Kentucky Anarchist

[kentuckyanarchist]

Songs of 2025

1. La Dispute, “Environmental Catastrophe Film”

Mapping, tracing movements, making visible the rhythms of the thing, its articulations, who gets what when where and how, so as to become a blockage, to cause a collapse, to create a space behind.

2. Craig Finn, “Bethany”

In so many Craig Finn songs, faith’s the irreducible thing in opposition to the chaos, never simple but nevertheless the antithesis of the scene and the city, the way to wake from the nightmare. And then in 2025, gallingly, there was this one.

3. Ex-Vöid, “Swansea”

So impressively claustrophobic the way this bounces between affects, careening into its velvety, plainspoken bridge, then tailing off (“it’s—been ages...”, ellipsis spoken aloud) into a chorus that’s, I think, nearly strident, almost forthright.

4. Joan Shelley, “The Orchard”

How to respond to the horror, or write in spite of it? How to compose in the aftermath, aware of art’s insufficiency? These are the questions of our century (and all the others too), and this is Joan Shelley’s tentative sidestepping response.

5. Friendship, “Free Association”

Far from free, this is a song that follows a magnetic pull, but does so with its own arrhythmia and distinctive stumble.

6. CMAT, “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”

It was CMAT’s year, in a way—not in the way 2024 was Charli’s year, not in the sense of any straightforward matching of vibes, CMAT being after all much too odd for that—but nonetheless a joy to feel a rare talent receive their flowers.

7. Self Esteem, “The Deep Blue Okay”

A swiss army knife of a song, at once an SNL monologue, a Broadway sprechgesang, a stage whisper, a Tumblr text post, a self-help sermon, or a high-camp parody of all of the above.

8. Big Thief, “Los Angeles”

A rambling parrhesiastic diary, or dream diary, or future-chronicle or space Western, nothing to it.

9. Explosions in the Sky, “This Land”

“This Land Is Your Land” reimagined as a rumble on the horizon that rises  to a roar, a warning/threat, an omen and shibboleth, though perhaps Explosions in the Sky are saying it always was those things. 

10. Jamie xx, “Dream Night”

A hint of longing for those nights, a hint of looking-backward, but this song’s comedown-utopianism soars past nostalgia.

11. Sam Fender, “People Watching”

Sam Fender reverses the cliché: from up in the stars, he’s looking at the gutter. His songs are all stomach-lurch choruses, all panoramic vistas, all twinkle, but they know the weight of kitchen-sink traumas, small but formative humiliations.

12. MJ Lenderman, “Dancing in the Club”

Covering This Is Lorelei, the often languid MJ Lenderman comes across unusually persistent, afraid even to pause or breathe, as though words are all he’s got.

13. Perfume Genius feat. Aldous Harding, “No Front Teeth”

There was a ramshackle, falling-down-the-stairs energy to a lot of early-’00s indie, and sometimes Perfume Genius still seems to be possessed by that clatter.

14. Sarah Mary Chadwick, “Soundtrack”

Sarah Mary Chadwick’s songs want to be heard at moderate volume in busy rooms, or in the park or on public transport: they want the sounds of life and the routines of work—car horns and chatter and keyboard tap—to soak into them.

15. Lucy Dacus, “Come Out”

A wrapping-up more than a letting-out, really; a gentle and patient act of bandaging in waltz-step—until the final third, when it unravels.

16. Emily Hines, “All of Our Friends”

Emily Hines knows all the vocal tricks: the whisper, lilt and half-talk, the speed up and slow down, the yawp and hum, rise and drop, and how to measure them out just right.

17. Samia, “Pants”

Something new for the normally-surefooted Samia: something eager to get lost, to circle and ramble, to dip and sample.

18. The Tubs, “Narcissist”

#3’s why-bother homebody twin, “Narcissist” gripes and refuses but still hits the road in the end.

19. Tucker Zimmerman, “Old Hippies Lament”

A story Tucker Zimmerman’s told a thousand times before, every wrinkle and detour turned over in his hands and tried out in new combinations.

20. Caroline, “Total Euphoria”

A kaleidoscope full of gravel.

