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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Dust, Volume 7, Number 8

Big Thief

Our August collection of short reviews contains more big names than usual with singles from Big Thief and Dry Cleaning, a digital compilation from Thou, live music from Obits and a side project from members of the Bats and the Clean. Never fear, there are obscurities as well, including an improv guitar player even Bill Meyer had hardly heard of, a Norwegian emo artist in love with Texas and a death metal outfit verging into psychedelia. Our writers, this time including Tim Clarke, Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Chris Liberato and Jonathan Shaw, like what they like, big or small, hyped or unknown. We hope you’ll like some of it, too.

Marc Barreca — The Sleeper Awakes (Scissor Tail)

The Sleeper Wakes by Marc Barreca

Odd connections abound here. One might not expect the usually acoustic-oriented Scissor Tail Recordings to make a vinyl reissue of an electronic ambient music cassette from 1986, any more than one would expect its maker to currently earn his crust as a bankruptcy judge. So, let’s just shed those expectations and get to listening. Unlike so many lower profile electronic recordings from the 1980s, which seemed targeted for a space next to the cash register of a new age bookstore, this album offers a profusion of mysteries that compound the closer you listen to them. It’s not at all obvious what sounds Barreca fed into his Akai sampler. Japanese folk music? Church chimes? A log drum jam? Tugboat engines? One hears hints of such sounds, but they’ve been warped and dredged in a thin coat of murk, so that the predominant experience is one of feeling like you’re dreaming, even if your eyes are wide open.

Bill Meyer

Big Thief — “Little Things” / “Sparrow” (4AD)

Little Things/Sparrow by Big Thief

Who knows how much more music Big Thief might have released in the last 18 months if the pandemic hadn’t tripped them up? Given the creative momentum generated by 2019’s UFOF and Two Hands, it’s fair to assume the band have plenty of music waiting in the wings. “Little Things” and “Sparrow” arrive with no sign of a new album on the horizon, so are probably being released to promote Big Thief’s upcoming US and European tour. Both songs clock in at around five minutes and handle musical repetition in different satisfying ways. Reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Everything,” but hyped up on caffeine, “Little Things” feels like an exciting new direction for the band. It cycles through its whirlpooling, modulated acoustic guitar over and over, the frantic little sequence of chords never changing; the interest comes from the ways in which the rest of the instruments bob and weave in the ever-shifting, psychedelic mix. “Sparrow” is a more traditional Big Thief song, sparse and sad. Its melancholic sway is enlivened by some beautiful wavering vocal harmonies as Adrianne Lenker paints a picture of a Garden of Eden populated by sparrows, owls and eagles, culminating in Adam blaming Eve for humankind’s fall from grace.

Tim Clarke

Simão Costa — Beat Without Byte: (Un)Learning Machine (Cipsela)

Beat With Out Byte by Simão Costa

Piano preparation often makes use of modest resources — bolts and combs, strings or maybe just a raincoat tossed into the instrument’s innards. By contrast, Simão Costa’s set-up looks like took all of the entries in a robotics assembly competition and set them to work agitating a snarl of cables that met the pirated telecommunication requirements for an especially crowded favela. But whether it’s twitching motors or Costa’s own hands doing the work, the sounds that come out of his sound remarkably rich and cohesive. He stirs drifting hums, metallic sonorities, and stomping rhythms into a bracingly immediate sonic onslaught.

Bill Meyer

Cots — Disturbing Body (Boiled)

Disturbing Body by Cots

Disturbing Body is the low-key debut album by Montreal-based musician Steph Yates, who enlisted Sandro Perri to produce. Where the songs are pared back to mostly just vocals and peppy major-seventh chords on nylon-string guitar — such as “Bitter Part of the Fruit” and “Midnight at the Station” — comparisons with bossa-nova classics such as “The Girl From Ipanema” inevitably arise. Where the tempo is slower, the chord voicings are less sun-dappled, and Perri’s arrangements call upon a wider palette of instrumental colors, the songs venture into more interesting terrain, calling to mind a less haunted Broadcast. There’s an eerie sway to the opening title track, backed by rich piano chords and clattering cymbal textures. Fender Rhodes and the light clack of a rhythm track give “Inertia of a Dream” an uneasy momentum. And forlorn trumpet, percussion and piano situate “Last Sip” at closing time in a forgotten jazz club. There’s something evasive yet subtly intoxicating at work here, the album’s ten songs breezing past in half an hour, leaving plenty of unanswered questions in their wake.

Tim Clarke

Dry Cleaning — “Bug Eggs” / “Tony Speaks!” (4AD)

Bug Eggs/Tony Speaks! by Dry Cleaning

A few months on from the release of their excellent debut album, New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning have put out two more songs from the same sessions, which are featured as bonus tracks on the Japanese edition. For a band whose unique appeal is mostly attributed to Florence Shaw’s surreal lyrics and deadpan delivery, it’s heartening to hear further evidence that it’s the complete cocktail of musical ingredients — Shaw plus Tom Dowse’s inventive guitar, Lewis Maynard’s satisfyingly thick bass, and Nick Buxton’s driving drums — that alchemizes into their winning sound. The verse guitar chords of “Bug Eggs” are naggingly similar to New Long Leg’s “More Big Birds,” while the instrumental chorus has a yearning feel akin to album highlight “Her Hippo.” Maynard’s bass tone on “Tony Speaks!” is absolutely filthy, swallowing up most of the mix until Dowse’s guitar bares its teeth in a swarm of squalling wah-wah, while Shaw’s lyrics muse upon the decline of heavy industry, the environment, and crisps.

Tim Clarke

Flight Mode — TX, ’98 (Sound As Language)

TX, '98 by Flight Mode

In 1998, well before he started Little Hands of Asphalt, Sjur Lyseid spent a year in Texas at the height of the emo wave, skateboarding and going to house shows and listening to the Get Up Kids. TX, ’98 is the Norwegian’s tribute to that coming of age experience, the giddy euphorias of mid-teenage freedom filtered through bittersweet subsequent experience. “Sixteen” is the banger, all crunchy, twitchy exhilarating guitars and vulnerable pop tunefulness, its clangor breaking for wistful reminiscence, but “Fossil Fuel” waxes lyrical, its guitar riffs splintering into radiant shards, its lyrics capturing those youthful years when anything seems possible and also, somehow, the later recognition that perhaps it isn’t. It’s an interesting tension between the now-is-everything hedonism of adolescence and the rueful remembering of adulthood, encapsulate in a chorus that goes, “Well wait and see if there’s no more history/and just defend the present tense.”

Jennifer Kelly

Drew Gardner— S-T (Eiderdown Records)

S/T by Drew Gardner

Drew Gardner has been popping up all over lately, on Elkhorn’s snowed in acoustic jam Storm Sessions and the electrified follow-up Sun Cycle and as one of Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders. Here, it’s just him and his guitar plus a like-minded rhythm section (that’s Ryan Jewell on drums and Garcia Peoples’ Andy Cush on bass), spinning off dreamy, folk-into-interstellar-journeys like “Calyx” and “Kelp Highway.” Gardner puts some muscle into some of his grooves, running close to Chris Forsyth’s wide-angle electric boogie in “Bird Food.” “The Road to Eastern Garden,” though, is pure limpid transcendence, Buddhist monastery bells jangling as Gardner’s warm, inquiring melodic line intersects with rubbery bends on bass. Give this one a little time to sit, but don’t miss it.

Jennifer Kelly

Hearth — Melt (Clean Feed)

Melt by Hearth

This pan-European quartet’s name suggests domesticity, but the fact that none of its members lives in the country of their birth probably says more about the breadth of their music. The closest geographic point of reference for the sounds that pianist Kaja Draksler, trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, and saxophonists Ada Rave and Mette Rasmussen’s make together would be Chicago’s south side. Their dynamic blend of angular structures, extended instrumental techniques, and obscurely theatrical enactments brings to mind the Art Ensemble of Chicago, even though the sounds on this concert-length recording rarely echo the AEC’s. But it is similarly charged with mystery and collective identity.

Bill Meyer

Klaus Lang / Konus Quartett — Drei Allmenden (Cubus)

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Drei Allmenden (translation: Three Commons) treats the act of commission as an opportunity to create common cause. For composer and keyboardist Klaus Lang, this is a chance to push back against a long trend of separation and stratification, with musicians bound to realize the composer’s whim, no matter the cost. Invoking works from the 16th century, he penned something simple, flexible and open to embellishment. Then he pitched in with Konus Quartett, a Swiss saxophone ensemble, to get the job done. The three-part piece, which lasts 43 sublime minutes, amply rewards the submersion of ego. Lang’s slowly morphing harmonium drones and Konus’ long reed tones sound like one instrument, enriched by tendrils of sound that rise up and then sink back into the music’s body.

Bill Meyer

Lynch, Moore, Riley — Secant / Tangent (dx/dy)

Secant | Tangent by Sue Lynch, N.O. Moore, Crystabel Riley

Electric guitarist N.O. Moore is barely known in these parts. I’ve only heard him on one album with Eddie Prévost a couple years back, and the other two musicians, not at all. But on the strength of this robust performance, which was recorded at London’s Icklectick venue, it would be a loss to keep it that way. They combine acoustic sounds with electronics, courtesy of guitar effects and amplification, in an exceedingly natural fashion. Each musician also gets into the other’s business in ways that correspond to the one spicy suggestion made by one cook that elevates another’s dish to the next level. Susan Lynch’s clarinet and flute compliment Moore’s radiophonic/feedback sounds like two flashes of lightning illuminating the same dark cloud, and her vigorously pecking saxophone attack mixes with Crystabel’s cascading beats like idiosyncratically tuned drums. This is one of the first albums to be released on Moore’s dx/dy label; keep your eye out for more.

Bill Meyer

Maco Sica / Hamid Drake Tatsu Aoki & Thymme Jones—Ourania (Feeding Tube)

OURANIA by Mako Sica / Hamid Drake featuring Tatsu Aoki & Thymme Jones

Ourania is named for the muse associated with astronomy in Greek mythology, and the album has an aim for the stars quality. In 2020, Chicago’s Mako Sica lost not only the chance to play concerts, but one third of its number. Core members Brent Fuscaldo (electric bass, voice, harmonica, percussion) and Przemyslaw Krys Drazek (electric trumpet, electric guitar, mandolin) could have just hunkered down with their respective TV sets. Instead, they booked themselves three other musicians who make rising above circumstances a core practice. The duo convened at Electrical Audio with Hamid Drake (drums, percussion, Tatsu Aoki (upright bass, shamisen), and Thymme Jones (piano, organ, balloon, trumpet, voice, recorder, percussion), rolled tape for a couple hours, and walked out with this album. The 85 minute-long recording (edited to about half that length on vinyl, but the LP comes with a download card) exudes a vibe of calm, even beatitude, with twin trumpets and Fuscaldo’s echo-laden, nearly word-free vocals weaving though a sequence of patient grooves like migrational birds on the glide.

Bill Meyer

Mar Caribe — Hymn of the Mar Caribe (Mar Caribe)

Hymn of the Mar Caribe b/w Rondo for Unemployment by mar caribe

Some musicians burn to make something new; others generate attention-getting sounds designed to maximize the potential of their other earning activities; and others, well, they just want you to sway along with their version of the good sounds. Mar Caribe falls into that last category. This Chicago-based instrumental ensemble has spent most of the last decade maintaining a robust performance schedule, and it would seem that recording is pretty much an afterthought; a photo of the test pressing for this 7” was posted in May 2019, but the release show didn’t happen until August 2021. Sure, COVID can be blamed for part of the delay, but one suspects that mostly, these guys just want to play, and they didn’t bother to stuff the singles in the sleeves until they knew when they’d next be leaning over a merch table. The titular suspends anthemic brass and pedal steel over a swinging double bass cadence, and if there was a moment during the night when the band invited the audience to pledge allegiance to their favorite drink, this is what they’d be playing while they asked. Guitars lead on the flip side, whose busy twists and turns belie the implied laziness of the title, “Rondo For Unemployment.”

Bill Meyer

Mint Julep — In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep (Western Vinyl)

In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep by Mint Julep

These songs traverse a hazy, dreamlike space, diffusing dance beats, dream-y vocals and synth pulses into inchoate sensation that nonetheless retains enough rhythmic propulsion to keep your heart rate up. “A Rising Sun” filters jangly guitar and bass through a sizzle of static, letting tambourine thump gently somewhere off camera, as voices soothe and reassure. “Mirage” pounds a four-on-the-floor, but quietly, angelically, like a disco visited through astral projection or maybe a really rave-y iteration of heaven. There’s an ominous undercurrent to “Longshore Drift,” in its growly, sub-bass-y hum, but glittering bits of synth sprinkle over like fairy dust. This is indefinitely gorgeous stuff, ethereal but surprisingly energizing. Dance or drift, take your pick.

Jennifer Kelly

Monocot — Directions We Know (Feeding Tube)

Direction We Know by Monocot

Directions We Know is an LP of free-form freak-outs generated by an instrumental duo that includes one musician who you might expect to perpetuate such a ruckus, and one that you might not. The more likely character is drummer Jayson Gerycz, who may be known for keeping time with the Cloud Nothings, but has shown a willingness to wax colorizing in the company of Anthony Pasquarosa, Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin. The happy surprise is Rosali Middleman, whose singer-songwriter efforts have kept her guitar playing firmly in service of her songs. She doesn’t exactly abandon lyricism in Monocot, but the tunes serve as launching ramps for exuberant lunges into the realm of voltage-saturated sound. On “Ruby Throated,” the first of the record’s four extended jams, Middleman lofts rippling peals over a near-boil of drums and churning loops. By the time you get to “Multidimensional Solutions,” the last and longest track, her wah-wah-dipped streams of sound have taken on a blackened quality, as though her overheating tubes have burned every note.

