MIX XLII — Begging Words From the Dirt.

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Glassjaw — You Think You’re (John Fucking Lennon) There are about 90 seconds of distant/muffled/faded drumbeats to kick this song off, and it’s almost more impactful than having the notes of the song ring at the beginning. The silence and the build-up feel so deliberate, so organic that it feels like someone is sitting beside you and the anticipation of the song playing is something that makes you want to get your hands on their shoulders, to shake them to life. It’s like when the lights at the venue go out right before the headliner, and nothing has ever felt more tense. Glassjaw’s entire tenure has been filled with moments like this, valleys of silence and inactivity followed by frenzies of release and shows and appearances and then nothing. It deeply reminds fans to seize these moments when they can, to show up, and to get there no matter the means. To play these songs loud and to drink from them every last drop. Daryl’s meltdowns in this song sit so well beside the virally infectious hook in the chorus. This is nothing new: this band has always been something so special and we will never experience anything quite like them. (Youtube)

Ithaca — Camera Eats First This band’s record is utterly flawless and from what I can tell, it’s as if they’ve just gotten started. Everything I’ve heard from them has the sense of a band in that adrenaline-fueled freefall where it seems like songs are just pouring out from them as if nothing has ever been more natural. It doesn’t feel like they’re taking time off to write and to sort out the style of their new record, what persona they will try to embody will be…. The songs from this record (#5 of 2022) come at you fast, *bang*bang*bang*bang* just ripper after ripper. This is just one example of a song that shows the massive range of what they can do within the metalcore genre. You want a breakdown? Check. You want some melodic soaring to throw your finger in the air to? Check. The sheer size of this song gets me lifted to some new atmosphere. Can’t wait until they [eventually, please?] hit the states. (Youtube)

Hum — Isle of the Cheetah Shoegaze, space chords, dronegaze, whatever you want to classify Hum as, there has always been something ethereal and intangible about what makes their sound scream with such a unique signature. The distortion and the fuzz that reaches out widely through the motes of dust and atmosphere always speaks of a buoyancy in antigravity, and the way that Matt Talbott’s blase affect exists as a steady beacon is such a testament to their existence as a band that you just want to feel SAD through. Even the opening noise that this track puts out feels like a neo-technological craft powering up and lifting off of the gruond preceding an inner-atmospheric launch. When a lot of modern bands are working on the revival of “-gaze” in any and all forms, you can find a common thread, somewhere whether buried deep within or worn on the sleeves, of the influence of Hum’s impact. (Youtube)

Hot Rod Circuit — Radiation Suit Along with The Get Up Kids, I think this was the first time I had ever heard the term “emo”. A couple of friends were going to a show (something unheard of to me at the time) to see The Get Up Kids and Hot Rod Circuit who they described to me as “poppy emo” and neither of those terms made sense to me as genres at the time. Just absolutely strange and for someone like me who was used to listening to Korn and Incubus and bands like that, I had no idea there was an underground that went quite as deep as it actually does. After digging into their catalog and liking them enough to catch them live, I remember seeing Casey absolutely losing his mind during ‘The Power of Vitamins” and it quickly rocketed this band to the top of my mind as one of the greatest and most energetic bands I’d ever seen (to that point). I think the tone of the guitars and the whipsmart sense of writing keen and unforgettable hooks is something that will keep this band cemented as one of my all-time favorites from the era and one of the grandfathers of that power-rock/”emo” sound which paved the road to me finding a lot of love for bands like The Stryder and Name Taken shortly after. This song is off of their second record which really took their songwriting to a height I didn’t know would be possible in that little “underground” nook where I had always expected a lot of that sadness and a lot of those more “punk” sensibilities. This was something different, something newer and polished to a beautiful sheen. Song gets me stoked. (Youtube)

Mannequin Pussy — Drunk II I don’t think I’ve heard a more honest and succinct quote in a song before I heard “I still love you, you stupid fuck.” This is the line that every song has ever wanted to utter, that every longing and pathetic reach has ever wanted to craft. Chills every time. This song moves in bops and jumps but still has that sad undercurrent, that desperate look of heavily bitten fingernails. The record this song comes off of (Patience) struck me like such a bolt of heat that I think I listened to it multiple times before I knew I was going to remember it forever. It’s raw and clawing on the outside, but comes from a place of a near-antisocial composure which builds it into one of those anthems that makes it sound like The Quiet Person is finally sticking up for themselves and goddamnit do they have a point. (Youtube)

