SONGS OF THE WEEK 09/08/2023

Today, we’re playing whack-a-mole with goofy YouTuber synth while I try to talk about serious, contemplative songs. Or maybe it’s the other way around? I don’t know, how are the kids feeling? Is optimistic nihilism still in vogue or are we back to pessimistic nihilism? Guess I have to just go for it. Okay, Squarespace… don’t you let me down…

I LOVE THE SOUND OF SCREAMING BABIES | Sanguinarius (Or treatsforbeasts. Or Roii. We’ll get to it.) A living fossil on the late-stage internet (and a true oddball at that), shoring up a treatsforbeasts video on YouTube feels like meeting a deep-sea creature, and that’s exactly why I love him. Debuting in 2009 with the still-unexplained “who wants to gnaw on human bones,” treatsforbeasts remained an anonymous, eldritch Santa Claus for years, occasionally dropping down the chimney with some 30-second, skin-crawling shitpost before disappearing in a cloud of MS Paint ink. Even then, he was undeniably a diamond in the rough—an artist who creepypasta youtubers often tried to box in horror and who zoomers tried to box in comedy, but who defies conventions at every turn. Perhaps the beasts’s biggest defiance was, after over a decade of posting bizarre animations and skits in the shadows, releasing a full album of serious and sincere metal songs under the name Sanguinarius, and it’s actually great, to boot. It’s the reason I still love the creature behind treatsforbeasts and Sanguinarius well past my esoteric internet days—dude seems dedicated to his art, and there’s an equal sincerity behind both his Sanguinarius projects and his most grotesque treatsforbeasts satire. Still, this explanation is starting to feel like explaining who the Space Jockey was or defining where The Force comes from, so I’ll leave plenty of treasures unturned for only the bravest amongst you to dredge up. For now, let’s start simple with my main man, Roii.

Roii is a recurring character in the vast and murky treatsforbeasts universe, first appearing a whopping ten years ago in 2013 (or, allegedly, 1993?) with his goth anthem “I Screaming Inside My Head.” Though his desperate proclamations of “I don’t can laugh no more” resonated with millions of fans, his confession “it like my name no longer Roii” followed by seven years of silence had some fans worried that Roii was lost all too soon. Oh no, oh boy. Those that weren’t there to witness it can scarcely imagine the world’s reaction to Roii’s shocking, surprise return in 2o20. In the time we needed him most, he rose from the grave of obscurity with a new single, “I Love the Sound of Screaming Babies,” in treatsforbeasts’s anthology film, “The Beast Is Dead.” Watch from 11:35-16:52 to witness the music video that put Roii back on the map, plus a bonus interview with the man himself on his time collaborating with Max Todd Dot Com regulars Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Consider this my word of warning to tread no further unless you’re ready for a coprophilia-based satire of organized religion. Like, at least take a breath before you go that far. Grab a snack? No, actually, don’t grab a snack. Wait on the snack.

There’s seriously so much to love in this video—I always have to play it twice because I’m laughing too hard to hear anything the first time. Once again, it’s not my place to spoil the details, so I won’t say more beyond the fact that the synth player with the baby mask absolutely shredding while Roii fervently steps on his foot to the beat with a vein ready to pop is somehow funnier every time I see it. As with all of treatsforbeasts’s recent work, “I Love the Sound of Screaming Babies” is delightful on all levels. If the title wasn’t clear enough, the goofy melodica crescendo and Roii’s stiff, leather-pants dancing should cement that this is taking the piss out of eighties and nineties goth-rock, but behind this sardonic veneer is a palpable passion for the genre. Sanguinarius’s synth work, dark tones, and production that’s almost too good to be funny betrays a genuine love of goth and metal, so much so that I wonder if Roii is meant to serve as a parody of Sanguinarius’s similar, serious work more so than early Ministry, Sisters of Mercy, or Fields of the Nephilim. I, for one, see this as an absolute win—when I realize I’ve stopped laughing and stayed smiling during the synth solo, that’s how I know I’ve found a real gem. Roii’s work, along with the rest of the oddities across treatsforbeasts’s oeuvre, can be purchased from Sanguinarius’s bancamp, as well as at select petrol stations in Slovenia.