Bill Meyer

Obits — Die at the Zoo (Outer Battery)

Die At The Zoo by Obits

Few aughts rock bands held more promise than Obits. The four-piece headed by Hot Snakes’ Rick Froberg and Edsel’s Sohrab Habibion emerged in 2005 with a stinging, stripped-back, blues-touched sound. Froberg’s feral snarl rode a surfy, twitchy amplified onslaught, that was, by 2012 a finely tuned machine. I caught one of the live shows following Moody, Standard and Poor at small club in Northampton the same year this was recorded (so small that I was sitting on a couch next to Froberg, oblivious, for 20 minutes before the show), and what struck me was how well the band played together. The records sound chaotic, and that was certainly there in performance, but the cuts and stops were perfect, the surfy instrumental breaks (“New August”) absolutely in tune. At the time this set was recorded in the Brisbane punk landmark known as the Zoo, the band was near the peak of its considerable powers—and regrettably near the end of its run. Die at the Zoo is reasonably well recorded, rough enough to capture the band’s raucous energy, skilled enough so you can understand the words and hear all the parts. It hits all the highlights, blistering early cuts like “Widow of My Dreams,” and “Pine On,” the blues cover “Milk Cow Blues,” and later, slightly more melodic ragers like “Everything Looks Better in the Morning” and “You Gotta Lose.” The guitar work is particularly sharp throughout, its straight-on chug breaking into fiery blues licks and surfy whammy explosions. It’s a poignant reminder of a time when American rock bands played ferocious shows halfway across the world (or anywhere) as a matter of course and a fitting eulogy for Obits.

Jennifer Kelly

A Place To Bury Strangers — Hologram (Dedstrange)

Hologram EP by A Place To Bury Strangers

A Place To Bury Strangers returns with a new rhythm section and renewed focus on the elements that made its version of revivalism the loudest if not brashest of the New York aughties. Sarah and John Fedowitz on drums and bass join Oliver Ackerman on the five track EP Hologram which is the most concise and vital APTBS release for a while. For all the criticism of copyism thrown at the band since their early days, APTBS has always been as much about Ackerman’s production skills and feel for texture as musical originality and the songs on Hologram sound fantastic at volume. Beneath the sonic onslaught of fuzz and reverb, not a brick is misplaced in this intricately constructed sonic wall. True “I Might Have” is pure Jesus & Mary Chain and “In My Hive” a Wax Trax take on Spector but Hologram is an endorphin rush of guitar driven noise bound to make one forget the world, if only for a while.

Andrew Forell

Praises — EP4 (Hand Drawn Dracula)

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Jesse Crowe’s work as Praises has been ongoing since 2014, but has shifted in tone, instrumentation and emphasis since then. While the first two EPs have more of a full, rock band feel, the third one and 2018’s full-length In This Year: Ten of Swords took things in a more electronic, sometimes industrial direction. It was an even better fit for the rest, probing creativity evident in Praises’ work, and 3/4s of the new EP4 are in a pleasingly similar vein. The echoing, ringing denunciations of “We Let Go” and “A World on Fire” are fine examples of Praises’ existing strengths, but the opening “Apples for My Love” is immediately captivating in a very different way. Gauzy and rapturous, it’s a reverie that keeps the satisfying textural detail of the other songs but turns them to different ends. It’s not something that was missing from Crowe’s work before — again, the other tracks here are also very good — but a reminder that what Praises has shown before is not the extent of what they can do.

Ian Mathers

The Sundae Painters — The First SP Single (Leather Jacket)

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“This is a supergroup, is it not?” someone asked the Sundae Painters bassist Paul Kean on social media last year, to which he responded, “Some may choose that title. We prefer superglue.” Kaye Woodward, his wife and longtime bandmate in both The Bats and Minisnap, takes the lead vocal on “Thin Air,” one of the pair of A-sides found on their new band’s debut seven-inch. From the outset, Kean’s unmistakable bass playing and Hamish Kilgour’s (The Clean/Mad Scene) drumming lock into a psychedelic march, with the other instruments weaving like kites above, vying for position on the same breeze. “You fight your way down/You fight your way up/You wait for the dust to settle,” Woodward sings. A few gentle strums cut their way through the parade, and a guitar calls out gull-like from above, before everything trails off as if something potent has just kicked in. On the flip side, “Aversion” has an old friend-like familiarity to it, soundwise (if not lengthwise) sitting somewhere between VU’s “The Gift” and “Sister Ray.” Things begin a little stand-offish, though, like you’ve interrupted a guitar pontificating to a rapt audience — it turns its head to look you over, falling momentarily silent, before picking right back up where it left off. Kilgour’s spoken vocals join the conversation, as the song builds towards a groovy kind of fever pitch. “You look a little stoned,” he says, before responding to his own observation. “Well me I’m a little bit groggy/But it ain’t too foggy/I can see some way of getting out of here.” By this point, both guitars (played by Woodward and Tall Dwarfs’ Alec Bathgate) are full-on screeching and howling, and as the song sputters to a sudden finish, our man’s left waiting for someone to buy him “a ride out the gate.”

Chris Liberato

Thou — Hightower (Self-released)

Hightower by Thou

Hightower is the latest in a string of digital compilations from Thou, most of which collect songs that have been previously released on small-batch splits, 7” records and other hyper-obscure media that briefly circulated through the metal underground. You might be tempted to pronounce that a cynical cash-grab, but Thou has posted Hightower (along with previous compilations, like Algiers, Oakland and Blessings of the Highest Order, a killer collection of Nirvana covers) on their official Bandcamp page as a name-yo’-price download. Thanks, band. Beyond convenience, Hightower has an additional, if a sort of inside-baseball, attraction. The band has re-recorded a few of its older songs with its latest, three-guitar line-up. Longtime listeners will recognize “Smoke Pigs” and “Fucking Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean,” which already sounded terrifyingly massive back in 2008 and 2007, respectively. The expanded instrumentation, new arrangements and better production give the songs even more power and depth, all the way down to the bottom of the effing ocean. Yikes. And there are a few additional touches, like K.C. Stafford’s clean vocals on “Fucking Chained…,” which provide an effective complement to Bryan Funck’s inimitably scabrous howl. Rarely has being pummeled and feeling bummed out been so vivifying.

Jonathan Shaw

Tropical Fuck Storm — Deep States (Joyful Noise)

Deep States by Tropical Fuck Storm

Fueled by exasperation as much as anger, the new album by Melbourne’s Tropical Fuck Storm rounds on the myriad ways in which the world has become a “Bumma Sanger” as leader Gareth Liddiard puts it on the eponymous song about COVID lockdown. A roiling meld of psychedelic garage garnished with elements of hip hop and electronic noise it’s close in method and mood if not sound to another Australian provocateur JG Thirwell whose Foetus project girded maximalist surfaces with rigid discipline. If the Tropical Fuck Storm sought to mirror current conditions, they succeed but lack of clarity in both production and intent makes Deep States a frustrating experience. Backing vocals from Fiona Kitschin (bass), Erica Dunn (keys and guitar) and Lauren Hammel (drums) leaven Liddiard’s blokey pronouncements and there are some good sounds and biting words but the band’s determination to overelaborate and underdevelop musical ideas makes this album seem like a lost opportunity.

Andrew Forell

Marta Warelis / Carlos “Zingaro” / Helena Espvall /Marcelo dos Reis — Turquoise Dream (JACC)

Turquoise Dream by Marta Warelis, Carlos "Zíngaro", Helena Espvall, Marcelo dos Reis

Turquoise Dream documents an example of an encounter that is a mainstay of avant-garde jazz festivals, in which out of towners mix it up locals that they may or may not know. This particular concert, which took place at the Jazz ao Centro Festival in 2019, is one such encounter that deserves to live past the night when it transpired. It featured three stringed instrument players who live in Portugal and a Polish pianist who is based in Holland. But they don’t sound like strangers at all. Violinist Zingaro, cellist Espvall, and guitarist dos Reis blend like flashes of sunlight reflecting off of waves, adding up to a sound that is bright and ever-changing. Warelis, who is equally resourceful with her head under the lid of her piano as she is at the keyboard, adding fleet but substantial responses to her hosts’ quicksilver interactions. The result is music that is resolutely abstract but closely engaged.

Bill Meyer

Wharflurch — Psychedelic Realms ov Hell (Gurgling Gore)

PSYCHEDELIC REALMS OV HELL by Wharflurch

Wharflurch is just plain fun to say — but there are at least two ways in which the name also makes sense for the band that has chosen it: it has a bilious, nauseous quality that matches the vibe of the pustulent death metal you’ll hear on Psychedelic Realms ov Hell; and if you separate the words, you can conjure a sodden, rotten wooden structure, swaying vertiginously over a marshy expanse of water, which is filled with alligators and decaying organic material. Imagine that sway, and that stink, and then imagine yourself collapsing into the viscous fluid, soon to be gator chow. Sounds like Florida, and that’s exactly from whence Wharflurch has emerged. Which also makes sense. Is Wharflurch’s music “psychedelic”? Depends on what you hear in that word. If you want to see hippies dancing ecstatically on a verdant, sun-drenched stretch of Golden Gate Park, then no. But if you have spent any time in the warped, dementedly distorted spaces that psychedelics can open (less happily perhaps, but very powerfully), then yes. Wharflurch likes to accent its meaty riffs and muscular thumps with weird flutters and electronic effects that frequently have a gastric, flatulent quality to them. The saturated and sickly pinks and greens on the album art do a pretty good job of capturing the music’s tones. So do the song titles: “Stoned Ape Apocalypse,” “Bog Body Boletus,” “Phantasmagorical Fumes.” Still game? I’m sorry. But I’ll also be standing right there next to you, on that wobbly, lurching wharf, watching the gators swim near.

Jonathan Shaw

Whisper Room — Lunokhod (Midira Records)

Lunokhod by Whisper Room

That the title of Whisper Room’s fifth album is taken from Soviet lunar rovers makes a certain sense, given how potentially frustrating it might have been for the trio to be working at such a distance. Generally their other records are recorded live, in one room, seeing Aidan Baker (guitar), Jakob Thiesen (drums) and Neil Wiernik (bass) exploring simultaneously, hitting whatever junctions of psychedelic/shoegazing/motorik sound come to them. With Baker in Berlin and travel understandably limiited, this time they recorded their parts separately, layering them together (and bringing in sound designer Scott Deathe to add the kind of pedal processing their sound engineer normally does live). The result certainly sounds as collaborative as ever, seven seamless tracks making up nearly an hour that makes the journey from the friendly, clattering percussion of “Lunokhod01” to the centrifugal ambience of “Lunokhod07” feel perfectly natural. Even though it explores just as much inner and outer space as Whisper Room ever have, there’s something very approachable about Lunokhod that makes it one of their best.

Ian Mathers

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fanfic-corner · 3 years

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Bed Sharing

I created this list probably about a month or so ago, and I remember being so hopeful for the finale. I never dreamt we would get semi-canon Destiel, but I also never imagined the finale would be that disappointing. I will be posting a list of 15x20 fics, but for now, take this fluff and ignore your problems for a while.

Lock and Key by tricia_16 on AO3. (144,500 words).

Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bookstore Owner Castiel, Musician Dean Winchester, Friends to Lovers, Keeping Secrets, Mutual Pining, Flirting, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Smut, Virgin Castiel, Angry Sex, Dubious Content, Recreational Drug Use, Fluff, Dating, Song Lyrics, Sharing a Bed, Happy Ending.

My Rating: 5 stars.

Description: In a world where people get songs stuck in their heads whenever their soulmate is singing out loud, Castiel discovers that being soulmates with an aspiring singer/songwriter can be taxing, to say the least. Finding said soulmate, learning that he's the most attractive human being on the face of the earth, and then not being able to tell him he’s meant for you? It turns out that's even worse. Not having a soulmate is just the icing on the cake on an already crappy life, if you ask Dean. He wants to sell his songs, but he's terrified of singing them himself. He wants to be a mechanic, but he's stuck selling parts, instead. He wants to kiss the ever loving fuck out of Sam's girlfriend's boss, too, but the guy's holding out for his soulmate, which of course means Dean doesn't even have a shot....right?

Notes: The pure terror that struck me at the end of chapter one nearly made me dip out of this, but I stuck through it, and was 100% rewarded with the ending (I screamed. I think everyone is worried about me now).

Stand By Me by whelvenwings on AO3. (31,252 words).

Tags: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Sharing a Bed, Slow Dancing, Smut, First Kiss, Canon-Typical Violence, Touch-Starved Dean, Love Confessions.

My Rating: 5 stars.

Description: Dean Winchester has been alone for a long, long time. When he and Castiel happen to find each other - a couple of survivors in a world that��s been all but wiped clean - Dean’s looking for his brother; Castiel is looking for something to look for. They stick together, because neither of them much wants to be alone. They hate each other at first, of course. Dean hates Castiel for being weird and quiet and ironic and antagonistic and proud. Castiel hates Dean for being blunt and reckless and coarse, for drinking, for refusing to talk about how he feels and just pretending everything is fine. Most of all, they hate themselves and each other just for being alive. What right do they have to be alive? No one else seems to be. But against his own will, Dean starts to notice things about Castiel that he likes. Starts to hope that Castiel might like him, too. And together, they start to fight for a world where they're both alive - and that's a good thing.

Notes: I know I have recced this multiple times before but it is one of my all time favourite fics so I won’t apologise! It is so cute, and it has everything you could ask for in a fic.

Partnered by K_K_TiBal on AO3. (28,112 words).

Tags: Minor Donna/Jody, Minor Eileen/Sam, Detective Dean Winchester, Lieutenant Castiel, Undercover as Married, Suburbia, Drug Use, Sharing a Bed, Pining, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fake Marriage, Falling in Love, Love Confessions, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, First Kiss, Demisexual Castiel, Demiromantic Dean Winchester.

My Rating: 5 stars.

Description: Dean didn't think that his life as a detective could get much worse after Castiel was promoted to lieutenant. Castiel was a stickler for the rules, had no sense of humour, and never seemed to give Dean a break, even though they used to be partners. But then, despite all of their questionable history, the two are asked to go undercover on a case in the wealthy suburbs of California. . . as a married couple.

Notes: I am screaming, that was so f*cking cute! And the artwork was gorgeous, too. Also, now I ship Jody and Donna. Cas gave off such Holt vibes in this, I was convinced I accidentally started reading a Brooklyn Nine-Nine fic (do those exist?)

the cost of a thing by quiettewandering on AO3. (74,198 words).

Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fake Marriage, Human Castiel, Protective Dean Winchester, Touch-Starved Castiel, Mutual Pining, Jealous Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, Depressed Castiel, Fake/ Pretend Relationship, Sharing a Bed.

My Rating: 5 stars.

Description: 16 months ago, Cas became human. 12 months ago, Cas left the bunker and a broken-hearted Dean behind. Now they must work a case together, where married couples are dying mysterious deaths and the only way to earn the neighbors' trust is by pretending to be married. Slowly, Dean finds that he loves being in a relationship with Cas, fake or not, and Cas finds his loneliness retreating, despite the harsh reality looming right around the corner. As Dean and Cas navigate this fake, but all too real, relationship, can they find the monster that is on a mysteriously motivated killing spree before it’s too late?

