Songs of the Week 06/30/2023 (coming to you from 07/07/2023)
Pscyh! I'm alive! Silly me, writing some drama update for clout. Look how that worked out... if I'd really wanted numbers, I'd have sung it all on ukulele. Just a little trendy apology video joke for you.
No, actually, this is the final regular Songs of the Week post loaded in the chamber I alluded to last week. For those who didn't catch it, until I can get my work schedule together—until I can uncluster my fuck, if you will, or perhaps unfuck my cluster—I've decided to refocus my free writing time on larger fiction and nonfiction projects instead of weekly song reviews. Stuff like this is super fun, but as these reviews have spiraled into multi-paragraph ponderings with curated playlist pairings, they've become a lot more time consuming than the routine writing exercises I meant for them to be, and I sort of felt like I was treading water. This July, I was hoping to shift to a temporary monthly schedule where I'd post songs every week on my twitter (that alone didn't age well) and have a summary post at the end of the month with written "highlights" from each week, but since I'm lazy, I didn't get this final post done quite as quickly as I'd hoped, and there were just too many thoughts already here to scrap the whole thing. Folks, my music taste is just too good.
In any case, I'm sorry to temporarily reduce the amount of posts I'm putting out—I know it won't look the same on a week-to-week basis, but like I said in my update post, I'm sincerely making an effort to use any time I'd normally spend writing these instead working towards publishing stuff here and elsewhere. I don't want to make promises, but I've got a couple poems and short stories I'm hoping to put out there soon that I'm excited about when I'm not sucked into a screen. In the meantime, though, if you're looking for a fix with the weekly consistency I pretended to have, I'm super proud to say I can finally plug my sister's blog, Madeline Todd Dot Com (Madeline! Todd! Dot! Com!), which has been putting out Sunday Songs posts inspired by Songs of the Week since the beginning of the year. As a multi-year camp Nanowrimo winner, she's on the reading and writing grind way more than I am, meaning her main schtick is book reviews every Tuesday, if that's more your style. Be sure to check her work out and support the Todd dynasty while I explore whether it's possible to be a writer working 9-5 and still maintain healthy relationships. Enthralling!
PRIMEVAL TITLES | Dominic Scherrer Last Songs of the Week—when was that, fifteen years ago?—I came out of the dinosaur documentary cultist closet with an almost religious fervor, and upon re-reading... yikes. Those are some pretty niche feelings for a pretty niche subculture. My legal team advised me to roll it back and stick to talking about the barely-fringe fringe, but they never said I couldn't sing... okay, last one, sorry. This week, I'm declaring my love for not only the best of dinosaur media, but the worst. Like... really bad. Not including you, though, Dino Hunters. Those guys oughta stay in the desert next season.
https://youtu.be/I77i0DceYYE
Primeval was a five-season, one-Canadian-spinoff BBC drama running from 2007-2011, and it was... well, you can watch it for free on Crackle, and that should tell you everything you need to know. Primeval follows a ragtag group of... government... paleontologists... contracted to neutralize temporal anomalies that, like other artifacts from across the world, can't stop appearing strictly within the borders of the United Kingdom. It's got a male lead with white bread trauma so bland they have to unceremoniously kill him off halfway through season three. It's got a no-nonsense, strong, female animal rights activist whose first scene is opening the door for the comic relief character in her underwear à la Star Trek: Into Darkness. It's got that one dude from Snatch and X-Men: First Class that also got unceremoniously killed in the second movie. It's got hammy TV villain acting probably just to match the costume department's antics:
It's a slay. Get real.
In seventh grade, this was my shit, dude. Maybe it was because there wasn't any other paleo-media left for me to consume, or maybe it was because there wasn't any other speculative evolution media left for me to consume, either (and whether or not it makes a lick of sense, you know that future bat design still goes hard), but let me tell you, I blew through all five seasons perfectly legally at 180p quality, and I remember almost nothing. Future bat impaled on Colombian Mammoth tusk? British people saying "Jaguar" like "Jeg-yoo-ah?" Jason Flemyng stuck in the Miocene and naming a bone "Molly" because he went insane, but in a quirky-funny way? Yea, that's about it. Anyways, Primeval, folks: it's... there.