I Feel Fine — Elemenohpea I love the sound of ~85,000 kids in a VFW hall piling on top of each other wearing the shirts of every broken-up band they’ve ever seen, the merch of all the other bands who played during the night, the merch guy of the touring band climbing up to crowd surf and the drummer absolutely losing his mind as he obliterates the cymbals of the borrowed kit. The local kids bobbing up and down because they’ve waited the entire week to hear just this song. The singer’s girlfriend with the camera being buried by the pile of every kid and their need to be a part of something so she can’t get the shot. This just feels so good, so energetic, so free. It feels like youth, man. If I had to isolate the emotion of every great show I’ve ever been to, this song is exactly how it would taste. Losing your friends in the bedlam and finding them again, only to shout the lyrics in their face. This song makes me miss John LoDispoto, wherever you are, man. (Youtube)

Faith No More — From Out of Nowhere When I first was making this playlist, I was on a little bit of a Faith No More kick. They have so many good songs, and Patton is something of an icon when it comes to his range and his innovation in the vocal space. He does a lot of things that didn’t (and still don’t) feel conventional. The song doesn’t do anything out of control and doesn’t reach beyond its scope, but its hook is so killer and the bridge (one minute here, one minute there) really stretches the distance that the song travels into some new territory. I think when I was curating the mix as well, initially, I had this song next to Glassjaw simply because of how much Palumbo and Patton seem to be rare peers as far as singers go. (Youtube)

Yabby You and King Tubby — Chant Down Babylon Every so often a nice little dub song or album comes along and gets me into the mood for some really hazy and hushed out reggae. This song is such a cozy loop to get lost in. When I first caught this one, I think I propped it up on repeat three or four times just to make sure I burned down the entire vibe from it before needing to return to it only days later. “Groove” is the cliche term for it, but this song gets me into such a singular space, something perpetual and onward that feels so affirming. (Youtube)

Ricky Eat Acid — Dear Lord This reminds me of a time when dubstep was king, just top of the world, and electronic songs like this would send me into a mental breakdown of movement and dance. Sheer loss of control, exclusively enslaved to the rhythm. The part where everything sort of liquifies and dissolves into a melting panoramic of kaleidoscopic ribbon is such a strobe-light inducing trip. Love the segmented beats. (Youtube)

O K H O and Saito — Wonderful Flavor A track on an utter pill, just tame and laid back, working as a smooth interlude. Love the audio distorition, like someone has played the tape out one too many times, left it out in the car in the blistering heat and tried to spin it up a hundred times in a busted tape deck. This song actually comes off of a record entirely ‘about’ or at least titled after the sensate concepts surrounding coffee. What a loose dream. (Youtube)

Blonde Redhead — Pink Love This whole record (Misery Is a Butterfly) is a masterpiece. Probably top ten of all time for me. This song in particular feels like a birdcage of a bad dream you can’t escape from. The way the bass line keeps rolling over and over, like something in the waking world that continues to repeat, your name being called again and again and you can’t respond due to the coma noose. The way a voice whispers on the down beat through the beginning part, like some succubus with claws and soft hands wrapped around your rib cage, melding with your spinal fluid. Its repetitive synth loop strumming in fluttering soap bubble colors like a laminar fountain, a strobing multicolor cowl. Even the accents that the singers have grant it a Dali tinted lean. Everything just held out a beat too long, the strong part of the words feels just a hint wrong. There’s a moment when he says, “watching you draw the line” that actually makes me feel like I’m being divided into subatomic components of my being and pulled into a trillion invisible trade winds towards a euphoric nowhere. And through this shallow unnerving and grotesque vestibule, there’s still something appealing, something that continues to draw you in. I love this record so much, and every few years, I’ll find that one of the songs on it is actually the genius piece of it, the song that the rest of the songs hinge on as the centerpiece. I guess this year, I’m going with Pink Love. I feel crazy listening to this song sometimes, like the voice of the Virgin Mary is trying to tap lightly on my window. (Youtube)