Notes: So cute! My favourite trope! And, as an added bonus, the sharing of a bed.

flowers in the backyard by justkeeponwriting on AO3. (34,710 words).

Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Homeless Castiel, Domestic Fluff, Sharing a Bed, Minor Character Death, References to Depression, Angst with a Happy Ending, Smut.

My Rating: 4 stars.

Description: After Uncle Bobby’s death, Dean goes to check up on the cabin that he’s inherited. Dean hasn’t been at the cabin for years, but he knows Bobby hasn’t renovated it in ages, so he isn’t very thrilled to be saddled with it. Upon arrival, he notices that unlike he expected, it’s not unoccupied, nor falling apart – instead, a stranger called Castiel has made it into his home.

Notes: This was such a relaxing and gentle read, I nearly fell asleep after I finished it! Cas & Dean’s tentative relationship was written absolutely beautifully, too.

What Happened In Vegas by Ltleflrt on AO3. (18,447 words).

Tags: Sam/Eileen, Alternate Universe - No Supernatural, Teacher Dean, Photographer Castiel, Las Vegas Wedding, Secret Relationship, Sharing a Bed, Switch Dean, Switch Castiel, Fluff.

My Rating: 4 stars.

Description: Long time friends Dean and Castiel are road tripping from Chicago to San Diego for Sam and Eileen’s wedding, and a pitstop in Las Vegas turns into drunken love confessions and a surprise marriage. Turns out the pining has been mutual this whole time, but now they’re finally together and on cloud-fucking-nine. Until they remember that this trip isn’t supposed to be about them. To avoid undermining Sam and Eileen’s important weekend, they decide to keep their new relationship status a secret. They’ll keep the heart eyes toned down and their hands to themselves, but the struggle is real.

Notes: Oh my lord, this was absolutely hilarious (especially that last piece of art - I totally lost it) and adorable. I can totally imagine Dean and Cas getting a cheesy Vegas wedding, and we can all dig Elvis (sorry).

Stories Are Made of Mistakes by wildhoneypie on AO3. (4,942 words).

Tags: Human Castiel, Diners, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Dean, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Slow Build, Case Fic, Domestic, Didn’t Know They Were Dating.

My Rating: 4 stars.

Description: In which Cas is human and doesn't understand basic concepts like: clothing, Mythbusters, moisturizer, and Greek food. Dean is...Dean and doesn't understand basic concepts like: boyfriends, language, how to tell your friend that he's a walking miracle, and when not to quip.

Notes: This was so cute and I live for human Cas. I also love the recurring ‘no fucking quipping’ joke in this, although the idea of Cas swearing broke me a bit!

Sharing the Rain Dog by almaasi on AO3. (19,837 words).

Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternative Universe - Historical (1999), Fluff, Romance, No Angst, Accidental Dating, First Dates, Rain, Dogs, Pets, FBI Agent Castiel, Musician Dean, Singer Dean, Flustered Dean, Domestic Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Moving In Together, Living Together, First Kiss, Sharing a Bed, Cuddling, Smut.

My Rating: 4 stars.

Description: When some asshole hits a dog with his car and drives off, the first two people on the scene are Dean and Castiel. Castiel's an FBI agent with a plane to catch, and he doesn't have time to take the dog to the vet. Dean's a musician, and he doesn't have the money. An agreement is reached: Dean goes, Castiel pays, and they'll exchange details and meet again to work things out. But who gets the dog? Sooner or later they're going to realise that having shared custody of one pitbull isn't ideal. She needs one home, not two. One stable, loving home...

Notes: Rain Dog was so cute, and so was flustered Dean! The hitting a dog joke is starting to get out of hand, though.

This Game We Play by destieldrabblesdaily on AO3. (1,195 words).

Tags: High School AU, Friends to Lovers, Fluff, Bed Sharing.

My Rating: 3 stars.

Description: Dean and Castiel have been best friends since they were little, and sleepovers are a common event. They've always loved playing the game where they draw out letters on each others backs and try to guess what the other is writing. Even though sixteen seems to be a bit too old to still play the game, Castiel uses it as a chance to silently confess something that he's been wanting to share with Dean for a long time.

Notes: This was adorable. I am 100% here for Cas and Dean being childhood friends.

Minty Fresh Kisses by almaasi on AO3. (7,905 words).

Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Motel Rooms, Teeth, Dean in Love, Human Castiel, First Kiss, Pancakes, Sharing a Bed, Fluff, Dean POV, One Shot.

My Rating: 3 stars.

Description: Dean teaches a newly-human Castiel how to brush his teeth properly. Things don't go according to plan – but for once, the unexpected development actually presents a more promising outcome.

Notes: This was so sweet, and Cas was so cute as a human! Also, I love fics where Sam is just done with the constant sexual tension, it always makes me laugh.

Wee Little Love Child by almaasi on AO3. (10,649 words).

Tags: Fluff, Romance, Kid Fic, Team Free Will, De-Aged Sam Winchester, Cursed Sam Winchester, Mistaken for Being in a Relationship, Sam Winchester ships Dean/Cas, Matchmaker Rowena, Parent Castiel, Parent Dean, Affectionate Dean, Love Confessions, First Kiss, Sharing a Bed, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Domestic Fluff.

My Rating: 3 stars.

Description: After being magically de-aged, little Sammy is under the impression that Dean and Cas are his parents. He wants to know if they're in love, but they can't (or won't) give a consistent answer. The thing is, they have to grant Sam's greatest wish in order to reverse the curse, but they can only do that as a pair. What does Sam want most? For Dean and Cas to express their true feelings. Aloud. To each other.

Notes: Aw, I love Rowena, and I am 100% here for her cursing Sam just to get Dean and Cas to stop being idiots and actually get together.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: the fans are in control now. We control the Supernatural content we are getting, so please create the ending you would want to see. And, if anyone wants to talk or rant or suggest a fic, I am always here.

#bed sharing #destiel #spnfamily #supernatural #fanfiction #ficrec

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izukult · 3 years

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sorry i can’t have you? one up me? so this playlist isn’t part of the matchups i’m sorry😞🤝

here you go IDIOT CHILD ( @rat-bastar ) being your friend is so hard 😁

choke - i don’t know how but they found me

ok absolutely your vibes. if you got the chance you would bitch slap me, we both know it. you big ol bully. this is the vibey pop ish version of a villain song and it’s such a hype song in my opinion idk

love me dead - ludo

we’ve established its a good song ok🤝. idk lmao play this while you’re thinking ab your friend OR her ex gf ;) as of my knowledge those the mfs you simp for or whateva LMAO

lemons (demo)

please. PLEASE THIS ONE IS SO OBVIOUS. you vibes. absolute you vibes. you @ me. you @ everyone. you play this on full volume while you try to convince yourself you hate everyone. you play this while judging every violin player ever. you play this glaring at maliek or whagever his name is. this song is you

piano man - billy joel

i saw this on one of your playlists lol BUT i feel like this is something you would blare on the bus or on your way to a fucking debate tournament you fucking loser

hesitation - hot flash heat wave

such a good song. this also feels like something you would listen to while you think ab other people. i dunno it’s got that sweet, sweet ‘condescending to hide real emotions’ energy and it’s vibey and it’s kinda sad yea

waltz #2 (xo) - elliott smith

don’t even get me started on how big of an elliott smith can i was. you def give him vibes but i mean that as a compliment?? i can imagine you with ur head down hands in ur pockets being all bummed out and angry walking up the hill to ur house idk that’s very niche oddly specific? i never really realized this song had BIG BIG BIG you vibes until i started typing this but i’m listening to the lyrics and it’s like describing you go off ig

everyone hates his parents - falsettos

i know you love falsettos and we both know we love to shit talk our parents so. it just seems to make sense. ALSO i feel like we would argue like marvin and trina or marvin and whizzer or marvin and anyone LOL

colorful penguins - we shore is dedicated

ok i know iM the one working, but this song please. listen to it. listen to the music. to the tone of voice. to the certain old tavern rustic vibe. that’s you. i cant rly describe it but the vibe of this song is your vibe

beachboy - mccafferty

well we have the shared mother’s name in the beginning there and that’s fun for me. also we know that i be smoking and yada yada and i know your friends do too and i feel like this song is just you dealing w ur friends dummy habits and angry fast sing

hannah - swmrs

something about this song just feels like a convo we’d have?? like in my head i can tell what you would say and what i would say IDK LMAO maybe that’s just me but it’s also a good song

problems - mother mother

this song. LMAOOOO. the way you constantly BULLY me i feel like this song is how you present urself to other ppl v some deep shit like how you feel ab urself idk i’m not ur therapist ur apparently mine w how much you be psychoanalyzing me🤨. ALSO you’d scream this dont argue w me

i love you like an alcoholic - the taxpayers

multiple things here. again those crusty cobblestone streets at night after it rains where someone’s getting murdered in an alleyway vibes that you give. and i feel like if u were ever like <3 at someone, this is how you’d feel idc bitch

seashore - the regrettes

i love this band sm pls i want to kiss her. ANYWAY feels again like a you @ the world song. you just feel like someone who would shove someone in a trash can if they said one wrong word about you & i rly appreciate it

gooey - glass animals

this song feels like something that would be on a playlist with “i know this:” and i thought you’d like those vibes. sorry for the peanut butter reference

chicago - flipturn

you feel like someone who would let me play flipturn and pretend to hate it cos you pretend to hate everything i do but actually vibe w it so

everybody loves raymond (except for me) - mookamay

this is the girl i was tellin u ab who wrote the songs ab me YEA THIS IS ONE OF THE SONGS AB ME SO I FIGURED YOU WOULD APPRECIATE A SONG THAT WAS KIND OF A SLIGHT TO ME SO LMAO I PUT IT ON THERE. basically this is a song ab someone literally getting tired of ME so yknow felt fitting 😁‼️ (this one is mostly a joke and i will probably take it off the playlist but it still stands)

power over me - dermot kennedy

you seem like someone who would listen to dermot kennedy which is fair bc i used to scream this shit in the shower i would just have a lil concert and you give me the same vibe this one isn’t that deep

ghost duet - louie zong

lol some serotonin. just this playin in the background while u game

iris - the goo goo dolls

just a rly good song. just a rly good song that fits ur vibe. also if u were ever in love i also stand by saying you would listen to this & think ab them

dream sweet in sea major - miracle musical

if you were ever listen to “soft music🥺✊” this would be your version of it

bs - still woozy

I TOLD U TO LISTEN TO THIS AND I DONT THINK YOU DID YOU BITCH SO NOW I WILL FORCE YOU. also i have brown eyes so basically this is everyone including u @ me it’s ok ur human u can’t be blamed for acknowledging my charm ;) 😁🤝

paper thin hotel - matt maltese

you just seem like someone who would listen to him during a depressive episode

troubled mind - cannibal kids

cant find the right words for this one but like gives me you trying to be there for someone and coming off as apathetic and someone not knowing how to be a proper friend to you and yall just space vibes yknow what i mean?? Idk

bloom (bonus track) - the paper kites

if you and a girl (strictly a girl idc that this was written by a dude no fucking guy gets this song) were in love. like in any way. romantic love, platonic love, competitive love idgaf i just feel like THIS has the vibe for u

kill the director - the wombats

i don’t care THIS IS YOU IN LOVE. I THINK YOUD HATE HAVING REAL FEELINGS FOR SOMEONE. YOUD DEF BE THE PERSON TO IGNORE IT AND YOU BULLY THEM JUST A L I L EXTRA AND YOU DO LIL THINGS THAT SHOW U LIKE EM LIKE IF YOU RLY PAY ATTENTION YOU CAN PICK IT UP but no way you’re gonna express that shit LMAO

i got the blues - big bill broonzy

i dunno this ones just a banger

dirty imbecile - the happy first

this is you having a breakdown. that’s all! thanks queen!

under my skin - jukebox the ghost

very similar to lemons but also different?? you getting pissed at everyone but having a select couple ppl you cherish 👍

song for me - greer

where do i START? you not properly voicing emotions ? preppy pessimism ? dissociation ? vibing ? teen angst ? good vibes ? in love w ideas ?

my explanations aren’t as good as urs but also i’m cool so 👍 ur welcome you’ve been blessed by a personalized playlist from ME 🙄🙌 not from no bitchass capitalist anime character 😐

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221biwanttodiestreet · 4 years

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Finally Posting This!

I said I was gonna draw Hazbin characters with Chicago songs so here they are! I do believe that ‘when your good to mama’ really works for Angel Dust and the guy that plays Billy Flynn sounds a lot like Alastor so ‘All I care about is love’ seemed appropriate. In Charlie’s I was going to put Razzle and Dazzle with her because haha the song is their names but I couldn’t figure out how to draw them even with reference soooo yeah. And ‘Mr Celophane’ seemed to go with Husk and the lyrics “suppose you was a little cat” makes me laugh..

Bonus: Cherri Bomb

Not the best but I’m proud of it..

#hazbin hotel #art #husk #alastor #radio demon #angel dust #charlie magne #cherri bomb

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sinceileftyoublog · 6 years

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Pitchfork Music Festival Preview: 10 Can’t Miss Non-Headliner Acts

Raphael Saadiq; Photo by Mel D. Cole

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Tame Impala haven’t released a new album since the last time we saw them three years ago. Fleet Foxes headlined Pitchfork in 2011. Ms. Lauryn Hill already played her best songs two years ago at--wait for it--Ravinia. What gives?

Okay, I’m still very excited to see all three of these headliners. But sort of like in 2016, for this year’s Pitchfork, the gems are earlier in the day. Here are 10 reasons to show up early throughout the weekend.

FRIDAY

Lucy Dacus: 2:30, Green Stage

And we thought she was good after releasing her debut! After a label bidding war, singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus has exceeded expectations with her second album Historian, released earlier this year. The songs are more lyrically and instrumentally complex and ambitious, headlined by opening album anthem “Night Shift”. Remember and shout along to this line: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers.”

Open Mike Eagle: 4:00, Blue Stage

The Chicago rapper’s latest album Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a concept record about the Robert Taylor Holmes public housing project. Any local voice showing public housing in a positive light to the rest of the world is welcome--let alone portraying Chicago as something other than what the media illustrates. That Open Mike Eagle has serious lyrical chops and charm is just an added bonus.

Mike also plays an after-show tonight at Lincoln Hall. Fess Grandiose opens.

Syd: 6:15, Green Stage

We’ve seen Syd play with her band The Internet, who release a new album today. But this set will be largely comprised of solo material from the singer’s debut Fin, released last year to much acclaim. It combines 90′s R&B and neo soul with contemporary beats and production styles.

