most mountain goats songs are time loops. some of them are brief stolen moments of singularity (like san bernadino and snow owl, quiet irreplaceable wonder), but mostly they're time loops and the characters are stuck. sometimes they know they're in a time loop, sometimes they suspect they're in a time loop, sometimes they're actively trying to get out, sometimes they've made peace with the loop, and sometimes they have no idea they're in a time loop and they never will. I'm being so serious btw

Could you a classpect analysis for a Knight of Hope?

I could indeed!! This one seems… really interesting!!

Title: Knight of Hope

Title Breakdown: One who Actively Defends [wields in defense of, serves, applies, protects] Hope [faith, belief, magic, positive emotion, pure creation]

Role in the Session: So, here we have the Wwhitest of Knights. Straight-up Paladin, right here. Maybe they’re actually religious, maybe they have a more nebulous personal code, but either way, the Knight of Hope is bound to be someone committed to their beliefs to the point of zealotry. Not only are they committed, but they’re also liable to proselytize or project a holier-than-thou attitude, to cover up for an internal sense that their faith is wavering and/or inadequate. Their role in the session is to keep Hope alive – to hold their team together by providing a light on the horizon, and a beacon of faith when rational optimism is all but impossible.

Hope as an Aspect is all about conviction, about as opposed to Rage’s nihilism/absurdism, and acceptance/commitment as opposed to Rage’s skepticism. It shares with Time and Doom a fondness for grand narratives and suspension of disbelief, and will probably manifest as a belief in fate, predestination, or some similar force in those Bound to it. The Knight is there to defend and make the most of what little Hope their session has remaining, and in order to rise to the task they must realize that the Hope has been in them all along. As soon as they overcome the hesitance within themselves, they can become the force for truth and justice that their session so desperately needs.

The Knight’s Quest may involve a Planet whose native consorts have become despondent and pessimistic, despairing that any Hope could rise again. Their Denizen, even sleeping, may be a wrathful, depressive force that keeps them in this state, but before the Knight can confront the Denizen themselves, they will have to face their own demons and fulfill their duty of being a Light even in the bleakest of landscapes. Their force of will is their greatest strength, and it will confer an advantage greater than any weapon might; when all else is lost, they’re going to be the ones staggering to their feet and saying, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it ain’t over yet. This is a tremendous task to rise to, and the Knight will certainly struggle at first – it will be crucial for them to fall back on their allies when they must, even when it seems as though those allies’ convictions may not be so strong as their own. A Seer of Doom might help the Knight acquire resilience, understanding of how to press forward in the bleak circumstances they are all but certain to face. A Rogue of Time’s ability to “buy [the Knight] some time”, perhaps by literally sending them back in time to correct whatever the flaw may be in their Session, would be a formidable tool in conjunction with the Knight’s ability to utilize their beliefs in every way possible.

Opposite Role: The Rogue of Rage. Boy howdy are these two gonna have problems with one another. The Rogue’s role is to “appropriate, redistribute, and give their allies skepticism, anger, and destruction” – which is pretty much the last thing the Knight needs, given that they’re already less-than-confident in the strength of their beliefs. I could see a slow-burn of resentment building between the two, culminating in one or both of them Inverting or Over-embracing, and allowing the clash of their mutually exclusive beliefs to tear the team apart. Needless to say, the team should not(!) allow this to happen!! It is absolutely crucial, for the Knight especially, to have people on their side, and the Rogue of Rage is bound to be a real sower of discord. I never say never when it comes to relationships (romantic or platonic) or teamwork/collaboration between two roles, but these ones in particular are like oil and water.

God Tier Powers

The Knight’s Aspect is Culminative-Conclusive-Personal; their Class is that of the Active Defender. This means that their powers are going to draw on their own internal beliefs and conceptions, and be directed towards intensity/concentration as opposed to expansion or diffusion. They are literally carrying their faith as sword and shield, for better or for worse. Here are some ideas as to how that might manifest in their suite of post-Ascension powers…

Divine Grace: The Knight’s faith acts as a literal suit of armor, perhaps invisible, or perhaps made of shimmering white energy. As long as they’re confident that they will not be harmed, they could walk through an explosion unscathed, simply by virtue of their unassailable conviction. While they needn’t focus directly to keep this ability active, their defenses will drop as soon as their belief wavers, so they’ll have to have sufficiently developed in their personal arc to make the most of this ability.

Templar: When the Knight is near a symbolic manifestation of their cause, or their team’s cause, they are both physically and psychologically empowered, using any of their abilities (Aspect-related or otherwise) with greater skill and magnitude as long as they know that the symbol is there. They needn’t even see it directly, as long as they believe it to be present; obvious destruction of the symbol (which could be a flag, a building, or really any physical representation of what they stand for) will almost certainly shatter this belief, but they don’t have to have a direct line of sight, for example.

Hope Against Hope: The Knight can take the smallest glimmer of Hope and turn it into a great, radiant surge. Once they have reached the height of their control over Hope, they can invoke it to conjure up something they need, something fully real but only present so long as they believe it is. This could be a tool or a weapon at the time it’s needed most, or it could be something more abstract – a single moment of opportunity, perhaps, or maybe a message or a sign that the tides are turning. This is a very abstract and powerful ability and its limits are all-but-nonexistent, but it can only be called upon when all Hope seems lost, and the Knight truly relies on their faith against all the evidence that such faith is senseless.

Personality: The Knight of Hope’s zealotry might seem obnoxious to the, uh, less persuaded among their teammates, but it’s also what sets them apart and gives them much of their strength. What they really need to work through isn’t their conviction or stubbornness but rather their tendency towards burnout, and their constant anxiety that their faith isn’t adequate, that they aren’t holding up to their own standards. This doesn’t necessarily mean they should let their guard down or allow their beliefs to lapse or weaken, they’ve just got to learn that sometimes it’s best to let your actions speak for themselves, and to remain fully committed to practicing what they preach. If they can do this, they can do just about anything.

Their interests, outside of their religion or philosophical code, might involve some symbolic representation of belief or personal truth – role-playing, fiction writing, or dramatic reenactment are all possibilities. The common thread is that each activity involves significant creative energy and active, sustained suspension of disbelief – the very forces that the Knight will rely on over the course of their personal journey through the Game.

Songs: I’vve got a feww of these in mind already… 8y wwhich I mean I’m attemptin a rare and highly dangerous x3 Goats combo ::::p

Last Man on Earth by the Mountain Goats

Hail St. Sebastian by the Mountain Goats

Romans 10:9 by noted North Carolina Christian/Pagan ska/metal alt/pop five-piece, the Mountain Goats

Also like, viva la vida by coldplay or somethin

Anywways!! I hope you enjoyed readin this analysis; I certainly enjoyed wwritin it!! Thanks for the ask ^^^^v^^^^

~ P L U R ~

Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure Plus Est En Vous Live Thoughts

Here it goes, the finale. Oh boy. 

=

Oh! Eugene is doing a story recap. 

Aw, two best friends.

That journal page looks a lot like the play poster.

LOL. It’s complicated. That’s the understatement of the series.

Goat headed monster and they show Milton and Shorty. Great gag there.

This is Rapunzel we’re talking about. Aw!

Hmm. I thought things were a lot more spiky where the Sundrop used to be. 

Arianna’s here! Willow built a brick wall in the bedroom. Must have been pretty big room. Knocked that wall down, oh that’s great. 

Ok so that’s where the promo came from. It makes way more sense in context. 

Nice callback to Tangled Before Ever After. 

Gosh, the music is epic. 

They finished the arch, I notice its not a gate, in the wall. 

The wolf too? Nice! And the waterfall. Okay they are really making it obvious they are redeeming Cass if they are racapping the bonding sequence from TBEA.

And we’re in the Snuggly Ducking with Eugene and the gang. 

What Would Rapunzel Do? True, Rapunzel would sing a bouncy tune. I love how Quirin hides his face behind his hand.

Nice backup there Lance. 

“We’re doomed”-Edmund. 

And cue Rapunzel coming in and here comes the song. 

When did Varian learn the piano?

Pascal fighting with a little pink paper umbrella is hilarious.

I take it this is called “Thru it All.”

Oh they finally notice the mark.

Varian is stepping into Demanitus’ shoes.

Snow/Eugene Fitzherbert = Snakes/Indiana Jones

Rapunzel put Cass’s room back together. Dusty. The Rose and the Cassandrium! 

It Eugene’s face is back on the practice dummy, so did “No Time Like the Past” not happen?

Cass is having a hard time with the past. Really doesn’t like the maid in waiting headdress. 

Oh look a climbing cliff, I’m sure its fine after a thousand years.

Oh no, not the Great Oak Tree!

Eugene had to ask.

Vigor! Talk about going hard on an esthetic. 

Great gag with the girls. 

That’s a great idea for a torch.

I would have expected a better lock then that.

G-bug?!

How the hell did Demanitus create a habitat like that at that high altitude?! How did the book survive?

Lance, No touchy! He touchy.

“Ah, nuts.” Is that all you can say, yes, it is because Disney, but yeah that’s getting ficced so much.

Ah yes, there’s always something. But what about luring her close to it?

Ah back tot he Demanitus device mountain.

Why does she care about Corona so much? Did she have a crush on Demanitus?

Oh Edmund, never change, okay maybe a little. 

Oh, we’re doing the proposal now!?

So is Quirin affected by the mind trap or not?

Hulk!Ruddiger and Wolf!Catalina are awesome! But that’s not a good plan.

It’s locked! It’s unlocked!

Rapunzel finds Zhan Tiri. I would urge caution. 2 millennia, where did that come from?

I so love the animation, someone was having so much fun animating BooBerry.

Wait what?! Rapunzel wasn’t paying attention about the eclipse. Why is her sigil glowing? They ever established it was magical, I thought it was just a button.

It looks like like a steampunk Stargate!

Important safety tip. 

Oh uh, Quirin’s being controlled. 

Good thinking Varian. But yeah nothing like having to neutralize your dad, again to make life hard. 

So there’s still some sundrop magic in her.

Feral!Zhan Tiri

Oh yeah, great idea, leave the bird in charge. Oh no.

That is the look of a princess with no f***s left to give. 

Aw a song for Cassandra.

The Moonstone is reacting now too, or are we a little bit in the past? Cass is in Rapunzel’s room?

Nice move! Don't trust her at all! But I have my doubts the cage will work.

Zhan Tiri doing puppy eyes is so ridiculous 

Backstory time! She was taller back then. Aw Demanitus had a monkey sidekick. Oh she's always had a boomerang. They had a thing.

The Lost Realm huh. 

Crowley is thoroughly unimpressed by the Lost Realm. 

Toucan Sam, is that you? okay, okay, that place is so creepy, yet fun looking. That has the most wacky vibe ever. They had so much fun doing that place.

Oh, hi Hector. bad to see you.

Why is Cass hanging upside down? Drama of course. OOoo, they were almost close enough.

So Edmund trained the Brotherhood, he's really good. Like Captain America good. 

Pascal is willing to take on Cass.

OOooo, new fighting features.

Raps just walks through the rocks, awesome.

Rhinos can't jump

Speaking too soon, but I love that Kiara calls Varian, V. It has goggles too.

Milton!

Aw, an Umlaut vase.

Dabne, the hood had a name?

Now Raps is starting to fight.

Oh, hi Adria, wondered where you were. 

Whoa, she broke Shadowblade

And now it gets interesting

The power of forgiveness!

Yeah everyone's back from the Lost Realm.

This looks familiar

This is my final form!

Yellow Rocks, not amber this time.

A very unfortunate growth spurt

For Corona!

Aw she apologized

Go for it Milton!

Hot damn that's some acting.

lol she grabbed Catalina

Hooboy the Hurt Incantation. 

You know what? this eclipse is going on for a pretty long time.

Yup Raps always has hope. 

Aw yes, There is more in you

Cool the shard is back.

Frying pans, we all knew!

YES, YES, YES, she cut her own hair!!!!!!

Oh come on don't kill her! That's ain't right!

yes, Yes, YES, YES, YES, YES, ALL THE YES! HEALING INCANTATION!!!!!!! Bring them all back!

Oh yeah, Goddess mode! 

oh no.

Yes! Pascal. LOL Now you know how it feels. 

HUG!!!!!!!!!

Walls are better.

Eugettle? blech

Nice new ranger outfit

AWwwww They said it.

A reprise of "Happily Ever After”!? WHooo!

Aww everyones there.

Finally the proposal!

=

And its over. Ok feeling pretty good. I can handle that ending. 

I admit I was scared for a long time. So many shows have biffed their ending, that having a show with a good ending is …different. And this one has a great ending. It was satisfying and powerful, yeah it didn’t tie up every last loose thread but enough of them. I’m good with it. 

Yeah, I’m good. I think I watch Tangled Ever After tomorrow maybe. I’ve got to digest all this. 

This gets a place on the great stuff list. With Star Trek: The Original Series, Firefly, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. 

Oakland Doomy Bluesers Phantom Hound Roar ‘Cross The ‘Mountain Pass’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

By Billy Goate

Album Art by Molly Stetson & Heather Hughes

I live not far from the railroad and there's something very comforting about hearing a train roll in. It's appropriate that the might and roar of that metallic convoy be responsible for opening the new record from PHANTOM HOUND.

We met them some years back, when the Oakland doom and power blues trio dropped, 'Phantom Hound' (2016), their debut EP. Now Jake Navarra (guitar, vox), Stephen Rogers (bass guitar), and Jack Stiles (drums) are back with a full-length: 'Mountain Pass' (2020). The new spin showcases a sound that's genuinely enticing, much like Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite For Destruction was when I first heard it at age 12 (the first cassette I had to buy clandestinely from my parents).

The riffmaking, from leads to solos, is strong with Mountain Pass, driving each track forward like a mighty engine, from the rush of an opener "The Northern Face" to the grinding blueser "Thunder I Am," the chugging pistons of "Irons In The Fire," and the Matt Pike-like filigrees of "The Southern Face."

Jake's powerful pipes fall somewhere in between Chris Cornell's soaring medium range, the raspy grit of Finnish vocalist Olli Suurmunne (Kaiser, Altar of Betelgeuze), and the commanding force of Australia's Chris Fisher (Field, Lamassu).

