Lighttime | Songs of the Week 10/06/2023
Against my better judgment, we’re doing two Songs of the Week for the two wolves inside you. Two Songs One Week? No. No, I don’t think I like that.
RED MOON | Big Thief Well, let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Big Thief’s got a new B-Side for “Vampire Empire” [Reviewed 07/28/2023] called “Born for Loving You,” and I can’t stand it. I really hate starting so negatively, but when you say “take me to the back of your pick-up truck / show me a thing or two” in earnest twang, don’t expect me to go easy. Admittedly, I’m not exactly country-curious, but I’d be just as close-minded as any Christian radio cowboy caricature if I wrote off the whole genre. I’m a huge fan of Wilco’s forays into country rock (see “Monday,” “Casino Queen,” or “Falling Apart (Right Now)”) as well as songs from The Black Crows and I Love You, and I’d be concerned for the soul of anyone who doesn’t love a little Johnny Cash or Marty Robbins. Still, I’d argue all of these examples stray far from the dominant form of country currently in vogue—what I think should be called “pop-country,” so long it still has the same humility and honesty of a megachurch (just gonna drop “Drunk on a Plane” here). It’s far from the first time Big Thief has fully flaunted their redneck past, but what irks me about “Born For Loving You” is a different breed of hillbilly. Like pop-country, it might as well be “if you ain’t country, you ain’t shit” spat by a scarecrow stuffed with hundred dollar bills. I don’t think Big Thief has sold out, but the style they’re imitating—for better or for worse—certainly isn’t rooted in the class or experience country once called home.
I could complain about pop-country all day, but that’d hardly be productive, especially when Big Thief offers other irresistible, country-esque morsels (though this one, to me, sounds a bit more Appalachian). In fact, I’m sort of fascinated by the fact that I adore a song like “Red Moon,” which has the aura of a rattlesnake barbecue. “Born For Loving You” has the southern twang of Bernie Sanders compared to “Red Moon.” I’d even venture to say that whole-hog commitment is exactly why “Red Moon” rocks—when so much of modern country sounds like a costume, it’s a delight to receive such a bona-fide, fiddling, hollering hoedown. Everything about this song feels organic, from Lenker and Meek’s offset harmonies to the scratchy, slippery fiddle strings—the frayed sort of violin you’d be lucky to witness a jig-dancing devil playing on a full-moon night. To me, there’s so much campfire warmth to this loose, joyous style, and it makes me nostalgic for mosquito-bitten bonfires I’ve never experienced myself. It’s the sort of song I wouldn’t feel embarrassed clapping along to, because even the musicians are having the time of their lives. While some of Lenker’s lyrics have a childhood reverence (I adore describing an encounter with mother nature as “I'm gonna leave town, there is someone to meet / She turns her head around a full 360” without outright saying the “she” in question is an owl), others are just endearingly silly—I laugh every time “open the screen door, talking with Diane Lee” is interjected with “That's my grandma!” (that is, in fact, her grandma). Call me righteous, but if last week’s TV Girl tirade is anything to go by, I’ve pretty peeved about imitating authenticity, so I’m happy to experience the real deal so emphatically.
Pairs Well With: “Big Indian” (The Dandy Warhols), “Dragon Eyes” (Adrianne Lenker), “Spud Infinity” (Big Thief) [Reviewed 08/25/2023]
EMBRACE THE CRIMSON TIDE | Elf Power Unfortunately, I haven’t historically been the most emphatic about Elf Power, but I don’t want that to come off the wrong way—like, shouldn’t all fantasy races matter? That’s a joke, everyone. That’s a joke. Looking back, I can sort of understand why I took so long to settle in with this song—its mid-tempo monotone never really leaves the octave to break into something bigger. I’m being serious when I say most of the instruments only ever play one or two notes for the entire song, and while I’m a fan of several songs that try this in one or two sections, the entire ensemble pacing in place sort of lost my patience on the first few listens. After all that, though—wow, what a build, not in the instruments, but in the intensity, the volume, and the vibration. As the single, trembling guitar chord buzzes louder like bagpipes, the rush stays steadily growing, like an approaching army. “Embrace the Crimson Tide” almost feels like driving past the foothills and suddenly realizing how close the mountains are—it’s that sudden feeling despite how predictable the journey has been that always has me saying “wait, holy crap, this is good.” Bonus points for creating one of the best transitions between, like, any song ever—you can barely tell the track has changed paired with Jónsi’s incredible “Sticks and Stones” from the end of How To Train Your Dragon, which makes me feel a lot of feelings. We’ll talk about it soon, don’t you worry yourself.