The Internet hosts an album release party for their new record Hive Mind tonight at East Room.

Mount Kimbie: 7:45, Blue Stage

Grey with splashes of color--that’s how I might describe Mount Kimbie’s most recent album Love What Survives. It’ll be perfect for a rainy day on the Blue Stage. The band combines live instrumentation with electronic music to create songs that vary between ambient, pop, and krautrock. While they might not have King Krule on the bill to come out for career highlight “Blue Train Lines” (surprise appearance, please?) or the other prominent vocalists they’ve collaborated with to come out for their respective songs, the band’s controlled chaos should suffice.

SATURDAY

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: 2:45, Blue Stage

One of the headier artists on the bill this year is Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, whose Buchla synthesizer-addled songs envelop your mind more than they make your body move. Last year’s The Kid followed up Smith’s great 2016 effort Ears and a collaborative album with synth master Suzanne Ciani, and that one wasn’t too bad either. A concept album about four stages of life whose context isn’t necessary to enjoy or appreciate the music, The Kid is ultimately a showcase for Smith’s ability to weave multiple synths together and combine it with her voice to make shimmering tunes.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith plays an after-show Sunday night at Constellation. Cool Maritime opens.

Moses Sumney; Photo by Eric Gyamfi

Moses Sumney: 4:15, Blue Stage

Moses Sumney is a once-in-a-lifetime singer. Not because he can shatter glasses or anything--though he probably could--but because he can take abstract concepts like capitalism and the hetero-normative nature of romantic love and make you feel like you’ve experienced them on a concrete level even if you haven’t, all through the sheer beauty of his voice and strumming of his guitar. The potential for quietest, most heartbreaking moment of the festival will come when he sings “Doomed” off of last year’s Aromanticism: “Am I vital / If my heart is idle? / Am I doomed?”

Raphael Saadiq: 5:15, Red Stage

The most surprising, yet welcome booking at this year’s festival is R&B master Raphael Saadiq. Pitchfork has reviewed one of his albums and has given him minimal coverage over the years despite the excellence of his 2011 album Stone Rollin’. Perhaps it was his production work on Solange’s 2016 record A Seat At The Table that landed him a spot on the bill, but I shouldn’t really ask any questions. I’ll just appreciate his unique mix of soul, funk, R&B, blues, and rock.

Kelela: 7:45, Blue Stage

After breaking out with her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me, Kelela finally released the brilliant, fully formed statement we’ve all waited for from her. Take Me Apart is an album about ending one relationship and going into another--territory that’s not original for an album but important because it’s immensely personal, celebratory of queer black self-love on songs like “LMK” and “Altadena”. She somehow makes dubstep and trap beats sound subdued and sexy, her ethereal voice the perfect complement to bubbling synth and bass.

SUNDAY

Japanese Breakfast: 4:00, Blue Stage

Michelle Zauner stole the show from Mitski two years ago. Now, she’s got an even better set of tunes in her repertoire. She released her second album of dream pop and spacious synth-laden shoegaze, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, last year. From epic opener “Diving Woman” to jams “Road Head” and “Boyish”, there will be plenty to love during her set. Doesn’t hurt that Zauner is funny as hell, either.

Japanese Breakfast plays an after-show tomorrow night at Thalia Hall. Mothers and Varsity open.

Noname: 5:15, Red Stage

Noname is one of the best live rappers in the world, let alone Chicago. Ever since catching her set at the inaugural House of Vans show last year, I’ve been floored by her ability to make her poetic words about growing up sound intimate and powerful and clear even in a live setting. Her debut mixtape Telefone was released two years ago, so hopefully she’s got some new songs for us at Pitchfork. She’s also collaborated with other artists on the lineup like Saba, Smino, and Ravyn Lenae, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them join her during the set.

(Sandy) Alex G: 6:15, Blue Stage

While we loved (Sandy) Alex G’s performance at the Bottom Lounge a couple years ago (before he adopted (Sandy) as part of his moniker), it was last year’s Rocket that made this writer a believer. One of the best indie-rock albums of the decade is a little bit country, a little bit...hardcore? Okay, the latter refers to the rap-rock of one track, “Brick”, but it speaks to the diversity of his songwriting. You can hear the influences of his work with Frank Ocean in 2016 on melancholy, auto-tuned ditties like “Sportstar”, while “Poison Root” and “Bobby” swell with Americana strings and banjo. Not to mention the classic rock bounce of “Proud”.

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frogsagainandagain · 6 years

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favorite lyric from every fob song

i’m so sorry this is so long please skip this is mainly for me to be able to reference

*songs with incredible lyrics throughout that it was extra hard to choose one or two

honorable mention: and maybe next time/i’ll remember not to tell you something stupid like I’ll never leave your side

calm before the storm: you said, between your smiles and regrets: “don’t say it’s over.”

switchblades and infidelity: walking out on the show is walking out on you/and walking out on you’s still the best thing that I ever did.

pretty in punk: well I’ve seen your boyfriend/and i don’t think he treats you right/but that’s none of my business is it?

growing up*: i’ve dried my eyes, now it’s “rushmore”/i’m deep with futures like chicago/no, glenview never meant a thing to me/she never meant a thing to me

the world’s not waiting (for five tired boys in a broken down van): we’re all “hasbeens” and “never-were’s”

short, fast and loud: good god i wish i was tall

moving pictures: where can I go when I want you around/but I can’t stand to be around you

parker lewis can’t lose (but i’m gonna give it my best shot): in the meantime just talking with my shoes/converse with my converse

tell that mick: stop burning bridges and drive off of them

dead on arrival: i know I’m not your favorite record/but the songs you grow to like never stick at first

grand theft autumn: you need him/i could be him

saturday: and i read about the afterlife/but I never really lived

homesick at space camp: landing on a runway in chicago and I’m grounding all my dreams/of ever really seeing california

sending postcards: when you go i will forget everything about you

chicago is so two years ago*: she took me down and said:/“boys like you are overrated. so save your breath." bonus: with every breath i wish your body will be broken again

the pros and cons of breathing: i want to hate you half as much as i hate myself

grenade jumper: living like life’s going out of style.

reinventing the wheel: i can’t wake up to these reminders of who i am:/a failure at everything… 18 going on extinct.

patron saint*: and when it all goes to hell/and when it all goes.

my heart is the worst kind of weapon: we are salt - you are the wound

it’s not a side effect: and think of all the places/where you’ve been lost/and then found…out/in between my sheets/in between the rights and the wrongs

our lawyer: we’re only good cause you can have almost famous friends

gin joints: i used to waste my time dreaming of being alive (now i only waste it dreaming of you)

dance, dance: joe trohman is lame

sugar: isn’t it messed up how i’m just dying to be him?

nobody puts baby in the corner: you look so good in blue

dark alley: joke me something awful just like kisses on the necks of "best friends”

atavan halen: i’ll be stuck fixated on one star/when the world is crashing down

sophomore slump*: cause i swear i’d burn this city down to show you the light

champagne: they say, “you want a war? you’ve got a war.”/but who are you fighting for?

i slept with: douse yourself in cheap perfume it’s/so fitting, so fitting of the way you are

sixteen candles*: she said, she said, she said, “why don’t you just drop dead?" bonus: so say what are you waiting for?/kiss her, kiss her

get busy*: i used to obsess over living,/now I only obsess over you

XO: to the "love”, i left my conscience pressed/between the pages of the bible in the drawer

snitches and walkers: show me a starry-eyed kid/i will break his jaw

the music or the misery*: it’s true romance is dead, i shot it in the chest then in the head. bonus: and if you wanna go down in history then i’m your prince bonus bonus: i went to sleep a poet, and i woke up a fraud

thriller: i can take your problems away with a nod and a wave/of my hand, ‘cause that’s just the kind of boy that i am

take over, breaks over: don’t pretend you ever forgot about me.

arms race: i wrote the gospel on giving up/(you look pretty sinking)

me & you: the best way/to make it through/with hearts and wrists intact/is to realize/two out of three ain’t bad/ain’t bad

hum hallelujah*: i thought I loved you/it was just how you looked in the light.

golden: and i knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me

thnks fr th mmrs: get me out of my mind and get you out of those clothes

don’t you know: i could learn to pity fools as I’m the worst of all/and i can’t stop feeling sorry for myself

the after life of the party: put love on hold,/young hollywood is on the other line

tunnel of love: got postcards from my former selves saying: “how’ve you been?”

doldrums: you’re wrong/are we all wrong?

fame > infamy: “there’s too much green to feel blue”

you’re crashing*: the headline reads “the man hangs”, but the jury doesn't bonus: baby boy can’t lift his headache head

ringing in my ears: new york eyes, chicago thighs

ginasfs: threw caution to the wind,/but i’ve got a lousy arm

hard to say: but don’t get the wrong idea/we’re gonna shoot you

lullabye: when you wake up the world will come around

disloyal order*: what a match, i’m half doomed and you’re semi-sweet bonus: boycott love/ detox just to retox

i don’t care: say my name and his in the same breath/i dare you to say they taste the same

winona: bop bop ba dop

america’s suitehearts: why won’t the world revolve around me?

headfirst slide: i don’t just want to be a footnote in someone else’s happiness

(shipped) gold standard: plant palm trees on lake michigan before it gets cold/i gotta feel the wind chill again before i get old

(coffee’s for closers)*: i will never believe in anything again/though change will come

donnie: i’m the one/who charmed the one/who gave up on you

27: you’re a bottled star/the planets align/you’re just like mars/you shine in the sky

tiffany blews: dear gravity, you held me down in this starless city

wams*: what makes you so special?/i’m gonna leave you/i’m gonna teach you/how we’re all alone

nosebleed: goes to the desert the same war his dad rehearsed/came back with flags on coffins and said,/”we won, oh we won.“

west coast smoker: got my degree in the gutter,/my heart broken in the dorms of the ivy league

pavlove: i want to make you as lonely as me/so you can get, get addicted to this

the phoenix: wearing our vintage misery/no, i think it looked a little better on me

light em up: a constellation of tears on your lashes/burn everything you love, then burn the ashes

alone together: but i don’t think i’m coming home and i said/i’ll check in tomorrow if i don’t wake up dead

where did the party go: my old aches become new again/my old friends become exes again

just one yesterday: letting people down is my thing, baby/find yourself a new gig/this town ain’t big enough for two of us

the mighty fall: two’s a whole lot lonelier than one

miss missing you*: baby, you were my picket fence bonus: i will sing to you every day/if it will take away the pain

death valley: undress to impress/you can wear the crown but you’re no princess

young volcanoes: come on make it easy/say i never mattered (basic ik)

rat a tat*: i’m the lonelier version of you/i just don’t know where it went wrong \

srar: how’d it get to be only me?/like i’m the last damn kid still kicking/that still believes

the king is dead: the may never think and wonder why, dear christ/every time i see you i just want to paint the walls white

art of keeping up disappearances: erase the conclusion/but never meant to clear up/any of the confusion

hot to the touch: if it’s never been broken/can’t believe in it/now you’re just a problem/for someone else to fix

love, sex, death: but out of every pretty pretty miscalculation/you have got to be my all-time favorite

eternal summer: i can’t do this again/i need more oxygen

demigods: what if we were demigods?/they’d take to our knees/raging at the half of our sins

american made: when i was younger i couldn’t wait for the days to pass/now i know they’ll never last/and i just want my childhood back

caffeine cold: don’t breathe life into a monster then/complain when he destroys it all again

irresistible: too many war wounds and not enough wars/too few rounds in the ring and not enough settled scores/too many sharks, not enough blood in the waves

ab/ap: i think i. i fell in love again/maybe i just took too much cough medicine

centuries: heavy metal broke my heart bonus: we are the poisoned youth

the kids aren’t alright*: and i still feel that rush in my veins./it twists my head just a bit too thin./all those people in those old photographs I’ve seen are dead.

uma thurman: the end of the fucking song

jet pack blues*: did you ever love her? do you know?/or did you never want to be alone?

novocaine: if you knew, knew what the bluebirds sang at you,/you would never sing along

4th of july: you are my favorite "what if”/you are my best “I’ll never know”

favorite record: and i confessed, confessed to you/riding shotgun underneath the purple skies

immortals: i try to picture me without you but i can’t

hotel in nyc: a birth and a death on the same day/and honey I only appeared so i can fade away/i wanna throw my hands in the air and scream/and i could just die laughing on your spiral of shame

young and menace?? champion?? i’m sorry who?? what?? huh???

hold me tight or don’t: i got too high again/when i realized i can’t not be with you/or be just your friend/i love you to death but i just can’t/i just can’t pretend/we were lovers first/confidants but never friends/were we ever friends?

the last of the real ones: 'cause you’re the last of a dying breed/write our names in the wet concrete

7-9 legendary: i want to choke (u)/and get sick off of you/like secondhand smoke

alpha dog: i want to put the midwest home again

austin we have a problem: i gave you pretentious./i gave you indifference, but you only wanted undressed and defenseless. bonus: hey! everyone’s an underdog.

catch me if you can: oh dear lord,/please let me into heaven, for just an afternoon.

from now on we are enemies: a composer but never composed/singing the symphonies of the overdosed

guilty as charged: i got greater expectations than oliver twist

hand of god*: it’s not gossip if it’s the truth/i’m sick of always writing songs for you to slit your wrists to

lake effect kid*: i’ve got the skyline in my veins/forget your night times/summer love on a gurney with a squeaky wheel/and joke us, joke us/till lakeshore drive comes back into focus

mskwyditd (demo)*: we sold our souls in dark hotel rooms/we slip tongues and lie like “i will see you soon”

star 67: maybe we could talk this over/but i swear to god/and i’ll have this phone to my head.

we don’t take hits, we write them: and my life is holding our heads to this gun/you and your new boy think you can come in and keep me off, but you’re wrong

yule shoot your eye out: and all i want this year is for you to dedicate your last breath to me/before you bury yourself alive

#fall out boy #fob #fall out boy lyrics #fob lyrics #evening out with your girlfriend #take this to your grave #from under the cork tree #infinity on high #folie a deux #save rock and roll #american beauty/ american psycho #mania #reference #mine

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jafreitag · 4 years

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31 Days of Dead 2019 | Day 31: The Days Between – Oakland, CA 12/11/94 // So Many Roads – Mountain View, CA 9/18/94 // Black Muddy River – Chicago, IL 7/9/95

December 31

Gave The Best We Had To Give: The Last Masterpieces

The Days Between (12/11/94 – Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum • Oakland, CA)

So Many Roads (9/18/94 – Shoreline Amphitheater • Mountain View, CA)

Black Muddy River (7/9/95 – Soldier Field • Chicago, IL)

BONUS TRACK: And We Bid You Goodnight (9/20/70 – Fillmore East • New York, NY)

We have arrived at the last day of this year’s project, so it seems appropriate to conclude our tribute to Robert Hunter by covering the final masterpieces composed by the Hunter/Garcia songwriting team – namely, “The Days Between,” “So Many Roads,” and “Black Muddy River.” They came at a time when the once very prolific songwriting team of the 1970s was long beyond the days of churning out an album’s worth of material a year, making these compositions all the more poignant. While Hunter continued to write, Jerry did not. Hunter expressed some regrets about that in his posthumous email to Jerry in August 1996, titled One Year Later:

One of my few regrets is that you never wanted to finish (Terrapin), though you approved of the final version I eked out many years later. You said, apologetically, “I love it, but I’ll never get the time to do it justice.” I realized that was true. Time was the one thing you never had in the last decade and a half. Supporting the Grateful Dead plus your own trip took all there was of that. The rest was crashing time. Besides, as you once said, “I’d rather toss cards in a hat than compose.” But man, when you finally got down on it, you sure knew how.

