents of colors and galaxies, the way there are strange microaggressions of sound that roil up to the surface. The whole thing boils. I think in terms of these mixes, this song seems like such an anomale. But I really do want to encourage a listen to this record, as it’s one that demands so many of your senses to fall back into. This song is just a portion of the record, but all of it will engulf you in exactly the same trance. Plus, I mean, how incredible is the title ‘Ghost Hardware’? Shoot, I could write a whole 33 page transactional fiction about Ghost Hardware, probably listening to only this song. I’m sure you’re all probably lucky that I won’t. (YouTube)
Alice Glass — Without Love I love Alice Glass. Her work with Crystal Castles really cemented her as legend for me, but when you hear the reason she had to break away from the duo, it makes you want to exile the memory of that music forever. But man, her style and her vision is so profoundly influential on my expectations for industrial pop. The EP that this came from is a perfect five track romp and her full length from this year is going to be talked about for sure at the end of the year. This is such a deconstructing tower of pleasure that teeters on near-collapse as gravity swirls and blasts around it. It grows to be such a massive wave of noise, composed of so many collaging and colliding synths and samples and notes. (YouTube)
Halsey — honey This was the first song from Halsey’s incredible album from last year that caught my attention for “end of the year” type of talk. I knew I was liking it right away, but this song had everything right. The production, the vocals, the way that Reznor lived in the notes… and then goddamn it, that hook. The chorus is absolutely perfect. So big and so catchy, and so long that it almost feels like it’s its own song. In under three minutes, she’s created an absolutely perfect song. It’s tough to not put one of my all-time favorite tracks on here as well, “You asked for this”, but I think I’ve not stopped talking and writing about it since its release so, yeesh, I’ll give you a break. Listen to this twice. (YouTube)
Bas — Purge I don’t have the vocabulary, truly, to describe what I like about certain hip-hop. I feel like a lot of what I’m saying you could Copy/Paste and put it on top of a billion other tracks and let it mean what you want. So what I’ll say about this track is that sample that is used in the background of the track is such a human and ambient loop, and the way that Bas echoes the rhythm in the chorus, singing it in an imperfect and quivering voice is so moving. His flow through the verse is quick and nimble, but doesn’t seem concerned with speed so much as ensuring he sets a dichotomy of rattling fast along with a molasses-thick backbeat. It’s such a cool song, every element of it feels absolutely crucial, at the very least, not a single bit of it is disposable. (YouTube)
Minus the Bear — Knights Man, this guitar repeater is so sick. Minus the Bear was a band who were able to make music with guitars into such an absolute good time. For me, they peaked at OMNI, a record that felt more like they found a groove into how they wanted to create a “late night good time” where their records before that really felt like showing off just how much they were capable of, not only in terms of writing wicked eclectic tunes but also in naming their songs. Planet of Ice furthered them from that wild and neurotic center, making songs that were way smoother, a bit more pensive and thought provoking. This song would be one of the biggest standouts from the record as that loop pedal brings that opening back around again as the beating heart of the song, and that huge dance part in the middle of the song really resonates as one of those parts that made the band such a good time to see live. You wanted to dance, you wanted to stop thinking about the instruments and the players and just lose your mind in the music. The end of the track slows things down to a pace where you can once again compose your thoughts and think about each note, examine each piece as it floats by in some kind of bullet-time. What an absolute ride. Knudson has a solo record that came out this year and it’s got his signature all over it. This guy writes music with such a patent. (YouTube)
Hrvrd — Kids With Fake Guns From the Bird’s Cage came back with a vinyl repress this year, several weeks ago in fact, which got me reobsessed with the record. This is a near-perfect album, one that was my favorite the year it came out and one of those that didn’t only get a trophy and walk home with it, wasn’t just an album that was my favorite for the year and I moved on back to all the records that I’d loved and were more “my style” anyway. No, this one ended up being in the pantheon of records that I revisit very frequently. The sonic atmosphere that hangs along so many of these songs is ethereal, wisping through a gauze-like fabric, clinging to fingers and nails as you try to go deeper into and out of the labyrinth it’s creating. Notes linger on the edges of light for long enough that you can grab them by their wing. Some of the snare hits smash wide and long enough for you to throw a stone into the sound to create wider ripples. (YouTube)
