I woke this morning with the grim specter of some form of restlessness spookily hanging from the ceiling directly above me, pointing one bony finger at me, taunting and teasing like a shitty five-year-old bully that's never been disciplined. This noxious little demon followed me into the shower and proceeded to inject a thousand of the most perfect words ever assembled directly into my brain. But, as with most morning routine-based inspirations, those particular heavenly turns of phrase had all but floated away by the time I made it out of the confines of the washroom, leaving little more than a vague recollection of whatever guidance I had been afforded.
Almost too quickly, I responded by creating pantsformation, an disturbingly similar site that I was determined to keep simple, cool and effective, as much for my own sanity as it was for keeping the interest of the people that visited. pantsformation changed my life, quite literally. Outside of receiving a burst of support from two of my biggest heroes (merlin and jez-burrows), gaining a weirdly large amount of great and loyal followers and receiving more than my fair share of kind words from the musicians that I was writing about, the site is also responsible for introducing me to the incredible woman that would become my wife last year and the soon-to-be mother of my very first child next year. Yet still, I felt uneasy every time that I signed on and attempted to write about some piece of music that was smashing me into dust and shards of pure light and happiness.
Thus, expants was born and, as you might have noticed, seemingly abandoned after a couple months of somewhat regular activity.
Here's the damage: I've spent a good deal of my teenage and adult life combined going on and on and on about music to any one of my friends that is willing to listen at any given moment. I've spent a full afternoon devoted to displaying my distaste for the music of Stephen Malkmus to a close friend that happens to be one of the biggest Pavement fans alive. I've written in detail about my extreme love for the debut album by Kris Kristofferson while sitting in a pool of my own summer sweat and heat stink, only to delete every single sentence out of fear and overwhelming boredom with my own voice. I've kept my wife awake on too many nights to count just to lovingly gush about music she has yet to hear or has no memory of hearing in the first place.
In truth, these silly little blogs that I put together over the past five years were little more than an extension of that unexplainable, often all-consuming need to exercise my extreme appreciation of the music, words and art that are being created now and in days past. They've been a way to write sometimes long-winded, sometimes brief and sometimes cringe-worthy love letters to their creators, letting them know they have been heard. They've never been done for attention, never been done for personal gain and never been done to earn praise.
Earlier this year, I made a small post about an relatively new, somewhat unknown artist that was in the process of slowly releasing brand new music. This artist had been written about quite favorably by a few of the major online music publications and for very good reason, the music he was creating was impeccable. So, I wrote about one of these new songs and gave my own explanation as to why it was beautiful, uplifting and freeing to me personally. Within five minutes, the artist had already re-posted my article to his own personal Tumblr, re-posted it to his music project's Tumblr, followed me on Tumblr and Twitter, retweeted the link to his followers and publicly replied to me on Twitter to humbly thank me for my ever-so-kind words.
However, in the background, quite a different story erupted. In my post, I had used a photo that the artist himself had posted as the cover art to the song that I had posted. I did a quick bit of research to gather the name of the photographer behind the photo in order to give the proper credit and tagged said photographer in my post. Soon after the artist's barrage of positive social network notifications flooded my phone's screen, the artist delivered a message to me in my Tumblr inbox declaring that by tagging the photographer responsible for the cover art he had used, I had made things incredibly difficult for him and that I was little more than a waste of space. Apparently, he had not informed the photographer that he had been using his photo to market his music without permission and that somehow, by me crediting the photographer, I was the true asshole in this situation.
If I'm being sort of honest, my first inclination was to delete the post I had made entirely and forget about it. If I'm being incredibly honest, my real first inclination was to delete my blog entirely and send the artist a expletive-laden treatise on all the different ways that I wanted to burn his whole life to the ground. But instead, I let it sit. I paused and chose to reassess how I felt about his ridiculous letter at a later date. And now, here we are, three months or so down the road. I haven't made a single post since receiving the message from the artist. I haven't written a response to him. I haven't exploded my existence.
The universe tends to drop things into our laps at strange moments, at times prophetic and other times without sense or understanding. Soon after I left this morning's early burst of inspiration in the dust, I stumbled across a post that a friend of mine had written in regards to the sheer frustration that she had been feeling in regards to living in and writing a blog for a world so focused on everything looking impossibly perfect in a time and place that is anything but perfect. The pressure placed on "lifestyle" bloggers to provide a constant flow of flawless content on every form of social media available that lives up to or exceeds the output of her "competition" had become so tiresome and soul-crushing to my friend that the urge to blow up everything she'd created and live a life of bandwith-less solitude was mighty and powerful.
This so closely mirrored the anxious, angry feeling that possessed me upon receiving such public praise and such private damnation from an artist that I had come to respect creatively. The two-faced nature of his action left me wondering why I ever felt the need to write a single word about anything that I loved or appreciated. I had attempted to write about something I cared for and hoped that people would listen to only to have my support returned as a slap to the face. The entitlement and arrogance of his words baffled me and turned me against doing something that I love.