You ain't gonna bring me down You ain't gonna bleed me out You ain't gonna kill me now You ain't gonna snuff me out

In fact, if you liked Kaiser's '1st Sound' (2018), this would make a very nice companion.

A pleasant acoustic interlude, "Grace of an Angel" gives us a rest stop from the treacherous uphill journey, leading to the album's expansive namesake track and a very overcast second-half. "Devil Blues" is quite effective in conjuring the rough terrain of the California mountains and the sense of aloneness one feels when traveling deep into the wild.

Steady return into the dark Dealing again my hand the card A whisper, a spark, and a flame Has bitten me again Killing me again the same

We've now travelled from "The Northern Face" to meet "The Southern Face," the Mountain Pass closer. It's a doomy one for sure, though the intrepid tempo gives the sense of determination that this journey will be finished.

"Overall this record is about survival and living for every moment," the band told Doomed & Stoned. "A gritty reflection on what is required to actually live your life rather than be a slave to it."

And now, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to bring you the premiere of Mountain Pass by Phantom Hound, ahead of its wide release on Saturday, March 28th (pre-order here).

Give ear...

Mountain Pass by Phantom Hound

Track By Track: A Listener's Guide to Mountain Pass

We asked the guys to give us a walk-through of each number on Phantom Hound's new album. We got more than we expected and are delighted to share this in-depth breakdown with you from frontman Jake Navarra.

The Northern Face

This song started off early writing sessions for the record as a new riff when I bought a new Jazzmaster not long after that Rob Zombie show. The riff was written hours before my first audition in two years as something aggressive and impressive to take to them. The guys I jammed with didn't get the vision and we didn't click in general so I put it in my back pocket. I brought it home and kept working on it though. My love of all things Alice in Chains carved this track out to serve as our "Them Bones" This main riff would later serve me again on a second song "The Southern Face" I used the main riff from "The Northern Face" as a bridge riff after the second chorus outro in "The Southern Face" but since the song is in B-Standard on the Baritone guitar its nearly unnoticeable. The songs became the beginning and the end of the record pretty early on. Lyrically the song serves as a cry of raw life. The idea being that, we are born into this world and its a fight to stay here. Climbing the northern face is a metaphor for the listener to be the train that has set off to see its railroad completed. (Drop D)

Thunder I Am

I grew up watching old westerns with my grandpa and my old man. There's nobody that doesn't relate to Clint Eastwood's characters and this songs a direct tip of the hat to the attitude portrayed in nearly all of his films. Thunder I Am is essentially that sense of justice that will always rain down. The song wrote itself when I first plugged this guitar into my Orange. Heavily inspired by Down and Soudgarden. (B Standard)

Irons in the Fire

This song directly reflects a love for Down & Pantera. Lyrically a direct reflection on how hard our members work on a daily basis and what it takes to make a band happen these days with all the different DIY elements band members have to juggle. We can never loose faith in ourselves or let the idea of a dream die out. We simply have to stoke the fire and keep it burning at all times. We put some southern style groove at the end of this song to pay homage to some dime style breakdown riffing. (B Standard)

You Don't Know Death

This song was written during The Ether era. How it survived is beyond me. It's tough, fast, and sharp as a dagger so maybe that helped. Lyrically a reflection on the overwhelming amount of death worship. I don't feel like a lot of bands really know what they're talking about sometimes but I was also much younger when I wrote it and far more angsty. I was craving diversity from metal at the time. I simply want life to be valued at its core. Perhaps the opposite of how it sounds I guess. (Drop C Standard)

Grace of an Angel

Throughout 2018 my step mother battled liver cirrhosis. She turned 67 on Dec 11th and passed away two days after Christmas on Dec 27th. She was in my life for 20 of my 30 years and was nothing short of an angel. She brought children into this world for over 30 years in the medical industry working as an RN for Kaiser Permanente. She never drank, smoked, or swore. She retired around the age of 64 and almost instantly got sick. She did her part for a transplant but was denied a liver through the waiting list. It was the single most painful experience of my life as I was there through the end holding her hand and looking after my old man as we all watched helplessly on the wayside. During her pain and suffering she never lost her integrity and showed more strength in her final hours than I think anybody could truly understand. People leave this world in many different ways but she did it as gracefully as only an angel could. I wrote this only weeks before the end. Steve is playing a Fender Rhodes and Jack added some light drums on it. I did more takes of this than any other track on the record. (Drop C)

Mountain Pass

This song started off during the years I walked away from music as the only thing I would play on my only instrument which was the acoustic that I kept. Occasionally I thought of a record that could capture the sound I always wanted to make combining heavy influences and trying to really make a grand opus. Something long and stoneresque calling on some Matt Pike meets Jerry Cantrell riffage. As the years went by and the idea for this record started to form it really honestly felt like we were struggling at every turn to see this record through. Life changes, career changes, the economy, the price of living, the music industry. Its been a struggle for many. This song is an anthem to all of the blue collar workers and dream of the builders putting one foot in front of the other to see their journey through. We have to set examples sometimes or nothing will change. (Drop C)

Devil Blues

This song is tip of the hat to The Blues. When I started playing guitar again I decided to play with a fire and make sure above all else that we were having fun in this band and having fun at our shows. Life is incredibly short and that's all there is to it. This song is about giving into The Blues and letting that feeling live inside you and remind you to stay out late, spend the extra money, go look at the stars, and jump into the ocean. (B Standard)

The Southern Face

The journey ends here. We've fought, we've struggled, we've survived the perilous journey of life and you're all the stronger and wiser for it. a reminder that you did it with your own two hands, your wit, and that not everybody made it. It's not a perfect story and it didn't work out well for everybody. We took losses and we made gains. And when you're done its time to reflect and count your blessings. This song is a steep descent into a smooth arrival back at the destination you set out to reach. This song wraps up the story entirely and leaves a sneak peak for what's to come. You can hear Steve's wizardry as his psychedelia morphs into a trance-like sense of closure and clarity until the train drops you off and carries on. (B Standard)

Wrong Turns & Second Chances: Interview with Phantom Hound

Every band has an origin story. Sometimes if you dig a little beyond the surface and get to know the musicians behind the music, their stories become surprisingly relatable. As Doomed & Stoned is all about both the music and the stories of the heavy underground, we were curious to know more about a lesser known band with a huge sound and grand ideas called Phantom Hound. We got the scoop from frontman Jake Navarra.

The Beginning

We formed in 2013 under the name Hound. Keith Hernandez (bass and engineer) and Dominic Torres (drums) did The Ether EP with me but not long after we recorded and started mixing I got into a motorcycle accident at the end of 2014 and decided to walk away from music altogether. I had been playing music for 10 years at this point and in part of the collapse of my previous band Cast Iron Crow and the continued struggle to keep a band going in general felt that my time as a musician was done. I fucked up my right shoulder and tore my ACL in the crash, had to get reconstructive surgery on my knee, and learn how to use my left leg all over again during recovery.

Because of this and the inability to play any instrument at all I sold off all of my gear except for my acoustic guitar in order to help pay my bills and for nearly two years never looked back. It was in summer of 2016 that I found myself with some free tickets for Rob Zombie. I took my older brother out to see him as we grew up listening to White Zombie and Rob Zombie from all the old Twisted Metal video games growing up. There was a brief moment when John 5 came out on stage at the beginning of House of 1000 Corpses.

The stage went dark and a spotlight came down upon him and he had this glow in the dark Telecaster with the TV screen in between the pickups while an old horror movie was playing on it and had the whole arena at his attention with that ominous riff. My brother elbowed me and said "You're telling me you don't wanna do that anymore? That doesn't look fun to you?" a light bulb went off that night and I called Kieth Hernandez a few days later to dust off The Ether mixes and we spent the fall dialing it in and finishing what we started. I ended up getting introduced to Oz Fritz who's worked with Les Claypool in the past and has some ties in the East Bay Area. I released it digitally that Christmas as a present to close friends and family.

The Rebirth

At the start of 2017, I wanted to really get back into playing again and struggled for some time to secure a lineup. I had two line ups of close friends help me get the ball rolling and things were off to a slow start for a while as we only had the EP material which was written on a Fender Jazzmaster. In the early months of 2017 I acquired a guitar that changed everything. The Hagstrom Viking Baritone. As soon as I plugged this guitar into my amp "Thunder I Am" was the first thing that came back out of it. "Devil Blues" was second and "The Southern Face" was the third. These three songs became the basis for what would become Mountain Pass and for a year-and-a-half my renewed interest in guitar and the blues pumped new life into the band. We played two shows this year and survived only by a slow pulse.

Paths Converge

It wasn't until I met Jack Stiles (drums) in March of 2018 through craigslist and that things got serious. He was the first person in 5 years that was as motivated as myself about the project and we set out to overhaul the band immediately. Jack (44) is a business owner of 10+ years, married, and a father of two little ones with more energy than most people my age (30). Jack has been a drummer for less than 5 years and a bass player of 20+. From sheer motivation he's answered the call and taken every challenge I've thrown his way. Jack strictly plays Ludwig classics and has shaped his playing around the hooks and rhythms these songs call for. A general love for all things music he's been one of the single most important musicians to ever share the stage with.

Through Jack we met Steve Rogers (bass) a few months later in June of 2018. Steve is a guy as casual as they come. (43) 100% Irish. Here's a guy who backpacked the John Muir trail in 8 days and shrugs his shoulders over his accomplishment when you bring it up. An established sound engineer with Dolby in San Francisco he's one of the friendliest people I've ever met. At the time he was pretty upset with his previous audition with some other band because they told him he didn't have the right image. Their loss, our gain. Steve's unwavering dedication to his bass tone filled a huge gap in our sound and with his Ampeg SVT and Music Man offers a brutal low end I didn't realize these songs couldn't benefit so much from. During the recording sessions Jack and I marveled at his ability to convey how these songs should expand with our engineer Chris Hughes. His sense of temp and atmosphere is responsible for all of the psychedelia and the keys hidden in 'Mountain Pass" and "Grace of an Angel."

Phantom Hound, Jake Navarra, and Mountain Pass

In late summer of 2018, the three of us went straight to work. At this time the name "Hound" had become convoluted and our music simply couldn't be found. After much deliberation and research we expanded the name to Phantom Hound. Symbolically this further represented the folklore surrounding the concept of why I chose "Hound" in the first place. Everything from Hell Hounds of the south capturing elements of The Blues, Black Shuck 's and Phantom Hounds of the UK and America to the mighty Cerberus going all the way back to Greek mythology. The Phantom Hound is essentially a guide/gatekeeper between worlds of the living and the spiritual underworld. We felt this helped us fully mature into our sound as were a bit of a mutt ourselves in the sense that we don't particularly fit in anywhere but get by everywhere so far.

As the main guitar player, vocalist, and songwriter it is my primary goal to try and compose records with expansive styles highlighting what the guitar can offer a listener. My own personal inspiration comes a lot from the classic rock I grew up on as a kid like so many, Seattle grunge, Mississippi and Chicago Blues, NOLA sludge, Italian and East Coast Jazz, Californian desert and stoner rock, and even the eclectic resurgence of all things metal in the local Oakland scene.

After rebuilding throughout the summer of 2018 on what had now become the 4th lineup of the band and the 1st lineup of Phantom Hound we came back up for air renewed and rebranded. We spent the winter of 2018/2019 performing, writing, shaping, and designing our brand. Our love for westerns, camping, backpacking, and history brought us to the Theme of "Mountain Pass," which is a loose concept record comparing one's personal journey through adulthood and all of the challenges one faces during those years to construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. In its essence: A perilous journey inward and mission for oneself to see through to its completion.

Producing Mountain Pass

2019 was the biggest year for us by far. We went into the studio with my friend Chris Hughes in May. About 10 years earlier I met him through an old friend back in college down in southern California. During that moment in time I was discovering Sleep's Jerusalem and was so stoked on Sleep I gave it to this transplant from Denver who wanted to get his hands on anything heavy and stoner metal related. Life went on and I didn't see him again for 10 years. During that time he continued to date and eventually marry an old friend of mine from High School and pursue audio engineering up here in the Bay Area at Expressions.

Somewhere along his journey, Chris got connected with the boys in the South Bay in KOOK and they hired him to produce their first album "Kook" and again their follow up "Kook II". This time however and the reason I mention this part of the story is that KOOK is well acquainted with Billy Anderson who came down from Oregon as the executive producer on the follow up record. Chris was able to shadow Billy in these sessions and learn and assist with much of the engineering on this record.

So after not seeing Chris or my old friend Heather we bumped into each other at Bevmo here downtown in Oakland to buy some beer. We instantly caught up having one hell of a laugh that after all these years the chance encounter we had over Sleep led him to working alongside Billy Anderson himself. With Chris fresh off the sessions of Kook II and Phantom Hound locked and loaded with Mountain Pass, everything lined up right and we went into the studio together at Airship Laboratories in Richmond, California and recorded nearly everything but the vocals in the same room Metallica recorded S&M and had a blast combining all our knowledge together and reconnecting as friends.

Chris Hughes took our record to extraordinary levels and our songs gave him a solid platform to apply his newly acquired skill sets on. We continued to perform all throughout the year with as many bands around town as possible as we built our relationships and earned a place here in town. In September of 2019 through Chris Hughes we were introduced to Jeff Wilson from Kook, Heavy San Jose, and Glory or Death Records and got on the bill for his annual Beers in Hell event. This was single handedly the most important gig of the year for us last year as we got to play with tons of killer bands and open for Hippie Death Cult, Kook, Disastroid, Holy Grove, and High Tone Son of a Bitch (which included Billy Anderson on Bass that night). We then played again with Hippie Death Cult in Pacifica a few weeks later and hit it off as friends.