Read the rest of Hunter’s email here: https://archive.org/post/318384/jerry-eulogy-request

The scarcity of Hunter/Garcia material during the later years isn’t the only thing that makes these songs special. A big factor is the quality and content of Hunter’s lyrics. Perhaps sensing that the end was near, Hunter knew he had to make these last ones count. These three particular songs seem autobiographical, as if he wrote them for Jerry. They also carry a common theme – a reflection from the perspective of somebody at the end of his life. Hunter cleverly uses metaphors and images to express that theme, such as the last rose of summer, the last bolt of sunshine, August dies, counting the years, collecting dust, giving the best you had to give, and having so many roads, but only wanting one to take you home. These lyrics stand in stark contrast to a song like “Ripple,” which was written from the perspective of somebody in their youth who has their whole life ahead of them – a life full of promise and optimism.

Also, whether or not it was intentional, I find it interesting that Hunter seems to reference lyrics in songs he wrote during the early years. It is another clever tool he uses to revisit or reflect on the past which is something we tend to do as we age. For example, the lyrics in “Black Muddy River” reference “Ripple” (“Listen to the ripples as they moan”) and “Eyes of the World” (“sing me a song of my own” / “sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own”). Another less obvious reference is in “The Days Between” (“once we grew into our shoes, we told them where to go”) and “Crazy Fingers” (“gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go we just ride”). And, by the way, am I the only one who thought the band was busting out “Mountains of the Moon” the first time I heard them perform “The Days Between”? There is definitely some similarity in the musical composition there.

The Days Between

According to Robert Hunter, “The Days Between” is the last song he ever wrote with Garcia. The somber ballad was written by the pair while on vacation in Hawaii during the winter of 1993. Nostalgic and subtly self-referential, “The Days Between” throws moral shade on the world’s passage from an idealized Summer of Love to the dark days of the early ‘90s. Here is what Hunter said about the song in an interview with Rolling Stone:

I’ve heard Jerry do versions of that and leave you a puddle. That is the story of what went down as far as I can see. More so than any other single song. It seemed to get my feeling about those times and our place in it. Jerry didn’t die that much… you know, a couple years after that. He had been into rehab again, and he called me up and he was out and he was going to come over and we were going to get writing again and he said some wonderful stuff that was very uncharacteristic of him. He said, ‘Your words never stuck in my throat.’ Jerry didn’t tend to talk like that, and there was something possibly, slightly alarming about it because he was dead within a week or so after that. Jerry wasn’t like that — to hand out appreciation that way. It was always implicit with him. Perhaps there was a finality to it, that that was the last statement, whether or not he knew he was going to die in a week or not. Apparently he died with a smile on his face, though. Uhh! Those were the heavy times.

With those words in mind, I selected the heaviest version of “The Days Between” that I could find – December 11, 1994. Haunting, mournful, dark, tragic, spiritual – this version has it all. The outro jam is a monster, filled with fury that finds Garcia going nuts with distorted fanning tremolo. In that posthumous email to Jerry, Hunter noted that Garcia sang this song “like a prayer.” This version definitely had the holy on their knees. Apparently GDM thought so too because it was officially released last month as part of the Ready or Not collection, which was curated by the band’s archivist, David Lemieux.

So Many Roads

No song epitomized Jerry’s struggles in his last years better than “So Many Roads.” It is the song where he bared his soul to us – the performances often seemed personal … almost too personal. Some particularly memorable performances were 10/1/94 (“HEAL my soul”), 6/23/92 (huge, screaming finale), and of course, the last one on 7/9/95 (“Lord, so many roads to ease my soul..I’ve been down that road”). Jerry’s vocal delivery on the version I selected is right on par with those performances – extremely passionate – but we also get a few other treats to ease our souls. First, Jerry changes the words a bit, opting for “So many roads to FILL my soul” before switching back to the more common, “EASE my soul.” And then instead of ending the song after the final chorus, which was the norm, we get a rare, post-lyrics GUITAR SOLO! Unlike the brief, noodly solo in 10/1/94, this one is light years better. It starts off a little tentative – a few sour notes here and there, typical in this era due to Jerry’s fragile health. You can tell that he is struggling to keep it together with every note he plays but he stays focused, desperately trying to channel whatever magic may be left in him. The man was playing as if his life depended on it – the reality of impending mortality. Suddenly, he finds a melodic, bluesy pattern and patiently builds it up to a life-affirming peak. It’s an extremely poignant moment. Chills! Finally, he brings it back one more time for a vocal reprise of titanic proportions not unlike the Eugene “Standing on the Moon” (8/21/93). It’s one of those stunning moments that catches you off-guard in disbelief and leaves you speechless. It’s a beautiful, heart-wrenching version for the ages. Essential GD listening.

Black Muddy River

I decided to conclude this year’s project with “Black Muddy River,” the gospel-infused number, from the 1987 hit album, In The Dark. It is the last Hunter/Garcia composition that the band performed and it’s the last song on which Jerry sang lead vocals (Soldier Field, July 9, 1995). Interestingly enough, the band had just brought “Black Muddy River” out of retirement on June 24, 1995 at RFK Stadium in Washington DC (my last show) after a four-year absence (last played on August 13, 1991 at Cal Expo). Hunter wrote it after Garcia’s near-death experience in 1986. It seems more than eerie that the band brought the song back a month before he died. Many people look to the cosmic significance of “Box of Rain” being the last song that the band performed (“such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there”), but I would suggest that this version of “Black Muddy River” might just hold that honor.

And, while we are talking about gospel-infused songs, I included the ultimate traditional gospel song as a bonus track – “And We Bid You Goodnight.” This lovely performance ends my project at the same place from where we began – the Fillmore East on September 20, 1970. How’s that for those of you who like musical sandwiches? The Dead ended some of their best shows with this somber, yet uplifting sendoff. And that is the way I have chosen to express my thanks and gratitude to Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia for touching my soul with their beautiful songs.

I hope you enjoyed this year’s edition of the 31 Days of Dead. I will do a project wrap-up in a few days that will include zipped mp3 files for you download. Before I sign off I want to send a big thank you to Jason Freitag for hosting my project on his blog, linernotesmusicblog.com, and to Brian Levine for creating the fabulous, 10-year anniversary artwork. And thanks to all of you who took the time to send notes of thanks, encouragement and kindness. Happy New Year!

Behind The Lyrics:

The Days Between – https://www.dead.net/features/greatest-stories-ever-told/greatest-stories-ever-told-days-between

So Many Roads – http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/soma.html

Black Muddy River – https://www.dead.net/features/greatest-stories-ever-told/greatest-stories-ever-told-black-muddy-river

MediaFire:

The Days Between – http://www.mediafire.com/file/iv4q09ofkwkkn8o/83_Days_Between_%252812.11.94_%25E2%2580%2593_Oakland_Coliseum_%25E2%2580%25A2_Oakland%252C_CA%2529.mp3/file

So Many Roads – http://www.mediafire.com/file/5b6p0yeuoogpyw7/84_So_Many_Roads_%25289.18.94_-_Shoreline_Amphitheatre_%25E2%2580%25A2_Mountain_View%252C_CA%2529.mp3/file

Black Muddy River – http://www.mediafire.com/file/k804idi4fssvaox/85_Black_Muddy_River_%25287.9.95_-_Soldier_Field_%25E2%2580%25A2_Chicago%252C_IL%2529.mp3/file

Bonus Track: We Bid You Goodnight – http://www.mediafire.com/file/tx5aywog3hrl4io/86_And_We_Bid_You_Goodnight_%25289.20.70.mp3/file

Live Music Archive:

12/11/94 – https://archive.org/details/gd94-12-11.sbd.unknown.12525.sbeok.shnf

9/18/94 – https://archive.org/details/gd1994-09-18.136849.sbd.miller.flac16

7/9/95 – https://archive.org/details/gd1995-07-09.sbd.miller.114369.flac16

9/20/70 – https://archive.org/details/gd1970-09-20.140664.sbd.boswell.smith.miller.clugston.flac1644

Relisten:

The Days Between – https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1994/12/11/the-days-between?source=99801

So Many Roads – https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1994/09/18/12-so-many-roads?source=99992

Black Muddy River – https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1995/07/09/black-muddy-river?source=100064

And We Bid You Goodnight – https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1970/09/20/gd70-09-20-s3-t15-and-we-bid-you-goodnight?source=102783

YouTube: Black Muddy River (7/9/95) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKxHQk2I6h

#thedaysbetween #12111994 #somanyroads #09181994 #blackmuddyriver #07091995 #andwebidyougoodnight #09201970 #gratefuldead #roberthunter #jerrygarcia #bobweir #phillesh #billkreutzmann #mickeyhart #pigpen #tomconstanten #keithgodchaux #donnagodchaux #brentmydland #brucehornsby #vincewelnick #31daysofdead #linernotesmusicblog

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roseisread · 6 years

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You Make Me Not Wanna Die: The return of the Pop Menagerie playlist! It’s been way too long since I posted anything on this blog. My only excuse is that I’ve had a crazy year in my personal life and sometimes internet things take a back seat to self care. But right now, I think my best form of self care is listening to and sharing my pop culture faves so I’m back to do just that. I’m starting off with a playlist that contains songs I love to sing along to, cry along to, dance along to, write along to, and think along to. Almost all of these songs are from albums released in 2017, although there may be an exception here or there for songs released earlier that I only discovered recently. In any case, here you go. Enjoy! 1. Allie X - That’s So Us If you love Carly Rae Jepsen, you should love Allie X. This song makes me so happy, and also it makes me cry sometimes because it reminds me of those people that you really can be yourself around and they love you anyway. Those people are rare and wonderful, and if you are one of them for me, then thank you. “You make me not wanna die,” as the song says. I love that line so much I used it to title this playlist. 2. The Drums - Shoot the Sun Down Remember these guys? Kind of sunny indie pop, hit it big with “I Don’t Know How To Love” off of their album Portamento back in 2012? Yeah. They are still here, still awesome, and the album this came from just gives me shivers it’s so freaking great. Also, I joke that this song is dedicated to my cat when she tries to bite and scratch me at night, because of that repeating line, “I put a blanket over my face.” Nena, this one’s for you. 3. Knuckle Puck - Conduit I have such a goddamn soft spot for emo-leaning pop punk, you guys. I can’t even lie. As a bonus, they’re from the Chicago area so technically I can claim them as a local band. This song reminds me of the best of Blink 182, early Jimmy Eat World, and maybe even a little Brand New. I also love the lyrics, with their references to grinding teeth and lucid dreams. Definitely relatable for me. 4. MUNA - End of Desire You might be familiar with MUNA if you love Tegan and Sara, because this band appears on The Con: X covering Relief Next To Me. I love the way their voices blend, and I love the vulnerability of the lyrics. This song is open to interpretation, but it seems to allude to having feelings for another person that you didn’t ask for but can’t get rid of. Who hasn’t been there? 5. Kiasmos - Jarred The Icelandic duo is back with more incredible, chilly electronic tunes that almost sound like icicles forming or frost creeping up the inside of your window pane in the night. This song definitely makes me want to hop the next plane to Reykjavik and spend a week sipping dark liquor in some poorly lit club that only the locals know about. 6. MUTEMATH - War You know about my love of MUTEMATH by now. Their latest album goes in so many different directions musically--not just from one song to the next but within the space of a single track. This one is a banger live, and one of my favorites on the album. Lyrically, it reminds me of my own not so great tendency to get heated as I try to convince someone they’re wrong and I’m right. A good debate is healthy sometimes, but not everything needs to be a battle for the ages. “War’s in my nature,” all right. But I’m trying to find a way toward peace. 7. Cat Dealers/Groove Delight - Calabria This is just a sick dance track. I can’t claim to know all that much about Cat Dealers, although I know they hail from Rio de Janeiro and that this song makes me want to tear it up on the dancefloor or the living room or the driver’s seat of my car. Groove Delight is Brazilian as well, making me think I probably need to go to Brazil sooner rather than later to discover what other booty shaking gems I’ve been missing. 8. Converge - A Single Tear Can you believe these guys have been around for 27 years? This song encapsulates so many things I love about them, from their always insane percussion to the insistent guitar melodies to the impassioned vocals of Jacob Bannon. The lyrics (which allude to “holding you for the first time,” presumably about becoming a parent) are so sweet, a word that doesn’t probably come up in a lot of reviews of metal and hardcore songs but still, I stand by it. 9. Luna Shadows - Jesus Christ (Brand New cover) I have always loved this song, and it’s awesome to hear a young up and coming artist take it on. She really puts her own spin on this classic of the emo genre, and I look forward to hearing more original tunes from her. 10. ROMES - Someone I just saw these guys open for MUTEMATH and they have so much energy live! Canadian by way of Ireland, they bring out anthemic indie pop tunes that are just irresistible. I’m reminded a little bit of Peter Gabriel and a little bit of Bastille, but not in a derivative way. 11. Fever Ray - Red Trails Ahhhhh! Fever Ray is back!!!! It’s been way too long since we’ve heard from her, but the album that she just released online helps make up for the absence because it just kills. She still has that haunting, hypnotic voice layered on top of unexpected instrumentation and arrhythmic beats. The lyrics are mysterious and dark. There’s something sexy about it but not in a Britney Spears way. She sounds kind of dangerous but you can’t help but want to follow her wherever she’s going. 12. ABRA - Bounty Speaking of hypnotic and sexy, ABRA is definitely both. Based in Atlanta, she sounds like she’s based in another planet altogether. Her off kilter brand of R&B does not fit any category--she has this supple voice that leads us along across breathy beats and frantic counter melodies. It’s unsettling and gorgeous at the same time. 13. Tove Lo - Disco Tits Tove Lo is my ride or die. She’s unabashedly herself in all her nympho trashy glory, and I adore her for it. I promise I’m not into club drugs, but Euro pop songs about them sure are fun. I put this song on the car radio when I’m driving to work just to wake myself up and then have to make sure my phone volume is on mute before I walk into the office because “nipples are hard ready to go” is probably not appropriate lyrical content for the workplace. 14. Golden Features - Funeral Tom Stell, aka Golden Features, has sold out tours in his native country of Australia but it won’t belong before he’s selling out everywhere. This track makes me want to see him in an underground dance club at 4am. It’s fire. 15. Jessie Ware - Stay Awake, Wait For Me Another one of my faves is back! I love her upbeat songs but this is one of those instant classic pop ballads, and I had to find a spot for it on this list. It’s intimate and romantic and sexy in a grown up way. Don’t put this song on if you’re trying to be celibate, is all I’m saying. 16. Hundred Waters - Particle If you miss Imogen Heap/Frou Frou, you should most definitely be listening to Hundred Waters. Nicole Miglis has that hushed tone in her voice that belies intense feeling, and the skittering electronic elements fill the spaces in between as a sort of musical representation of anxiety and uncertainty. This song, about a romantic coupling that seems lopsided. “I’m only a particle, a drop in you, forever dissolving,” she sings. Damn.