21. Lord Huron feat. Kristen Stewart, “Who Laughs Last”

Femme-fatale glint layered over gearbox lurch and tyre skid, but this is something sketchier and more fidgety than any road-movie rehash.

22. Case Oats, “Bitter Root Lake”

A tightly constructed short story, every narrative beat hitting its mark.

23. Disiniblud feat. Willy Siegel, Katie Dey and Julianna Barwick, “It’s Change”

A pair of smirking kids, playing in dirt, speaking a private language.

24. Wet Leg, “Davina McCall”

A languid, untroubled love song, half-awake, cracking half-jokes.

25. Horsegirl, “Frontrunner”

There’s something uncanny and folk-horror about Horsegirl, chaos behind their plaintive bounce, like malice behind placid eyes.

26. Bon Iver, “From”

A soundtrack for your nature documentary or graduation ceremony or gender reveal, or your doomscroll spiral or heartbreak or worst nightmare.

27. SnoCaps, “Doom”

Muted, pacing, pushing limits.

28. The Beths, “Til My Heart Stops”

I love a song that changes its mind, that admits it was wrong or reveals something hitherto-concealed: even better when it’s as simple as saying “then”, as in “then I want you to take me back home again.” 

29. The Horrors, “Trial by Fire”

Sparks fly, gears crunch, something neon-green and toxic pours out: the Horrors know how the machine keeps running.

30. Daughter of Swords, “West of West”

Alex Sauser-Monnig sings as if bored, or high, or sex-smitten; or else channelling the breeze, the waves, the colour blue.

31. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Boise, Idaho”

Last year I wrote: “Places are maybe my favourite subject-matter for songs; all the better when the songs are beige and coffee-stained like old maps.” Nothing’s changed! Never will!

32. Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell, “Ketchum, ID”

Sam Beam and Ben Bridwell adapt Boygenius’s original for a college campus in the autumn: homesickness, red brick, leaf-rustle and distant voice.

33. Ethel Cain, “Nettles”

Hayden Anhedönia’s 2025 work leant into desolation and world-reduction, but “Nettles” excels in fullness, surprises with its richness and bustle.

34. Yeule, “Eko”

Yeule’s crystal-cool talk-it-out tries to keep up its pretence of control and clarity but has to give way, before long, to something much less easily contained.

35. Mal Blum, “Husbands and Other Strangers”

I guess I’m drawn to songs that are stridently conventional: there’s nothing precisely new in this song’s dabble and quiver, nor in its narrative nor its weight, which means there’s audacity in Mal Blum’s ability to do all those things so well.

36. Indigo De Souza, “Heartthrob”

Another Indigo De Souza song that glories in the overload, the overconfidence, the overshare.

37. Billy Woods, “BLK ZMBY”

True-life horror in a pansensory zoetrope, blood leaking out the speakers, somebody laughing—gasping—choking—just offstage.

38. Charli xcx, “Chains of Love”

A sleek poppy asphyxiation, a catchy heartfelt vivisepulture.

39. Stella Donnelly, “Standing Ovation”

An opening line so untoppably good that Stella Donnelly soon dispenses with words altogether (they return, but it’s hardly the same song).

40. Matt Berninger, “Bonnet of Pins”

Something suave and almost carefree from the National’s man, like a drive through woods on an autumn morning.

41. Backxwash, “9th Heaven”

Backxwash practices some kind of opacity, some kind of refusal to cohere or be comprehensible; sits somewhere between childlike glossolalia and insurrectionary countersurveillance; occupies some fraught, risky place between fight and flight.

42. Oklou, “Thank You for Recording”

A lullaby for babies born on spaceships, disintegrating before your eyes.

43. Wolf Alice, “The Sofa”

A retrospective of sorts, a showreel, or just a velvety confession, enunciated for the back rows.

44. Silver Gore, “Dogs in Heaven”

Something familiar and soaring in the chorus, uncannily uprooted and inserted into this distracted, mumbling, stop-start, trailing-off thought-experiment.

45. Fontaines D.C., “Starburster/In Heaven”

Fontaines treat “Starburster” like last year’s toy, break it up for parts, turn it against itself.