Mastering Mountain Pass

After mixing was completed and our shows for September were wrapped up, we took off into Nevada City to reconnect with Oz Fritz at Ancient Wave Studios. This place is located down a long dirt road deep in the woods of Gold Country. A perfect relaxing place to kick back and watch the record come to life. Oz Fritz worked with me on The Ether EP. He's worked on Primus's Antipop, several Tom Waits records, and Miles Davis to name a few. Oz is straight to the point and gets down to business quick. He was stoked on the variety of the songs he was working with and added a great layer of warmth that comes through the best on vinyl as we've heard with our test pressings. There is a photo attached of us at Ancient Wave with him working his magic. He was once asked by Tom Waits "This mix sounds great but...it needs more brown" and so he figured it out.

The Northern Face Music Video Shoot

In October, we took off to Soda Springs and rented a cabin during filming for the music video. As I mentioned above we filmed in a historical landmark. You can see us at the entrance of Tunnel #6. If you look Closely you can see the scars on the granite as if the black powder and dynamite just blew it up yesterday. The town behind me on the cliff is Truckee and the lake below is Donner Lake. It is my goal to bring our listeners into the outdoors and feel the dirt in their hands and the smell of the woods.

Tragedy nearly took place though as after we finished filming all day on Saturday and celebrating all night Saturday night. What we thought were minor electrical issues with the house itself turned out to be a near fatal one when an electrical short in the gas fireplace sparked around 3AM. The fireplace caught fire thus lighting the outside of the house and chimney on fire proceeding to fill the house with smoke while 9 of us were fast asleep.

At 3:30 AM the smoke alarms went off like a symphony and we scrambled to find the source only to quickly determine that the fireplace was the problem. Black smoke poured out everywhere from behind the fireplace and we used two fire extinguishers in an attempt to put out the flames. What we didn't know and couldn't see was that the fire crept up all the way through the chimney in between the interior and exterior of the chimney. And just like that, within 10 minutes we started evacuating the house and helping each other clear the place out of our belongings, instruments, film equipment, and vehicles. The Truckee Fire Department came out and went to work and kicked ass on the fire while we assisted with information on how the fire and extending the hoses until reinforcement arrived.

In the end we all got out ok and luckily nobody had to go to the hospital. We all got smoked out pretty bad and were pretty shaken up. It was the real deal 100%. That house was on its way to burning down the house. That's the story behind the home footage at the end. If you look closely the entire house is billowing with smoke. We were all fast asleep about 40 minutes before that was filmed.

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intro to genevieve, pt. 4

Getting close to the end now!!! Only a few more to go!!! @ocelotsflatass it’s almost done!!! Here’s the reference post!!!

S: Streets 1. Viv is not particularly street smart, mostly because she’s never needed to be, but she’s pretty cautious and not dumb enough to believe everything somebody told her. That said, the streets are not her scene.  2. She’d give money to someone on the street, no question, but she sometimes wonders why there’s not a better social safety net, or why the available services are not better promoted.  3. She’s never gotten into a fight, but could be provoked enough to throw hands. Harassing her or assaulting her or her friends and not taking the hint when she tells you to stop is usually a surefire way to blow every single one of her fuses. She’s not big, but god is she pissed and when she goes feral, she goes feral. Anger at your own risk.  4. Nothing physical aside from one dude trying to grab her in a club, but she has been verbally harassed, catcalled, and followed multiple times. Definitely has one of those lipstick knives or cat-ear knuckle-duster things. Would like to take a self-defense class. Dante is more than happy to help train her.  5. Overall, yeah. Viv isn’t a big risk taker by nature and the only times she’s done something Not Smart is if she’s under the influence, but she’s pretty level-headed and at least tries to be aware of her surroundings and the people around her. But she’s usually pretty good. Even Not Smart for her is still pretty smart overall. 

T: Truth 1. Is she honest? Yes, almost to a fault. Almost to bluntness, which can be aggravating for quite a few people. It’s usually not out of meanness, she just believes in being direct.  2. She can usually tell when people are lying, or if they’re hiding something at the very least. She’s very perceptive, and very persistent if she feels someone’s not being upfront with her, which can be annoying.  3. Viv is usually honest about most things, so people don’t really think of her as someone who lies, which means she can get away with quite a few.  4. She has, but she can’t change the past. And she does believe that sometimes lies are kinder than the truth, even if keeping the lie up or telling it to begin with upsets her own conscience.  5. I’m... not really sure what this means. Has she spread rumors, or has she had rumors spread about her? Yeah, middle school sucked. She was kind of known as the weird girl in high school, but that didn’t bother her too much. 

U: Underdog 1. The bullying she experienced was mostly the bullying-by-exclusion, behind-the-back stuff that happens in middle and high school. She had enough pride to snap back at people if they insulted her to her face, which happened, but very infrequently, and people did learn quickly not to go at her directly because she would fight back.  2. She may have gone along with people who bullied other people, or taken sides in group/clique fights, but she wasn’t tormenting people in the hallway or taking their lunch money or anything. She was very sensitive and reactive in middle and high school, though, and could be a bit high strung. Viv wasn’t exactly the easiest person to deal with back then, but she has mellowed out considerably.  3. She’s never been physically attacked by a bully. She did kind of rough up some other kids as a young child, but it was mostly done out of a sense of rambunctious fun and not meanness, and she stopped when most people got bigger than her. But she does still feel bad about it. She feels that she was kind of a mean kid, which... she kind of was, but also wasn’t? It’s kind of weird. 4. Has she ever been doubted??? Uh... she has historically been dismissed about her concerns or complaints, which, for the most part, were valid and justifiable. She’s mentioned things to her parents before and been ignored, and unfortunately those things grew to be much bigger problems than they should have been. Viv fell through the cracks of her family for a long time, and she’s kind of got a chip on her shoulder about it.  5. Viv is surprisingly good with children and enjoys math as a subject, even if she sucks at actually doing it. She’s interested in a lot of activities and wants to learn a lot of practical things, like woodworking or knitting or how to fix her own car. Learning new things, however, is one area of her life where she is not particularly patient. 

V: Vomit 1. She can, particularly if she eats something that doesn’t agree with her, or during a migraine, which she gets more often than she likes.  2. She doesn’t really get a lot of stomach aches per se, but she can get nauseous pretty easily. Motion sickness is one of her nausea triggers, especially in a moving car, which is why she prefers to be the driver the majority of the time, or at least ride shotgun.  3. Viv is a mother hen to the max. She will make you soup, tea, run to get you crackers or whatever it is you need, force medicine down your throat, you name it. It makes sense, because one of her strongest love languages is caretaking and acts of service.  4. When she’s ill, Viv generally likes hot tea, a dumb movie marathon, taking as many drugs as she can stand, but mostly she likes sleeping it off. She also finds hot baths to be very soothing, if not always helpful.  5. Viv can get indigestion so her stomach can gurgle because of all the acid, but she mostly retches and coughs when she vomits. It’s very intense, and it sounds awful. Dante thought she was legit dying when he heard her vomiting for the first time during a migraine, and absolutely flipped his shit when he saw how awful she was feeling. It’s horrible to hear.

W: Water 1. She tries to, and she’s always yammering about how important it is to stay hydrated, but she can slip up with this. She’s also constantly bitching about single-use plastic, so you won’t find any plastic water bottles in DMC, and if you somehow do, she didn’t put them there.  2. She does know how to swim, but she’s no competitive swimmer. She could probably keep herself afloat long enough to get back to the boat, as long as it wasn’t going too fast or wasn’t too far away, or for someone to rescue her, but if it’s long-term survival in the ocean that you’re talking about she’s kind of fucked.  3. She doesn’t really enjoy swimming per se, she enjoys being in water as long as it’s relatively safe. Viv is actually kind of afraid of deep and open water, because she’s also kind of afraid of drowning... or any kind of death by suffocation, really.  4. She’s an... okay diver at best. She’s never gone scuba diving or snorkeling, but she does think that doing so would be fun. Viv would also like to swim with sharks, because she likes sharks. Also alligators.  5. She’s not good at rationing her oxygen, which is something her brother--who was very good at swimming--tried to help her with. Her breath control needs work. 

X: Xylophone 1. Viv likes indie music, rock music, and folk music in particular, but she’s not absolutely married to any single genre. She does not like stadium country, however, with only a few exceptions. Can roll with Dante’s metal, although she prefers symphonic metal herself.  2. She doesn’t have a single favorite song, but she does have a few long-lasting faves or songs that personally mean a lot to her. Viv will go through periods where she’ll be intensely into a few specific songs and listen to them ad nauseam, then move on to something else or have her interest in them die down.  3. She has a few fave bands and artists--Joanna Newsom, the Mountain Goats, the Decemberists, Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, or whatever passes for them in the DMC world.  4. It’s not her talent, and she can only sing some songs well, but her voice won’t make your ears bleed. In the right circumstances it’s actually almost pretty. However, she is pretty good at piano and would like to learn guitar and cello. Again, Dante is happy to oblige, but they differ because he’s self-taught and Viv can read music... but they find a middle ground and jam together, though not without some Shenanigans. Zoe can play ukelele and guitar, and she and Viv used have some jam sessions.  5. This is one of her most closely-guarded secrets, but she does actually like some rap and hip-hop. One of her favorites comes on at a party? She’s spitting. Everyone is shocked. 

oops! i did it again (ficced some Penumbra)

When The Reckoning Arrives (Chapter 1) (Complete!) [ao3] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6]

Fandom: The Penumbra Podcast

Relationship: Lord Arum/Sir Damien/Rilla

Characters:  Sir Damien, Sir Angelo, Queen Mira, Sir Caroline, Rilla, Lord Arum, The Keep, Quanyii

Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 02, Established Relationship, Forbidden Love, (lmao), Threats of Violence, Declarations Of Love, (but probably not the way you're thinking), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Sir Absolon is here if you squint, background Sir Caroline/Quanyii

Summary: As Damien crosses the threshold into the Citadel, the sunrise at his back and moss clinging to his boots, he is stopped at spearpoint. (AKA: There are, inevitably, consequences for being too complacent while having a highly illegal affair with an enemy combatant.

Notes: ahahahaha this is the literal polar opposite to my other Penumbra fic hey sorry about that? Stick with me here, things will get worse before they get better. Title taken from the Mountain Goats song, Heretic Pride. And like, basically the entire inspiration for this disaster. Saints bless.]

-

As Damien crosses the threshold into the Citadel, the sunrise at his back and moss clinging to his boots, he is stopped at spearpoint.

“Pardon- me?” he says, blinking, and then there are more spears, more guards glaring at him in alarm and fury over their points. Damien raises his hands in surrender, more confused than frightened, and asks with a laugh, “To what do I owe this pomp and circumstance at my arrival, friend guards?”

“Silence!” one of them barks in what Damien recognizes as a poor imitation of Sir Caroline’s authoritative tone. Apparently she has had an impact on the ranks in the months since her promotion. “You are to be detained and brought before the Queen. Do not resist, traitor.”

Damien feels a moment of worry at the word ‘traitor’, but he takes a breath and allows tranquility to fill him. Focus, wait, learn the situation before reacting. He raises an eyebrow, keeping his hands carefully above his head. “I have no such plans as of this moment,” he says calmly. “To resist, I mean. Shall I remove my weapons for you, then?”

The guard who spoke is thrown by the acquiescence, and he hesitates before glaring with renewed fury. “Drop your weapons now!”

Damien thinks that Sir Caroline could possibly have done a better job with this particular squad. He starts to lower his hands to do as told, but the guards all collectively flinch at the movement and their spears waver in a concerning way, so he pauses for a long moment to consider the best course of action. “Shall I remove my quiver first, so you know I cannot fire when I remove my bow? Or would one of you like to take them off of me, for your own peace of mind?”

There is another moment of pause before the apparent guard in charge gestures for one of his squad to move forward and disarm the knight, and Damien would be amused by their twitchy hesitance if it were not an immediate threat to him. He makes no move to stop the man as he unbuckles the quiver, then the bow, and then the sheaf of the knife at his hip. Damien almost flinches at that – the knife is borrowed, more an object of familiarity and comfort than a weapon as far as he is concerned – but he suppresses the reaction to a mere frown. The guard should bind his hands, now, Damien thinks, but the collective group seems almost afraid to even touch him. “There,” he says with levity he does not feel. “That is better, is it not? Lead on to the Queen, then, gentlemen, and I shall follow.”

It is not a particularly long walk, but Damien feels the stares of the entire Citadel as they watch him pass through. He tries not to pay it any mind, tries not to notice if there is anyone he recognizes watching as he is escorted through the streets at spearpoint, tries not to feel the lack of his bow as acutely as nakedness, but he falters in the effort once or twice.

He could have made an escape, he thinks absently, by way of distraction. He could have disarmed the lot of them, trained by Sir Caroline or no, and retreated from the Citadel before another soul managed to confront him… but what purpose would that serve? Whatever he was being detained for – and there was only one glaring, loud possibility he was trying and failing not to consider – it would not help his cause in the least if he hurt someone on the guard, or if he tried to run. Damien has worried his own sins and supposed sins over in his own mind long and hard enough that they have ground down to sand, and he finally came to the surprising realization that where Arum is concerned, his feelings and his actions are not wrong, even if the laws of the Citadel contradict what he knows.

He breathes in the cool morning air in one last long lingering lungful before they bring him inside, leading him towards the Queen.

“Sir Damien! My good friend and rival!”

Angelo’s voice booms from the other side of a wide hall and Damien winces at the number of heads it turns as Angelo hup hup hups his way over to himself and his escort. “Good morning, Sir Angelo,” Damien says as lightly as he can manage, keeping in step with the guards as he does. “I’m afraid I’ve been summoned and I cannot stay to speak with you.”

“What a terrible shame!” Sir Angelo cries, and then he pauses, eying Damien curiously for a moment before he speaks again. “Hold on a moment… your- Sir Damien, your…” he narrows his eyes, his bold voice dipping down uncertainly into a more manageable register when he notices Damien’s bow dangling improperly from the hands of one of the guards. He looks over the scene as he keeps pace with the uncomfortably hurrying squadron, his brow furrowing in thought. “Is… is there something wrong with your hands, my friend?”

“No, Sir Angelo, not as such,” Damien says with an amused sigh.

“Have the straps on your quiver broken, then?”

“No, Sir Angelo.”