Pairs Well With: “Hi” (Sanguinarius), “Baby Screams” (The Cure), “Black Planet” (Sisters of Mercy)

SOMETHING I CAN NEVER HAVE | Nine Inch Nails Speaking of which, let’s check back in on Trent Reznor, always skipping and smiling, saying “hee-hee, hah-hah, hoo-hoo, heh-heh,” eh? I’d hate to be the shit in his sunshine, but the fact of the matter is, no matter how much it means to me, I made some gripes and grievances about Nine Inch Nails’s debut album Pretty Hate Machine this June, and I’m here to roll one of those back. Despite its genre-defying and genre-defining sound, the edgy lyricism of Pretty Hate Machine wasn’t nearly as revolutionary, and while this wallowing honesty may add to the appeal for many, I sometimes can’t hold back the secondhand embarrassment when I hear stuff like “grey would be the color / if I had a heart.” Indeed, this defeated moping is perhaps what made “Something I Can Never Have” my most-skipped song on Pretty Hate Machine, even on full listens. Granted, I always “got it,” especially at fifteen and freshly heartbroken, but the tender sadness of this sleepy, piano lament was, in all honesty, sometimes too much for a casual listen, and I eventually sealed it away on some military-grade moping playlist to never be heard from again. After all those years in stasis, it somehow lost its potency—all that remained in my memory were dramatic lyrics and feelings I’d thought I’d outgrown, or maybe feelings I was afraid to revisit. It turns out, accidentally revisiting “Something I Can Never Have” while on solid emotional ground was just another lesson in Reznor’s innate musical wizardry. While the piano piece itself certainly tugs at the heartstrings, what makes “Something I Can Never Have” so suffocatingly dark is its atmosphere, where Reznor always works his magic. In this case, what sunk me back into years-old despair was the truly dread-dripping groans that grumble past the last chorus, like sputtering planes or some predatory backroad. On good speakers, I find myself absolutely chilled by these trembling sounds that manifest Reznor’s metastasizing self-hatred better than any words ever could. Credit where credit is due, Reznor’s rasped and desperate vocals are a perfect compliment to such a sinister, churning soundscape, like tarred seabirds lurching over an ashen ocean. Though I can’t claim to even know the brink of Reznor’s past struggles, I’m no stranger to self-hatred, and the rotting, clawing trenches that these sounds evoke feel all-too-familiar in my tensing muscles. I’m a writer, and a self-conscious one at that—at my worst, I’m too meticulous with not just my words, but the words of others. “Something I Can Never Have” and the rest of Pretty Hate Machine teach me time and time again to pay attention to what transcends words—in this case, the music says everything so beautifully, so powerfully, it’s practically telepathic.

Pairs Well With: “Exit Music (For A Film)” (Radiohead), “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Tori Amos covering Nirvana), “NOTHING EVER ENDS” (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)

VICTIMHOOD | Björk While we’re down in the trenches, why don’t we dig a little deeper? Maybe get so lost that we emerge newly defined on the other side. 2023 hasn’t quite been the Björkstravaganza I set out for it to be, but after starting this year with a pedulum-swing on Fossora, I’ve decided I have still more to say about this alien album after the release of a video for its scariest song, “Victimhood.” While I thought Björk was eons beyond mere primate comprehension, she seems to have met her match in animator Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, and the results are captivating beyond anything I could’ve imagined.

Seriously, this video has a chokehold on me—I’ve watched it five or six times now. It’s a testament to the virulence of Björk’s archetypal dream-tongue, which first captured Friðriksdóttir while playing in her dreams, who has in turn spread this celestial thought-form through her work. However, as Big Thief put it perfectly—“when I say celestial / I mean extraterrestrial / I mean accepting the alien you’ve rejected in your own heart.” It’s struck me more and more how deeply alien our home world is—without and within—and of course, within is where Björk, as always, aims her telescope with this haunting piece. In this case, Björk reflects on her now-scabbed divorce trauma, and the tumorous complexes she must now shed in the storm’s blackened aftermath. Where “Something I Can Never Have” feels misted with the cold spray of hateful waves, touched by the tremor of an inner rebellion, “Victimhood” feels like a mouthful of fetid soil, sunken fossil-deep in some mythological struggle. Though it resonates at such a cosmic scale, “Victimhood” is deeply personal—arguably, the more cosmic, the more personal, though such a mystic quality isn’t easy to balance. In an interview, Björk discusses the psychological aftermath of victimhood on her identity:

"She now feels physically rooted, and emotionally, she says, there is no divorce trauma left to dredge. “I’m over it,” she says, waving a hand. “It’s absolutely finished.” Nonetheless, after wormholing in psychology podcasts, she became fascinated with Jungian victimhood archetypes, trotting them out at dinner parties and insisting that friends, too, identify their flavor of victimhood. Her own complex—deferring her needs to benefit staff, friends, and family—creates a “topsy-turvy” headspace, she says. “You think you’re being the hero, but you’re actually sacrificing something, and then you become a victim.”

In other words, her self-defense mechanisms stayed shambling far after their obsolescence, crumbling away her sense of self in favor of this unconsciously-gratifying victim mindset. It’s such an insightful and mature realization that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard expressed in musical form, and one which I can’t imagine was easy to trawl up for dissection. As niche as this subject might sound, its confrontations of such psychologically skeletal ideas of identity, trauma, and most importantly, aftermath are probably what make this song so sticky in others’ psyches despite sounding so inaccessible. While my conscious mind can’t identify anything even vaguely pleasant about the atonal foghorn blasts that harmonize with Fossora’s clarinets off-beat from the clicking percussion and Björk’s seemingly improvisational vocals, but this murky instrumentation is another emotion transcribed directly to sound—this time, the feeling of trudging through psychological work in treacherous, uncharted waters. It’s not scary because it’s dangerous—it’s scary because it’s daunting, even if the end result is one epiphany closer to some personal nirvana.

Pairs Well With: “Mycelia” (Björk), “Erde” (Chelsea Wolfe), “Object Input” (Ben Salisbury & Suvi-Eeva Äikäs)

SEARCH ‘N’ RESCUE | R. R. Slugger Okay, and we’re back to weirdo Youtubers and happy times! See? Full circle, excluding Harry Nilsson, which I should do more often anyway. It’s intentional whiplash, okay? You’re just not on my level yet. Pretentious as I may sound, though, I’m not the sort of person to judge someone by their taste in escapism—pick your poison, it’s a free country! True pablum is out there, and it roves in sprawling flocks, but I’d still defend the vast majority of escapist media, especially when it comes from a place of true passion. Personally, I’ve been struggling to shake off a pretty crippling YouTube addiction this year, and while I certainly regret the majority of the time I’ve wasted watching insipid breakdowns and petty complaints about media I’m never going to consume anyways, there are a few passion projects I’ve missed since quitting cold turkey (except, of course, watching the “Victimhood” video six times)—Captain among them Disillusion, but Chief among them the intrepid Lego connoisseur, one R. R. Slugger. A music teacher by day, Slugger is one of the most earnestly enthusiastic, creative, and dedicated YouTubers I’ve stumbled across in years, not only writing articulate and well-researched videos on now-vintage Lego themes, but also incorporating his own stop-motion and synth soundtracks into every episode—the latter can be downloaded for free on his Bandcamp, by the way, which I find criminally generous. It’s the sort of work ethic I aspire to have on the best of days—a pure and unadulterated creative drive which I haven’t felt since I was a carefree kid—all sourced from genuinely impassioned philosophy about imagination, play, and the Lego group’s fair-weather relationship with the two as a for-profit company. Even though I struggle to find much application for Slugger’s often-archival knowledge in my own life, his retrospective reviews are each a little piece of art—the sort of production value and global creativity you only get with such rare YouTubers as Contrapoints, the aforementioned Captain, or the earlier-aforementioned treatsforbeasts, though he belongs in a very different corner of the house party. One listen to any track off of R. R. Slugger’s Rock Raiders Mix Tape is evidence enough of this wholehearted dedication—fan music for a 90’s toy theme has no right rocking this hard (whether or not raiding rocks is involved, whatever that means). Like, come on—there’s synth whimsy aplenty to accompany these interplanetary sci-fi miners, but the industrial base and guitar solo feel far more atmospheric than I thought these sets could warrant. I may have an extra soft spot for this series having grown up with its spiritual Lego successor, Power Miners, but the talent here is undeniable, and the heart even more so, and I am touched by this absolute blossoming of both.