Faye Wong — 天使 I checked out Chungking Express and was pretty sure that I recognized a cover of The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’. When I looked it up, it was actually Faye Wong (the main actress in that film) covering the song. I went to Spotify to check out the cover and it was definitely rad to hear a song I knew all too well in a language that I have no comfort, no familiarity with. I checked out some of the rest of that album and this track really stood out. It has that very western 90s sound to it, right down to the “yaahh yaah”s in the background, not only calling up similarities to The Crainberries, but Alanis Morissette and others as well. The fact that the song is entirely in mandarin really lets my mind hone in exclusively on the appeal of how the song sounds and enjoy it from that surface layer. Eventually, the more I listen to it, the more I start to hear the syntax of the language, the way that different sounds change the way the song was written to let the words row the boat in the direction it wanted to go. It’s interesting that the shape and cadence of language can change the potential of a song entirely. I think that’s why songs like ‘Tom’s Diner’ sounds so… wrong?… outside of the famous hook. Or ‘Christmas Wrapping’ sounds like they wrote a great chorus and outline for a song, but the vocals sounded adlibbed in the booth. (Youtube)

Stevie Nicks — Edge of Seventeen The first time I knowingly heard this song was while I was playing GTAIV on Liberty Rock Radio. It was one of those tracks that came on enough where it cemented itself in my mind as a song that really dregs up my best memories of time with that game, a game that I feel genuinely had a better overall plot, a bigger impact on me than the ubiquitous and enormous GTAV. And it wasn’t until last year that I even really knew that this is a Stevie Nicks song. One of the biggest names of all time actually came through Charleston last year and I debated the $300 price tag until I finally surrendered: if my ticket purchase would prevent someone else who deeply felt they wanted to be there, I definitely shouldn’t be going, especially if I was doing so just for posterity. But MAN! It would have been really incredible to see an icon, a legend in person. This song has a couple of different meanings surrounding it, the two that I know of being that it is supposedly about the death of John Lennon, and it got its title from one of Tom Petty’s ex-wives who said that the Petty and she had begun their romance at the “edge of seventeen”, which is such a beautiful and almost archaic turn of phrase. Regardless of some of the more somber themes surrounding this song, it’s still one of those songs that gets deep in my mind, something about journeys, long and winding sojourns, and big coming of age moments… turning the page to something fresh and becoming something different than you had been before. I kind of remember when I was turning 17, early 11th grade, being a big turning point in a lot of what I determined was and would be my Self. Lots of shedding skins and something of a changing of the guard, personally. (Youtube)

Aaron Frazer — Over You I miss what Portugal. The Man used to be. They used to have a little bit of a retro kind of feel, especially on my favorite release of theirs, 2007’s Church Mouth. It was distant, it was sunfaded and trippy. Since then, they’ve moved onto what seems to be their new expertise, embodying an entire genre of something of a commercial-pop songwriting machine, capable of making songs that tap almost scientifically into what The Human Mind devours as just catchy enough to never forget, but not poignant enough to define as a band’s banner song, instead making the song hypnotically influential in drawing the recall to the product it was assigned to. This song from Aaron Frazer, an artist who seems relatively prolific (although I’ve not heard of him), seems like it meets that perfect blend of deeply catchy hook, high register vocal, disco-influenced jam. It’s one that feels like it was hijacked directly from the top-tier library that P.tM would have put on our shelves if they continued along the same path they had been on. Frazer has been described as a “retro soul revivalist” which is just so on the nose. This song got me hooked from the first time I heard it. I’m down to dig into this as a proxy of something that’s gone missing. (Youtube)

Little Richard — Long Tall Sally (The Thing) I usually cite Korn as one of the first bands that I ever really heard integrate “screaming” into their songs, and I (along with a generation of others) couldn’t imagine music without that divisive form of vocal delivery. But to be honest, I believe Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally may be the first time I heard such raw and shredding vocals bared on a track. I heard it so many times while watching the movie Predator in that opening helicopter scene, which at the time, I don’t think I felt much of any way about, but the more I build up a tolerance for different aspects of aggressive music, it also opens avenues of different ways aggression can be expressed in the medium. I can’t imagine what that wail must have hit people with the first time they heard Richard blasting through that first YEAH!! It’s such a sick rip. It’s so unleashed. I’ll be honest too: I feel like this song came around back to me at just the right time. If I had told myself two years, even a year ago, that The Thing would be a song that was getting me absolutely hyped to hear, something that I could understand a small platoon of marines heading into combat would want to hear to get themselves revved up for combat, I wouldn’t believe it. But there’s something in the vein of the way that note and the song that forever rolls forth from that moment that feels like a deep release, something from the core, something primal. I wish I could have seen this song performed live and in its prime. Richard seems like a force. (Youtube)