“A rather strange and chivalrous favor done out of the goodness of these kind guards hearts-”

“Sir Damien has been accused of treason and is being brought into custody!” one of the guards snaps, “and I will thank you to leave us to our work, Knight.”

“Ah, that certainly explains all of the spears these fine fellows are pointing at y- Saints what possible reason could there be to accuse my best friend and rival of something so hideous as treason!? Sir Damien-”

Angelo reaches a hand for Damien’s shoulder, and the procession finally halts. The spears waver, as if carefully considering how reasonable an idea it would be to point at the intimidatingly muscular form of Sir Angelo instead of the deceptively slight Sir Damien. They don’t aim Angelo’s way, in the end, but the consideration was obvious enough in the air that Angelo’s hand doesn’t make contact with his friend.

“It’s alright, Sir Angelo,” Damien says quietly. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not afraid.”

“Of course you’ve done nothing wrong!” Angelo cries, voice cracking in the middle. “And so, these fellows should clearly let you go.”

The guards tense, and Damien sighs again. “I have been summoned by the Queen, Sir Angelo. And my duty is to report as summoned, is it not?”

“Well- yes, of course, but-”

“Don’t worry for me, my friend.”

“I cannot allow them to arrest you, Sir Damien, you-”

“If you draw that sword, Sir Angelo, you will regret it.” Sir Caroline steps towards them, boots clicking on the stone, her expression unreadable beyond the usual veneer of vague disappointment.

Damien feels a pang of hurt, but he stifles it. If this detainment is because Caroline spoke out then, yes, that would be a betrayal given her stated intention to stay out of their business, but Damien cannot be sure that is what happened. Caroline doesn’t look particularly smug about his situation; only dutiful, as always.

“I would not draw on the city guard, Captain Sir Caroline!” Angelo yelps, flinging his hands away from his own body in a gesture of innocence.

“Hm.” She turns to Damien and gives a small nod, then looks at the guard. “Why have you stopped, anyway?” Their heels collectively click together, and every one of them looks overwhelmed by her mild ire. “Go on, then.”

“Er- one thing, Sir Angelo?” Damien hesitates, eyes flicking to the guards for a moment. “You- would you talk to- would you tell-”

“Rilla, of course!” Angel nods fervently, and Damien hopes that he knows that Damien is asking him to talk to both of his loves, actually. It’s a faint sort of hope, but… maybe he’ll figure it out.

“Tell- tell her not to worry, please?” Damien swallows, and makes himself smile. “And tell her to be safe.”

“Very good,” Sir Caroline says in an exquisitely bored tone. “Move along, then. Sir Angelo, I believe you have other duties to attend to, hm?” She raises an eyebrow, then gestures towards the barracks. “Off you get.”

Angelo pauses, giving one last confused, pained look towards Damien, and then he wanders off, for once silent, and Sir Caroline follows behind.

There is little to distract him then, between there and the Queen’s audience chamber.

Queen Mira watches him enter, still and cool as marble, and the moment the guards shove him forward onto his knees, she frowns and lifts a hand.

“Leave us.”

There is hesitation, while the guards struggle between the instinct to obey what the Queen instructs and the desire to stand between her and the highly skilled, treasonous knight with his hands still unbound. The obedience wins in the end, and they flee, and only when the enormous stone door is closed again do Queen Mira’s shoulders sink, her stiff stance cascading into one of exhaustion.

Damien remains kneeling, unsure what his Queen intends.

“Sir Damien,” she says, voice clear and cool and slow. “I have trusted you implicitly since you achieved your Knighthood. You have a moral core that I wish more of your order shared, and a profound sense of compassion, and the most tenacious nature of anyone in the Second Citadel.” She inhales deeply, looking down at him with an expression so utterly blank it’s like being observed by the moon. He drops his eyes to the floor instinctively. “All of those factors combined… are why it is so difficult for me to believe that you have committed the treason of which I have been made aware.”

Tranquility, Damien’s heart murmurs, even as it chugs anxiously in his chest. Tranquility, tranquility, oh Saint Damien your tranquility I beg you-

“Well, Sir Damien? Have you nothing to say for yourself?”

“I am waiting, my Queen.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For the accusation itself. I cannot defend against that of which I have not been made fully aware. The guards who brought me in were conspicuously tight-lipped on the subject, I must say.”

Damien raises his eyes again, and the Queen watches him for a long, still moment.

“Three witnesses claim to have seen you at the edge of the jungle, Sir Damien, holding a decidedly amicable conversation with a monster.” She pauses, scrutinizing Damien for a breath or two. Damien suspects that this is not the end of the accusation, and when he remains silent he is eventually proven correct. “They also claim that when this conversation was finished, you embraced the creature, and- kissed it. The monster. On the mouth,” she says pointedly.

Damien draws a mercifully steady breath and lifts his chin, meeting the eyes of his Queen.

“If this is a mistake, Sir Damien, I command you to tell me so now. If this is a curse, or a compulsion or a thrall- if you are being manipulated or coerced or blackmailed, you must tell me. I can do nothing to protect you if you do not tell me what has caused you to commit this- this betrayal.”

It’s an out, and Damien knows it. She doesn’t want to believe that he would choose to betray the Citadel, so she is grasping at any possibility that would shift the guilt of the act to the monsters, and not Damien himself. He could lie, claim a curse, claim anything, really, and Queen Mira might grant mercy or clemency or- forgiveness.

But Damien does not desire forgiveness. He knows in his heart that his love for Arum is something good. As purely good as his love for Rilla, as good as their love together. He is long since past that guilt, now, and the idea of being forgiven for loving Arum- it is incomprehensible.

As incomprehensible as the idea of turning, and blaming Arum for tricking or manipulating him into love, as the Queen seems to expect him to do right now.

“I command you to speak, Sir Damien,” Mira says, and a crack of grim humor slips into her expression for a half-second. “For what may be the first time.”

A laugh wants to bubble out of Damien, but he is too scared that it will escalate to hysterics if he lets it. He is calm now, calm only through force of will and a surety of feeling, but he needs to maintain his grip. He breathes deep, and then breathes again slowly, and then he allows himself to speak his heart.

“The monster your witnesses saw is called Lord Arum,” Damien says, softly. “He who rules the Swamp of Titan’s Blooms. He is an architect. He is quick, and clever, and proud, and I have been in love with him since the battle at Fort Terminus, at least.”

Queen Mira’s expression shatters into utter shock, which is just about what Damien expects it to do.

“He poses no threat to the Citadel,” Damien continues. “His most earnest desire is to be left alone by humanity and monsterkind alike, with the exception of- of myself.” He barely avoids blurting Rilla’s involvement. Barely. “He loves me as well.”

“It does not love you,” the Queen says, voice scathing, and Damien can’t help the bemused, disbelieving smile that curves his lips. It feels strange, to feel disappointed in his typically wise, venerable Queen, but that claim is too ridiculous for Damien to bear with a straight face. She glares at his expression, eyes going even colder. “The monster has tricked you somehow, Sir Damien.”

“He has done no such thing, my Queen.” Memory, steadying him; Arum draped over his back, leaching heat and murmuring soft complaints into his ear. Arum, watching him practice with his bow as his arm recovered, equal measures of worry and pride in his violet eyes. Arum, carrying Rilla more than was strictly necessary as her own injury healed, doting and pretending not to. Arum, throwing his weapon into the mud, looking down at him with vulnerability and hope and desire. Damien knows. Damien knows this, with utter certainty. “He loves me.”

“You are lost, Sir Damien,” she says, a new hopelessness in her voice. “It is using you to try to get to the Citadel. It is performing another trick, another manipulation, just like the last one-”

“Lord Arum helped us defeat the fear monster, actually,” Damien admits, gently. “Sir Caroline did not know, but that was how- how we learned the methods the creature used. Lord Arum told us, of his own free will and under no coercion. If he had not done so, we would have gone into the situation completely unaware of the kind of danger we were in. He did not want us to die.”

“That is impossible.” Mira slashes her hand through the air between them, as if she needs to accentuate her denial. As if it isn’t perfectly clear that she won’t believe him. “Do you have anyone who can corroborate that claim?”

Rilla can, of course, since she is the one Arum actually gave the information to, but Damien cannot say that. “Arum could not speak with Sir Caroline or Sir Angelo,” Damien deflects, shaking his head. “They would sooner have killed him than let him explain.”

“As would be their duty,” Mira says, each word clipped short. “As should yours have been. To destroy a monster that threatened our Citadel and its citizens.”

“Lord Arum is not a threat,” Damien repeats. “He may once have been, but-”

“You really think a monster would change for you, Sir Damien? Are you truly so naive as that?”

“Not for me alone,” he says, and then quickly follows with, “and I do not think he has changed all that much altogether. He was always Arum, and only his priorities and perspective have changed. He is not a threat, my Queen.”

“This is your defense,” Mira says, and she sounds disappointed. “It is no threat, so you should not be punished?”

Damien sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. “It is perfectly clear that by the letter of the law, I have colluded with a monster and thereby have committed treason against the Second Citadel,” he says. “What I now understand to be true, my Queen, is that the letter of the law is wrong.”

“How dare you,” the Queen whispers. “The Second Citadel nearly came to ruin, nearly fell to fire and fear at the hands and claws and machinations of these beasts, and you try to claim that collusion is not treason?”

“All monsters are not evil,” Damien says, and the Queen inhales a gasp. “They are all so very different, my Queen. Has that not always been the most difficult challenge in fighting them, in holding them back? Every one is a unique being, just as we humans are. They are more chaotic, yes, and less predictable, but- Arum is not the only monster that would choose peace with the humans if given the opportunity.”

“You have colluded with other monsters now, Sir Damien? You admit this?”

“I have spoken to some peaceably, yes. Not many; Arum happens to be a very solitary creature,” he says, and he feels a soft smile curve his lips.

“Have you allowed every one of them to take you to bed as well?”

The Queen’s words are biting and bitter and crass, and not at all like her. Damien frowns, but brushes away the stab of hurt he feels at the question and lifts his chin defiantly. “There is no call for vulgarity, my Queen.”

Her jaw clenches, but she neither apologizes nor repeats the question. After a long moment, she speaks again. “You are determined not to repent, then,” she says, and Damien can hear her stifling a deep sadness. He pities her - and that is quite an odd feeling - but his will is like steel when he knows he is following the right path. “You will not defend yourself.”

“I have defended myself, my Queen,” Damien says, feeling very, very tired all at once. “I have defended myself as honestly as I am able. I have spoken my heart, spoken the truth of it, and told you where that self-same heart and my guiding Saint have led me. My fate lies in your judgment now, in your understanding and clarity of vision. I know who I am, my Queen, and I must believe that you know who I am as well. I love my Citadel.” There are tears burning at the corners of his eyes, the fierceness of his conviction thunders in his heart, but he ignores them both and continues. “I love the people I defend. You must know that I believe what I say, because if I thought for a moment that Arum posed a threat, you know that I could not live with myself if anyone was hurt by my inaction towards him.”

“Yes,” Mira says slowly, and Damien feels her tone creep like dread up his spine. “I can see that you believe what you say.” Damien can feel his future solidifying as the Queen speaks, his very short and unfortunate future before she inevitably sentences him to hang. “That, Sir Damien, is precisely what frightens me.”

even when i don’t cooperate

Lord God,

“I’m doing better now. We made it.” 

I want to say these words and mean them, so badly. But I can’t. Not yet. And not knowing when I can again is suffocating, because I don’t want to be not okay anymore. 

I’m sorry, Lord, that I don’t know how to receive your love and comfort right now. When you want me to do something for you or hack and slash for your kingdom, I’m in. It takes my mind off the pain in my chest. But when you draw near as the lover of my soul, or as my father in heaven, I’m going to greet you with a door, boarded up and bolted shut. I’m a conflicted, irrational child on the other side, weeping over my own brokenness, over how I need you and miss you so much, but I can’t bring myself to look at you because it reminds me of this open wound that in all honesty, I hold you partially responsible for. 

I need you to bust through that door. I need to know that you’ll fight for me and win a landslide victory, even when I fight ugly against you. I’m tired of always trying to do the right thing, holding myself to a standard that is higher than I can maintain without growing bitter and resentful for having to meet it. I think the best thing I can do for myself right now is to stop trying so hard to be the person I think I should be, because I’m not there yet. I never wanted to point my finger at you and blame you for my unhappiness, Lord, but this is the only way I can relate to you as your child right now. To take it all out on you, because you can take it, and only you can take it, even though you’re the only one who never ever deserves it. 

But I’ll do myself a favor and record the bits and pieces I remember of how you’ve pursued me in the past month. Your love is relentless. And I hear you. I hear your gentle whispers through the door. Maybe one day soon, but certainly one day eventually, I’ll read through these words, and they’ll finally get through to my calloused heart:

You make a way for me at work every day.

I like my job for the first time in 5 years, and the change that made that happen was handed to me on a silver platter.

I have the best manager and teammates who love me and care for me.

Though I’ve been a mess, I’ve never had to de-prioritize my own wellbeing, because you always make just enough time and space for me to do that without compromising my work. 

You continue to speak encouragement through me to the people in my life. If anything, I’ve seen an increased boldness behind my words and genuine affection for others in the midst of my pain. Thank you for the grace that allows me to do what I love most.

On 10/2, you spoke to me clearly through another one of your children, words that I needed to hear, even if I didn’t want to. Still, I recognize this as a divine appointment, for you didn’t delay a single minute after you had prepared my heart to receive your command, but you held off just long enough until I was ready. This day, in order to obey, I decided to let go of something very precious to me. Thus began this arduous process.

On 10/10 and 10/17, my coworker and I read about Noah in our Bible study through Genesis.

Late at night on 10/16, I spilled my guts to a few sisters and started to process in earnest how hard it has been to let go. The next morning, one of them sent me the teddy bear picture. You got me this time. It struck something deep inside of me. I realized I’ve been so reluctant to let go because I loved that teddy bear. And I thought if I could truly say “I love it,” that’s enough to justify keeping it for forever. But it’s not. And you know it’s hard to let go of what I’m holding on to, but you definitely have something better in store. At the end of the day, obedience to you must supersede my love for anything else.