Go West — The King of Wishful Thinking This is such a great and feel-good song. It’s got that really big 80s vibe to it, that really fake-sugar kind of aftertaste to the production, lots of big false casio trumpet sounds. All of those pink and zebra-pattern geometric shapes. This sound is like what The 1975 ate for breakfast while trying to write their last few records. The message of this record really makes me want to take all of the bullshit that’s ever happened to me and nuke it all with affirmations. It’s the anticlimax for all of the sad emo music I’ve spent my whole adult life listenin to, watering down any drama with the simple anthem: “I’ll get over you. I know I will.” Putting everything in the rearview, man. Everything’s gonna work out. Trust. (YouTube)
Pinegrove — Moment This just sounds like such a deeply panicked song, sung at the most composed and written in the most ornate alt-country influenced style. It feels like it’s addressing a crippling answer to a question that was never asked, trying to know more than Evan is able to control. It reminds me a lot of the millipede-esque spiral that we can coil ourselves into while droning on and on into our own mind, spelunking into a cave system of our own ancient tectonic erosion within the palaces of thought we’ve composed for ourselves. The song builds some great big sky, lifts some big ceilings. There seems to be a lot of overhead space, lots of dreamy and meditative music but there’s still that fluttering guitar that sits produced deeply at the bottom of the verse, the three-part-throb that peaks on the third note from the beginning that acts as a reminder of anxiety as a criminal, the ticking of the clock that won’t let you forget that it’s there. The song disintegrates at the end, becoming a quotient of its many parts, disassembled and dissected. Don’t be scared to know. (YouTube)
Radiohead — Subterranean Homesick Alien It took me fifteen years to acknowledge that Radiohead was a band that I enjoyed, even the smallest bit. I think it began as Sit Down. Stand Up. and then maybe Everything In Its Right Place? Songs trickled in here and there. But it wasn’t until their live performance that deeply cemented their role as a band that would maybe not change but refine a style that I loved and maybe more accurately (unfairly) set a new bar for what I looked for in music and sound. Somewhere between 2012 and 2015, OK Computer became one of my immediate go to records for many reasons (mostly enjoyment, but there are other ways to explore it as well) and it actually was one that I listened to 2, 3, 4 times while sitting in a parking lot having a panic attack before moving away from NY. This song and its discussion of the hopes of being “brought on board a beautiful ship” and being dragged out and away so you could look back at the world and appreciate it from an outside perspective is such a fantasy for me at some points, to hit that zenith of an infinite leap and look down and grasp the understanding that none of it means what you think it means. One of the lyrics that stands out to me like a massive glowing neon billboard is “…all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits. Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets.” It’s one of those lines that has worked to me like a literary muse. I have often been “the weird kid,” and the way that he describes people as locking up their spirits, I’ve truly thought that same thing, the way that people keep their core Personality, their core Thriving Madman, their core Joy caged up within themselves (though over time, I’ve wondered if by ‘spirits’ he simply meant ‘their alcohol’). Why aren’t they some magnificent creation that they assumed they’d be when they were a child? And more and more as phones become lockable, as password protected journals become a norm, as we allow our personas to thrive while our Normal Body clocks in and wanders the earth in a stupor, he wrote in 1997 how we live for our secrets. Let them go, man. Let yourself go, man. Also, I love something Jonny Greenwood said about this song in general: “People flock to the same places with their cameras and hope to see the same things.” The song itself is beautiful, something that really embodies the extraterrestrial life that it describes. It’s punctuated by marathon-long keyboard notes, with flying and passing meteors of guitar sounds, all tied together by a sterile and mechanical dry high hat and snare pattern. (YouTube)
