SONGS OF THE WEEK 11/24/2023

A blessed Black Friday to all, and may all your Mondays be Cybered or whatever. Fargo season 5 is out, I’m sick, and even if I wasn’t, my mammal brain’s not liable to do anything but bed down for hibernation, so we’re going a little short on this one. To, um… show my gratitude. Take it or leave it.

MY UNUSUAL FRIEND | Fruit Bats For two people who both love Fruit Bats, my girlfriend and I are coming at the fandom from very different angles. I mean, I felt like being the largest flying mammals, frugivores, and essential pollinators was enough of a selling point, but I can’t knock having a band for PR (ha ha, hee hee, ho ho). The band does have a leg up on their namesake, though—while actual fruit bats are the only chiropterans incapable of navigating by sound, Eric D. Johnson’s voice occasionally squeaks high enough to echolocate. Alright, alright. Chronologically, I’m gonna have to hand this discovery to my dad first and my girlfriend second. As with most of my music taste, I’ve been hearing Fruit Bats in the background of my Dad’s car for years, but none of their songs really took until they were separately discovered by my girlfriend. Though I immediately remembered the Fruit Bats, I wasn’t initially sold on tracks like “Ocean,” where Johnson’s indie-hippie voice veers from dad rock to “tailor made for Spotify’s Chill Playlist” (something I’m trying so hard not to attach a value to). Of course, I never want to give into my ingrained cynicism with any band, but especially not with one my girlfriend likes, so I took a look back through my dad’s old catalogue, and would you look at that: memory unlocked! Though I’ve since learned to love other Fruit Bats through this gateway, “My Unusual Friend” is far and away my favorite from their catalogue thus far. My girlfriend said its secret ingredient best: “it sounds like Wilco.” Well, uh, sorry for being such a predictable automaton, I guess. Beep boop, if it makes you feel better (I am deeply insecure). Of course, through this lens, “My Unusual Friend” checks all of my Wilco boxes—a deceptively dancey beat (here on bobbing piano) and sincere lyrics turned a little bit strange. That insanely catchy guitar doesn’t hurt, either—this one fits with Wilco’s slightly more raucous “Dawned On Me” like a puzzle piece. Finally, of course, I know I’ve dunked on Johnson’s vocals twice now, and for absolutely no reason—though they’re undoubtedly as unusual as the titular friend, his range is great while staying measured and mellow. Plus, I immediately know who I’m listening to the second he opens his mouth, which must be great for branding. Thanks again to the Fruit Bats fans in my life for finally wearing me down—this won’t be the last Bats we hear from this year, time willing.

Pairs Well With: “Dawned on Me” (Wilco), “Sea Legs” (The Shins), “Unchain Your Heart” (Silver Synthetic)

HOTWAX | Beck Holy shit, I love Beck, did you guys know that? I went into writing this thinking it would be obvious, but come to think of it, Songs of the Week has never shown the spotlight on Beck, which is a travesty (much like his later work. Ooh, zzzouch!). I’ll reserve the serious simping for covering anything from Midnite Vultures—an easy top-ten-albums-ever pick, zero dif—but Odelay is a masterful sonic collage in its own right, so we’ll consider this the prelude. From the get-go, Beck proudly proclaims “It takes a backwash man to sing a backwash song,” but to his credit, that’s exactly why we all love him. I’d (maybe generously) interpret this line as a metaphor for his penchant for recycling and remixing totally disparate sounds and spitting them back in the bottle—an entirely new (and enchanting) elixir. Early critics of the hip-hop scene called sampling lazy, but while it has certainly been used for evil, the best sampling layers so many indistinguishable snippets that the resulting exquisite corpse is unrecognizable. It takes a “that goes there” instinct in an artist that I find utterly alien—what must the world sound like wearing Beck’s ears (or his Cadillac pants)? While not exactly hip hop, “Hotwax” is a seamless chimera of hip-hop delivery, country twang, and latin culture. Remarkably, though, none of these genres account for the actual songs it samples, which would be totally untraceable if not for the internet (love you Who Sampled bae). Owing various beats to metal (Black Sabbath’s “Behind the Wall of Sleep”), soul (Freda Payne’s “The Easiest Way To Fall”), and funk (Bernard Purdie’s “Song for Aretha”), “Hotwax” melts away its ancestry into a singular sound. The closest likeness is the Beastie Boy’s similar sampling masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, but even that can’t match Beck’s ransom-note twist. Credit where credit is due, the era-defining Dust Brothers co-produced this track with Beck, but they can’t compete with his innate talent for trashiness—even before Midnite Vulture’s nosedive into satirizing consumerism, there’s a pungent, faux-macho flavor to so many of Beck’s lyrics approaching the low, low highs of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That’s not to discount the obvious cleverness crammed into every phrase—Beck lyrics take like jingles, and even his humorless lines are vivid and lived-in, like his many allusions to growing up in a prominently chicano neighborhood (later revisited in Guero, which is practically Odelay 2). Some of these asides are so out-of-pocket that they take on a life of their own, seeming like samples themselves, e.g. “I’m the enchanting wizard of rhythm.” My brother in christ, what? Stuff like this certainly has captured the imaginations of many esoteric funkmancers, but it comes a dime a dozen within his discography. While there might be better showcases of Beck’s off-the-wall art, “Hotwax” is about as good an introduction as one could get.