On 10/21, I woke up and wrote another song for the first time in almost 2 months. It was going in one direction, but the bridge came to me and redirected the song to you. It heavily references Noah’s flood.

On 10/23, a sister messaged me a word from you. She said she felt like Jesus was asking me out to dinner. I said He’d have to work for it, but I appreciated it.

On 10/27, I couldn’t muster the energy to worship you until we sang, “Even when I don't see it, you're working. Even when I can't feel it, you're working. You never stop, you never stop working.” At the end of service, a sister prayed for me. When she finished, she held me, looked at me, and said, “I feel it. I feel the pain ... It’s going to be okay.” Then she hugged me. And the way she did all of that disarmed me. Someone else actually knew what it felt like to be me, and they acknowledged that I’m not just weak. That it really does hurt, and it makes sense that I need time to grieve. So I went back to my seat, and I cried for the first time since 10/2. I cried and cried and prayed that I wouldn’t stop until I got it all out of my system, because crying doesn’t come easily to me anymore.

Later on 10/27, I pulled my own name again during prayer time in accountability group (which of course, I didn’t know until after I prophesied over the name on my slip of paper). You told me my heart is like the ark, and we’re still building it to prepare for the flood you’ll release in my life. You will wash away all the pain, all the grime of my past. At the end, I will see your promise, and I will walk forth as the new creation that I already am, completely freed from the chains of yesterday. This time, I finally realized how intentionally you’ve been planting Noah’s story in my life. 

On 10/31, my coworker and I continued reading about Noah.

I marveled at how long it took Noah to build that ark. How pointless it could have seemed if he had stopped to compare what he “had to” do with what everyone else “got to” spend their time doing. How he could have stopped at anytime to doubt your command and give up because it was hard labor and didn’t make sense, yet the Bible says “And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.” It made me feel a lot better about what you commanded me.

One other verse also struck me: “Then the Lord shut him in.” Somehow, when I read that verse, I felt like you were saying, “Don’t be afraid. I see you. I brought you here--to protect you, not to harm you. There is a purpose to this pain.”

Sometime in the last week, I was willing to open up my Dwell app and listen to Job 38-42. They just happened to be the next chunk in the chronological Bible in a Year audio plan I started a while back. You spoke to me through a number of verses, which I found somewhat amusing because you were talking mostly about animals, yet you spoke to me through each one in such a relevant way:

Job 38:39-41 (the lion and raven): “I am a provider, and I provide for you, as I provide for animals that do not know how to pray to me with eloquent words.”

Job 39:2-3 (the mountain goats): “I know the right time for all things, including the fulfillment of my promises in your life. You don’t know when this heavy burden will pass, but I do. And there will be joy and life at the other end.”

Job 39:5-8 (the wild donkey): “I am a liberator. I freed you from bondage, and I’ve given you a home, a lush and vibrant place of provision.”

Job 39:9-12 (the wild ox): “I hold absolute authority. Don’t trust in other people or powers, not even yourself. Trust in me, because I alone have authority to command all people and powers.”

Job 39:13-18 (the ostrich): “I am the source of wisdom. Without me, you labor in vain, and you won’t even be able to recognize the value of what is precious in your life. So ask me for wisdom.”

Job 39:19-25 (the horse): “I am all powerful, the source of your might, and I made you like the horse. You shall laugh at fear and not be dismayed, and you won’t turn back from the sword. This is a hard battle, but admit it--somewhere deep down inside of you, when you hear the trumpet sound, and you smell the battle from afar, you’re not actually afraid. You are ready and aching to claim another victory for my glory.”

Job 39:26-30 (the hawk and eagle): “I am a master strategist, and I give you vision. I know where to position you for success, unique to how I designed you. Don’t compare where you are right now with someone else, because it might not make sense for that person, but it makes sense for you. And if you trust me and obey me, you will land in a place where you can finally see clearly.”

Job 40-41: (Behemoth and Leviathan): “I am not a tiny God. Behold my creations. No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up. Who then is he who can stand before me? Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.”

Job 42:10: “I listen to the prayers of my people, which carry the power to forgive sins. Job prayed for the people who failed him, even betrayed him as friends in their failings. I call you to do the same. I empower you to do the same.”

On 11/3, a sister shared her testimony. It was powerful. But what really got me was when she referenced an alternate version of the teddy bear picture. The same picture I can’t get out of my head, and you clearly don’t want me to forget. At this moment, I honestly hate what you ask for in that picture. But I can’t deny that you are clearly reaching out to me, even now.

During service on 11/3, Jason spoke on Mark 10:35-52. Verse 50 hit me: “Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.” The blind man threw his most prized possession aside to ask for sight. In faith, he exchanged his one tangible source of security for the possibility that you would answer his prayer. I thought of the teddy bear in my hands. You’re asking me to trust you, to throw it aside, and to reclaim the singleminded devotion I once had for your vision. You’re inviting me to come before you and confess, “Father, my beloved, I want to see.” 

Heaven By Violence: Chapter 1

Go get lost where no one can be found Drink so long and deep until you drown Say your goodbyes but darlin' if you please Don't go without me — “C’est la Mort”, The Civil Wars

The prisoner says nothing during the interrogation, but her face speaks for her: she stills, brows furrowed, throat bobbing, before her expression crumples as grief takes over. She says nothing until they get outside the Chantry and her eyes are drawn up, up, to the whirling maelstrom that is the Breach. Cassandra does not miss the way relief joins the myriad of emotions flitting across her scar-lined face — she’s certainly not skilled at hiding her feelings — before the mark on her hand pulses and she crashes down with a gasp.

“I didn’t kill my own husband,” she says finally, when the pulses have stopped and her breaths return. Her tone is defensive, but then, softer, before Cassandra can reply, “I didn’t kill him…”

Cassandra reaches down, helps her up because she looks lost, sitting in the snow, and it’s a strange look on such a woman. “You thought you did?”

“I don’t remember anything,” she says. “It’s different from— I thought I must have done something, for this thing to be on my hand, but I’m not… not capable of that!” She gestures at the sky with her bound wrists.

They will see about that. Cassandra leads her toward the gates of the little village, their Haven from the valley beyond. The townsfolk watch them carefully, mistrust and open hatred on every face. The Seeker can’t say she doesn’t understand. She is not yet ready to throw aside her judgment, either, but the arguments in her head are cracking, crumbling. Her instincts are generally reliable, and they say this warrior is no Orlesian actress. What if the culprit died in the explosion, or escaped somehow? Will this all be for naught? “And your husband?” she asks.

The prisoner stops in her tracks, staring at Cassandra. “No. He—” She shuts her mouth with a click of her teeth. “No.”

“Hmph.” She’d come back to that later. “Regardless, we must stop this Breach before it takes over the entire sky. Every hour, it grows. We have a theory, but we must test it on one of the smaller rifts, first.” She tugs her forward again, but the prisoner seems to rally to the goal and lengthens her strides, not only keeping up with Cassandra but almost out-pacing her. Maker, but she is tall.

“I understand.” A chill wind blows from the mountains, whipping her long blond hair out behind her. “If there is any way to find out what happened, who— who did this, I will help. Whatever it takes.”

“Good.” Cassandra can’t sense any deceit from her, and they may be attacked at any moment, so she cuts the prisoner’s bonds and prays.

~o~O~o~

Solas and Varric look expectant after introducing themselves to the prisoner, and that is when Cassandra realizes she still doesn’t know her name. One rift down, many more to go, and they’re already hustling up the valley again, making for the forward camp.

The woman has been examining at her left hand with a faint look of disgust, but she looks up after the pause has stretched on an uncomfortable while and says, short and sharp, “Irene.”

“Irene?” Varric repeats, fishing for a last name. Cassandra does not find it subtle at all, though surely the dwarf thinks so.

“Irene.”

Solas cocks his head. “That means ‘peace’ in one of the ancient Tevinter dialects, does it not? I do hope it proves prophecy.”

Irene scowls and walks faster, forcing Varric to break into a jog to keep pace. “It hasn’t so far.”

Cassandra is inclined to agree with her. The forward camp isn’t far, and the Breach not much more than that. The demons rain down faster the closer they get, but the prisoner — Irene — wields the greatsword she has picked up with deadly efficiency, and doesn’t seem to tire. She is feeding off her own rage and single-minded focus, that much is obvious. Cassandra wonders how long it will take before it runs out.

Irene climbs the treacherous mountain paths like she was born to it: a mountain goat in the form of a woman, or a spirit of Perseverance. Cassandra never thought she would regret her Seeker armor, but it weighs her down as she follows in Irene’s tracks through the snow. Solas appears unaffected by the cold trek — probably some magic, it wouldn’t surprise her in the least — but she and Varric are already straining by the time they reach the gate to the forward camp. Varric rather more vocally.

There’s another rift there, hovering before the gate, but it goes down quicker even than the first. The soldiers here are a great deal friendlier than the folk of Haven, saluting Cassandra and watching Irene with more hope than fear, though they, too, know who she is. A few of them may even have seen her emerge from the Fade, or helped carry her down the mountain. The marked woman stalks across the bridge, ignoring these stares as easily as she ignored the others.

Cassandra curls her lip when she sees who Leliana is arguing with. Roderick, who she has met once before in Haven. The toad. Irene seems to take an instant disliking of him, too, growling at him like a bear at every accusation. She is even more enraged by him than Cassandra herself, but to the Seeker’s relief she refrains from laying him flat with a punch to the face. No matter how much either woman wants to, it’s not the best course of action right now.

Irene doesn’t even entertain Leliana’s suggestion of taking the safer side route, but charges up the mountain. Varric has stopped his complaints, mostly focusing on his breathing.

And then they are there, what remains of the Temple just a few paces away. There’s yet another rift just before the drop-off to the crater, and Cassandra spots Commander Cullen among the few soldiers left battling the horde of demons. They charge in, and Irene closes her third rift with the same brutal efficiency with which she had slaughtered the terror demon that came from it.

She stalks past the Commander when he hails her. Cassandra shrugs at him. The closer they are, the more focused she is, and the Seeker is content to let her lead for the moment.

“Is that…?” Cullen asks, though he has already seen her, when she stumbled out of the Fade and in the dungeons of Haven’s Chantry before he moved up here to battle demons. Cassandra doesn’t blame him though. Awake, thrumming with furious energy, she seems like a completely different person.

“Irene. Wouldn’t give a last name. I’ll tell you more later, if there is a later.”

“We’ll buy you as much time as we can, Lady Cassandra,” he says, eying Irene’s back where she stands on the edge of the devastation. It’s just a short jump down to the scar in the earth where the Temple of Sacred Ashes once stood. Where the Divine, her Divine, was murdered.

Solas and Varric have come to flank Irene, also looking on the site up close for the first time, and the dwarf mutters something about ‘the big one’. He and Solas turn to look when Cassandra approaches, but the prisoner is frozen for once, hugging herself in the chill wind. She finally lets out a shuddering sigh, dropping her marked hand to her side and clenching it into a fist.

“Let’s go.”

~o~O~o~

“Someone, help me!”

“What are you doing? Stop!”

The voice that answers Divine Justinia’s echoing plea isn’t Irene’s. It isn’t anyone Cassandra knows — but it is someone Irene knows. She gasps, staggering back before surging forward again, sprinting for the railing and hurling herself over the edge, into the crater.

“Andraste’s golden knickers,” Varric says, looking for a safer way down. It winds around the outside, past enormous crystals the color of liquid blood that make the fine hairs on the back of Cassandra’s neck stand on end. Red lyrium, Varric supplies, and though she hears none of the infamous song as she inches around, just the presence of the madness-inducing substance still gives her the chills. The crater smells of lightning and burnt flesh, so strong it makes her dizzy.

By the time they catch up to Irene, she’s standing almost directly beneath the Breach, looking up at the faded image-echoes of the Divine, her captor — a mass of shadows with flames for eyes — and the man who stumbles in on the sacrifice. He’s soft-bodied and sweet-faced, a mage by his robes and the staff on his back, which he unhooks when he sees the bound Divine.

“We have an intruder, a traitor to his kind,” the shadow says, turning its fiery gaze to the mage.

“Colm, husband, where are you going—” Another voice, recognizable as Irene’s though it has a hint of laughter in it. She slides to a stop a pace behind the mage, and only then realizes what she has come upon.

“Kill them both. Now!” The shadows reach out, knocking the mage aside. He lands in a crumpled heap against the wall, staff broken in two.

A flash of that sickly green Fade-light, and the echo is gone.

Cassandra shields her eyes, mind working as to what it means even as she realizes Irene — the flesh-and-blood Irene who charged up here — has disappeared. She looks around frantically and spots her, kneeling over a charred skeleton with a broken staff — oh. Irene is wailing, hands in her hair, tearing out what little remains of her braid that survived the journey up here and leaving blonde strands scattered on the ashen ground.

Solas hangs back, looking sympathetic but uncomfortable, but Varric is striding forward before Cassandra can, crouching beside Irene and saying gently, “Stormy?”

It takes a beat for Cassandra to realize it’s one of the dwarf’s nicknames, and a strangely appropriate one, if not quite right to say out loud now. But Irene doesn’t know about his habit yet, and it shocks her just enough for her to turn to him. He barrels forward. “I wish we had the time, I really do. But we need your help to get this thing gone. In fact, you’re the only one who can do it. Will you help us? I promise I will keep the Seeker and everyone else from bothering you, after.” He throws a pointed look at her over his shoulder.

Irene glances back too, nods sharply even as the tears dry on her face. It is a strange thing, this turn she takes. But Cassandra thinks she understands. Rage is more familiar, more welcome, than confusion or grief. Here is an emotion Irene can channel into action.

And she does. She rises sharply, thrusts her hand up and the closed rift screeches as it is ripped back open.

The massive pride demon that emerges doesn’t faze her, nor do the multiple shades that come with it. Irene whirls through the battlefield, greatsword arcing deadly and radiant to cut shades in half and slash the pride demon’s scaled legs. Ichor splatters across the field. It laughs, lightning whip snapping at the scouts on the rim of the crater. Cassandra grits her teeth and hacks at the demon’s ankles, gaining its attention but not injuring it in the least.