46. Samantha Crain, “Ridin’ Out the Storm”

A buckle-up bass-drum barn-dance where Samantha Crain’s as much travelling preacher as balladeer.

47. Joshua Burnside, “Marching Round the Ladies”

Joshua Burnside knows better than most how to tease out the ache and groan of a voice, to dig up the compost and loam, spread it round.

48. Noah Cyrus feat. Ella Langley, “Way of the World”

2025’s most puzzling song: because there’s charm and there’s calm, not to mention truth, in the memento mori, but there’s so much rightful resentment in the refrain: to say “just the way of the world” is surely always to ask what if it wasn’t.

49. Laura Stevenson, “I Want to Remember It All”

Laura Stevenson’s songs have this sense of wilful abandon and undoing, velvety and confident delivery always ready to dissolve into just vowels and wails.

50. Florist, “Gloom Designs”

To finish: a finish. To sign off, a sign-off.

[kentuckyanarchist]

Some contemporary passages from Barnaby Rudge

What does Barnaby Rudge, published in 1841 and set mostly in 1780, tell us about 2025? Dickens’ depiction of the Gordon Riots, written a century or so before fascism proper took root, nonetheless seems to grasp something of the way that micro-fascisms congeal and begin to exert power. Dickens understands the frog-in-a-pot nature of fascist politics, for example, and the way that new orientations enter via the edges of your consciousness: Haredale, the upstanding Catholic who will by the novel’s end have been driven out of home by the mob, firsts meet it as a new mood in the familiar London throng, in which ‘the No-Popery cry, which was then becoming pretty familiar’ rears its head but doesn’t trouble him (355; page numbers refer to the 2003 Penguin edition). It’s not long after, though, that this mood reveals its sharp edges and the cruel Schmittian fascism, the fascism that holds that the enemy is simply of no account, rears its head. When Haredale comes face-to-face with Lord George Gordon himself (curiously a cipher the novel, inert and always away from the action), and raises his protest with him, he’ss met with a wave of the hand: ‘I cannot talk to you, sir,’ Gordon tells him, ‘we have nothing in common.... I can’t hear you. It is indifferent to me what you say. I can hold no communion with the worshippers of idols’ (361). Gordon’s refusal to address the object of his ire, even when the object of his ire presents himself to him, is familiar: when Trump rallies were interrupted in 2016, he never addressed the agitators, speaking of them only in the third person even though they were in the room with him—‘get him out,’ ‘knock the crap out of them,’ ‘maybe he should have been roughed up.’ This encounter happens in Westminster Hall (albeit long before the extension of the franchise), Gordon is a parliamentarian (albeit a hereditary one), but the prospect of democracy, debate or dialogue is precisely what he wants to cut off. This casual denigration and dismissal, which evacuates politics, feels entirely contemporary, and indeed it’s Dickens’ depiction of the tense calm that precedes the riot that chimes with moments from our own times—but in the midst of the riots, too (the disturbances ebbed and flowed for a week), he’s interested in the problem of silence and the road from silence to complicity (the problem famously framed in the twentieth century as ‘first they came for the communists’). Haredale, having apprehended his brother’s murderer (which begins the tying-up of another part of the novel’s plot), seeks help in getting the man to London and to prison, but no help can be found—his neighbours tell him they are ‘assembled for their own protection, and [can]not endanger themselves by lending any aid to him’ (505). When he arrives in the city, he’s met by Catholic families trembling, turned out and unable to find transportation, not because those who might offer aid have joined the rioters and want to desert their neighbours, but because they’re fearful of becoming targets themselves. Dickens always finds absurd humour in incompetent or obstructive bureaucrats, though, and Rudge is no different: the Lord Mayor grants Haredale an audience and listens to his plea for help, but can only lament, ‘what a pity it is you’re a catholic! Why couldn’t you be a protestant, and then you wouldn’t have got yourself into such a mess?’ (508).