17. The Tuts- Dump Your Boyfriend What’s not to love about this UK based garage girl group? This song describes the kind of toxic relationship that it’s easy to criticize from the outside but harder to shake when you’re the one who’s in love with an asshole. 18. Fellwarden - Sun of an Ending This kind of moody, atmospheric black metal is so soothing to me. It feels ancient and primal, like the old gods are still roaming the land slaying dragons and protecting those that live in their realm. If you’re a black metal fan, you may recognize the vocals as those of Fen frontman The Watcher. 19. Palehound - Silver Toaster On Boston-based Palehound’s second album, the writing sounds more self-assured and the songs even more personal than those on the debut. Frontwoman Ellen Kempner attributes this in part to being more comfortable in her own skin as a queer-identifying woman, and in part to being in her first healthy adult relationship. This song is short and simple, but I love the unexpected turns of phrase and imagery, like the line, “hack off my split ends.” There are plenty of bands doing the whole DIY stripped down aesthetic, but this one rises above the rest. If you were into artists like Kimya Dawson and Mary Lou Lord, you should definitely be paying attention to Palehound.

20. Kelsea Ballerini - Miss Me More Nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy earlier this year, Kelsea Ballerini hits the ground running on her latest release. She’s been writing songs since she was 12 years old and listening to Britney, Christina, and N Sync. Something about the fact that she considers Shania her biggest influence really charms me. I am obsessed with this song, which I can relate to on a very personal level. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve compromised yourself for another person until you don’t have them in your life anymore and suddenly the real you starts to re-emerge. 21. The Maharajas - Too Late To Repent If you hear this song and think it must be a re-release of some little known 1960s garage rock/British Invasion group, I don’t blame you. I wondered that myself. But it turns out these Swedish dudes have only been active since the 90s, and they are still recording music that sounds like it’s from a bygone era. A little Kinks, a little Beatles, a little surf rock--it’s all here and it’s all great. 22. Margo Price - Don’t Say It This Illinois native was signed by Jack White to Third Man Records, and she recorded her debut album at Sun Studios in Memphis. Both of those things make sense upon hearing her traditional country sound. She has one of those clear, classic voices that really do harken back to the Lorettas and Patsys and Tammys. Her second album even features a duet with Willie Nelson, proving that she’s definitely earned her classic country bonafides. 23. Peaness - Skin Surfing OK, yes, initially I was drawn to this 3-piece English band because of their silly name. But once I heard the first guitar strums and vocal harmonies, I was truly done for. Formed in 2014, they have songs about everything from wasting food just because it doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing (”Ugly Veg”) to George Osborne of Brexit fame (”Oh George”). This song is very seductive while staying playful and affirming consent. I dig the occasional Veruca Salt vibes it dips into as well. 24. Dori Freeman - Ern & Zorry’s Sneakin’ Bitin’ Dog I guess an acapella song about a mean neighbor dog might be an odd choice for a playlist but it’s so adorable I couldn’t leave it out. Dori Freeman, who cites Peggy Lee and Rufus Wainwright as her major influences, hails from Virginia and her songs have an Appalachian flavor. I predict a T-Bone Burnett collaboration in her future. 25. The Blow - Summer It’s hard to believe The Blow has existed in some form for going on 20 years, but it’s true. The K Records vets continue to release hypnotic, electronic indie pop with a lo-fi feel, and this song has been stuck in my head from the first listen. It’s a simple melody but good luck escaping that hook. 26. Austra - Beyond a Mortal The Canadian dark wave is back with their third album, this time recorded in Mexico. For this particular track, singer Katie Stelmanis says she recorded the vocals over 100 times to achieve the hushed, whispery effect. The rest of the album, titled Future Politics, is a meditation on the state of the world as it is now and what we all wish it could become. 27. MGMT - Little Dark Age Finally! It’s been 5 years since MGMT’s last album, and even longer since the world sat up and took notice of them. This lead single off their upcoming album makes me think that they’re poised to re-take the synth pop throne. This song has elements of their earliest work, but it also incorporates bits of industrial and even krautrock. I listen and think Depeche Mode! Kraftwerk! Skinny Puppy! So many of my musical faves somehow distilled into a single track. I can only hope that the rest of the album lives up to this single. 28. Charlotte Gainsbourg - Ring-a-Ring O’Roses To me, there’s always been an otherworldly quality to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s voice. She took some time off from music to do some acting, notably in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac volume 1 and volume 2 and Melancholia. Those films required heavy lifting and emotional degradation, which perhaps allowed her to tap into a deeper place when recording the songs for this album, her first in seven years. The video for this song features Gainsbourg’s son, carrying on the family tradition started by Charlotte and her father Serge Gainsbourg. 29. Sun Glitters - Where the End Begins If there’s one thing I love, it’s shimmery electronic music. And Sun Glitters, who hails from Luxembourg, produces just that. Rarely does an artist’s name so aptly describe their sound, but this is one such perfect marriage. If you enjoy the likes of Gold Panda, Boards of Canada, Fennesz, Teen Daze, or Blackbird Blackbird, you will definitely dig this sound.

#playlist #2017 music #mgmt #charlotte gainsbourg #sun glitters #austra #mutemath #the drums #allie x #tove lo #fever ray #romes #the tuts

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therappundit · 6 years

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November 2017 - *PlayLi$t of the Month*

Real talk: 2017 has been a rough year.

Speaking both globally and personally, the news events of the last twelve months have really made it challenging to be an optimist in today’s world. Picture what the year-end TV montage is going to look like this year before the ball drops? It’s going to be a straight-up horror show jumping from clip to clip of some of the most depressing highlights imaginable.

That all being said, musically speaking there is a lot to be thankful for this year. Take this playlist for example, reflecting a nice mix of hip-hop talent from all across the country. From household names to names that I’m not even too familiar with, the last month has treated us to a cornucopia of rap diversity worth celebrating. So have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope you enjoy my November PlayLi$t of the Month…

1. “Bulletproof Gucci Windshield” - Fly Anakin, Koncept Jack$on & Tuamie

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/panama-plus/1295998624

(While I have been checking for new stuff from the VA collective, I had not been eagerly awaiting a new album from the Mutant Academy folks. With their Soundcloud loosies still in my rotation from over the last few months, I did not think that Fly, Koncept and Tuamie would bless us with such a well-constructed, but still very raw underground hip-hop album, yet here they are to snag the #1 spot on this month’s list. Let it be known that Tuamie is a force to be reckoned with behind the boards, as he conjures up ways to put fresh spins on old boom-bap that bring to mind some of the vibes that DJ Spinna and Jay Dilla were able to infuse into their work. And the MC’s sound potent throughout, spitting bars at a clip that sound fierce, but without losing the vibe that these guys love to rap. Picture D.I.T.C. with some dashes of Gang Starr, Lootpack and even C-N-N, and you have a handle on why this album is easy to rock from start to finish. Keep your eyes glued on the Virginia underground rap scene for the foreseeable future, you won’t be disappointed.)

2. “Free” - CyHi The Prynce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtTgM1OUR-8

(Having long past the point where G.O.O.D Music fans were asking “hey when’s CyHi dropping?”, I would never have expected CyHi to bless us all with what sounds like it may be one of the best hip-hop albums of 2017. More than any other rap artist this Fall, CyHi perfectly timed his release to come after the wave of highly anticipated big label releases, but before the big holiday push. CyHi shows us sooooo much on this album, it is ridiculous! From his storytelling skills, to quote-worthy bars, to crafting actually songs with a point, to spiritual themes, production choices and features, the dude manages to do everything right on No Dope On Sundays. I waffled between several song choices for this slot, but ultimately went with “Free” because it’s one of the sparsest instrumentals on the album, which provides welcome room for CyHi to flex his pen game, which is his most impressive instrument of all...and perhaps G.O.O.D’s secret weapon.)

3. “R.N.H.” - Jayy Grams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzy02h-SoJM

(I know very, very little about Jayy Grams except that he is coming out of the criminally slept-on - but recently thriving - Baltimore rap scene. I heard this song on Hot97′s Real Late with Peter Rosenberg a few weeks ago, and then immediately took to the internet to find out more. The instrumental on “Real N***a Hours” sounds more like the type of soulful backdrop that would have appeared on Nas’ Lost Tapes, a classic late night head-nodder that you can only be used for two things: zoning out after a tough day, or deep, nostalgic reflection. Whatever you choose to do with this one, just make sure you follow Jayy Grams and play this one at night...I happen to be nursing a gin and tonic and listening to it right now!)

4. “Traveling Light” - Talib Kweli feat. Anderson.Paak & Kaytranda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kfxkZoSzPk

(The new joint featuring Jay Electronica off of Talib’s new Radio Silence album will get more love since Jay Elec only comes out of his cave once or twice a year nowadays, but this song right here holds up to the best of Kweli’s kwatalog. Perhaps his best adrenaline-laced track since “Move Something”, it’s so great to hear Talib drop energized music like this again - in fact I highly recommend the whole album from start to finish.)

5. “Our Streets” - DJ Premier feat. A$AP Ferg

https://soundcloud.com/dj_premier/dj-premier-feat-aap-ferg-our-streets-produced-by-dj-premier

(Did you see this coming? I sure didn’t envision the concept of DJ Premier joining forces with the most unpredictable member of the A$AP Mob. Ferg represents both the old and new school so well on this one, spitting bars with substance without checking his madcap charisma at the bar. Not one of my favorite Primo beats ever, but certainly dope enough to please fans of both classic boom-bap and the new school turn-up crowd.)

6. “Rap Saved Me” - 21 Savage, Offset & Metro Boomin feat. Quavo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK9rgGmrH7I

(One of a few unexpected treats to drop this past Halloween. 21 Savage and the Migos gang already have a strong catalog of catchy joints with Metro Boomin behind the boards, and this is certainly one of the strongest cuts off of Savage, Offset & Boomin’s aptly titled Without Warning tape. Nothing groundbreaking on this project...just a steady line-up of bass heavy trap tunes that sound decent enough through headphones, but street-shaking through car speakers. Something about 21′s chilly flow works for me more often than not, and this one definitely works as one of the more polished efforts from the four talents.)

7. “Down State” - WESTSIDE GUNN feat. Benny & Styles P

https://soundcloud.com/westsidegunn/06-down-state-ft-styles-p-and-benny-prod-by-daringer?in=westsidegunn/sets/hitler-wears-hermes-5

(Another month, another display of Griselda Records flexing their muscle. Westside Gunn closed October by dropping the 5th installment of his now classic Hitler Wears Hermes series, and this joint is an obvious standout. SP and Benny are an especially potent combo, considering that for my money Benny is the best street music poet since artists like the Lox and Beanie Sigel were sitting at the top of the food chain.)

8. “Walk” - Young M.A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zogtwLQQEfY

(I never gave up on Young M.A, and I never thought for a minute that all she had to offer was “Ooouuu”. What makes M.A’s music sound so convincing is the same skill-set that enabled Cardi B. to become a superstar: the ability to sound casual and believable on tracks, like every verse is an effortless freestyle that arrived following a shot of Henny and bottled-up feelings that simply must be released. “Walk” doesn’t have a catchy hook like “Ooouuu”, but it does pack a steady head-nodder of a beat for M.A to cruise over, and cruise she does. Brooklyn can be proud of this one.)

9. “Once Upon A Time” - The Diplomats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h9wRBzaqwc

(For any east coast rap fans over the age of 25, turn your nostalgia dials up to eleven for this one. Cam’ron, Juelz Santana and Jim Jones have done a handful of tracks since they split up, but not many have successfully rekindled the classic Dipset vibe quite like this one. Equipped with a trademark soulful, high-pitched Heatmakerz instrumental, the Diplomats sound as fresh as ever on this one. Check out Killa Cam’s latest tape too while you’re at it - The Program: http://www.datpiff.com/Camron-The-Program-mixtape.870785.html .)

10. “The Light” - Big K.R.I.T. feat. Bilal, Robert Glasper Jr , Kenneth Whalum & Burniss Earl Travis II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=047nimeOEAw

(Welcome back, King. Big K.R.I.T. took on the challenge that few MC’s have succeeded at, and that was dropping a really good double-album. Dripping with Southern-fried soul and ready to spill his guts on each and every song, K.R.I.T. packs so much heart into this album that it may be a long time before we can all fully digest it. That being said, I didn’t have to sit through “The Light” for too long before I declared it one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have heard on a rap album in recent years. Combining the meandering brilliance of jazz with the depth of live instrumentation and the Mississippi rapper’s deliberate voice, this is easily one of my favorite songs off of 4eva Is A Mighty Long Time.)