Solas is the one who figures out how to weaken it, yelling at Irene over the demon’s booming laughter to use her mark to disrupt the rift. She is interrupted several times, but Cassandra manages to distract it long enough for Irene to channel the strange magic and destroy the demon’s guard. Irene’s swings bite deep, then.

The fight is long, and bloody, and Cassandra’s shield is badly dented by the end of it, but at last Leliana is the one to bring it down, shooting an arrow from across the ruins straight into one of its eyes. It wobbles, collapses, shaking the earth and nearly crushing a scout, who leaps back just in time.

Immediately Irene is whirling to close the rift, greatsword slipping from her hands. The shockwave staggers them all, but it affects Irene the most: she is flung back, landing hard and skidding along the ground, stopping by Solas’ feet with a groan.

He kneels to check her vitals, long fingers skimming over her pulse point and her temples. “She’s unconscious. That took a lot of energy from her,” he says to no one in particular.

Cassandra nods and looks up at the Breach. It has stopped growing and spitting out demons, but the tear remains, a long open wound oozing Fade magic. She wonders how many rifts came from it while it was active, and shakes her head. “Take her back down to Haven. We’ll need more power to get this thing out of the sky for good.”

Power. Rebel mages or templars. Each might work, but neither would speak to them yet. She is getting ahead of herself again, and unlike Leliana’s machinations, she’s no good at it.

Mother Earth’s Warrior

Interview: Aurora for The Line of Best Fit by Cheri Amour (September 28th, 2018)

Norway’s greatest pop export, AURORA speaks to Cheri Amour about her not-so-difficult second album and why it opens up a forest of thought for our future preservation.

There have long been popular culture characters in our midst hell-bent on saving the planet. Healing the world and making it a better place, for you and me and the entire human race. But there’s something different about AURORA Aksnes, better known as million-streamed Norwegian singer/songwriter, AURORA. Her latest release, Infections of A Different Kind, puts Mother Earth at its heart.

It feels fitting then to be sat in one of London’s luscious parks together, AURORA decked out in green amongst the evergreen sipping on her coconut water. She is slight but by no means shy and constantly alert, throwing out relatable anecdotes that seem to be skipping through her mind as she scans her surroundings. Her eyes are shining bright, often looking outwards rather than directly at me. Instead, she is constantly seeking out the sky, the clouds, darting at the path of a pigeon, beaming at a small child opposite us on another table. At one point, she becomes distracted by my stationary choices (“I have the same pen but in green”) and is immediately back in the bustling streets of gay Paris where she made the purchase, with her underlying care and compassion for all things, living or otherwise. “I should’ve brought mine and they’ve could’ve spoken”.

It’s been over two years since the singer sprang onto our stereos like a forest-spirit from the Bergen mountains with her debut EP, Running With Wolves. But whilst her musical mission might be led by a bold vision for a brighter future, her present still looks pretty rosy with debut full-length, All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend racking up a massive 200 million streams globally. It’s an almost magical might for an artist who only celebrated her 22nd birthday this year. But on speaking with AURORA, her emotional intelligence is undeniable. “I know the world is not a fairy tale and we’re just doing our best…” she happily admits, an astute admission for someone so renowned for her enchanting pop gems.

For the Bergen-based artist though, her strength clearly comes from the collective power of change rather than the sole-creator. She often refers more holistically to an issue than nitpicking specifics. Indeed, it’s this rallying sense of collective change that has gifted AURORA such a solid fan base of “warriors and weirdos” from the depths of South America to the smaller towns and cities of Australia. “It’s so important to fight for the things you care about”, she continues. “They have proven they can do that. They share my message. They stand up for me. If one person disagrees with what I do, they go to war”.

It reminds me of another story of a similarly impassioned figure wanting to make collective change in their world. Often admired as the crowning work of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke powerfully paints the struggle between the gods of a forest and the humans who consume its resources. And, it seems unbeknownst to Ghibli at the time, over 20 years on from its original release, that same spirit hasn’t been lost in Infections of A Different Kind.

Her relationship with nature is woven throughout, a sort of Hansel and Gretel style breadcrumb trail through her mind’s eye of the world around us. Much like Ghibli’s tale which finds the main protagonist locked in a struggle for the future of the unspoiled forest and an elaborate moral universe, the sophomore record is rooted in Mother Earth. “We are killing incredible beauty without even knowing that we’ve already killed so much”, she reflects, her fingers playing with a small burgundy, woven scarf. It looks homemade, thin and narrow, entwined around her small hands. “We’ve killed entire species of animals. We’ve killed possibilities of making medicine. We’ve killed people”, she pauses, clearly upset by the thoughts. “It makes me sad because I know the planet will live. She will outlive us all and we will die because we’re just tiny ants on her big skin”.

But despite her worry, life and death feel like a natural cycle for AURORA, as you might expect from someone so clued up on the climate. She speaks confidently about nature’s balance, preferring the pragmatic output of an organism rather than anything overly fussy which could also be true of the sounds she makes. “I don’t really like flowers that much. They’re too pretty for their own good. People pick them and they get to die inside a vase”. If she were a flower, AURORA would be a dried white rose, perfectly encapsulated within a moment of time; pure, classic and radiating humility. Meanwhile, lavender for its medicinal properties and affection to bees gets a glowing write up. “That’s my favourite thing about Mother Earth actually”, she explains. “All the knowledge and all that she provides us; the fruit, the medicine. That’s why we need the rainforest but we tear it down”.

Only recently have we seen the devastating effects of illegal logging in the Papua New Guinea forests which provide a home for many of its unique species. Most timbers from New Guinea and its offshore islands are processed in China before being sold around the world, largely for use in furniture and flooring. Likewise, in the Amazon around 17% of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching. Sadly it’s the global brand giants causing most of the destruction with Greenpeace releasing a recent report that identified major palm olive producers such as Unilever, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive, and Mondelez, have destroyed an area of rainforest almost twice the size of Singapore in less than three years. The problem is, much like the Native American saying, what will happen after the last tree has fallen and the rivers have been poisoned?

Live favourite, "The Seed" encapsulates this idea. Her vocal is moving, selflessly offering herself up to restore what humanity has destroyed: “Suffocate me / So my tears can be rain / I will water the ground where I stand / So the flowers can grow back again”. "The Seed" acts like the nucleus of change for AURORA. It’s the birth of something. It’s thought or an act or a movement. “It’s the beginning of everything”, she explains, enthused. “The way the seed lies underground with no sun, nothing, darkness but it knows where to go and then it breaks through the stone, the mountain, asphalt, and earth. All these things they came from down there”, she insists, pointing at a nearby flower bed at which point her gaze is caught by a fluttering pigeon on the roof. After a few seconds, she apologises: “The pigeons are so distracting”.

Conversation turns to her own beginnings, painting a picture of her home back in Norway which sounds like something straight out of a Lord of The Rings novel. A fjord carved out by glaciers in the ice ages with a little island in the middle of it that she would often take a small kayak out to and sleep overnight on in the summer when the sun rarely sets. “On one of them lives quite an angry goat so don’t go there. He’s like a proper…”, she gesticulates the animal’s horns with her hands by her ears. “He’s intense. All the other ones are fine”, she laughs. The open water feels like it is a bit of a theme to her early years, spending much of her childhood on sailboats of some varieties, not surprising for a country that has the kind of tight relationship with water that Brits have with tea. Whether it's coastline, fjord, lake or river, water is everywhere in Norway and Norwegians make the most of it. Her father sailed the seas for four years in a row before she was born, she tells me proudly.

The other towering backdrop to her youth were those sturdy mountains and an ambitious walking regime. The latter almost certainly a contributing factor to her ingenuity and appreciation of the rambling flora and fauna so prevalent in her songwriting today. “We’d go for mountain hikes at least four times a week”, she states, matter of factly. “You bring some chocolate with bread and cheese to eat at the top. It’s kind of what you do together with your Mum’s friend and her kid, you know?” Perhaps not the same as growing up in the flatlands of Norfolk, I admit. “Well, it’s very normal in Norway, especially Bergen because you have the mountains everywhere”, she continues. There’s a mountain in every city at least. In every village. And in my village, we only have eight neighbours, there’s only us living there. And I look at the water and I have the forest behind me. She openly sighs and takes a moment, transporting herself back to the shimmering open waters, stood with lungs full of the fresh mountain air.

Surrounded by such a magical setting, it’s not surprising that AURORA tries to create a kingdom of her own for listeners. The first hint at the new record, former single “Queendom” is dedicated to “everything that’s alive”. Insistent that “Queendom” should be a place “with only love”, the song is also a celebration of our differences with an open innocence that tries to find the best in all of us. Again, Ghibli’s own ethical ethos rings true here, with Princess Mononoke heralded as for its ability to make heroes of outsiders and blurring the stereotypes that usually define such characters. It’s the same for AURORA. She is an artist breaking down huge barriers around inclusivity which shine through “Queendom”’s electro-pulse and call-to-arms. “It’s very much about giving hope, like being given the tools to become a warrior, a fighter to deal with the now. Not an escape but a way to really stay in the present, and make a change”.

Directed by Paris-based, Polish-Australian Director King Burza, the single’s video finds Aurora bathed in natural light exploring the cavernous surrounds of an old country home, the dappled light falling on her through the beaten window frames. She leaps through the high-ceiling hallways in flowing white cotton, much like the lyrics suggest, as our lamb. The pulsing chorus beat kicks in with a procession of women dancers weaving behind her arms like the Shiva herself, the fierce warrior Goddess. With Scandinavia often heralded for its gender parity, it’s not surprising that a huge part of “Queendom”’s rallying cry is being channeled into some sort of feminist anthem but as AURORA herself says: “it’s much more than that. I want it to be a song for people in need”.

“I began writing for Infections of A Different Kind the day after my first album was released...it’s good when it’s fresh when you’re still like a predator. You can still smell the blood from the prey."

With its timely post-#metoo-era release, it’s not surprising that there’s a strong focus on the strength of women in here though as well as flipping assumed gender norms and empowering an army, as she sings: “The women will be my soldiers / With the weight of life on their shoulders”. It’s an element of Nordic folklore that really spoke to her warrior instincts. “I like that it was often the women that hunted. When the men went out on a journey to kill and steal, the women stayed and were the boss which is kind of cool”. Similarly, she sees herself played back to her in scrappy forest-dwelling nymphs, the Huldra. “They had messy hair like I had when I was a child”, she jokes.

Propelled by our comparisons, talk turns into a bit of an education in Norwegian children’s tales as she boasts that many of them centre around a troll. Whether that’s a troll turning to stone in the sun before it eats the children or the story of a young boy from the village who challenges the troll to a porridge-eating contest. Tactfully tying his knapsack to his belly, the boy scoops more porridge into the bag than he eats himself and then, once full, slashes it open encouraging the troll to do the same so they can power through the porridge. Fooled by the boy, the troll cuts his stomach and dies leaving all of the gold and silver in the cave for the boy to take home to pay off his family debts. “Then you have the troll mother who has put her eleven troll children to bed. That’s the first song I sang when I was two years old in my Mum’s blue kitchen”, she recalls. A newborn with pink cheeks begins to whimper to its Mum on the table next to us now which lures the singer’s attention away for a fleeting moment, her mouth fixed in a wide-open smile. “Sorry, babies and pigeons. Very distracting”, she reasons.

After the brief introduction to Norwegian folklore, it feels apt to ask around the production of the new record which took place in a fairytale studio-cum-chateau somewhere in the South of France. Positioned in a vineyard surrounded by animals and a pond, the castle sounds like the right kind of pastoral setting for such a life-affirming record. AURORA details an almost Beauty And The Beast-like existence there, holed up in the huge house’s halls and libraries for just over a month. Chef Marie cooked a three-course meal, three times a day whilst the dog Paula and cat, Ginger amble through the corridors.

It becomes clear quite quickly that AURORA hasn’t faced the difficult second album syndrome. “I began writing for it the day after my first album was released because then the first album had been done already for four months”, she beams. “That’s why I always begin right after I release right after my previous thing. I begin on the next”. A natural hunter, she adds: “It’s good when it’s fresh when you’re still like a predator. You can still smell the blood from the prey. And you’re kind of just running after it and you know where to go, that’s how I felt”.

It was a fairly natural process then? “I found it way easier than the first because I really knew what I wanted. I’ve always known since I was an embryo what I want and now I have the tools to make it happen. I know how to produce, and how to play more instruments. I played the drums and the rhythms. The multi-instrumentalist played drums on all of the songs on Infections of A Different Kind, actually, it’s kind of a new passion for her. “I love it. It’s very energetic and you get quite tired afterward which I love. I love the feeling of exhausting myself”, she grins.

"I have my own dream language which half of the population understands...a fourth...an eleventh so I also had to learn things myself because I am the only one who can know."

Adding to her workload, AURORA took up a lot of the production duties on the record too which makes a powerful statement in a world for far too many women artists are corralled into working with male producers. She’s not afraid to tackle this in her own terms, often struggling to articulate what she wanted using the technical language, the singer offers up her own alternative parallels: “Make it sound like water or bellyache”. “I realised I don’t have the technical language. I have my own dream language which half of the population understands...a fourth...an eleventh so I also had to learn things myself because I am the only one who can know”. She’s adamant that crafting her music, much like her new love of drums, is one of her biggest pleasures. The ability to realise her imagined worlds into reality gives her a certain sense of belonging which, in the future, might remain a constant more so than the live show. “If there’s one thing I’ll do less of, you know in forty years, it’s touring. But not studio, I’ll always be there”, she adds resolutely.

But despite her preference, she knows the power of sharing her songs with her legion of fans and she confesses many of the new numbers have already made it into the live set. “I think at one point it was maybe a bit too many. I like all my songs better live just because of the energy so it’s always nice to know that the fans will get to experience that first”. And that’s exactly what AURORA has tried to do with the release schedule of the record, teasing one more single out last week ahead of today’s full-length. The stark opener of “Churchyard” finds AURORA’s sincere vocal layered over one another and doused in reverb as a solemn strings section soothes in with a morbid twang as she questions the fine balance between life and love. You can almost see the arms flailing theatrics of similarly environmental leaning, Kate Bush against the beat.