But Dickens isn’t totally without sympathy for the mob. He seems to grasp its charm, the appeal of joining the crowd and temporarily turning the world upside down, even of turning loose the inmates at Newgate. The sentiment behind some of the rioters might even be noble, but more pressingly there’s a romance in the movement of the bodies, the licking of the flames, the running-rampant and damning the consequences. Hugh, the uncouth hostler who’s only at home with horses, and who Dickens can’t entirely avoid respecting (for his physical courage and his lifting himself above his inauspicious beginnings) seems to stand in for a wider problem posed by the mob: whether to treat it as wholly irrational, scarcely even human (a representation inseparable from its bibulousness), or to acknowledge its unavoidable intellectuality, its capacity for strategy and cunning (indicated by its pursuit of specific, significant targets). And the mob passages are terrific, grasping effortlessly the crowd’s spontaneous order and its magnetism: ‘Each party swelled as it went along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea; new leaders sprang up as they were wanted, disappeared when the necessity was over, and reappeared at the next crisis.... [S]ober workmen going home from their day’s labour ... were seen to cast down their baskets of tools and become rioters in an instant; mere boys on errands did the like’ (438). But there’s another passage that interests me, and it’s another moment of interruption or uncommon calm: after the first night of rioting, the single-minded public hangman Dennis, who’s joined the cause without fully defecting from his day job, regroups in the tavern with his new comrades. So far, Dennis laments, they’ve achieved nothing: ‘When that soldier went down, we might have made London ours; but no;—we stand, and gape, and look on—the justice ... says “My lads, if you’ll give me your word to disperse, I’ll order off the military,”—our people set up a hurrah, throw up the game with the winning cards in their hands, and skulk away like a pack of tame curs as they are’ (414–5). The mob has been too easily satisfied, has failed to press its advantage and failed to realise its own strength. Dennis is a devotee of killing and especially of the gallows, which he sees as the beautiful and pure method by which an Englishman ought to be brought to death. So it’s significant that here too, his attitude is not one of sheer bloodthirstiness: instead, he’s furious at the tactical opportunity missed. If Hugh, perhaps, stands for the animalistic mob, Dennis (a contradictory figure who at the novel’s end goes to the gallows himself, uncomprehending, bewailing the injustice of it) figures as the mob’s strategic sensibility, which Dickens admires but can’t fully avow.

One more passage bears attention—in fact, one from the following chapter (424–8). Knowing that another night of violence is in store, and indeed planning once again to be a part of it, Sim Tappertit, apprentice to the locksmith Gabriel Varden, arrives drunk at his master’s household, where he receives an offer of shelter. Varden is unsure if he should make the offer, but Sim is part of the household, so he’s owed assistance. But Sim isn’t there seeking refuge. Instead, he offers the Vardens, and particularly Mrs Varden, a supporter of Gordon’s Protestant Association, a notice to display, bearing Gordon’s own stamp, declaring the family ‘true Protestants’ and so protecting the house from the rioters. Varden, furious, tries in vain to reassert his authority over Sim, but can’t bring himself to actually restrain him, and can only chase him so far when he runs away. When Varden returns, his wife tells him it’s fortunate, at least, that Sim brought them Gordon’s protective charm, and hands it to her husband, who tears it up and throws it in the fire. ‘Let them come and pull the roof about our ears; let them burn us out of house and home; I’d neither have the protection of their leader, nor chalk their howl upon my door, though, for not doing it, they shot me on my own threshold’ (428). This is a complex sequence that has something to tell us about the politics of domesticity and hospitality, one where different visions of hospitality are working at cross purposes: Varden protects Sim, for what even in Dickens’ time might have seemed old-fashioned paternalistic reasons, because he belongs to the household; but in reality he isn’t seeking refuge, but rather trying to protect his political ally, Mrs Varden. To be able to offer protection to the master’s wife is to assert his own capacity for proprietorship and mastery—a cruel, veiled, unsuccessful gesture of paternalism. Gabriel’s heroic refusal of protection, meanwhile, soon lands him in the mob’s maws. But he’s somehow done right by his household in ways that are both conventional and radical: he’s offered protection to one under his roof, even though rebuffed; he’s refused to be usurped as protector, even though he can’t meaningfully protect the house on his own; and, crucially, he’s refused the complicit form of fearful silence that, Dickens insists, bears as much responsibility the violence as outright hatred.