In looking back on old obsessions, I always think of my middle-school, Wolfmother forays and the like as leaving my parents' curated taste nest. To this day, I like a solid 90% of the same media as my family, and that's usually something I feel lucky for, but it sometimes means I'm more likely to write off media I know they won't enjoy—either that, or they've already found all the good stuff, and I'm only discovering the scraps left behind. Still, in finding these gems, I've learned to discern what's worth taking with me—what resonated with something deep in my core—and what fluff to let fly away with time. For as forgettable as Primeval was, it clearly struck a chord in me; back in the day, I even started writing my own little ripoff of the show that was totally different because it was in Colorado, I guess. Also, time portal gauntlets? Anyways, even looking back today, I still get giddy about the few things they got right, and thanks to composer Dominic Scherrer, what they got right they really got right. In case you weren't already feeling the hype, that beautiful theme song comes blasting through the gates with ten times the gusto a 2007 TV budget should allow for. Between the eerie howls and the cheap graphics, I'm well aware of the cheese it exudes, and yet to be so bold and brazen in spite of that is exactly what a theme song is meant to do. I always call theme songs a sacred ritual whenever they come up, and this one's no exception—it's short and snappy, but still sweeps through the intrigue, action, and emotions that the show shoots for, and rockets viewers back to the plot fast enough to coast through mediocrity a little while longer. I have a theory that it's even meant to deliberately evoke memories of other dinosaur media in its target audience, since this sounds strikingly similar to Benjamin Bartlett's Walking With Dinosaurs theme, and even more so, his punchier action-packed work on the contemporary Walking With Monsters: Life Before Dinosaurs. Interestingly, the pulpy dynamism of that soundtrack was criticized by fans for being too dramatic, turning prehistoric animals into mere bloodthirsty monsters, which... wouldn't that work more in, say, a BBC drama for five seasons? It certainly doesn't help that the animation studio behind Walking With Monsters, Impossible Pictures, also designed Primeval's creatures. I'll take off my tinfoil hat, but listen for yourself...
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ddw8c4LIxTU
Kenneth Branagh is really going at this like an MMA commentator, too. Bro is about to pop a vein.
What a weird little corner of culture, right? It's kind of crazy that so much art exists around such niche communities, and it's even cooler that such niche communities can form around art this obscure. I have to say, listening to all of this music makes me wonder if I've been too harsh on Primeval. I've definitely got a soft spot for it, but I have a feeling if I looked back at it, it wouldn't be very defensible. Either way, I'm thankful for the good memories it gave me, even if the details have faded.
Pairs Well With: Okay. Unconventional break here. Beyond "Walking With Monsters Theme" (Benjamin Bartlett), this sounds like a lot of late 2000s docuseries themes, from "Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman," to "The Future is Wild!", to "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking," to... yea, you've heard this theme song before if you watched the science channel before, but none of its many faces can be found on youtube for some reason. It's out there. We just have to free it.
A QUIET LIFE | Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld This might come as a shock to some (myself included), but months after the Dark train rolled through town, there's still a few stops it missed that are really worth revisiting. "A Quiet Life" is a song I really should've written about during my Dark era like my sister did, but the gentle power of this piece somehow slipped through the cracks. Today, we're going to alter that timeline, though, because this subdued song deserves some time in the spotlight, especially given its immaculate placement in season 1's finale. Major spoilers for Dark ahead.
Maybe I've passed Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld's "A Quiet Life" over because its pathos is just too powerful--too stiflingly sad to stomach, sometimes. I don't know, man, whenever I hear sullen, plodding cello accented by occasional chimes, I know I'm in for a real rough ride, and this is just about hammered home when Teardo's first words are "Maybe this time, Maybe this time I'll outwit my past." The combination beatdown of these weary words and their perfect delivery—a scraping, worn, and half-sung lament that somehow strikes a balance between defeated and winking. It's the kind of delivery I'd expect in a dialogue between an old man and the reaper, the sort of emotional wringer you'd read that would rip your heart out and spit on it (but, you know, in a well-crafted way). This song is unsubtly about desperate remorse—the shakespearean sort of haunting choices that chase ordinary sinners to the end of their lives—but as listeners, we are only privvy to the end of this journey, it seems, where our ragged and desperate speaker has run for so long, the chase itself is an old friend. Each footstep resounds in the lashing, staccato cello, which itself ticks like a clock until the languid, flowing chorus howls in like the wind. "A Quiet Life" is immaculately melancholy, and though it's a bit too openly existential for a casual listen from me, that's a compliment in my book—it's a well-told story if I find myself lost and lingering in it.