Indeed, AURORA isn’t the first artist looking to heal the world with their humanitarian ideals. Pop’s biggest ally, Cher donated more than 180,000 bottles of water to Flint, Michigan, in the middle of the city's clean-water crisis. Grammy Award-winning, Rihanna was named Harvard Humanitarian of the Year back in 2017 for her philanthropic efforts after funding the build of a state-of-the-art centre for oncology and nuclear medicine to diagnose and treat breast cancer in her home nation of Barbados. Infections of A Different Kind stands united with Mother Earth almost as a vocal shining a floodlight on the dire situation we’ve left her in.

At this point, playing with the tousled strands of her hair, AURORA is whisked off for another meeting and disappears into the trees of Holland Park, much like the Huldra into the Norwegian forest. Just from spending an hour with her, it’s clear how much the Norwegian songwriter cherishes real connections with the people she meets and is keen to create a shared space where we can all co-exist together; new technologies alongside sustainable ecosystems. Without national treasure, David Attenborough preaching about the plastics in our oceans, it’s sometimes easy for us to cut out the stark realities of climate change. But high up in those Norwegian mountains, with her ear to the wind, AURORA hears it all and is ready to lead.

Forget Princess Mononoke, AURORA is our modern day pop royalty.

Infections of A Different Kind is out now on Decca Records.

Blunt Repetition in The Mountain Goats

This happens a lot, doesn’t it?

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway

Is that it's you and that you are standing in the doorway

-Going to Georgia

 This seems like a good place to start with it, because it’s the most direct part of a direct song, and it’s early on in the career. The actual effect is in a sense obvious: it’s a doubling down on a thought to give a quick psychological insight which propels the focus and intensity of the speaker, the kind of “I don’t care about anything but this right now”. Out of all of JD’s narrators it seems the “Going to Georgia” type does this the most, the extremely intent, slightly psychotic, deliriously happy guy who has reached the end of a kind of pilgrimage, and is a touch self-destructive.

A funny thing is that this trope, which I don’t have time to document every single instance of, starts to appear a lot more in his later work, and happens a lot on Transcendental Youth. Here are all the instances I obviously see on that album:

 I hide down in my corner because I like my corner

Every dream’s a good dream, even awful dreams are good

Nothing in the shadows but the shadow hands

And you can't tell me what my spirit tells me isn't true

I don’t have to be afraid, I don’t wanna be afraid

 I once wrote an essay on what repetition means for poetry and here are some ideas that arose in that essay:

1. When you repeat something you can’t miss the fact that you’ve repeated it, but you can miss the fact of a connection between the old word and the new word if you chose a new one

2. The first use of a word threatens the repetition of the word because the second time it is used it has to justify itself in a way it didn’t have to before

3. When we repeat, the space inbetween the repetitions can often imply a liminal space during which something changed

4. Most obviously, obsession with repetition betrays a desire to live in the past or to recall the sweetest first glimpse of a strong emotion

 Safe to say when I say “obviously see” I mean that compulsive behaviour performs the same effect in the speaker from our point of view, the reduction of life from a complication which is too awful to bear (illegality, drug addiction, total torment) into a series of actions which you can handle:

“Dig through the trash, sleep on the grates, and watch for the cars with the counterfeit Florida plates”

Or the directness of

“I am just a broken machine and I do things that I don’t really mean”

And this happens also in You or Your Memory where the hook acts to refocus the speaker by honing in on his eyes in the mirror, and on a few objects which, by having names that don’t immediately imply their properties as drugs, highlight their own existences as things to be focused on:

And when I came back I spread out my supplies

On the counter by the sink

I looked myself right in the eyes

St. Joseph’s baby aspirin

Bartles and Jaymes

And you or your memory

I don’t know the exact grammatical term for what happens in Counterfeit Florida Plates and a lot of other TMG songs- it’s not parataxis, I don’t think- but it’s that proposal of a sentence which floats as if to indicate that the noun is a definite article:

Steal some sunscreen / From the CVS

Like it might be “THE sunscreen”, that sunscreen is an essential activity which is part of a day that is composed of schizophrenic activities and survival, or when establishing “Wear Black”:

Rain everyday

Fog all night

Wind in the evergreen cypresses

(these lines may also be gothic fantasies, but I also could have picked surrounded, “Pale white moon, quaking aspens etc.)

That is, these things are turned into essential categories as a way to cope. To return that to Transcendental Youth it helps us reaffirm the obvious, which is that this is a survival technique. You refocus down onto one thing, and in a song this is greatly effective because the listener naturally expects a varying ending, but doesn’t get one. It’s kind of motivating and powerful. I don’t really need to explain the effect, you know what I mean and how it feels. That type of repetition sits explicitly at the centre of two songs on the album:

Stay alive, just stay alive

If this article has any point apart from pointing out a nice trope, it’s to touch on a much larger subject which deserves a separate study, which is this:

Poets can’t write lyrics

Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen are actually good examples of this, and it obviously doesn’t mean that their music is bad, but it becomes quite clear that both writers cross into spoken word because they prioritise words over how they fit into songs.

Deciding whether Bob Dylan deserved a literature prize (he didn’t) was so difficult because he was very, very good at balancing directness and poetry. Obviously I love JD but it would be a lot easier for judges, who clearly don’t think about this sort of thing enough, to disqualify him from literature prizes because his lyrical power is so often (but not always) dependent on being direct, as a lot of songs are. He’s more of a lyricist than a poet, and his prose writing shows great similarity with his lyrics. 

If you disagree with my general gist, then try writing out a song which you think is very poetical as just the lyrics, and then comparing it to a good poem. You’ll almost definitely find that the song has a storytelling quality, not just because songs are so typically stories, but because connective language and concrete direction of the song (songs are always the same length and speed) will always tend us towards storytelling, rather than poetic ambiguity. This is NOT intended as a judgement on quality, as literature JD’s lyrics are a lot better than a lot of poems I know (see a much earlier article of mine on why calling something “poetry” shouldn’t be a value judgement), it’s just a comment on how different writers approach literature.

Now I KNOW that this is hugely simplified- good poems aren’t always ambiguous, some very good songs are abstract, and directness vs abstraction is a bad dichotomy to look at anything by- but I think my point, which would need a book-length study to explain in full, is essentially clear.

Love,

Alex

My Top 20 Albums of 2017, Part 1: 20-11

Alright, let’s do it. 20 albums that I liked more than the rest of this year’s albums. Some are easy to stand behind because they’re just genuinely and technically great, but there are a few albums that just resonated with me a lot - seemingly in ways that didn’t with others? But, whatever, it’s my list and I’ll forget about all of these albums a few weeks into 2018 when I’m just listening to If You’re Feeling Sinister ten times a day.

20. Black Mass - World Eater:  In what will likely be a recurring theme as I talk about albums that were important to me this year, it was hard not to weigh any art (music or otherwise) against the flaming circus-tent of a year it's been for anyone who wasn’t an old white male billionaire. And while I didn’t always seek out music that seemed to directly react to the state of the world, some albums just seemed to fill that role naturally. In any other year, I probably would’ve embraced World Eater’s dark and noisy aesthetic as a good counterpoint to all the lighter power pop I consumed, but this year, World Eater felt more like necessary noise in drowning out the barrage of darkness in our newsfeeds. For an album without any actual intelligible words or lyrics, it's hard to say just how much of a reaction World Eater is to 2017, but it still managed to fill that role perfectly.

19.  Dirty Projectors - Dirty Projectors: It’s like listening to your best friend talk about his recent breakup. And you love your best friend, and he tells a really good story. And in the moment you’re thinking “Man, that sounds like it was really hard.” But later on, after he left your house and your mulling it over, you think: “She might have been too good for him.” Look, I don’t know what happened between Amber and Dave, and I’m not supposed to know either - that’s their business.  But they made some of my favorite albums together, and this album - the first without Amber - simultaneously feels both incomplete and like an evolution in the sound of Dirty Projectors. The last thing I wanted was to feel like I was between two of my friends as they broke up, but at least the fallout sounded beautiful.

18.  Los Campesinos - Sick Scenes: What year did Hold On Now, Youngster… come out? Oh, 2008. Wow, seems surreal it's been almost 10 years, and like, 4...5...6 EPs and LPs since then? I gotta admit, I fell off the wagon for a while. It wasn’t you, Los Campesinos, it was me. But, man, am I glad that I checked back in this year. I dunno what happened. Maybe you were fucking killing it the whole time and I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe I just happened to check back when you made exactly the album I was hoping I’d get a few years/LPs ago. Still twee. Still snarky. Still angsty. It’s the bitter version of Belle & Sebastian we needed right about now.

17. Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent: There’s a lot of archaic sounding rock music anymore, right? I still like it, but to stand out in 2017, a good rock album needs to have something special to say. This album, and the band’s Joe Casey, has a lot to say. It’s hard to describe the band’s sound, and I mean that in the best way possible. The Fall’s chatty lyrics and punk sound is a good starting point, maybe a dash of Titus Andronicus (or maybe I just listened to TA a lot this year, and they were always on my mind when I listened to Protomartyr?). This year’s album by Priests actually felt akin to this album, and vice versa (and we’ll talk about that album more later…). But this album felt wholly original, political, socially aware and personal in a year where all of those things mattered more than usual, and we were all better for it.

16. Ariel Pink - Dedicated to Bobby Jameson: More than ten years after having discovered Ariel Pink, I still feel like there’s no artist or band that sounds like him. His honest-to-goodness songwriting knowhow always seems at odds with his continued embrace of absurdism. Whereas his older material always reminded me of listening to someone’s AM radio through the wall (at midnight,after you had a few drinks), his newer material is more like finally being invited into your neighbor’s apartment, only to find out that the music is coming out of the sink. There’s almost a sense of maturation on this album for Pink, but only in that he seems more comfortable than ever in exploring the niche that he’s made for himself and remains alone in.

15. Everything Everything - A Fever Dream: You know those bands, or albums, that you think you know everything about before you listen to them? That. For the last three albums, I kind of wrote off Everything Everything based on nothing more than a bad hunch. “I think they’re from the UK? They probably have a guy on the synths. I bet NME likes them. Nothing to see here, folks.” I was wrong (and why would any of those things have mattered?). I’m always wrong when I do this (sometime I’ll tell you about the years I was really wrong about The Mountain Goats). This band, and this album in particular, feels so much refined and on point than I ever would’ve imagined. The strength of “Night of the Long Knives” alone, and it being the first track, was like a slap to the face. Who else was I wrong about?

14. Grandaddy - Last Place: I told them not to do it. They probably couldn’t hear me, and I doubt they would’ve listened had they heard me, but I fucking told Grandaddy: “Don’t come back. You’re music is of a time and place, and this isn’t the same world. Nobody’s going to get your slacksadaiscal lo-fi indie-pop. Please, think of me: You’re fan who loves you and who used your music to get through some dark days.” But they went and did it. They came back. And they made an album. And that album sounds exactly like what I would’ve expected from a Grandaddy album 10 years ago. And you know what? They fucking killed it. Welcome back, Grandaddy.

13. Gorillaz - Humanz: Now here’s a doozy. What do you say about an album that, while inherently flawed and less than perfect, is still a blast to listen to? Look, I know, this doesn’t sound much like a Gorillaz album. Even as a mixtape, it's kind of uneven. But, you know, according to Last.FM, this is the album I listened to most this year, and I believe it. A flawed package can’t distract from just how enjoyable most of these songs are. There has never been a time when I’ve heard one of these songs in a playlist or when my library is on random, and I wasn’t excited to hear it. Maybe it lacks the vision and cohesion of every Gorillaz album that came before it, but maybe that's its biggest strength too.

12. New Pornographers - Whiteout Conditions: I know. I knooow. This isn’t the best New Pornographers album, and it probably wasn’t, technically, one of the best albums of the year. AND Dan Bejar isn’t even on this album! Yeah...but I still love this album. Coming off their last album, Brill Bruisers (an album that I firmly believe is one of their best), there is still a thrilling amount of energy left in a band that is pushing almost 20 years together. And, like BB, there’s a continued sense of cohesion here. This sounds less like a bunch of good songs collected on an album, and more like the end result of old friends getting together in a specific mindset and mood. Its an effortlessly charming and smooth power pop album that still sounds manages to demand attention, despite the shadow of their more acclaimed classic albums.

11. Spoon - Hot Thoughts: I dunno, should I just copy and paste the write-up I did for the New Pornographers? I could switch out Brill Bruisers with They Want My Soul, and it’d still be accurate. I could point out that they’re still putting out amazing work this late into their epic career. Maybe the difference here is that while New Pornographers continue to hone and perfect the same sound they’ve always had, Spoon always seems to be stretching itself out a little bit.  Never too far from their core sound, but enough to give each album its own feel. This time out, Spoon leans on some new electronic elements that seem to fit in with their sound perfectly. Britt Daniels continues to seem incapable of writing a bad song, and there are just so many good songs this time around. Like, I predict that I’ll still have “Do I Have To Talk You Into It” in my head when Spoon releases their next album.

#97 For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver

    I’m glad that my brother was such a big fan of the book “The Giver” by Lois Lowry when we were young, because that lead to him buying another book by her named “Gossamer” and because of that I now have the word gossamer in my vocabulary and it is the perfect word to encapsulate Bon Iver’s debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Before he going out and defining the Kanye West song “Monster”, Justin Vernon went to his dads cabin in Wisconsin and recorded an album that is the musical manifestation of the word gossamer. It’s wispy and ethereal and even when it tries to start pumping there’s something subdued about the sounds (see Creature Fear).

