Nighttime | Songs of the Week 10/06/2023

You’ve seen Songs of the Week 10/06/2023, yea? But what if it was goth? Yea, hear that ChatGPT? I have original ideas out the wazoo.

I WHIPPED BATMAN’S ASS | Wesley Willis Unfortunately, literally nothing I could say here would add to “I Whipped Batman’s Ass,” or sometimes “I Whupped Batman’s Ass,” depending on where you find it. Literally every line delivery is perfect, and I’m usually on team Batman. Of course, as much as I’d like to leave this with A-plusses all around, I’m going to be the wet blanket here and talk about why I almost retracted this one from the Songs of the Week slate. I found this through my girlfriend, who found this through her sister, and god knows where her sister found it—to me, it was just one of those deep-core Spotify treasures dredged up from the bottom of some rabbit hole alongside The Wet Ones. It turns out, Wesley Willis’s story is more akin to that of The Shags—leaving me a little too icked out by the fanbase’s intentions to keep comfortably laughing. It turns out, Willis was active from 1989 to his death in 2003 in spite of his schizophrenia, releasing a staggering fifty albums starting in 1994. After finding this alone—unrivaled output, to be sure, but starting to make sense in the context of his diagnosis—I began to worry Willis was being made the butt of his own joke. It seems critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine is at least in an adjacent boat—in his review of Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die, he worries the production of Willis’s records was itself exploitative, writing,

“It's certainly admirable that Willis has decided to not be tied down by his schizophrenia, but it often seems that his audience is laughing at him, not with him.”

This was also my initial wince—I was afraid I was inadvertently ridiculing someone too far gone to fully laugh with. However, Erlewine’s further comments, though perhaps well-meaning, start to transform into something far less compassionate:

“Of course, Willis is above criticism—it's hard to criticize something that is essentially variations on one simple theme, let alone a batch of songs written by a schizophrenic—but that still doesn't make listening to any of his records any easier.”

Boy, doesn’t that just leave a bad taste in your mouth? What Erlewine frames as looking out for the little guy really seems itself to be belittling. Though schizophrenia is undoubtedly debilitating in its warping of the sufferer’s reality, why assume that every song is rotten to the core with this delusion? Schizophrenic people can still make jokes, make art, and make intelligent commentary, obviously, and all appear to be an intentional part of Willis’s work. To assume record companies are actively exploiting Willis (why else would they offer money to a mentally ill person?) and that his audience is actively mocking him (why else would they give attention to a mentally ill person?) reveals a pretty bigoted perspective lurking just beneath the mask. Here’s a better question: why are we starting from a place of assuming childlike inability? I can’t say with any more certainty than Erlewine, but I choose to believe Willis knows exactly how funny “I Whipped Batman’s Ass” is by design. Rock over London. Rock on, Chicago. Wheaties, breakfast of champions. Rest in Peace, Wesley Willis.

Pairs Well With: “Nettie’s Girl” (The Beastie Boys), “Don’t Pass Me By” (The Beatles), “Funnel Cakes Revenge” (Shakey Graves),

SUMMERTIME ROLLS | Jane’s Addiction Indisputably, Jane’s Addiction rocks (addiction does not, though. Stay clean kids), but for a long time, their music wasn’t much more than that to me. Sure, their innovation is on display in almost every song, bringing synapse-realigning sixties magic to the edgy nineties, but how do they make you feel? For me, their sound was just too sharp and shrill to read as anything more than “cool”—not a bad place to start by any means, but almost certainly a disservice to their more shamanic offerings, à la their tour-de-force “Of Course.” Don’t worry, I was able to unlock everything else eventually—“Summertime Rolls” was the song that changed my mind. I’m always struck by how tender such heavy instrumentation can sound, Eric Avery’s starring bassline chief among them. Sure, “Summertime Rolls” is a song about ecstasy and oral sex, I guess—or, as frontman Perry Farrell put it, “this song’s about getting laid on a waterbed… no… it’s about laying in a park… no, it’s not… yes, it is”—I think Avery’s bassline works magic beyond these sloppy confines. Though I’m not quite sure why, “Summertime Rolls” sounds like a sunset in August’s beating heat, sticky with sweat and melting popsicle. Somehow, it’s nostalgic despite the mosquito bites—it almost reminds me of tired kids in drying swimsuits walking home from the lake back to their parents’ hazy cookout. Though the romantic aspect is certainly palpable, this shimmering, muggy bass somehow bottles so much more of summer, with the rest of the band’s build serving to specifying these memories. Starting incredibly soft at first, “Summertime Rolls” patiently awakes into this profound explosion, so intimate and still so epic. It’s a powerful tranquility that I don’t think I’ve heard articulated so accurately anywhere else in music—well, scratch that, there’s one song out there like “Summertime Rolls,” but also so unlike it in so many ways.