As you can already imagine, though, these lyrics could be applicable to half of Dark's characters, easily—those who remember, those who regret, and especially those caught in a loop of the same, desperate mistakes. In Jenny Nicholson's famous Vampire Diaries video (bear with me), she lambasts that show's tendency to use painfully obvious needle drops that describe exactly what's happening on screen, and like... is it camp? Yes. Am I likening Dark to Vampire Diaries? Not really. Unless... is Dark my Vampire Diaries? If it is, then hopefully you (Jenny) will forgive me (Max Todd Dot Com) for defending this song choice to back [SPOILER] The Stranger's attempt to destroy the time tunnels beneath Winden. Hearing this haggard story over his desperate (and futile) attempts to change the future—to, essentially, commit temporal suicide—not only fleshes out the feelings we already have for his story, but enhances repeat viewings given how much more we learn. As a theme for this character, I don't know if I could've picked a better song, but its universality makes it applicable to any of us grappling with the choices that define our lives.
Pairs Well With: "Poor Places" (Wilco), "Hurt" (2CELLOS covering Nine Inch Nails), "Family and Genus" (Shakey Graves)
WORLD OF AMMONITES | Anže Rozman & Kara Talve I wish I could say the theme this week was time travel, but as much as I wish I'd planned that, "World of Ammonites" is our last temporal selection. If it's any consolation, where we started with some of paleomedia's worst, we're ending with its best: Prehistoric Planet 2. I already went off about my unbridled adoration for Prehistoric Planet, but when it comes to bringing tangibility and believable behavior to animals lost unfathomable millions of years in the past, season 2 remains unbeaten. While one of my few complaints for this season was a lack of paleontological diversity after last season's impressive selections, one of the best scenes in the entire season was meeting an incredible menagerie of ammonites, a staggeringly successful group of shelled cephalopods (squid, but give it a snail hat) that died off with the dinosaurs but thrived for literal hundreds of millions of years beforehand. Ammonites aren't quite as charismatic as dinosaurs, given that invertebrates don't leave behind huge, smiling skeletons, but their shells alone hint at a humbling monopoly on hundreds of oceanic niches. Not only were these animals living like squid today, but some were living like fish, and some were living lifestyles we may even have no contemporary analogue for—behaviors that we may never even be able to imagine when the context is dust within dust. And isn't that sublime? Isn't that amazing and terrifying and beautiful? Once again, Prehistoric Planet remains one of the few pieces of media that, for me, has ever crystalized the wonder of glimpsing untold complexity totally erased by time, hammering home the true alien nature of these fellow earthlings by showing some of their most bizarre shell morphologies, from paper-clip, to spiral, to whatever the hell Nostoceras could possibly be. I mean, see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/YoeuakfJxBM
And despite the truly breathtaking visuals, what makes this scene a masterpiece for me is the added chatter of the score, evoking some alien jungle with its oxymoronically harmonious discordance. While I'm a fan of the arpeggiating patterns in this piece, sounding spindly without being goofy, I'm particularly struck by its boldly bizarre instrumentation, which pairs sounds I've never heard together before. The almost atlantean sound of dull bells (or is that marimba?) evokes buoyancy, age, and depth simultaneously—all things I'd associate with an ammonite. Yet in a stroke of genius, instead of building a song from similar sounds, composers Anže Rozman & Kara Talve selected the synth—a flat, modern instrument that couldn't be a better opposite to bells—to fill out "World of Ammonites." Like. the soft and speculative creatures that once propelled their now crumbling, fossil shells, the synth reflects the unknowns of these ammonites where the bells reinforce what's known. The more we explore, the more these unknowns become borderline unthinkable, with a long, flatulent trombone (1:38) emphasizing a paper clip-shaped Diplomoceras like a deflating question mark, or the fluttering of larval tentacles whisking alongside Danny Elfman violins (1:53). The more I dissect "World of Ammonites," the more it impresses me, pushing up against the limits of how much science an instrumental song can communicate while also pushing just as many boundaries creatively.