*Honorable Mention - Bonus Cut*

“Horn Play” - ChanHays feat. Roc Marciano, Ghettosocks & Meyhem Lauren

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-vik0eU1wE

(A month ago I had not heard of the Canadian producer, but I promise to stay tuned to ChanHays’ future work after listening to his Here album. The project is stacked with top-notch stars of the underground hip-hop realm, and this dope little gem features two of the best torchbearers of the classic NYC rap sound in Roc Marciano & Meyhem Lauren. Definitely cop this whole project, it’s a no-brainer.)

“War Drums” - Meyhem Lauren & DJ Muggs feat. Hologram & Benny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCT8zIwZGws

(Speaking of Meyhem, his project with legendary Cypress Hill producer DJ Muggs is not to be slept on. Even with strong features from Roc Marci, Action Bronson, and the late great Sean Price, it’s this hard joint with Benny and Meyhem’s brother Hologram that make for my favorite cut off of Gems From The Equinox.)

“Mandatory Drug Test” - Moneybagg Yo & NBA Youngboy feat. Young Thug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5M8QdU2KAQ

(When some of the biggest names from Louisiana, Atlanta and Memphis’ modern rap scenes get together, it’s usually safe to say that you’re in for a bouncy trap-anthem. Moneybagg & Youngboy dropped a surprise project this month that really seemed to bring out the best in one another. The hungry young talents flashed enough flow, personality and hunger to put over some tracks which would be indistinguishable in lesser hands. Thugga jumps in for some fun on this one, and the result is a strong little thumper that pulls ahead of some of the more repetitive fair on their solid Fed’s Baby tape.)

“2809” - Yo Gotti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReAWz0kZJ0A

(Before Moneybagg, Yo Gotti was buzzing in the Memphis underground and slowly building a catalog of mixtapes stuffed with catchy tunes. Gotti has finally garnered household-name status in recent years, and in spite of a fairly low ceiling he has managed to deliver a steady flow of strong singles for years now. “2809″ is one of my favorite tracks from his recent I Still Am album, and like much of his music it showcases a deep appreciation for surviving a perilous lifestyle without losing an ounce of pride for where he comes from.)

Still In Heavy Rotation (can’t stop, won’t stop, eh-eh):

4:44 by JAY-Z

http://www.hotnewhiphop.com/jay-z-4-44-upcoming-album-new-mixtape.117283.html

Rosebudd’s Revenge by Roc Marciano

http://onsmash.com/music/roc-marciano-rosebudds-revenge-album-stream/

[ICYMI: Last month’s list below]

https://therappundit.tumblr.com/post/166616081671/october-2017-playli-t-of-the-month

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anotherdyingartform · 7 years

Audio

ADA Spotlight - January 18, 2017

1. San Cisco - SloMo

This new songs from this Aussie collective have been floating around my radar for a few months. This funky number has a particular singularity, inspiring some impromptu dance moves while still feeling a bit rough around the edges.

Spotify | Bandcamp | Soundcloud | YouTube

2. Nnamdi Ogbonnaya - Let Go of my Ego

Chicago rap is a true force of nature already, showcasing all of the varied talent this city has to offer. The next star to be born is Nnamdi Ogbonnaya who spontaneously follows his own lyrical, tongue-twisting muse. Nnamdi refers to himself as a polymath, plays in multiple rock bands, and is a personality music needs desperately right now. Look for his album Drool, out on March 3.

Bandcamp | Soundcloud | YouTube

3. Railings - Hell is Real

Cobbled from membership from Ava Luna, Leapling, and Journalism, this Brooklyn collective latest single captures you from the opening slinky groove. What sets Railings apart is the gritty vocals of Alex Ian Smith that burst from his gut with surprising fortitude.

Bandcamp | Soundcloud

4. Tall Tall Trees - Backroads

This lively tune comes courtesy of Mike Savino, who uses the counterintuitive blend of electronics and banjo to create a rich and unexplored aural environment. Find his album Freedays next month via Joyful Noise.

Spotify | Bandcamp | Soundcloud

5. Lynette Williams - Au Revoir

Harlem musician Lynette Williams creates timeless music that rests on the simplicity of a wistful melody and the soulful voice. Her latest EP is stark but captivating, made to gently wake you from your auto-tuned consciousness.

Spotify | Bandcamp | Soundcloud | YouTube

6. Age Coin - Raptor

Born from the ashes from Danish punk band Lower is, surprisingly, this minimalist-techno duo. The sound from Age Coin has a curious ambience reminding of your favorite IDM producers still residing deep in your milk crates.

Spotify | Soundcloud

Bonus: Check out Nnmandi’s video here!

youtube

#spotlight #playlist #san cisco #nnamdi ogbonnaya #railings #tall tall trees #lynette williams #age coin

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raysondetre · 6 years

Text

U2′s Songs of Experience

Here are the things in the album and release that U2 have done that tie into this book, summarized without substantiation. I reiterate the list with substantiation below if you actually want to find out if this is going on.

Why this is important: -the book was published January 9th, 2016. Bono received the same book at the halfway mark as a draft in 2011. It was submitted for copyright April 2014 and received its copyright license at the end of that year. So you're dealing with a situation where the book can in no way have been contrived to fit U2's actions with their subsequent album, Songs of Experience. Which implies that Bono contrived his creative output in response to the book, because there are enough of them that it appears it could not have been chance. To find out why that could be of pivotal import, it would pay to read the book, but I'll give you the shorthand, -for the book's entire premise to fly, -Bono was so creatively involved he'd have to agree to its existence on some level. And this is enough to assert that he does. But to understand why that statement can be made that strongly, you'd have to understand what was in the book. Same goes for understanding why that may be so important, but U2 themselves have framed the import themselves quite perfectly by this choice quote they released on the day of the US recent eclipse, "Blackout, it's clear, who you are will appear".

1) Bono appears to have read the halfway draft of this book he got in 2011 -in terms of creating a song that manages to juxtapose finishing the book, along with what might be a reaction to the fact that I have lately published a spate of negative investigative articles about the band with regards to their philanthropy sources, -with the fact that I was on Killiney Bay in the draft right before the first time I met him personally, -a song which actually manages to tie into this circumstance three different ways (relying on the journal entry from the night prior)

2) Bono's preview interview for the album's release (the exclusive Amazon Alexa podcast) had him pulling out and talking about an incident he's practically never discussed, -the theft of his lyrics for U2's album ATYCLB on his laptop - an incident that happened right after I first met him, and was thoroughly documented in the draft he received (as well as the current book), -a theft that happened 18 years ago.

3) U2 have deliberately timed their album's release with both an eclipse (to the day) and a supermoon (which happened two days after the album's release) -both events which happened before and after the first and second time I met and spoke to Bono in person in Dublin in 1999. An eclipse happened at almost at totality over Dublin (over 98%) just days before I met Bono, and the supermoon occurred two days after I met him the second time. U2 timed the release of the album with a supermoon occurring two days after the album's release. All this occurrence was documented in both the draft and the current (pre-published 2016) book.

4) Bono snippets "Walk to the Water" in the BBC promotion of the new album's release, -a song that has never been performed and has only been snippeted four times in all of its existence (including this time). He edited the lyrics so that they emphasize the song's (female) subject, opening by her saying it wasn't cold, and how she walked down the "North Strand" to the sea, -which is exactly where you'd walk to go to U2's secret studio then (in 1999, not when this song was written). This is exactly what transpired when I met Bono the first time. Bono was in a position to know that this was exactly what transpired the first time, because I described the process of finding the secret studio in the draft, including describing which streets, -not to mention the conversation itself.

5) The new album, Songs of Experience has a bonus track, "Book of Your Heart" which actually has Bono describing having reading something given to him exclusively for his reading alone (in which he was a character), that corresponds with several appertaining facts of the book.

6) The most significant of these is that it mentions the name change I made to my legal pen name in order to publish the book. Or at least, this is alluded to as something the writer described in the song has done, and this is something I did to self-publish. This happened after 2011.

7) Prior to this, with Songs of Innocence -Bono titled track 10 after the "sincerely" line of my opening letter that presented the draft, word for word: "This is Where You Can Reach me Now". This is something I cannot document because that letter was saved exclusively to the flash drive that Bono received.

This got started as a reply, which I've kept the link to document because the reply thread is literally when I noticed, in real time, that there could have been a deliberate interplay between the song and my book draft. (As well as the embed code just in case which is not a hyperlink.) Facebook censored me from replying, which is how this analysis took flight.

Anthony: "Pamela Williams this is the stupidest crap I’ve ever read. So Bono stoled lyrics from you? Ok lol"

"No. And not insulting you back Anthony takes some restraint. The lyrics are not a quote -which is apparent to anyone literate. What is he doing by the look of it is tagging the period I was in Ireland and met him personally (and delivered an art theory to him as per lyrics with some pretty serious implications). You might register the fact that every one of these points I'm listing is in the book draft I managed to get to him personally in Chicago, -2011. The draft he got, the chapter I was in Ireland and met him personally was just being begun. I had to summarize it as a series of journal entries." So in the book draft he got:

1) I was crying on Killiney Bay the night after a Full Moon just days before I met Bono for the first time. The night before I was singing my lungs out and dancing on the roof of a Dublin Pub three stories up. -With the song "Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way". -Bono lyrically suggests to start singing, instead of 'talking' -which would suitably reference the fact that I've done a series of five investigative articles in the last year and a half or so on the band's billionaire sponsorship etc. that were deeply negative. -That's probably the reason for the 'I know the rage in you is strong" reference.

-Now when I went back into writing the Chapter on Ireland in earnest after Bono received the book in 2011, I found I'd made an error and in fact these journal entries were several days apart, -not just one day apart. So the page I put in the book footnotes (that are in the existing published book as hyperlinks) that has these same journal entries (at a higher level of detail) -they're a week or so apart instead of a day apart. The quay I was sitting on (crying) at Dalkey is on Killiney Bay. I said, "I think my heart is completely broken." In the draft Bono got the entry is only two lines and the episode on the roof (June 28th) is listed as the Full Moon the night prior. In reality the second night I listed as June 29th in his draft really took place July 6th. (Yea, I have the original volumes (handwritten journals, -seven of them), the only way this would have even been the result.)

This is not asserting that he is taking lyrics from me. It looks like what happened in the book draft may be something he chose to write a song (actually maybe three plus one deliberate choice of snippet) about. There's a (big) difference between that allegation and alleging "Bono's copping my lyrics".

-Disclaimer, I have run across this interview in The Sun that says the song was written for his sons (heard the same thing about "13 (There is a Light)" -Bono says on record in the liner notes that this is the case, listing three songs by title as dedicated to his children). However, as explained in the book itself, (and further below) -both sons appeared to have been named after the document I handed to Bono the first time I met him, so it may have a dual intention. It may fit both situations and fits this one a little better, as the book puts a host of songs into one giant, narrative uber song. PS: From what I've seen, apart from this one song out of the three I'm referencing, despite the fact that Bono said all the tracks were letters of some sort to people in his life (including fans) the ones I'm mentioning have no such attribution by Bono or the band (fans assume attribution). I'm not sure why Bono would dedicate two songs to his two sons and only one song to his two daughters, and Bono has only attributed one so far to his daughters. So I'm wondering if the song was written with a dual intention, which is not a first in terms of song analysis where Bono is concerned. PPS: I’m not the type to make an assumption about one song because that song "just happens" to fit what he received in a draft. There’s a lot else going on.

2) Bono talks about his laptop getting stolen with all his lyrics on the Alexa interview special that was a retrospective preview to the album, and only broadcast before the album's release (since this individual didn't listen well enough I checked on this interview with second source). This theft happens in the book draft I gave to Bono in 2011, -right after I documented meeting him personally in the draft. "-But [Anthony is] too dim to consider how I might possess a scan of the newsprint article that documents when he recovered it, and exists as its own page because it is an actual book footnote in a book that was already published in iBooks January 9, 2016, -which means I've already written and published this so I cannot have possibly contrived any of these pages, -nor the book's existing context to fit what Bono has since written and U2 have done in releasing this album (same goes for all the links from my book page to follow) - They all exist as hyperlinks in a previously published book." The lyrics/laptop theft is dealt with in considerable detail. Bear in mind Bono's pulling out an event that happened in 1999, -18 years ago, for this interview. -And I know I got the true skivvy on this from a taxi driver because Bono talked in the Alexa interview about negotiating through bad people to get to even badder people. Ergo, The Mirror lied about the recovery.

3) I met Bono for the first time in person less than a week after an eclipse at over 98% totality took place right over Dublin, and this is in the notes Bono received in the book draft, -very shortly after the journal entry where I was crying on Killiney Bay. (Again that's original scanned newsprint that's already footnoted into the book for this very reason.) So, Bono and Co. notify everyone of "The Blackout" (the first single release to Song of Experience) -on the day of an eclipse passing very close to where I live now, it so happens, -in fact where I live it was it was 88% totality. -A blackout is what happens when there's an eclipse, btw. They quoted one song lyric from the song in this mail out to fans in the path of the eclipse: "Blackout, it's clear, who you are will appear". (They don't mention anything about "The Blackout" even being a single release that's in the pipe with this mail-out, what you saw is what people received.) "Eclipse" as both an event and analogy that have very serious occurrences; it is an existent analogy throughout the book. (You can search the term. -In fact the one line of lyric responsible for triggering this whole book, or even traveling to meet Bono in 1999 (let alone bothering to write about it), was "You know the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon, y'know I don't see you, when she walks in the room" - "The Fly".)

Interestingly enough, one of the very few (two) religious essays I did for the book centered on a female theologian whose entire religious practice centered on "learning to walk in the dark" - naturally, -because her system of thought was something the book explored doing existentially. (-This was released publicly at the time of writing.)

After signifying the first single with the eclipse, U2 released the album Songs of Experience, two days before a supermoon occurred. -In the book notes Bono received I recorded how I met him personally a second time at the Octagon Bar in The Clarence Hotel in Ireland and the supermoon, which was declared by the Irish Times to be the brightest in 136 years, happened two days after I met him the second time. That is why the book also has a footnote about that as well. -This is also in the notes Bono received that were the book draft at that time. Now what's absolutely mind-blowing about this, is that the supermoon occurs in the book draft two days after I met Bono the second time where we spoke and I gave him a Christmas gift, which is the exact date spacing of how U2 timed the album's release, with the supermoon occurring two days afterward.

4) Bono deliberately snippets "Walk to the Water" in the BBC broadcast promoting this album at the end of the performance of "All I Want Is You": "Walk to the Water" has never been performed. This is the 4th time it's been snippeted in all of its existence (30 years). These are the lyrics. He drops a very sensitive quatrain about the song's subject; she wore a "necklace given to [her] by [her] father".