Much like Julian Cope’s cover of “I Have Always Been Here Before,” I’ve avoided talking about Oingo Boingo’s “Change” because it feels too truly profound to encapsulate in writing—also, it’s sixteen minutes long, so there’s that. We’ll save “Change” for a rainy day, but in the meantime, I was recently struck by how similar the two sound. Maybe it was because my obsession with “Change” struck while I spent a week in July Alabama heat, but I think the similarities go far beyond that—the chords are incredibly similar, and the way Farrell’s iconic “I love her, I mean it’s oh so serious / as serious as can be” is echoed slightly off-beat with the lyrics “she loves me” mirrors not just the off-beat echoes of “Change,” but the fact that each verses also reshuffle the same words. It’s crazy to me how such similar production and delivery can create a couple of totally different moods—one a decades-long discovery of meaning amidst malaise, one a rose-colored recollection of sweet, unsullied summer memories.

Pairs Well With: “Change” (Oingo Boingo), “The Day The World Went Away” (Nine Inch Nails), “Hey Jude” (The Beatles)

SPACEMAN | Harry Nilsson Guys, I know this looks bad, but I broke my Harry Nilsson Habit months ago, okay? I’ve had this one in store for forever, I’ve just been waiting for a set of songs Hammer Horror enough to stand beside the cover of Son of Schmilsson. I don’t care what anyone thinks, everything about Son of Schmilsson’s presentation is oddballery incarnate, only to be beat by the subsequent record A Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. I haven’t listened to either in full—I’ve had my Nilsson fill for now—but “Spaceman” itself is undeniable. Though it’s just as much 70’s Bowie as “1941” is 60’s Monkees, “Spaceman” is also more than just a product of its time. Bowie’s then-influence, T. Rex, is also here—pitch down “Children of the Revolution” side-by-side with this, and you’ll see what I mean—but there’s a signature Nilsson whimsy to these near-nonsense lyrics that swings from sincere to just the right amount of goofy. I’m also realizing I’m a sucker for the strings sections in the rock of this era—I don’t know what it is about late-sixties recording, but the strings in songs like this, Bowie’s original “Let Me Sleep Beside You,” and The Troggs’ “Any Way That You Want Me” all sound just a little flat, and I love it. All seem to be reaching for this superhuman melodrama, but their timbre, whether intentional or not, really lends a human quality to all three. Even without overanalyzing them, the “Spaceman” cellos are just a blast—they alone are worth a listen.

Pairs Well With: “Children of the Revolution” (T. Rex), “Let Me Sleep Beside You” (David Bowie), “Any Way That You Want Me” (The Troggs)