Pairs Well With: "Tardigrades" (Alan Silvestri), "Hedwig's Theme" (John Williams), "Caught in a Weird Loop" (Amie Doherty)
OUT THE DOOR | Esmé Patterson Songs like Esmé Patterson's "Out the Door" are, maybe, one of the few positives of not talking about every song every week—I like it enough to recommend it, but not enough to force a multi-paragraph opinion on it. And sure, maybe if I'm even considering forcing an opinion on a song, maybe I shouldn't even be featuring it, but especially after seeing Patterson perform live at the Globe Hall a few months ago, cutting "Out the Door" for time feels like a disservice. I don't know what it is about half-spoken, rambling songs, from Courtney Barnett's "Avant Gardener" to The Kinks' "Destroyer" (both great in very different ways)—maybe it's the contrast between a tight instrumental background and fervent vocals slurring past the tempo, or maybe it's the tension resolved when the lyrics suddenly snap to said tempo in a cathartic chorus—but whatever it may be, "Out the Door" scratched that itch for me live. While Patterson's intermittent ramblings aren't the tensest I've heard, sounding more groggy than actively fraying, they make for a different sort of off-beat jam in tandem with quirky synth and murmured lyrics like "When I die my soul will leave my body / When I die my spirit won't be mine anymore." For those missing Patterson's incredible voice, though, look no further than 0:55—a pseudo-chorus or bridge smack at the center of the song that breaks conventions by turning the volume not up, but down. Faint and harmonic, it's almost an ascension from the mania into some airier plane before descending back down as the drums begin to skitter. It's a cool song with a delightfully Wes Andersonian video (and that term gets thrown around a lot for anything with symmetry and fall colors even if it doesn't have anything even remotely close to the mannerisms, so go educate yourself and watch Asteroid City in theaters as penance). For now, that's pretty much all I have to say about it... which is more than I thought. What was that about not forcing a multi-paragraph opinion? During a peer review session in high school english, a friend of mine once wrote "you, my friend, have a problem with commas" in the margins of my essay, and I think about it often. The problem, Mollie, is the parentheticals, and so on, et cetera. Anyways, we'll see if posting songs weekly but only reviewing a handful at the end of the month works out—if not, I might have to learn a thing or two about self discipline.
Pairs Well With: "Dedicated" (The Amps), "Avant Gardener" (Courtney Barnett), "Headshots" (Suzanne Vega)
TERRIBLE LIE | Nine Inch Nails If you've been feeling secure about your life choices thus far, just remember: Kate Bush wrote The Kick Inside at nineteen, Adele wrote 19 at nineteen, and none of A Tribe Called Quest had turned twenty by the time they'd recorded "Can I Kick It?"—and that's not even mentioning Fiona Apple's work at seventeen, Olivia Rodrigo's at sixteen, and Stevie Wonder's at fifteen. Luckily, if you're now feeling insecure about your life choices thus far, have you ever recognized the nineteen-year-old sound? Because—
Ope. Okay, just googled it. Trent Reznor wrote Pretty Hate Machine at twenty-four.
So, this is a backhanded and certifiably villainous way to start talking about one of the most influential albums ever written by one of the most influential musicians ever, both of whom happen to be huge inspirations in my creative life, but I have to be honest—despite all it has meant to me over the years, I can't listen to Pretty Hate Machine without a touch of secondhand embarrassment. As Nine Inch Nails's debut album, it's humbling how each track, back to back, was already visionary, already shifting the musical zeitgeist. Musically, it's a tour-de-force, which might be why its far less refined lyricism sticks out so strongly—that, or I'm unhealthily projecting my insecurities on my artistic heroes again. I've never shifted a zeitgeist, but I've never been twenty-four yet, either, and that's exactly why I dread looking back at what I've written here, someday, especially if I'm lucky enough to have an audience. When I was nineteen, I poured my whole heart into a short story about friendships, relationships, and whale-ships and it won me the Dick Shahan Undergraduate Writing Competition, but less than three years later, I look back and see something that breaks every rule I write by now. While I don't regret writing From the Belly of the Whale—I'm still pretty proud of it if I don't look to closely—it's strange that it's still floating out there, an ambassador for an author who is, I think, totally different now. As I age, I wonder if I'll always be beyond my work by the time it sees the light of day, and I'll always look back on work that could've been done better with hindsight I never had. Are we destined to make something immature before we can make what really matters? Do we have to bare our souls in a lackluster way before the real magic can happen, or is the vulnerability of these imperfections part of the magic itself?