Pairs Well With: “Sticks and Stones” (Jónsi), “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty)” (Emperor X), “Words of a Fool” (Love & Rockets)
BE ALRIGHT | The Dandy Warhols Praising The Dandy Warhols after my TV Girl tirade (Max! Todd! Dot! Com! T! V! Girl! Ti! Rade!) is pretty rich, considering their own noxious hipster aloofness. I don’t have much to say in my defense—Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, an album title that should probably trip your pretentious senses, is still an all-time favorite of mine for its incredible creative range and still-joyous sarcasm. While I haven’t yet found a Dandy Warhols album that stacks up to the back-to-back bullseyes on Urban Bohemia, the sleepy melancholy of 2019’s “Be Alright” still always hits me hard. For how upbeat “Be Alright”’s composition may be, I’m always stunned by its delivery—lo-fi on the good days, heavy on the bad. All told, it’s a very danceable song, with its piercing, looped piano keys and bubbling background creating a blue but still-starry atmosphere. As the title might suggest, though, “Be Alright” sounds exhausted with keeping up a happy façade. Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s Portland drone suddenly sounds emotive, dipping even lower as he says “and I could die right now,” lingering a little too long before bouncing back up to clarify “but I wouldn’t mind / I would be alright.” The wordless chorus, too, turns pop chanting tired, with its “oohs” and “ahs” never sounding sharper than a schwa, with I think is a super interesting storytelling tidbit that uses phonics instead of words. I don’t know, maybe I’m overanalyzing this one—it’s always embarrassing to admit this, but I listened to this one a lot in the aftermath of a high school graduation breakup where I felt deeply betrayed but felt it was the mature thing to do to pretend was mutually amicable, which… I don’t know, sound familiar? No doubt, it’s a projection, but one that wouldn’t have been possible without such a lurid musical canvas. Even if you’re not feeling the angst, this one’s an indie-pop gem that’s always good for a nighttime walk or a lazy day.
Pairs Well With: “Sticks and Stones” (Jónsi), “I’m Fine (And Other Lies)” (Birdmask), “Caroline” (Arlo Parks) [Reviewed 09/01/2023]
INFINITE SURPRISE | Wilco AYO! NEW WILCO BAY BEE! Cousin is finally out, and I couldn’t be more… I don’t know, sheepish? I gave Cousin’s first single “Evicted” [Reviewed 08/25/2023] a pretty lukewarm reception, as it then sounded like if you averaged every Wilco song instead of doing something new. Even then, though, I gave myself a little leeway for the inevitable turnaround:
“Then again, like most mature musicians, the work of Wilco can be incredibly convincing on second and third listens, so I'm sure I'll find something to love.”
I always keep the receipts. As of now, I still haven’t fallen head over heels for “Evicted,” even with its delightful lyrics and insidiously catchy chorus—in most other cases, that would be enough, but this song hasn’t scratched the unreasonably high standard I hold for one of my favorite bands. A week after its release, I’m feeling largely the same about Cousin as a whole, though I’m still chewing—if my Cruel Country turnaround is anything to go by, I’ll love this album after a couple more hits. Right now, one thing I can say for sure is that, dude, Wilco can open a fucking album.
By far my favorite track of the bunch (and the most fitting of their art-pop label), “Infinite Surprise” just about brings me to my knees. Like “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” “Can’t Stand It,” “Art of Almost,” and “Bright Leaves” before it, “Infinite Surprise” steps up to a long lineage of openers that immediately stop you in your tracks. Musically, this one is full of surprises (as advertised). The song starts as though it’s transitioning out of a preceding track and immediately has me at attention. Then, Nels Cline’s guitar rends like the whine of ripping steel cables, with the fluidity of a bow but the sharpness of a pick. Finally, the song closes on headphone-destroying hail that sounds like a microphone put too close to popping popcorn, or my earbuds when they’ve been through the wash. All of this, backed by the slow crescendo of orchestral horns so fuzzy they could be hold music, reminds me of sifting through my mom’s scrapbook supplies before I knew anything about color theory (or anything at all, really. Except dinosaurs. Still taking dinosaur questions). It makes perfect sense corresponding with Cousin’s cover, Azuma Makoto’s “Frozen Flowers”—clashing colors caught practically boiling over beneath a milky sheen of ice, somehow making everything seem less chaotic. That’s the magic of Wilco.