Tommy McGee — Come On This is simultaneously such a difficult genre to dive all the way into and find good cuts, but also one that’s so approachable and easy to identify the major hits. I think if I spent the time, I could take an entire year trying to explore the labels, the artists, the producers and make a good enough breadcrumb trail to begin to really chase down some of the hidden artists, and the ones who didn’t get that much of a big push. Tommy McGree and his record Positive-Negative is definitely one of those that would be one of the building blocks of that major research. The fact that this was released in 1976 is one of the only little facts I can find, noting that McGee himself released the record on his own label, pressing 500 copies and ultimately disappearing into the ether. One day when my ravenous need to listen to as many new releases as I possibly can every Friday, I’ll start to pull the slingshot back and take that deep dive into that elusive r&b/soul archive. That little guitar flourish of notes on the down beat in this song is enough to craft a classic for me. Mean song. (Youtube)

The Black Keys — My Mind Is Ramblin I’ve talked about the Chulahouma EP as my accidental introduction to the Black Keys (wherein someone was trying to recommend the Black Eyes to me, instead) for years. This EP is a handful of tracks which cover Junior Kimbrough and his delta style of blues. The song is an absolute drag. Downtrodden and shaken, the song can deliver the listener into a trancelike state, something about the rhythmic repetition which brings about a great deal of contemplation and introspection through the fuzz, the mess, the imperfection. Everything about this song feels like a bent mirror, like a door hanging off a hinge but barely lodged in a frame. Threadbare and perforated. I’ve had songs by Junior himself on previous mixes, and while I love the work of the original artist, there’s something about the way the Keys handle the effort, the way that it’s a tribute album of sorts, that makes it feel even heftier. The fact that it’s an homage drags it even deeper. (Youtube)

Adrianne Lenker — Anything An overstatement, perhaps, but maybe not: the Big Thief record UFOF shifted my brain chemistry. It forever added a book to the shelf of my mind’s labyrinthine library, providing a cipher to forever apply to the billion codexes I’ve tried to examine both within and without. Adrianne Lenker, the aforementioned band’s lead singer, released a solo record the next year, and while it didn’t dissolve into my spinal fluid the way the record from the previous year had, it still had moments of the same resonance with the frequency to obliterate the cage around my heart and make it tremble. This song feels like an infinite spin on the wheel of time, cycling and spiraling and casting a hundred small dots as it reflects the sunlight that comes through every window. This is a song that puts together the constellations of a simple beautiful love. It inspires the same small fire that simmers in the furnace of our heart when we think about the quiet Wednesdays we spend next to each other, the hushed breeze that we alone feel when we daydream about that one person. We spin the carousel of our love and we get snapshots of each other, you’re smiling as you turn away, you stare off into the ocean as you send apparitional postcards into the universe. (Youtube)

Allegra Krieger — Isolation This is a short tale, starting with prayers to the sky and ending in the inability to find any hand reaching back. And while we’re visiting different things in the beginning and the end, the cycle seems to remain the same. Dominated by an ominous bent and distorted hum which waxes and wanes through the song, Krieger’s voice is casted along through the stream, light and delicate like gossamer, baring witness to a hope that runs in one direction, in hurdles of disappointment and eventual abandonment. The song comes apart in the end as the tidal forces swirl and cyclone past the song’s surface tension. Isolation feels like the perfect name for this as the smallest voice, the miniscule assemblage of its creation is so quickly snuffed out, helped by nothing, no beacon sent no beacon returned. (Youtube)

Slowdive — Go Get It These shoegaze demigods came back with this record in 2017 and it landed in the top 20 of my favorite records of the year. It was a big and majestic sound, something that seemed to push against the borders with a calming heft. It floats by with a leviathan’s mass, big enough that it has its own atmosphere and its own earthly politics, big enough that it doesn’t need to ignore you to never know you’ve just been engulfed by its presence. In some ways, the discernible lyrics to this song are the most inspiring of all, as it really cuts to the quick of something I used to embody. I want to see it. I want to feel it. Its affirmation in the form of a misted titan gloaming through the umbral haze cries out to me in such a way that metaphor almost seems to be hyperbole. What am I doing to be myself, and how close am I to piercing the AT Field and attaining that synchronization again? When will the crevice be bent to meet its vertex? What or who or where is the phenomenon that breaks this stasis? I want to see it. I want to feel it. (Youtube)