    On previous reviews, such as Brand New’s Deja Entendu,I really celebrate the albums diversity in sound as a real selling point over other albums in the bands discography. For Emma is not an album that is particularly diverse in sound (not that I’ve listened to any other Bon Iver albums to where I could exclude this off the list for another. One of my only talents is the ability to really deeply love an artist’s album and manage to totally ignore/never get around to listening to the rest of their discography, most of which I would enjoy (I listened to the National for four years before bothering to listen to High Violet, an album that makes it onto this list!)). For the most part, For Emma’s sound consists of a solid, diligent guitar, Vernon’s falsetto, and an air about the song that creates a misty, dew like atmosphere. That “air” could be anything from the angelic vocals on the song Lump Sum to the way Vernon’s vocals drag and cascade at the end of Blindsided. One of the albums other defining traits is its modern production. It skews the rustic sound of guitar and wailing vocals to create an off-folk sound. The sound isn’t the primal and hollow yelps of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea; it’s dreamier, less tethered to reality. The only major diversions from the established mood are tracks six and seven, Creature Fear and Team, and as much as I enjoy diversity, these tracks end up being among my least favorite on the album. Since Team is essentially an extension of Creature Fear, so to see why I dislike the two I only have to examine at the former. The beginning of Creature Fear feels slow and plodding, almost stuck in mud, whereas the slowness on the song The Wolves (Act I and II) that appears two songs prior feels intentional and suspenseful. The jump in Creature Fear is more than welcome when it does kick in, as I’ve stated it’s one of the only high energy moments in the album, but the way that the energy dies off and the song goes back to the transient and winding verse makes the chorus feel short-lived and unsatisfying (which I am far too familiar with as is HEYO (I’m sure there’s another penis joke in here with the phrase “Creature Fear” but I’m too weak of a man to be the one to make it I think the bad at sex is as far as I go with this one.)). Contrast that fall off of energy to the vibe of For Emma, the album’s sole up tempo, pick yourself up by your bootstraps sounding song. It’s consistent strumming has a sense of comfort and solidness that I wish were there to give the choruses more body. However, all of this is just personal preference.

    Speaking on preference, I would be remiss if I failed to mention one of the highlights of the album and that would be the song Skinny Love. I had heard the song covered two or three times before discovering the original and best version. As much as the latent hipster in me (he’s chained up and handcuffed to a table in a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, picture the house Courage the cowardly dog lived in but a local coffee shop. He wears fake glasses and beanies with the bill on them and smiles every time I introduce the Mountain Goats as my favorite band to which someone replies “oh I’ve never heard of them” and I hate him so much) enjoys loving songs that aren’t the most popular song on any particular album (see Humble Mumble), I found myself coming back to this album time and time again mostly because I was excited to hear Skinny Love. Similar to how I started listening to Bright Eye’s I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning to hear First Day of My Life and Band of Horses Cease to Begin to listen to No One’s Gonna Love You. It’s in the album’s favor that The Wolves, which happens to be one of my favorite songs on the album, comes immediately after Skinny Love, creating a one-two punch that knocks me into experiencing the album to completion (HEYO2), which is fortunate because the closer, Re:Stacks is one of the better closers on this list. It’s a fitting end for an album that sits like mist, right above your head and deep in your lungs, and any fans of indie-folk who haven’t heard it are have missed one of the true gems of the genre.

It is never too late to be what you might have been ̴ George Eliot Reasons for and against giving up the glitzy, glamorous world of flying: Pros: 1. No more cleaning up other people’s sick. 2. No more 2 a.m. wake-up calls, jet lag, swollen feet/ stomach or shrivelled-up skin. 3. No more tedious questions like, ‘What’s that lake/ mountain down there?’ and ‘Does the mile high club really exist?’ 4. No more serving kippers and poached eggs at 4 a.m. to passengers with dog-breath and smelly socks. 5. No more risk of dying from deep vein thrombosis, malaria or yellow fever. 6. No more battles with passengers who insist that their flat-pack gazebo will fit into the overhead locker. 7. No more wearing a permanent smile and a name badge. 8. No danger of bumping into ex-boyfriend and his latest ‘I’m-Debbie-come-fly-me’. Cons: 1. No more fake Prada, Louis Vuitton or Gucci. 2. No more lazing by the pool in winter. 3. No more ten-hour retail therapy sessions in shopping malls the size of a small island — and getting paid for it. 4. No more posh hotel freebies (toiletries, slippers, fluffy bathrobes etc.). 5. Holidays (if any) now to be taken in Costa del Cheapo, as opposed to Barbados or Bora Bora. 6. No more horse riding around the pyramids, imagining I’m a desert queen. 7. No more ice skating in Central Park, imagining I’m Ali MacGraw in Love Story. 8. Having to swap my riverside apartment for a shoebox, and my Mazda convertible for a pushbike. ‘Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing. Ten minutes, please,’ comes the captain’s olive-oil-smooth voice over the intercom. This is it. No going back. I’m past the point of no return. The galley curtain swishes open — it’s showtime! I switch on my full-beam smile and enter upstage left, pushing my trolley for the very last time ... ‘Anyheadsetsanyrubbishlandingcard? Anyheadsetsanyrubbishlandingcard? ...’ Have I taken leave of my senses? The notion of an actress living in a garret, sacrificing everything for the sake of her art, seemed so romantic when I gaily handed in my notice three months ago, but now I’m not so sure … Be positive! Just think, a couple of years from now, you could be sipping coffee with Phil and Holly on the This Morning sofa … Yes, Phil, the rumours are true … I have been asked to appear on Strictly Come Dancing. God only knows how I’ll fit it around my filming commitments though. Who are you kidding? A couple of years from now, the only place you’ll be appearing is the job centre, playing Woman On Income Support. This follow-your-dreams stuff is all very well when you’re in your twenties, or thirties even, but I’m a forty-year-old woman with no rich husband (or any husband for that matter) to bail me out if it all goes pear-shaped. Just as everyone around me is having a loft extension or a late baby, I’m downsizing my whole lifestyle to enter a profession that boasts a ninety-two percent unemployment rate. Why in God’s name, in this wobbly economic climate, am I putting myself through all this angst and upheaval, when I could be pushing my trolley until I’m sixty, then retire comfortably on an ample pension and one free flight a year? Something happened, out of the blue, that catapulted me from my ordered, happy-go-lucky existence and forced me down a different road … ‘It’s not your fault. It’s me. I’m confused,’ Nigel had said. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, almost choking on my Marmite soldier. ‘What’s brought this on? Have you met someone else?’ ‘No-ho!’ he spluttered, averting my gaze, handsome face flushed. ‘But you always said we were so perfect together …’ ‘That’s exactly why we have to split. It’s too bloody perfect.’ ‘What? Don’t talk nonsense …’ ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but it’s like I’ve pushed a self-destruct button and there’s no going back.’ ‘Self-destruct button? What are you talking about? Darling, you’re not well. Perhaps you should get some help …’ ‘Look, don’t make this harder for me than it already is. It’s time for us both to move on. And please don’t cry, Em,’ he groaned, eyes looking heavenward. ‘You know how I hate it when you cry.’ I grovelled, begged him not to go, vowing I’d find myself a nine-to-five job so we could have more together time, swearing that I would never again talk during Match of the Day — anything as long as he stayed with me. Firmly removing my hands from around his neck and straightening his epaulettes, he glanced at his watch, swigged the dregs of his espresso, and said blankly, ‘Good Lord, is that the time? I’ve got to check in in an hour. We’ll talk more when I get back from LA.’ ‘NO!’ I wailed. ‘You know very well that I’ll be in Jeddah by then. We’ve got to talk about this now. Nigel … Nigel …!’ For three days I sat huddled on the sofa in semi-darkness, clutching the Minnie Mouse he’d bought me on our first trip to Disneyland, as if she were a life raft. I played Gabrielle’s ‘You Used to Love Me’ over and over. I wondered if Gabrielle’s boyfriend had dumped her without warning, leaving her heartbroken and bewildered, and the pain of it all had inspired her. If only I had a talent for song writing, but I don’t, so I channelled my pain into demolishing a family-sized tin of Celebrations chocolates instead. Cue Wendy, my best friend, my angel on earth. We formed an instant friendship on our cabin crew training course. This was cemented when she saved me from drowning during a ditching drill. (I’d stupidly lied on the application form, assuming that it didn’t really matter if I couldn’t swim, because if I were ever unfortunate enough to crash-land in the sea, there would surely be enough lifejackets to go round.) ‘Look, hon, this has got to stop,’ she said in an uncharacteristically stern tone, a look of frustration on her porcelain, freckled face. (As a redhead, Wendy has been religiously applying sunscreen since she first set foot on Middle Eastern soil as a junior hostess twenty years ago; whereas I would roast myself like a pig on a spit in my quest to look like a Californian beach babe.) ‘Okay, so it’s not a crime to scrub the toilet with his toothbrush, but who knows where that could lead? You’ve got to stop playing the victim before we have a Fatal-Attraction scenario on our hands.’ ‘Eight years, eight years of my life spent waiting for him to pop the question, and now he’s moving out to “find himself”. I think I’m entitled to be a little upset, Wendy.’ Prising Minnie out of my hands and hurling her against the wall, she straightened my shoulders and looked deep into my puffy eyes. ‘I promise you that, in time, you will see you’re better off without that moody, selfish, arrogant …’ ‘I know you never thought he was right for me, but there is another side to him,’ I said defensively. ‘He can be the most caring and sweet man in the world when he wants to — and I can’t bear the thought that we won’t grow old together,’ I sobbed, running my damp sleeve across my stinging cheeks. ‘Come on now; take off that bobbly old cardie. I’m running you a Molton Brown bath, and you’re going to wash your hair, put on your uniform and high heels, slap on some make-up and your best air hostess smile, d’you hear?’ she said, pulling back the curtains. ‘And while you’re in Jeddah, I want you to seriously think about where you go from here.’ ‘But I want to be home when Nigel …’ ‘You always said you didn’t want to be pushing a trolley in your forties, and how you wished you’d had a go at acting. Well, maybe this is a sign,’ she said gently, tucking a strand of greasy hair behind my ear. ‘It’s high time you did something for you. You’ve spent far too long fitting in with what Nigel wants.’ ‘It’s too late to be chasing dreams,’ I sniffed, shielding my eyes from the watery sunlight. ‘And anyway, I just want things to go back to how they were. Where did I go wrong, Wendy? I should have made more effort. After all, he’s a good-looking guy, and every time he goes to work there are gorgeous women half my age fluttering their eyelashes at him, falling at his feet. He can take his pick — and maybe he did,’ I whimpered, another torrent of tears splashing onto my saggy, grey jogging bottoms. ‘Get this down you.’ Wendy sighed, shoving a mug of steaming tea into my hands as she frogmarched me into the bathroom. ‘And don’t you dare call him!’ she yelled through the door. Perhaps she was right; she usually was. She may be a big kid at heart, but when the chips are down, Wendy is the one you’d want on your flight if you were struck by lightning or appendicitis at thirty-two thousand feet. For the last year or so, hadn’t I likened myself to an aeroplane in a holding pattern, waiting until I was clear to land? Waiting for Nigel to call, waiting for Nigel to come home, waiting for Nigel to propose, waiting until Nigel felt ready to start a family? Yes, deep down I knew she was right, but I was scared of being on my own. Did this make me a love addict? If so, could I be cured? Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ‘Hayyaa’ala-s-salah, hayya ’ala-l-falah …’ came the haunting call from the mosque across the square, summoning worshippers to evening prayer. It was almost time to meet up with the crew to mosey around the souk — again. Too hot to sunbathe, room service menu exhausted, library book finished, alcohol forbidden, and no decent telly (only heavily edited re-runs of The Good Life, where Tom goes to kiss Barbara, and next minute it cuts to Margo shooing a goat off her herbaceous border), the gold market had become the highlight of my day. Donning my abaya (a little black number that is a must-have for ladies in this part of the world), I scrutinised myself in the full-length mirror. No wonder Nigel was leaving me; far from looking like a mysterious, exotic, desert queen, full of eastern promise, it made me resemble a walking bin liner. I read the fire evacuation drill on the back of the door and checked my mobile for the umpteenth time, then cast my eyes downwards, studying my toes. I know, I thought, giving them a wee wiggle, I’ll paint my nails. It’s amazing what a coat of Blue Ice lacquer can do to make a girl feel a little more glamorous, and less like Ugly Betty’s granny. As I rummaged in my crew bag for my nail varnish, there, stuffed in between Hello! and Procedures To Be Followed in the Event of a Hijack, was an old copy of The Stage (with another DO NOT PHONE HIM!! Post-it note stuck to it). Idly flicking through the pages, my eyes lit up at the headline: DREAMS REALLY CAN COME TRUE. Former computer programmer, Kevin Wilcox, 40, went for broke when he gave up his 50k-a-year job to become a professional opera singer. ‘My advice to anyone contemplating giving up their job to follow their dream, is to go for it,’ said Kevin, taking a break from rehearsals of La Traviata at La Scala. That was my life-changing moment; an affirmation that there were other people out there — perfectly sane people, who were not in the first flush of youth either, but were taking a chance. That’s what I’d do. I’d become an actress, and Nigel would see my name in lights as he walked along Shaftesbury Avenue, or when he sat down to watch Holby City, there I’d be, shooting a doe-eyed look over a green surgical mask. ‘What a fool I was,’ he’d tell his friends ruefully, ‘to have ever let her go.’ Hah! But revenge wasn’t my only motive. Faux designer bags and expensive makeovers were no longer important to me. I wanted the things that money can’t buy: like self-fulfilment, like the buzz you get on opening night, stepping out on stage in front of a live audience. Appearing through the galley curtains, proclaiming that well-rehearsed line, ‘Would you like chicken or beef?’ just wouldn’t do any more. Inspired, I grabbed the telephone pad and pen from the bedside table, and started to scribble furiously. 1. Apply to RADA/CENTRAL any drama school that will have me. 2. Hand in notice. 3. Sign up with temping agencies and find part-time job. 4. Sell flat, shred Visa, store cards, cancel gym membership, and Vogue subscription (ouch!). From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Audition Dear Emily, Following your recent audition, we of The Academy Drama School are pleased to offer you a place on our one-year, full-time evening course. We look forward to meeting you again at the start of the autumn term, details of which are attached. Sincerely, Edward Tudor-Barnes Principal Whey hey! It was reckless, irresponsible and utterly mad, but I was tired of being sensible or doing things simply to please others. Ever since I’d played the undertaker in a school production of Oliver! I’d wanted to act. Okay, so I may be running twenty-five years late, but now nothing and no one was going to hold me back. * * *