Still, none of this would be fully synthesized without the sparse words scaffolding it all. Much as I’m always in awe of Jeff Tweedy as a musician, the man is a poet, through and through. It at first surprised me, then, to see how few words make up this song. Of course, those are rookie words—I’m far from the sort of mastery where someone can say everything with a sentence (case in point, this post), but Tweedy here has long since matured this far, reaching deep with the simple, building phrase “if you were only you / if I was only me / if you were only you / what would I be” followed by the repetition of “infinite surprise.” Like, I can’t say I know this whole, complex song just from these words, but with that blaring brass just beneath the fog and Cline’s guitar fighting free of music theory, I just… get it? I’ll have been with my lovely girlfriend for three years next week—the longest relationship I’ve had at this point—and “Infinite Surprise” can’t sum it up any better. There are a lot of complicated emotions at play, but for me, being in love is the infinite surprise—even as independent people, I will never be only me again, and neither will my girlfriend, because knowing each other so closely reveals who we are, what we have been, what we can be in one swirling, sizzling form. The infinite surprise is always finding new growths, new iterations, on who we were, and trusting each other to make these discoveries together. It’s cosmic, but contained—infinity in two finite brains—and I’m lucky to experience it. Thank you, Wilco, for giving me the song to articulate it.
Pairs Well With: “Everything Now” (Arcade Fire), “Before Us” (Wilco), “Nude” (Radiohead)
10,000-YEAR EARWORM TO DISCOURAGE RESETTLEMENT NEAR NUCLEAR WASTE REPOSITORIES (DON’T CHANGE COLOR, KITTY) | Emperor X Ohhhh baby. You want to know the real reason we’re doing a double feature this week? This song. This fucking song. I had all of these other songs (now in the Nighttime side) that I’ve been hoping to cover for weeks, but then this little kitty came along, and since I’m a slave to the color scheme… well, you know, I had to make a whole new graphic for five extra songs. Just more homework for you guys, I guess.
But first, a small segment on Long-Term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages, and I really do mean small, okay? The problem, it seems, is this: we as a species have committed such a grievous affront to nature by splitting the atom that, in order to protect our descendants, we must transcend our human time scale. Our culture, our symbols, are not equipped to face oncoming millennia—thanks to the erosive effects of pop culture, the Jolly Roger, for example, has no guaranteed warning power even just a century after its heyday, and radioactivity symbols are also approaching their expiration date. If only a few centuries can make a symbol at least uncertain, how can our biohazard warnings truly stay meaningful when nuclear waste will remain hazardous for the next ten thousand years? Ten thousand years ago was before the agricultural revolution as we know it and all of recorded history, by the way. There were still fucking Mammoths walking around ten thousand years ago. Just in case you were wondering how gravely we messed up here. There have been numerous proposed solutions, from foreboding architecture with shapes and sounds that trigger primal fear in passersby, to a Rosetta stone of concentric rings updated at consistent intervals, to just burying this waste as deep as humanly possible. I’ll direct you to the Wikipedia page and the Vox video for a good starting place, but the solutions are as numerous as they are bonkers. Today, though, we’re going to look into a personal favorite of mine, which was paid tribute to by musician Emperor X.
When surveyed on their response to this slow-burn crisis, author Françoise Bastide and semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed a two-pronged approach: hijack a constant older than recorded history, and adjust history accordingly. Step one of Bastide and Fabbri’s plan was to employ the help of a human companion older than agriculture itself: the domestic cat. Bastide and Fabbri first proposed spreading a dominant gene through the global cat population—benign, except when these cats wander (as they do) into derelict nuclear waste repositories. In the presence of radioactivity, these “ray-cats” would change the color of their fur, and flash their luminescent eyes. Though a borderline supernatural ability—especially in the wake of a societal collapse that erases all formal records of the gene sabotage—the inherent usefulness of this danger indicator would remain with the zeigeist in the form of folklore: mythology, idioms, and music all making casual or moral references to the fact that cats glow on bad land. To me, this is absolutely brilliant. Though I might be biased, it feels simultaneously so powerful and so dystopian to have grown into our own power, uniting both our conscious and unconscious mind to pragmatically deploy our underestimated strength: that of imagination, of the enduring archetypes we still follow because they are fundamental to the way we see the world. Who knows what could change in ten thousand or more years, and maybe all of this “collective unconscious” stuff is bullshit in favor of a mutable culture that can just be whatever, whenever I guess (it’s not), but for what it’s worth, I think these guys got closest to the actual crux of the problem. Of course, between all of these “authors” and “semioticians” and “theoretical physicists,” not one of them asked for my two scents, which is that we should just bury it as deep as humanly possible, sealed in a container only a civilization with our nuclear knowledge could crack, and pray no one ever finds it. Then, do the folklore stuff as a failsafe, but short of that, I’m not sure any warning sign, however well-meaning, will be revered enough for the most arrogant idiot to ignore. I’m asking for royalties until the fall of the American empire, by the way. Or… maybe I should ask for those a little farther out, right? I want to get paid for a little longer than the next five years. Anyway, in the end, maybe “growing up” for our species will be facing the consequences of what we’ve created, no matter how many times we warn ourselves, but I suppose that’s where we’d stray into essay territory. For now, we have an equally exhaustive song title to go through here…
While Bastide and Fabbri’s plan never won out (tragically), their story has left a lasting cultural impact (one which, like the Long Term Nuclear Waste Warning Booty Shorts, could be equally helpful for future archaeologists or hurtful to the long-term efficiency of these tools. Okay, ha ha, they’re funny, I’m lame, etc). On the podcast 99% Invisible, which discusses all sorts of other background architectural details that are designed to subliminally assist us, musician Emperor X was commissioned to create ray-cat folk music, and let me tell you, this dude delivered on everything except conciseness (a problem I have never had, will never have, and, to clarify, currently don’t have). In his album
10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories, Emperor X has created a folk song bunker to withstand the test of time; an informational time capsule in the form of a nursery rhyme he calls “cloying” enough to spread into nooks in listeners’ subconscious. That sounds sinister, but if it is, you can consider me a member of the dark hoard, because I have been 100% corrupted by “Don’t Change Color, Kitty.” Like a song from an alternate timeline, “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” has a simple purpose: ward off settlers and their cats in the distant future from land near nuclear waste repositories, as described in the lyrics:
“Don't change color, kitty.