That ends today.
Instead of turning and running to a new location to broadcast my thoughts or giving up entirely, I'm staying right here. I'm going to post anything and everything that I love to anyone that will look and listen. I know that in the scope of things, my voice is quite a small one amongst millions of louder, dominant voices, but I can promise you that I will do my best to make mine a voice that you should pay attention to and I will never apologize for the things that I love or the ways that I show my appreciation of them.
"I gave you apples from our old tree. I gave you wisdom under the sun. I gave you something that we could not see."
As a child, I spent every Sunday with my back pressed against the hard, wooden pews of the Catholic church that I would attend with my father. My dad's faith was strong in a way that presented itself more like a long-held obligation to his family's beliefs than to his own and I followed suit in the time-honored, mirrored fashion of a doting son. Over time, what little faith I had to begin with melted away entirely, but my appreciation for the rhythm of the language used in the ceremonies of mass, my love of the dark, minor key dirge of the gospels and the frightening pull towards the bits of art that dotted the walls and vestibules of the church never escaped and continues to enthrall me. I would stand on tiptoes, desperate to get just a little bit closer to the sounds of the brief bits on Latin that were sprinkled into the priest's melodic rendition of the presentation of the body and blood of Christ.Â
Sean McMahon's investigation of the inner workings of his own personal faith have resulted in a gorgeous, daring collection of six songs that gush with a level of honesty that few of us are bold enough to share with anyone, let alone the entirety of the internet. As the gospel of "No, It's Not" continues to ramp itself up and up and up, you can feel the fire, the fervor and the trepidation that rests uncomfortably in McMahon's soul. It's an incredibly moving piece that's part of a much larger story that deserves as much attention as it can possibly muster.
[The Lamb EP is available now on Workman Song's Bandcamp] [Photo: Unknown]
"You choose the best string to pull on, then we move about to your song."
We age at a disturbing pace, one that we often aren't even aware of until it's far too late. The usual excuses apply: our faces are buried in our work, our thoughts are firmly focused on what other people think of the weight we've either lost or gained, our love is reserved for made-up characters in an apocalyptic fantasy world broadcast once a week, our happiness is rooted in the slim hope that everyone is at least a little unhappier than we are.
"Without A Face" tramples upon the belief that you are too old for anything. It's a thumb to the nose of age and deterioration as a barrier between us and anything. Luluc uses their three and a half minutes brilliantly to create a child-like, uneasy tension elegantly bears down upon you, never once letting up and yet, it finds a way to soothe every crazy-making thought trapped in your mind.
[Passerby drops July 15, 2014 on Sub Pop] [Photo: Unknown]
A quick journey to the record store this morning provided a significant amount of joy from procuring a copy of the beautiful, new box set of Songs: Ohia singles, while also serving as another stark, white reminder that it's been just over a year since the world lost Jason Molina.
Just before heading out the door, I stumbled across Jason Evans Groth's diaries from time that he spent touring with Jason in Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. when I was floored and saddened by a particular passage in his writing:
"In 2009 Jason always seemed as if he was on the brink. As evidenced by stories you’ll hear of anyone who ever toured in his band at any point of his career, he could be a handful, but he was also hilarious, generous, efficient (at least when it came to getting the hell out of clubs he didn’t want to be in), awake early, talkative, clever - a smart-ass little brother and big brother rolled into one. Especially by the time we were on the bus, Jason was still all of these things, but if I may use the heavy-handed metaphor of Jason Molina as a beautifully detailed pencil drawing that depicted a complex individual carefully treading the line between absolute light and absolute dark, that pencil drawing had been smudged considerably and had been soaked in alcohol, and all of those delicate lines swirled around into a sometimes incomprehensible shadow of his former self."
During his short life, the music and words that Jason Molina crafted engaged and haunted me in equal measure by speaking to a part of my heart that had yet to find an opening out into the glare and blare of the world. His path through existence and the creations he graced us with have continued to teach me and inform me every single day and have been present at the most meaningful days in my own life. The earth is a better place because of him and a degree or two colder each day without him.
[Journey On: Collected Singles (1995-2002) is available now on Secretly Canadian] [Photo: Steve Gullick]
Chet Faker // "1998" // Directed: Domenico Bartolo
"Take my good word, turn it backward, turn it back on me."
The louder you shout, the more likely it is that no one will believe what you are saying. It's a rarity for grace, dignity and sincerity to spend even a few fleeting moments together these days and "1998" has all three of them clasping hands and raising hell with one another.
[Built On Glass is available now on Downtown/Future Classic]
"Because here things go from gray to gray and back to gray again and they get green and go to gray and go back to gray again."
