PLEASE WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU KNOW TO BE TRUE
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about grief. It’s partly because of this song on the new Hayley Williams album but partly because it’s been a year of dealing with this one emotion. It feels like we’re exhausted carrying this around. We’ve lost loved ones, time, and the chance to travel and make choices that we’ll never get back. The more I reflect, the more I’m certain that the kind of psychic pain that comes from grief overwhelms us because what we’re attached to is ultimately surprising. Put another way, how we’re connected to things doesn’t register until its loss is confronted. We don’t miss the thing, necessarily. We feel pain because up until now the reasons for our attachment was obscured. Processing that dissonance is more than a little tricky. I want to believe that grief empowers us to move forward, like it’s our bodies telling us that it’s impossible to stay. Still, we say goodbye in different ways, at different speeds, and maybe we chat at the door for a little while longer while we chart out where to go from here.
Niki Yang - Fresh Potatoes
Camp Trash - Bobby
Slaughter Beach, Dog - Do You Understand (What Has Happened to You)
Washed Out - Paracosm
Perfume Genius - Queen
Trixie Mattel - Mama Don’t Make Me Put on The Dress Again
The Armed - All Futures
Apok - Mute All
Chelsea Wolfe - American Darkness
DJ Shadow & Little Dragon - Scale it Back
Joy in the mundane parts of life oscillates between meditative practice and Adventure Time revelation. Both are pretty spot on and such is the way of “Fresh Potatoes,” a quaint folk-tinged intro that finds BMO, an androgynous video game console, contemplating a quiet life of galactic agriculture. BMO gives me comfort though this unrestrained joy, the ability to take what the universe gives you and greet it with an enthusiasm unknown to humankind. And of course, this song has an all time couplet: “Terraforming martian soil / Put ‘em in a pot to boil…” More than anything, BMO represents the possibility of meeting everyday with the beginner’s mindset and all that comes along with it.
When people ask if Camp Trash is The Internet’s Most Mysterious Band, I respond by saying that might have been true at one point but it’s all over now because “Bobby” exists. This is a remarkable way for the group to lead off their debut EP Downtiming, settling into the kind of wide-eyed emo-meets-power pop that made The Get Up Kids, Oso Oso, and Blue Album era Weezer household names. The part that gets me is the chorus, the way the guitars do that incredible rev up that’s all at once chunky and huge while everything drops out. The vocals soar on “Bobby,” covering the awkward feeling of missing the people you used to know but being happy with the person you became. Like The Clash, pretty soon Camp Trash will be The Only Band That Matters.
This Slaughter Beach, Dog song makes me think of many things: the last road trip my wife and I took as we traveled across the wide open American southwest, psychedelics, the people I don’t speak to anymore because I’m not on Facebook, remembering that some of those people are not people I want to speak to and that’s why I quit Facebook, and the feeling of moving to a new home. The song is literally about unpacking the memory palace of our minds, the “what does it all mean,” the mercurial nature of truth that necessitates writing this stuff down to preserve how it felt as it was happening. It’s a hard look in the mirror. There’s a lot to unpack as to why this song is hitting me so hard right now. Maybe I’ll cover it in a future newsletter. For now, I’m just enjoying the soft Rhodes and lazy acoustic strum, as I try to understand.
“Paracosm” is the sound of of a beautiful dream, the way you might float through your subconscious, lush with blooming details of vivid experiences. I know Washed Out get flak for being the “Portlandia Band” but this is a gauzy kind of majesty that just glides, with hypnotic orchestration and delicate trip-hop leanings. There’s an intimacy to dreams that’s impossible to replicate but “Paracosm” gives us a brief of glimpse, before we wake up completely.
Is there a sassier march than the one Perfume Genius gives us on “Queen?” Hard to say but the huge distorted stabs and shimmering keyboards do wonders to lift Michael Hadreas’ skillful falsetto to immaculate heights. To me, “Queen” is about absolute confidence, the feeling of walking into a room and knowing that all eyes are on you and it doesn’t matter. Hadreas aesthetically draws on the dissonance of imperfection and luxury, noting that which is less perfect often means the most, and is deserving of more love, over status prisons. In a way, “Queen” posits luxury as a state of mind, the kind of magnetism that’s present when you are living your best life.
“Mama…” is the reverse “Fancy,” a kind of shy rebellion against overexposure and overextension. I can’t conceive of how exhausting a performing career must be, to be “on” all the time and vulnerable for a crowd of people that will eat you alive if they have the option. The trade-off being that drag is freedom, both in expression and from the binaries that riddle ordinary life. There’s real bravery in drag, for a host of reasons. Identity and norms are all malleable—such is drag’s central point—and it reminds us how disarming humor can be in the face of “conservative values.” I’ve been a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race since my wife started watching a few years ago, and it’s been nice to see someone like Mattel succeed, making a career out of subverting our expectations and challenge the status quo with the complexity of our collective humanity. In many ways, she’s the purest embodiment of RuPaul’s ethos: “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
If you want to get kicked in the throat by your hardcore, like I do, listen to The Armed. The riffs sound like manic cyborgs weaponized for maximum head-banging in a post-human dystopia, disgustingly reckless and relentless. “All Futures” is a massive precursor to the forthcoming Ultrapop, which is set to continue the evolution of their pummeling aggression with even more death ray inspired electronics.
Nathan is one of my good friends from high school and I’m obsessed with the EP he put out last year. Performing under the name Apok, Nathan crafts weightless and nimble electronic music—songs that showcase his meticulous attention to detail as well as an open love letter to some of the artists he loves. The tense clicks and deep pulses on “Mute All” call to mind electronic titans like Burial or Four Tet, while the liquid piano and mid-track pivot conjures the foggy melancholia of Amnesiac-era Radiohead. If it sounds like I’m just naming influences, that’s not my intention. It’s the dreamy synth washes and pristine arrangements Nathan employs that make these songs sound like no one else. That’s the mark of a good producer and a good listener. I’m thrilled to highlight this song from Nathan and hope he gets the kind of credit he deserves. His music is something special.
Chelsea Wolfe can really do it all, shifting between doom folk and doom metal with unparalleled ease. On “American Darkness” though, she channels something more sinister—the mysterious allure of decay and the power of our intentions under the moonlight. The strings climb on this one to dizzying heights, perfect for a night drive to anywhere. This one is for my witchy friends, to play at dusk as we are manifesting from the great beyond.
“Scale it Back” has this expansive quality that’s sublime. The beat feels like a massive drum line through a trip-hop lens, while the lumbering piano cascades against soft synths and Yukimi Nagano’s lilting voice. The song carries you somewhere unknown, yet somehow offers the promise of a safe destination. It’s the kind of late night ballad that you share with someone close, witnessing something awe inspiring together that you don’t need to talk about—you just feel it in your bones and let that feeling linger for as long as you can. People give DJ Shadow a lot of unwarranted grief for “failing” to measure up to Endtroducing…’s genre-defying legacy. That perspective feels misguided and further underscores the need to let go of the past and appreciate some the work DJ Shadow as put in since 1996. Believe me, songs like “Scale it Back” are their own reward.
Originally published February 7, 2021 as part of Hella Vibes.