DUSK | Chelsea Wolfe My god, it’s my second October song-blogging and I haven’t spoken even once about Chelsea Wolfe. Someone ought to fire me. Thankfully, I got the best possible nudge from the queen herself in the form of a new single to usher in Halloween season. For the uninitiated: Chelsea Wolfe isn’t so much a woman as she is a presence. On my nineteenth birthday, I had the pleasure of seeing her haunt the Stanley Hotel with just an acoustic guitar and a backup synth player, and let me tell you, it was unforgettably goth. Wolfe’s magic comes from the foggy atmosphere that follows her—any other performer pantomiming this level of detached witchiness couldn’t sell it, but hearing her ghostly voice over folk strums and metal shrieks alike feels like finding a seven-foot reaper in the mist. Guys, Chelsea Wolfe is so cool, and I’m so excited about her new single, “Dusk.” Admittedly, as I’ve grown both as an amateur music reviewer and an artist in my own right (we’re being witchy today. I’m manifesting), I’ve found myself more and more inclined to believe that every new album should mark growth for an artist—listening to Kate Bush’s entire discography condensed will do that. It’s a natural part of growth, but one which I’m beginning to wish I wasn’t paying attention to so closely—if my reviews of Wilco’s Cousin and my upcoming thoughts on Movie of the Week are anything to go by, I wish this standard that everyone must always outdo themselves hadn’t become so much of a necessity in my mind. Though Wolfe’s last album, Birth of Violence, felt like a shock to the system at the time—I certainly wouldn’t have seen a stripped-down folk album coming after her screamiest metal yet on Hiss Spun—I think I expected hints at another transformation, another era, from “Dusk.” What it gave us instead was a return to form—a song that may well have been cut from 2015’s Abyss. That’s not to say I don’t like “Dusk” by any means—Abyss is honest-to-god one of my favorite albums of all time, and the single itself is about as fuzzy and spooky as it gets. Still, I do wonder how Wolfe has grown in the last four years, and I’m hoping to find a glimmer of that wherever “Dusk” leads us. Then again, maybe Wolfe will always be that inimitable specter, silhouetted in tattered black—a constant and comforting reminder of the beauty to be found in the dark.

Pairs Well With: “After the Fall” (Chelsea Wolfe), “Phoenix” (De Staat), “Limbo” (Shakey Graves)

LIMBO | Shakey Graves MOVIE OF THE WEEK! OUT NOW! OUT, UM, THREE WEEKS AGO! I have no excuse for waiting as long as I have to talk about Shakey Graves’s fourth studio album (though closer to his, like, ninth, if you count all of his pre-studio compilations, EPs, and various reorganizations)—trust me, that will be remedied in the coming weeks. On my first listen to Movie of the Week, I can’t say I was disappointed, but I wasn’t wowed the way I thought I would be—call me crazy, but I think releasing my four favorite songs (of ten, excluding interludes) as singles starting a year and a half ago might be testing the limits of the hype-rdrive (sorry). I have a near-religious zealotry toward figuring out the exact formula for releasing singles that hype an album without spoiling its best parts—I have a hunch it’s a lot like cutting a good trailer, but that’s a story for another post. First the fall of western civilization, then my “unfortunately, genres suck” video that I like to talk so much about, then maybe we’ll get to album release order theory. For now, let’s just say as much as I really love “Ready Or Not,” “Evergreen” [Reviewed 07/28/2023], “Big in the World” [Reviewed 08/25/2023], and “Playing Along” [Reviewed 08/25/2023], I think I’d have loved the album as a whole even more if some of these singles had stayed surprises.

Even then, another reason why I initially felt Movie of the Week wasn’t quite what I’d hoped is that, well, a single album never could live up to this concept. Just look at the cover—Shakey’s fully thrust into a mad scientist cackle like he’s just cracked some forbidden law of music. Movie of the Week, after all, was never meant to be just an album—many of these pieces, as it turns out, were originally written for an undisclosed movie. As the story goes, Shakey’s demos were never used by the director because, basically, our man got too invested in it and made songs too moody for their intended movie. My hope, however wild, was that Alejandro himself would go rogue and make a movie of his own to accompany his orphaned soundtrack. The concept of Movie of the Week demands a more expansive project; without one, this release ranked below Roll the Bones and Can’t Wake Up for me, but with one, this album could be boosted to an all-time favorite. Fortunately for me, that’s exactly the huge reveal Shakey had up his sleeve. I give you: The Movie Machine, featured on shakeygraves.com (Shakey! Graves! Dot! Com!). This mad genius man and his mad genius band not only made their “director’s cut” of the album, but also dozens of different takes that, alongside a smattering of b-sides, instrumentals, and sound bytes, can be randomized to make a movie score for your own impossible movie. Just enter your genre into The Movie Machine, and behold one of thousands of possible combinations for your own unique twist on the album—I can vouch for it, because I’ve spent a cumulative six hours re-rolling the results for the optimal result (I know). In that time, I’m almost certain I’ve catalogued every single song available, and if you’re interested, I have an entire upcoming blog post busting The Movie Machine wiiiiide open to examine its contents (just as Shakey intended, I’m sure). I underestimated what a cornucopia Movie of the Week would be, and if my obsessive spiraling hasn’t already betrayed me, it’s become one of my favorite Shakey Graves works to date—if nothing else, it’s undeniably his most impressive endeavor. Today, though, let’s start with a much smaller scope—an introduction to the director’s cut, the band’s best version of Movie of the Week.