Keep your color, kitty.
Stay that pretty gray.
Don't change color, kitty.
Keep your color, kitty.
Keep sickness away.
Don't change color, kitty.
Keep your color, kitty.
Please, 'cause if you do,
or glow your luminescent eyes
we're all gonna have to move.”
There is no why, no explanation for this phenomenon; just common sense passed down like any other indigenous knowledge. My girlfriend (a linguist) and I have had such a good time dissecting what we think works about this song as a pragmatic piece. While I musically like it a lot more than she does (catboy behavior), we both agree that the lyrics, at first, sound too fast to be easily picked up. That said, I’ve had a surprisingly easy time remembering them after five or six listens—not to mention the concept, which obviously stuck firmer than a speaker of the house (apparently). After some further reading, however, it seems Emperor X was a step ahead, claiming that the chords, not the words, were this song’s preservative. Also included on 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories are multiple versions of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” in various states of digital decay, several of which are instrumentals. In his notes, Emperor X imagines that even if the words are long lost to time, a sort of instructive dance could be taught alongside the song that would outlive even the English language. That sort of stuff is absolutely fascinating to me, and if you’re as enthralled as I am, definitely check out the annotations for 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories on Bandcamp—there’s lots of goodies to be found, including weaponized aeolian sounds to drive Nuclear Waste Site Explorers to insanity and, even eerier, an extremely data-minimized, Acapella version of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” presented as the last vestige of our current civilization, sitting buried on some ancient hard drive. A confrontation with being utterly forgotten—not just you, but your family, and their family, and every name, place, and facet of normalcy in what seemed like their normal lives—might be a haunting place to end my inconsequential music wrap-up this week, but as I said, there’s a strange and unnamable feeling I get when on the other side of the warning sign. After all, not every name from 10,000 years ago has been forgotten—how often do we still speak of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and their fight with the dreaded Humbaba? Granted, they’re no household names, but they’re a hell of a lot more recognizable than I may ever be. Empirical pragmatists may dismiss the reliability of stories and the indigenous knowledge imbedded therein, citing their hearsay mutability as something to be distrusted. Yet, zooming out, we can see that stories’ adaptability is their strength—for every branch that deviates from the trunk, there will always be a preserved center; what one might even call a soul. We are nothing but our stories—look no further for magic.
Pairs Well With: “Holland, 1945” (Neutral Milk Hotel), “Embrace the Crimson Tide” (Elf Power), “The Shuffleman” (Robyn Hitchcock) [Reviewed 08/25/2023]
REALNESS | Mark Bradford I keep coming back to The Light Show for art inspiration—a traveling exhibit my girlfriend and I saw at the Denver Art Museum on our second date almost three years ago. Maybe it’s that nostalgia haze, but I felt pretty floored by almost everything there—even the abstract styles I’m not usually so connected with. While I can usually appreciate abstract art for its textures, colors, and colorful connoisseurs, in the case of Mark Bradford’s “Realness,” there’s not much I’d normally connect with—not much, except for the striking, strict line that splits this otherwise chaotic piece in two. Often, a name like “Realness” would only earn pretentious points with me, but it doesn’t feel contrived to see the point being made here—to me, the graceless, sudden division between otherwise chaotic and organic colors says it all. Plus… that aesthetic, right? Mark Bradford was for sure thinking of these double feature graphics when he painted “Realness,” which makes him the realest, imo.