[kentuckyanarchist]

Songs of 2024

2024 never shook itself out into a shape for me: highs and lows, much to be thankful for but not much material for living. The sense of coming-after of all these recent entries on the calendar—’22, ’23, ’24—feels like it’s only gotten stronger and worked its way further into the collective gut. So—before we get too far into Summer ’25, here’s to the interlude—here’s to the interim and the inbetween! Here’s to the ’20s; here are some songs!

1.  Adrianne Lenker, “Real House”

And this is my song-of-the-year but there’s nothing to it: just Adrianne Lenker telling true stories and floorboards creaking and a clock ticking, just “do you remember?” and “I saw” and “and” and “and” and “and”.

2. Waxahatchee, “Tigers Blood”

Katie Crutchfield threads together Southern Gothic stories with thrum and vagary, patches them with clear-headed sentiments, wears them around the house.

3. Nia Archives, “Silence Is Loud”

There’s both high and comedown here, both flirtation and real love.

4. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Babys in a Thundercloud”

Godspeed!’s No Title builds soundscapes for doomed saboteurs, for the simultaneous knowledge that you’re fucked and that you still can—still must—short-circuit at least some of their machinery.

5. Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”

What more is there to say on what was, in many senses, the unambiguous (air-quotes now) song of the year? Other than to reaffirm its unlikeliness, its mellifluous eccentricity, circling and diving, as the song of that year?

6. Father John Misty, “Mahashmashana”

A cryptic-crossword clue on a Piccadilly Circus illumination, a problem play on Broadway, a riddle adapted for symphony orchestra, a lost train of thought sung in full voice.

7. Xiu Xiu, “Common Loon”

Contortions and twists, ears popping, bones buckling—dancing and/as torture.

8. Porridge Radio, “Anybody”

A glimmer, daylight coming in round the curtains or just a neon sign, but it gets—yes!—brighter and brighter.

9. Los Campesinos!, “Feast of Tongues”

In Los Campesinos!’s thesaurus, synonyms of  “love” include “suffer for” and “sacrifice for” but also “wreak absolute screaming havoc for”.

10. Chastity Belt, “Hollow”

Chastity Belt songs sound like Sunday-evening bus rides home, raindrops on the windows, when something of suburban childhood, familiarity, repetition, comes back to you.

11. yeule, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”

Broken Social Scene’s song gets a new best friend, with piercings and a Deftones T-shirt, and her parents don’t understand, but it isn’t a phase, mom!

12. Stick in the Wheel, “Long the Day 2.0”

This extra-fuzzy rework of 2021’s “Long the Day” sounds like a city coated in mycelium, gooey and diaphanous, half-amnesiac but still able to lament.

13. Jake Xerxes Fussell, “Feeing Day”

To live in Jake Xerxes Fussell’s charmed folkloric world for a day or two! To walk with him and share a story!

14. Japandroids, “Chicago”

Brian King sings with a tightness in his neck, a twitch and a fearsome rasp to match, and eyes fixed on the horizon.

15. Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Buffalo”

To say nostalgia would be so wrong: pasts, yes; histories, yes; but pasts to be lived in and revivified, histories to be made visceral.

16. The Cure, “Alone”

History twists and turns and backtracks, the unprecedented becomes everyday and effects outstrip their causes; we all knew this by 2024, but we still didn’t expect The Cure coming back and coming back like this.

17. Charli XCX, “Von Dutch”

More than anything else on Brat, this reminds me of “c2.0”, my all-time Charli song and her very saddest: this one too brings a dab of yearning for bygone cultural moments, it pays homage to their hedonism.

18. Clairo, “Add Up My Love”

It takes a few listens (it took me a few, anyway) to spot the mirror-image of these verses, how Clairo puts such different sentiments to the same snappy sounds twice over.

19. The Last Dinner Party, “Nothing Matters”

At the start of the year I was cynical and didn’t know if this would still work for me at the end. But the velvety bass, the strut and wail, the principled resistance to restraint and reserve—yes, still a thrill.