Manchester Orchestra — Obstacle Andy Hull is the Mozart of writing depressingly taut songs about internal struggle and being encapsulated by one’s own limits. This is a beautiful, captivating song which reminds me of Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. It’s personally painful to listen to, a ground level look at the things we carry, the weights we bear, the appreciations we never share. There’s a moment around 2:14, right after he says, “No one loves you like me, hear that sound; it’s all around” or so where I think the DMT releases and Hull (or the character singing, the ‘narrator’) actually experiences their own death (“in the light you arrive, as the curtain closes”), as the song shifts into something more contemplative, slower, more observational. The next lines say that “the music finally got him”, the weight of the writing and facing his demons finally burying him. But as the lyrics are annotated, the final line repeated is “It’s better than without him,” what I believe is acknowledging that the narrator, the singer, Andy Hull, me, you, the listener, all of us, are contributing to a better place while we are here to the people around us than the world would be without us being here. It’s such a deeply powerful, incredibly moving reminder that while I was just talking about wanting to be lifted out of the earth, removed from the scenarios of all of those around me as if by some giant claw in a crane game… it’s just as important to be engaged and involved in the lives that are around you that you have the ability to contribute to. The song is feather-delicate, intricate like a labyrinth on a pinhead. It wasn’t until recently that I was able to put all of this together. I loved the record this came from and I don’t think I was ready to experience the necessity of my necessity until these last few months. (YouTube)
The Postal Service — Recycled Air I was listening to music on new headphones last year and this was one of the records that came up when I did a little survey on which records one would listen if they got new headphones (I think the question was “You get brand spanking new headphones. What’s the first record you listen to?”). This one never really struck me as a ‘sonic’ record for some reason. And when the answer came back, my first reaction was of course. This record is such a sensually digital experience, a record that softens the technology into an analog discourse. I feel these electronic sounds as soft-sinking rubber buttons, as squishy gaskets around corded spirals. This song in particular feels so densely packed with a lush jungle of synthetic sounds. The little pops from the virtual vinyl, the morning sunset keyboard sounds changing artificial light into false prisms through geodesic domes, the android orchestra. There is little editing it seems, as noise and sound and glitch and tech sails lazily into a bottle neck until only the silt remains, a distant stare back through astronautical revelations of the death of a planet as the listener(s) sail in an orbiting pod strapped to their looping final thoughts. It’s all gone. Let the cotton sounds of dream envelop. The sound cauterizes the drip. (YouTube)
Sam Cooke — A Change Is Gonna Come What the fuck are we doing? This song came out in 1964, over 50 years ago. And we’re still waiting on A Change. I’m not the person to write eloquently on this topic, however I can tell you that I’m angry about it, I’m passionate about it, I’m deeply moved and hurt by it. The reason I chose to put this song on the playlist is because I saw a man in a barbershop shock its patrons with his singing voice (look up Shawn Louisiana Sam Cooke, it should come up) and as he’s singing it, it transforms the entire scene. Excitement bubbles up at first, and then a silence grips the room as they listen, contemplating not only the beauty of the voice but also the subject matter. There’s a child getting his haircut too, a kid who is sitting and watching a man sing a beautiful song, more than likely not fully understanding the tidal wave of power that this song carries. In a way, I hope he never finds out, never has to understand that there is a distinct lack in the amount of respect, of equality, of reason, of belief that his people get, that he will get simply by being. Simply by existing. I hope he’s confused by the past, I hope he can one day say that he can’t imagine it. I hope by then, The Change has come. Sam Cooke said that he hoped his father would be proud of the song, but also that the song scared him, that it came to him as if almost intended for someone else. It came to him out of thin air as if it already existed and he was merely channeling it. Its truth was divine, a story of not only a person, but of a generation. This song is an admission of all the ways that we’ve failed an entire people. Over 50 years. Singing this song brings a light of hope to the audience, but it also works as a reminder of way that we’re still waiting. For all of the ways that things have gotten better, just look at the news over the last 3 years. But listen. A Change Is Gonna Come. What a great song, what a listen, to be sure. Those notes, those tones, that delivery. But when you do hear this, please… please urge this change to come soon. (YouTube)