Early this morning, as he pulled the contents of his life around the landscape of Idaho in a rented U-Haul truck, my best friend sent me a brief, but meaningful text message that read: "I really wish I had a CD player right now." As he passed highway signs emblazoned with the names of cities like Boise, Coeur d'Alene and Twin Falls, he longed to hear that state's unadorned heroes, Built To Spill, in the same scratched glory that he and I had first experienced them as we battled with the quickness of our youth.
He and I never saw eye to eye on the band that would later earn arguably more fame and more glory than their influential forefathers, but lord knows that I pushed them onto him as much as I possibly could in hopes that it would be one more thing in a long list of treasures that we held onto together.
Almost every single person that I grew up to be close with, played music with or just had a passing acquaintanceship with had some sort of monumental entry story when it came to Modest Mouse. And while each of our tales felt individually magical, I'm pretty sure that we all secretly believed that ours held the most meaning or the most impact on shaping who we would become.
It was my sixteenth birthday and I was trapped in the sweaty student center of a local community college with two friends and an ex-girlfriend. I was desperate for escape from the sounds of the pathetic attempt at disco revival perpetrated by the first opening band and the painful awkwardness of the company I had chosen that night. Before I could attempt to weasel out of the rest of the show, a kid that I'd seen around school hopped up on stage and dropped a sentence that I have yet to forget to this day, partly for it's idiocy, but mostly for what happened immediately after he was groaned off the stage by the restless teenage crowd. "Next up is a band that used to call themselves Humble Rat, but now go by the name, Modest Mouse..." As the last ridiculous word of his attempt at humor stopped echoing, the slow burning "Tundra/Desert" abruptly began and by the time the thrush of guitar and the pounding kick drum of the song's second half graced my ears, I had already been obsessed for a minute and a half.
I wandered home that night with a copy of This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About stuffed in the back pocket of a pair of worn-out corduroys I had stolen from my dad. That same copy of the record accompanied my wife and I this past fall as we tore down the Pacific Coast on our honeymoon, showing her the landmarks of my youth and the touchstones of all those endless tours taken by the band that inspired that longing, lonesome sound that still disturbs and excites me in equal quantities.
I had never been able to hear "Head South" without thinking of my best friend and his incomparable allegiance to the Pacific Northwest, but as both of our lives have forged ahead over the years, situations have changed and our respective homes have moved further and further away from the origin we both share with the song, it's ties to who I am and who I was have evolved, it's cast of characters has grown and the depth of it's meaning is unparalleled.
[This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About was released April 16, 1996 on Up] [Photo: Pat Graham]
Courtney Barnett // "Anonymous Club" // Directed: Celeste Potter
The slow burn of a one-time only view from a train window. Landscapes dotted with trees, skies accented with stars and nightmare monsters made friendly and inviting through warm, beautiful and pulsating animation. A true delight that creates a perfect alchemy of reality and imagination.
[The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas is available now on House Anxiety/Marathon Artists]
"And I wrote the truth, you read it one last time. And I have the proof for the rest of our goddamn lives."
The urgency, the panic to get your version of events out into the world, whistling through the ears of the masses is, at times, unyielding. That need to be at the top of whatever food chain still exists amongst your acquaintances can keep you struggling to secure a single moment's rest. That wild desperation that leads you to pile lie on top of lie on top of lie until you are perched atop a mountain that you cling to as nothing more than a mere meaningless molehill.
"For You" wields a massive smack to the face of dishonesty and in the process, makes it look effortless, though the distinct feverish agony present shows this particular misery was anything but easily earned. There is music that can match your mood, pull you deeper into the gloom, give you the comfort that your pain has somehow been equaled. And then there are songs like "For You" that elevate you, inspire you, destroy the flatline that is your condition and force you to turn everything upside down in joyful exuberance.
[Dalliance drops June 3, 2014 on Slumberland] [Photo: Unknown]
"Is there a weight that you're trying to unload here? But you just can't get it, you can't get it off now."
This is a last desperate gasp for air. It's a frenzied gallon of sweat left on upon a dimly lit stage in a town that you've already forgotten the name of. It's a shaky pair of nervous hands gripping the edge of a highway overpass. It's the lunge for that first kiss when you know you don't have a shot. It's panic and tension given a voice and put to sound. It's the way things should always be.
[More Than Any Other Day drops April 29, 2014 on Constellation] [Photo: Unknown]
"It's inherent I need a therapist 'cause sharing is caring and apparently, I could spare the wits."
Originality is not a crime, it's a battle cry. Most of us spend our days assaulted by the words of other people. Repackaged, repurposed and wrapped in a slightly new container of scantily clad opinion and vanity. We've reblogged, reposted and retweeted ourselves to the moon and back and in the process, we've punished anyone who bleeds a little authenticity by shoving them into "sounds like", "looks like" and "acts like" boxes, securing them tightly with duct tape embossed with our own customized personal logo and URL.