Pairs Well With: “Oresome!” (R. R. Slugger), “Debunk Breakdown” (Captain Disillusion), “Squares” (The Beta Band)

1941 | Harry Nilsson Professionally, I hope to avoid any and all comparisons to John Lennon, but he and I do have one thing in common: we’ve both been on a wild, months-long bender with Harry Nilsson that has taken us to many shameful places we’d rather not return to. As they say: never go with a hippie to a second location. Nevertheless, I have Skidoo’d with a few less-than-regretful tracks that I’m begrudgingly quite happy to have come away with. One such song, “1941,” is quite fun for me because it’s an early glimpse at Nilsson’s oddball sensibilities slicked behind the British invasion sheen of the late sixties. Before I go on applauding that, though, afford me some cynicism first. Apple Music’s praise for later album Nilsson Schmilsson says that “[f]or years, Nilsson had labored at mannered, orchestrated pop music that was extraordinary but often seemed to stifle its author’s sense of mischief[,]” to which I immediately raised my eyebrow. Much as I love Nilsson’s weirdo moments, reading this pre-“Coconut” redemption earned a pretentious scoff from me—maybe I’m just too far gone, but people who call Harry Nilsson “weird music” feel like the same people who’d say they like surrealism and they’re talking about Wandavision or something. It’s not that I think there are lesser and superior weirdos or anything—come one, come all, as far as I’m concerned—but, for all its wonderfully strange range, Nilsson Schmilsson sounds more prominently like seventies sleaze which, for me, even backwards-corrupts Nilsson’s later records. Somehow, this intermingled with my initial skepticism upon hearing the opening organ of “1941,” which at first sounded more like a pastiche of a Beatles pastiche more than the Beatles pastiche it was trying to be. Still, this was a pretty big red flag that I was looking for excuses to dislike a song that I was actually really enjoying, and, like Nilsson’s producers, I decided to let go—what can I say? I’m a sucker for the sixties.

So, that was nasty enough. What’s there to like about “1941?” Much like the Monkees, though it’s clearly riding the coattails of the British invasion, there’s a charming sense of self here that starts to emerge from beneath the bowl cut. Much like the later “Coconut,” “1941” is another looping song disguised in a linear ladder of years, though these lyrics are far less nonsensical. The regal horns and organ of this song are pretty awesome, too—I’m not sure how, but whatever theatrical magic they’re working even lead me to accept Nilsson’s sudden urge to scat all over the chorus with rolling, British r’s (which is undeniably very him, but still sort of reminds me of this). I’ve been pretty harsh on it thus far, but “1941” will inflate me into a pompous, monarchy sympathizer twirling my cane and adjusting my monocle once fall’s London fog rolls in, and that’s coming from an American song. For a “mannered, orchestral pop” musician, you’re not doing too shabby so far, baby Nilsson.

Pairs Well With: “When I’m Sixty-Four” (The Beatles), “Look Around You” (Jim Noir), “There Goes A Tenner” (Kate Bush)

UNTITLED (COSMOS SERIES) | Paul Kontny Speaking of mining (I liked “rock raiding” better), I may have exhausted most of my Denver Art Museum picks, which means it’s time to quarry the Kirkland Museum for all that it’s worth. Paul Kontny’s piece of cosmic impressionism may remind me of looking out a rainy car window without my astigmatism contacts, but it’s a beautiful array of blues that are too rich to stop drinking in. Maybe don’t actually drink anything that’s that color, especially not Sudafed—the grapes are a lie. Paul Kontny himself has a fascinating story worth reading about on the Kirkland’s collections page—or, better yet, in person. That’s right, you, get up! Go for a walk! I’m projecting my insecurities onto you now! It’s like a dinner party with post-divorce Björk! Go, go!