Pairs Well With: “Qué Onda Guero” (Beck), “Country Leaver” (Dandy Warhols), “Contact” (Big Audio Dynamite)

FAILING FARM | River Whyless While I’ve been told River Whyless’s folky harmonies, violin-plucking, and clacking wood blocks aren’t exactly my style, this song’s premise really snagged me, and the music soon followed. To me, the image of a failing farm feels primally off-putting—the sort of disaster you’d blame on a punitive god, or at least the whims of some wronged witch. It’s an attack on the source, withering the roots unseen and toppling livestock only when the end is inevitable. As “Failing Farm” puts it, “There is a lesson, careless eyes / Prying the fruit out from behind the story.” Much like a blight, this song takes hold slow and subtly, with incessantly-knocking woodblock and steady guitar chords creating a plodding, routine rhythm that mirrors the first signs of rot. Though River Whyless’s three-person harmonies sound solid, what really sells me that something has gone awry are the slow, instrumental builds in the background—I can’t tell what sort of marimba mutate is making the resonating thrum behind “and all the bats died” (at 1:34), but it might make the whole song for me. For me, a good indie-horror atmosphere like this is enough to defy a genre I’m not normally accustomed to.

Pairs Well With: “Seven Hells” (Brown Bird), “Imitosis” (Andrew Bird), “Bull Black Nova” (Wilco)

UBER CAPITALIST DEATH TRADE | Cabbage Okay, points off because I thought this was going to be a capitalist death trap. No other notes, Cabbage, go nuts. Give me another Cramps wail, bruv. RAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Pairs Well With: “Pig” (Sparklehorse), “Bloody Knuckles” (High On Fire) “Just” (Radiohead) [Reviewed 12/09/2022]

EULOGY FOR YOU AND ME | Tanya Davis Of this week’s alternating indie-folk features, “Eulogy For You And Me” is the indie-folk to rule them all. I’m long past beating the pretentious allegations here, but thanks to my girlfriend, I’ll also always have a soft spot for this mostly-rambled piece. From the surface, everything about Tanya Davis’s “Eulogy For You And Me” seems selectively bred to the genre’s specifications like a thanksgiving Seelyham Terrier, from its pastel, coyote cover, to its lo-fi instrumentation, to its spoken-word lyrics about fall’s final breaths, to even its own final moments—a candid “end it?” from Davis. However, as I’m increasingly beginning to realize with music, timing is everything, and receiving this song the morning daylight savings began while staying in a one-man cabin converted from an abandoned rail yard… well, I couldn’t have been in a better position to understand this song. Staying there was probably one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received (that, too, from my girlfriend, who is very neat)—solitude in the mountains—and while I spent it writing about Chelsea Wolfe, I started my hour-shifted day with “Eulogy For You And Me.” Maybe it was just the crisp air, the altitude, or even just the rustic furniture, but this methodically-rambled poem set to pulsing, precise guitar wove a warm, November ode to witches, seasons, and even daylight savings. It’s almost a summer counterpart to Eden Ahbez’s older “Full Moon,” full of rasping frogs and the molasses mugginess of summer. Though its title is funereal, “Eulogy For You And Me” breathes life into the brownest, desiccated mummy of a month before the clouds fall and bring back magic, for a moment. That’s, of course, before the windshield scraping sets in. You know how I feel about that.

Pairs Well With: “Ingydar” (Adrianne Lenker), “Full Moon” (Eden Abez), “Pegasus (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)” (Arlo Parks)

THE WATCHFUL FOX, CHIEF OF THE TRIBE WITH TINSELLED BUCK NO. 4,520 | Kent Monkman Any art of Kent Monkman’s sends a hair-raising wave washing over me (some apples make my throat burn a little bit, too, so I might need an allergy test. Okay, not the time). That might be because it’s baked in with the boundless, silent rage repressed from two concurrent genocides: one racial, one sexual. While The Watchful Fox might not be quite as imposing as a piece like his devastating, wall-sized The Scream, it nonetheless reeks of generationally reinforced trauma. In a way, The Watchful Fox is itself generational, calling back to a story told by artist George Catlin in which, while sketching young, cross-dressing Natives, a tribal elder deliberately posed to block Catlin’s field of view. Monkman, who hails from the Swampy Cree, often revives the flamboyant two-spirits erased by history with a revolutionary vengeance, but their impression here is more subtle. In a way, the lurking ghost of a drawn-over sketch tells is all that’s needed for Monkman’s gut-punch to land.

Certainly, Thanksgiving is a colonial holiday, but I see no reason not to throw the baby out with the bathwater—I, for one, am thankful to have found a family and partner who embrace my identity unconditionally, and with whom I’d feel safe expressing myself from my closest core. Some say that asking for safety is soft, but these are coward’s words—or, more sympathetically, the words of someone just as scared, wounded by the outside world. Maybe they think love is stabbing others until they callous; maybe they simply stab to keep the target off of themselves. In some way, I’m sure we have all been both The Watchful Fox and the forgotten Tinselled Buck—trying to impress a foreign presence and throwing our people under the bus in the process, or trying to express a new idea only to be boxed out for it. Next time I catch myself in Watchful Fox’s moccasins, though, I hope I can find the grace to remember the value of safety—that it doesn’t leave behind ghosts.

Not to brush over the whole stolen land/ongoing genocide/two-spirit erasure side of things, but on a much lighter note, I am thankful for any and all of you who keep supporting my writing through thick and thin. I like to think I work consistently hard, but lately, I’ve burned myself out pretty good while standing in place—I get to thinking about taking risks, and before I know it, I’ve spent the whole month paralyzed without a word on the page. Talk about a coward’s words, right? Without getting too personal, though, I am trying to be brave, trying to reconnect with whatever muse I hurt within myself, and trying to put myself out there again, so hopefully there will be good news (or at least more news) in the fiction front soon. My heart goes out to all of you that help me be me every day—I really couldn’t do it without you all. Happy Thanksgiving.