Reznor—someone I'd consider very mature, despite what people say—seems to have found himself in the same spot at some point or another, telling Kerrang! "I wasn't proud of a lot of the things I was saying, but I said to myself, 'Well, no one's going to hear this stuff anyway.' [...] The record is honest and that's where its power came from." This insight certainly speaks to my own experience with Pretty Hate Machine, and that of many others for decades before me—even at its most adolescent, it's admirable that Reznor made his angst into art, acting on whatever was blooming or festering within him like so many refuse to do for fear of retribution. My forever alt parents made a great call bringing me Pretty Hate Machine at fifteen, hair down past my shoulders and freshly heartbroken from my first relationship (two months is a big commitment, you guys). Of all of the hormonal, entitled, and brashly teenage memories this era dredges up that I'd rather stay well hidden, this album will always make me strangely nostalgic for existing in that body and brain. Nine Inch Nails was omnipresent at that point in my life—Trent was singing while I brushed my teeth, while I walked to lunch, while I did geometry homework in some spine-twisting position on the couch (which is maybe bad, because I sure don't remember the geometry). Even if my teenage tough spots had little crossover with Trent's own experiences, the intangible, bitter rage Reznor somehow managed to bottle almost felt like fuel, especially when it sounded so goddamn cool. You hear all those little clinky-clanky noises? This is where it started, folks.
Picking one favorite off of this album would be an impossibility for me—too many rotate through that role—but the song that resurfaced on shuffle this week was the stupid-catchy atheist anthem "Terrible Lie." Great title to project your own feelings of betrayal on, right? I've been doing this for forever. Far from the worst lyrical offender on this album ("grey would be the color if I had a heart," "how can you turn me into this / after you just taught me how to kiss............. you" "the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car," and in the same song, "my moral standing is lying down"), a lot of its then-ambiguity for me was my inability to hear "Hey, God!" yelled crunchily at the beginning of every stanza in the remastered edition mix. So, when you take the accidental subtlety out of it, it turns out God is the terrible lie in question (ooh, ah, etc.). While I guess we've all been there, the real staying power of this song, for me, is not its spiritual anger but the music it became. Among all of the other industrial music at the time, Pretty Hate Machine is by far the catchiest despite every aspect of its complexity, chaos, and cacophony fighting against that. Like reining a flock of wet rats on leashes, so much of Pretty Hate Machine's fittingly mechanical melody should, by all accounts, be unbearable, and yet these ugly sounds, conducted with so much emotionality, become something beautiful to witness. There are so many moments like this in "Terrible Lie" that have me grinning ear to ear, from the build of the whispering bridge, to the flow of Reznor's rambling outro, to the IMPECCABLE synth breakdown at the end that hasn't been beaten by anything else I've ever heard. Honest to God, it's such a simple little ditty, but I can't help but play it, like, four times over after it ends.
So, this has gone on criminally long (see what I mean about these posts just being hard to maintain as a warmup?), but I think just like he nailed it with this outro, Reznor nailed it in his post-hoc analysis of Pretty Hate Machine: the ugly honesty we'd rather not revisit is often powerful because of its jagged edges. First drafts are first drafts for a reason, but creation should never be too fueled by anticipating perception—the act of creation is so numinous because it's raw, and honesty hits hard because it's brutal, and to sanitize these things in search of perfection might entirely scrub away the spark that makes art special. Or maybe that's just what I need to tell myself to keep from cringing when I look back on my callous overuse of alliteration. I know I sound like an elf, it just comes out that way, okay??
Pairs Well With: "Into the Void" (Nine Inch Nails) "I'm Afraid of Americans" (David Bowie feat. Trent Reznor), "No Self Control" (Peter Gabriel)
So, apparently, this isn't the original cover of Pretty Hate Machine, but—and this is the only time I'll choose blue-grey over bubblegum pink—this remastered version will always be my cover, by association. As much as I understand why Reznor would opt for the pink-and-blue original—it evokes the eighties, it's a pretty fun(ny) juxtaposition, and it's striking to almost an ugly degree—I think this cover evokes the claustrophobic bitterness that scaffolds this album. The cover, which is meant to evoke a rib cage but is actually the distorted blades of a turbine, certainly screams "goth trapped in Iowa," but the dark spaces really enhance the feeling of entrapment. Here, I really do feel stuck in a Machine, and there's nothing Pretty about it. Sorry, I Hate to say it that way.
Like I said, this may be the last Songs of the Week I planned to write with this routine in mind, but don't worry—this is far from the end! We're already almost halfway through July (?!), and my songs in review should go up around the end of the month. See you all then, and hopefully with some fiction in between...