Chester Watson is a kid only in the sense of the actual time that he's spent on earth, but his words gush with the sophistication and experience of someone that has kept their eyes wide open from minute one of this big game. Creative wordplay is one thing, but Watson's tantalizing banter pulls you deep inside the weirdly alluring nooks and crannies of his mind, a feat that simply cannot be taught to a writer. It must be earned.
[Tin Wooki is available now on Chester Watson's Bandcamp] [Photo: Unknown]
"If you're peaceful, it's not hard to be free. Is that so hard to realize this?"
Have you ever spent time with an echo? Have you ever watched one dissolve and dissipate right in front of you, grasping at invisible threads in an attempt to stick around, stay relevant and find meaning? It's hard to watch. It's hard to stay quiet. It's hard to hold down the vomit of words you are dying to throw up in their direction. Words that you hope might move them forward, push them in some new direction, but know will only serve their need to keep existing in the same fashion they always have.
Truth is a difficult concept to harbor inside of art. Even in this age of online openness, absolute honesty is met with abject suspicion and straight up disbelief. We all know of the darkness that sits just out of focus and off to the side in every single one of our friends' photos that we hurriedly scroll past on Facebook, because each of us also exists with a form of that weird, intangible something that we can't accurately explain to anyone. It keeps us cropping our photos and mincing our words. We've accepted that most of the time, most of what we see or hear is a half-truth, if we're lucky. Mr. Matthew Sisken has reminded us of how fucking good it feels to hear the whole truth.
[The self-released I Can't Keep Still When It Comes To You EP drops April 28, 2014] [Photo: Unknown]
"The time has come to turn the page. With killing time comes a coming of age."
When you finally stand up and walk away, make sure that you've left everything on the table. Remove your filters and speak loudly. Leave your journal open and let your written words become the nagging thought that keeps other, fairer heads from reaching a place of slumber. For the love of anything, just fucking care.
Grace and beauty do not often come easily to such awkward monuments in life, but the gentlemen behind the ice-encased curtains of Grand Courriers breathe ease and comfort into the sorest of subjects. A consistent, dusty crackle, a faint shout and random horn bleats dot the landscape of this magnificent drive through ache and pure feeling.
[The Rejoice single is available on Grand Courrier's Soundcloud] [Photo: Unknown]
"I was born in a dark place and then I found you there."
You will be tested. You will too often sit through a steady drone of gripes and frustrations from slow-as-snail friends and colleagues lamenting the fact that they aren't further along in whatever it is they think they are doing. You will be expected to agree with their loud proclamations and fervent belief that they deserve more by sitting absolutely still than those who move and shake and "make it". You will be asked to tamp down who you are in their presence because nobody likes you if you stand taller.
A few of you will finger paint with mud on the sidewalks of your youth. A few of you will buy a battered, rusty-stringed acoustic guitar from a second-hand store. A few of you will pen-scrawl in the dusty margins of every book you check out from the public library. A few of you will pick up a single microphone and press record on whatever device is close at hand and captures sound. A few of you will create magic.
[The Blood For The Return EP is available now on Mirage's Bandcamp] [Photo: Javier Rey]
“Outside, the palm trees burn. Back up your present concerns.”
For the past decade, our eyes and ears have been inundated with countless artistic renditions of a potential apocalyptic world. The most fan-obsessed television shows and movies right now revolve around barren landscapes dotted with small groups of extremely flawed people doing their best to turn tragedy into opportunities for heroics. As a people, we have become fascinated by and fixated on what our end times will look like, feel like and sound like.
Morgan Delt’s entry into this arena might be the most melodic interpretation so far and yet, it still boasts a sordid, frenzied confusion of sound that spells little more than trepidation and doom. Each pulse that vibrates from the low end of “Tropicana” urges your heart rate along in a panicked race to match the desperation of the melting world. It’s a truly breathtaking ending.
[Morgan Delt is available now on Trouble In Mind] [Photo: Morgan Delt]
“I want to follow through on all my promises and threats to you, babe.”
The ineffable potential that walks hand in hand with hopeful expectation so rarely survives it’s first gasping breath in the atmosphere. Anticipation and hype are quickly replaced by disappointment and the all-too-enticing promise and crave of the next best thing. Things are more often than not denied the chance to sink their tiny, dulled fangs into you before you’ve yanked them from your skin and tossed them out the passenger-side window to let the elements have their turn.
Let this song sit. Let it fester in a forgotten part of who you are. Let it infect you. Let it color your late afternoon and early evening. Allow it’s jerk, stutter and swing to affect you and profoundly wound you. Accept that everyone is a sinner and that most people are dreamers. Feel something mighty for a change.
[Hot Dreams drops March 31, 2014 on Full-Time Hobby] [Photo: Jeff Bierk]
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