If we’re not counting instrumental interludes, “Limbo” was chosen to open Movie of the Week to fantastic effect. Though it’s technically the second track, I still think this one counts as a “prologue opener,” as per my previous criteria (there’s always more Max Todd Dot Com lore)—it starts fairly subdued, but sets a delightfully eerie mood in motion that defines the rest of the album. Of course, it’s “Evergreen” that really kicks off Movie’s momentum, but that’s why Limbo is such a perfect prologue—it tells a confined, slower, and more digestible story before the full album unfolds. Starting with a sad and sardonic piano ballad that wouldn’t be out of place in early (or late, but not in between) Will Wood work, “Limbo” hits some of the hardest lines of the album right off the bat—I always say this, but Shakey has quite a defined voice, and if “Doomed, entombed, exhumed with the rest of it / Put on display for the PhD candidates / To build a working model for where all the good times went/ And what was the point of it all” isn’t Shakey Graves, then I don’t know what is. Mortality and manipulative norms continue to concern our nonexistent protagonist through not just the song, but the entire album—one which could be a lot sadder, but instead nestles into a spookier sweet spot. Call it a guilty conscience, but I’ve always struggled to explain why darkness done right is so delightful for me—no matter how I define it, Limbo’s sudden launch into a body that’s simultaneously bitter, wistful, and witty is nothing short of awesome. After dangling on the precipice, the piano tumbles into this rumbling bass, almost like a loose-strung cello, that always gives me instant goosebumps. The remainder of the song teeters on synthy, as preceding EP Look Alive predicted, but the instrumentation never strays from the strumming guitars and tambourines that define Shakey’s signature. It’s a spooky soundscape, but the lyrics are what keep “Limbo” bitter—harmonizing with his low, spoken drone, his snarky “what a surprise, you’re never at a loss of words / I guess you are what you eat” always gets a smile out of me, especially when it’s reversed to “I guess I am what you eat” in a second verse. So good, dude, right? It even seems to turn the music sarcastic, with little jazzy piano interjections and cringing background yelps later on down the line. Still, there’s plenty of the intro’s sincerity to be had—the wistful chorus, “How low can you go […] Nobody cheered when they called your name / Rain or shine it’s all the same” followed by more of that soulful piano has this romantic quality almost befitting of a musical. If it wasn’t made for the theater, it certainly was for the opening credits of a movie—I immediately see slow-mo, nighttime shots obscured by slithering raindrops and the multicolored lights twinkling in them. Even if the prior singles currently rank higher than “Limbo” if only for the memories I’ve already made with them, what a god damn solid opener this is, right? So imagistic, lyrical, and grade-A snarky—as good an indicator as any of Shakey Graves’s visionary artistry.

Pairs Well With: “Loved Despite Great Faults” (Blonde Redhead), “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” (Spoon), “Skeleton Appreciation Day in Vestal, NY (Bones)” (Will Wood and the Tapeworms) [Reviewed 09/23/2022]

REALNESS | Mark Bradford I keep coming back to The Light Show for art inspiration—wait, didn’t we already do this? Ugh, I’m tired. Nighttime? More like bedtime. Go away.