Rabbit Hole #1

-Bono skips that part of the song in this snippet of "Walk to the Water" to go onto the Dublin streets: she "turned left on the Northstrand, and out towards the sea". -If you know where that is, in Dublin, -you'd know that it changes into Pearse Street when it turns left and later becomes Rings End Road, -and that was exactly how to get to U2's then (1999, certainly not in 1987 when "Walk to the Water" was written) secret studio (which was on Hanover Quay on the Grand Canal, and you can google that location now as they decided to let it go). -If you turned left on the North Strand you'd get to their secret studio, if you just took two more turns at the right place. Turning left on the North Strand is the same as turning towards the mouth of the River Liffey, and the sea. Which I walked before and after meeting Andy a couple of times by chance (Guggi's brother -Guggi is practically Bono's best friend in the world)) -I followed North Strand to Rings End (Rings End was overshooting it, actually the turn off was on Pearse Street) until I came to the secret studio and sat on the bench outside and first met Bono. The book draft Bono got in 2011 goes into these encounters and the walking to get there in a lot of detail because I was in a deadline rush of sorts to sort out to Bono how I actually met him, a deadline determined by a concert ticket. How finding Bono transpired was actually sort of odd and interesting, because it took a series of things happening by chance (Andy included), -and I had to blow Andy's mind by proving that with the song "The First Time" Bono was referencing a feminine Holy Spirit (not by trying to, it was that his mind was blown that prompted him to divulge the location). It took quite a convo to tease the location out of him. So the book mentions "Pearse Street" and "Rings Road". -You can search the book for terms after you've found them on Google Maps. The book has a search option. Incidentally Bono has written a song about Andy all of two times, "Bad" in 1984 (which reappeared and became a regular in their live set after the delivery in 2011 was made), and "Raised by Wolves", which appeared on the first subsequent album "Songs of Innocence" after Bono received this book draft. -Yes, made a note of that observation at the time. (Scroll down, to "let's meet under the cherry tree".)

Now practically the first thing that happens when I relate conversing with Bono the first time in this book (which was the same in the draft) is that Bono goes into a brogue about how cold it is today and waxes apologetic about the state of Ireland's typical weather. And I had to suppress my comment about how it wasn't cold at all, -being from Canada. (For what I avoided saying I interjected the thought "Oh puleez". "oh puleez" will pull up that first conversation with Bono.) -So Bono's literally teased out this verse snippet on the BBC broadcast and modified it (by dropping half of the first verse and going onto the second) -so that it happens to fit the actual context of when I first actually met him -that again (*sigh*) -was transcribed in the book draft I gave to him in 2011 and presently exists in the actual book. -The first line in "Walk to the Water is, "She said it wasn't cold". So the choice of snippet just happens to have fit the real situation.

All of these events happen in just a few pages in the draft that Bono got. They formed the substance of that chapter then, which is certainly not how it stands now.

Rabbit Hole #2

Rabbit Hole #3

5) The album has a bonus track called "Book of Your Heart" - the first verse sure looks like he might be reading a book he received personally that is his sole edition, doesn't it? (No one's ever going to see that draft other than himself.)

The song opens "Right from the start, you put this into words, how you think we should proceed" - I began writing in reference to the matter when I was 21, the "big" concept landed at 25, and then I began writing in earnest. "Love is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way" - has "So young to be the words of your own song". - If you follow the protagonist in this book the full course, you'll find out this linking situation - (-when the protagonist exists as object in an array of songs and you put that all together for the first time as a book, that book is the first elucidation of the whole song-) -this situation of the protagonist as object actually can be traced back to when she was just thirteen years old, with Bono coming into the picture at sixteen, not that any of this was known at those ages. The watershed moment that came on like a neutron bomb happened at age 21. The really freaky part is that in terms of becoming her own song, her own self-conceived myth that ends up playing out through the book, the character she came up with that becomes this myth personae in later years, she came up with at age 12; -first writing the story's beginning at age 14.

"Write a world where we can belong" -in "Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way" -looks like an endorsement to finish writing (but that the writer is on their own). Bono got a draft that was at the less than halfway mark. And subject to some serious revision in key earlier chapters after he got it (one got added).

"Book of Your Heart" also has the lines "This is the promise that we'll stay, Through the long descriptive passages, Where we don't know what to say" -Also looks like reading a book (and first encounter, the entire intercourse was of what was not said). It's a wordy one that clocks in at 836 pages last I checked (in Word). The song also has "We are not fictitious characters, We don't belong to this world" -which again, indicates characters that exist as writ. It is very fitting for a book that centers on Bono and a protagonist between the two of them, plus an associated ensemble cast, and deals in pre-conception existence (post-death as well).

6) "Book of Your Heart" mentions a name change. When I met Bono and made the deliveries, both in 1999 and 2011, I went by a different name. The book's legal pen name is Pamela Williams. (It's right on the cover.) You'd have to be fairly aware of me, I know, to understand that I changed my name between 2011 and now to release the book, -but I did so on all my social media, it so happens. If you find this dubious, well, I decided on the pen name in 2000. It's on record in the book itself that I'm going to change my name for it -and what the name will be. You can search the name inside the book also to find this out.

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theliterateape · 6 years

Text

"Here's My Heart": Braid's 'Frame & Canvas' Turns 20

By David Himmel

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Frame & Canvas by the Champaign, Illinois-based band Braid. This album mattered. It mattered when it was first released for what it meant for the punk/emo/hardcore genre. It mattered for what it meant for the band. It mattered for what it meant to me and the thousands (Tens of thousands? Millions?) of kids like me. And yeah, it matters now.

I know I’m not the first to get all fanboy gooey over this album or this band. But lately I’m having a hard time not submitting to the allure of nostalgia, that gorgeous siren. No, it’s not nostalgia. It’s reference to the past, my past. It could be that the last year was a wild one — first year of marriage; dog gets sick; land a new job; wife gets pregnant; lose the new job; dog dies; first child is born. A lot of impactful things have happened personally — internally. And it’s been busy externally, too — all things Trump; the generational war; the race/socio-economic war; the geographical war; Stranger Things 2. In wild times like these, it does one best to cite history for the guidance, clues and cues for how to best navigate the new, but always familiar, waters. And so, I’ve been going back to the well of my favorite movies, books and music for comfort and clarity.

Frame & Canvas is a favorite. Braid is a favorite. As such, the record release of 20 years ago today is worth writing about.

On April 7, 1998, I was a freshman in college at UNLV. I was miserable. The whys and whats of why are too numerous and convoluted to get into here but I can tell you that overall, I felt stale.

I didn’t run out and buy Frame & Canvas on its release day. I don’t remember when I bought the CD but I remember that it did not leave its place in the 6-CD disk changer in my new Volkswagen Golf — my first car — for all of my sophomore year at school. I remember playing it at full volume with the windows down and the sunroof open as one of my sophomore year roommates, Matt Sandoval, and I drove to San Diego for a weekend on the beach. He was impressed with it. It sounded like nothing he’d ever heard before. He wanted more. So did I.

“So I’m told that Chicago’s cold. Can’t be cool as California.” — First Day Back

Braid wasn’t new to me. The released two albums (and a slew of singles and splits and compilations, etc.) but Braid hadn’t resonated with me until Frame & Canvas. The band’s third and final album — before the release of a two-volume compilation of singles and B-sides, and a temp-to-full-time reunion release 16 years later — was just the right mix of nuance that my sensitive, wannabe rockstar heart and ears required. I had even seen Braid perform the earlier stuff at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl several times when they shared the bill with my favorites at the time, The Promise Ring and The Get Up Kids to name two. (Those bands still rank among my favorites, and their albums remain in routine rotation on my turntable, in my iTunes and in my car.) After I completely absorbed every lyric, drum beat, guitar riff and bass line I could from Frame & Canvas, I dove into the older stuff. And now I loved it. All of it. I became a superfan.

Braid broke up in 1999. They went on a one-off reunion tour in 2004. I flew from Las Vegas to Detroit to see them open for Minus the Bear. I still have the ticket stub. It wasn my birthday weekend. It was fucking incredible.

But back to the record at hand…

The songs were about being in a state of certain uncertainty. A place of transition with the balls to step up and have no fear of fucking it all up. The songs were about girls and friends and getting older and being younger and parents and longing and having and missing and distance and places and things and giving a shit and not giving a shit at all.

“We’ve got a lot of great mistakes to make. We’ve a lot of chances to take, so let’s take our time and hurry.” — The New Nathan Detroits

Or that’s how I perceived them. What do I know? I didn’t write them, I only listened to them. It’s that old argument: What Does The Art Mean And Who Does It Mean It To? The album, front to back and back again was everything my tender Midwestern heart was feeling and everything my late teenage brain was thinking

Frame & Canvas was released at the end of my freshman year, but it was wholly consumed throughout my sophomore year. My sophomore year was the year when I was still sad but sick of being sad; bored but sick of being bored; interested but struggling to find something interesting. Throughout the album, there were lyrics that spoke to exactly what I was feeling or thinking, or needed to hear because I hadn’t thought of it that way. And certainly not with that shift in time signature or run down the frets.

It was my sophomore when I shook off the dust and salt and tried new things while staying evermore true to myself. That was the year college started to be enjoyable and life started to suck. That was the year my twenties began and a new, more confident, less afraid David emerged. I didn’t know what a Nathan Detroit was — I didn’t get the reference, but I couldn’t help to relate because there was something both familiar and new about this guy, Nathan. (I later, of course, realized that Nathan Detroit was a reference to the character from Guys and Dolls. The reference and connection still accurately applies.)

One of my longest standing and still best friends, Brian Wolff, once told me, “You treat lead singers like they’re great philosophers.” Yeah, I do. Fuck Socrates. Eat shit, Voltaire. Bite my dick, Angelou. Give me my Nanna, Broach, Portman, Schwartzenbach, Andriano…

I’m not alone in this, I know. Music matters. Bands matter. Singers and guitarists and bassists and drummers matter. They say and play what we want to say and play but can’t because we’re in our own way. And get this; there are bands for the bands, too. Everyone is inspired.

So, it’s 20 years later…

I’ve seen Braid perform live countless times at this point — considering all the times in high school at the Fireside, the reunion show, the quieter shows before the release of the new album in 2014 and the few since. And yeah, I own the VHS and DVD of Killing a Camera, the live performance documentary of the band’s swan song performances. I’m a fan. Superfan.

In the years since Frame & Canvas has been among us, the listening public, it has remained a constant source of companionship. Through girlfriends of distance, through missing my Midwestern roots while living my dear dessert life in Nevada, through being married...

“I can’t come home, I’m stuck in a phone booth again. But once in your arms, we’ll rise above the ground. You and me, and the beautiful aerial view… I’m never coming down.” — Collect from Clark Kent

A short departure for a story of a different tone, yet related…

When I was making my move from Las Vegas to Chicago during June of 2007, I stopped in Rock Springs, Wyoming. It was on the way and I had to pee. I also was jonesing for a small town beer. Preferably a draft. I found what I considered a local-enough tavern to piss and throw anchor in, and steered the VW into the small parking lot. I too my piss, drank my beer and scribbled in my notebook. Those writings are somewhere, actually close to me in a well-disheveled filing of notebooks in my desk just to the left of this very keyboard. I’ll spare you the contents of that bar top writing because it’s not good. At least not without music to it…

Point is, while I was drinking and writing, it dawned on me that Braid had recorded a song about Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s called I Keep a Diary, and as I realized that, I recognized that was living out a song I loved. For I, too, was keeping a diary. Bonus: The date of the diary entry in that song is my wife’s birthday. How about that?

“Ten-ten, ninety-seven… Rock Springs, Wyoming hotel. As far as I can tell, I just don’t miss you anymore.” — I Keep a Diary

OK. So here we are, 20 years later. I embarked on my career, I poured through and over girlfriends, I bought a house with a pool, I lost my virginity, I bought a boat — sort of — I got married, I became a dad, I bought another VW Golf then a VW GTI, I got some cancer, I became a scotch drinker.

The thing about our formative years is that they’re always formative. We don’t grow out of who we were when we were angsty, emotional, needy, angry, confused, certain, brilliant, and dumb-as-fuck teenagers and twentysomethings. That is our base. All of us. That’s why our record collection, and collecting, caps out around the time between our teenage and late twenties years. Unless you’re a music critic or seriously committed to avoiding atrophy in spite of the certain emotional disappointment new music will bring your aging ass, this is true.

But Braid keeps on.

Never mind that the band got back together. Never mind what members went on to do in subsequent years. Never mind that Bob Nanna — guitarist and vocalist of Braid — went on to write — for hire — our wedding song. Yeah, it’s pretty fucking cool that my rock ‘n’ roll emotional hero knows my dog’s name!

How does one reconcile fandom with heroism. I see these guys at shows… they are cool enough and real enough to be friends but incredible enough to pass me over as a passing piece of late ’90s and early 2000s dust. Except that we’re all part of the same thing… The Scene, the listening public. And wouldn’t you know it? My wife hired Braid’s lyricist to pen our wedding song.

Jesus Christ.

The frame… the canvas… it’s still so real and so important.

And if Bob, Todd, Chris, Damen or Roy happen to read this… Thanks. Next time I see you at some show in town, the drinks are on me.

#Braid #David Himmel #Emo #Frame & Canvas

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literateape · 6 years

Text

"Here's My Heart": Braid's 'Frame & Canvas' Turns 20

By David Himmel

Frame & Canvas is a favorite. Braid is a favorite. As such, the record release of 20 years ago today is worth writing about.

On April 7, 1998, I was a freshman in college at UNLV. I was miserable. The whys and whats of why are too numerous and convoluted to get into here but I can tell you that overall, I felt stale.

“So I’m told that Chicago’s cold. Can’t be cool as California.” — First Day Back

But back to the record at hand…

“We’ve got a lot of great mistakes to make. We’ve a lot of chances to take, so let’s take our time and hurry.” — The New Nathan Detroits

So, it’s 20 years later…

A short departure for a story of a different tone, yet related…

“Ten-ten, ninety-seven… Rock Springs, Wyoming hotel. As far as I can tell, I just don’t miss you anymore.” — I Keep a Diary

But Braid keeps on.

Jesus Christ.

The frame… the canvas… it’s still so real and so important.

And if Bob, Todd, Chris, Damen or Roy happen to read this… Thanks. Next time I see you at some show in town, the drinks are on me.

#Braid #David Himmel #Emo #Frame & Canvas

0 notes