20. Laura Marling, “Child of Mine”

This is a nothing-to-it song in a different way from #1 but it’s the same way too: choruses of angels and breathy duets cosseting a story older than language.

21. Bill Ryder-Jones, “This Can’t Go On”

Duffel coat, seeing your breath, church spire, snow turning to slush. It’s surely important that Bill Ryder-Jones’ Iechyd Da came out in the dead of winter.

22. Billie Eilish, “L’Amour de Ma Vie”

Subtle and supple, permanently in command, Billie teases out small mercies, charts ambivalent betrayals, retraces her steps, then goes in for the kill.

23. Fontaines D.C., “Favourite”

“Favourite” never seems to get to where it’s going, but it’s a song about the journey, a song by turns louche and wistful, and always wedded to the jangle.

24. Sarah Mary Chadwick, “Nothing Was the Same After the Bar Burnt Down”

Sarah Mary Chadwick’s enunciation, nearly hammy, almost stagey, is what keeps this allegory’s feet on the ground: the half-there ghost of a bar-room singalong makes its grief explicable.

25. Lola Young, “Big Brown Eyes”

Oddly enough it’s the “regardless” that does it for me: some words fit smoothly in fist-pump choruses and others require unusual irreverence.

26. Pillow Queens, “February 8th”

A cyborg transformation, a resurrection just in time for battle.

27. Holly Humberstone, “Down Swinging”

A pop affirmation for melancholy times: simple, single-minded, a bit broken, a bit barbed.

28. Cassandra Jenkins, “Aurora, IL”

Cassandra Jenkins’ songs can sometimes sound planet-sized, but this one faces up to what’s too big to reckon with—not by making it small, just by ducking and diving around the astronomic, glancing off it.

29. MGMT feat. Christine & the Queens, “Dancing in Babylon”

Only waves could dance to this and not be tripped up, only the sea.

30. Bright Eyes, “Tin Soldier Boy”

From the teenage coughing-shaking fits to the cowboy country ballads, Conor’s best songs are all lurch and shambles, crashing and veering across the drag, picking fights like loveable rogues.

31. Pedro the Lion, “Modesto”

Places are maybe my favourite subject-matter for songs; all the better when the songs are beige and coffee-stained like old maps.

32. Vampire Weekend, “Classical”

I always want to keep the negativity at arm’s length here, but—“Heartbreaking: The Worst Band You Know Just Made a Great Song.”

33. Phosphorescent, “Revelator”

A troubadour song for the ways certain moods attach themselves to certain places: witty-sad and knowing-dumbstruck.

34. Elbow, “Good Blood Mexico City”

Elbow use old tricks and new ones to fuel a car chase of a song.

35. Iron & Wine, “Anyone’s Game”

A beguilement, full of insouciant asides: Sam Beam’s always been devilishly wise.

36. The National, “Heaven”

A different kind of cover from #11: not quite a reworking or reimagining but something ethical, only gently troubling, an act of mirroring or of partnering.

37. Charly Bliss, “Nineteen”

Charly Bliss songs are this unique feat of engineering: Eva Hendricks’ syrupy vocals pour out until they overflow into reservoirs of trauma, and they’re propelled by the fizzing that results.

38. MJ Lenderman, “She’s Leaving You”

MJ Lenderman finds a new way of inhabiting an old story: he makes the awful predictability, his narratee’s failure of imagination, the centrepiece of the thing.

39. Doechii, “Denial Is a River”

Doechii wisecracks here, recaps there, alter-egos throughout and gets through a lot.

40. Half Waif, “Ephemeral Being”

Your AI voice-assistant fell in love, joined a choir, went on a road trip, she’ll send a postcard.

41. Romy & Jessie Ware, “Lift You Up”

A silky, clear-eyed duet with no time to waste.

42. Justice & Tame Impala, “One Night/All Night”

“Waters of Nazareth” sounded so much like the future in the mid-late-aughts, and that timeline sounds like a good one to visit for the evening.

43. Dummy, “Blue Dada”

Despite all the soft blurry edges, “Blue Dada” comes up with such deft footwork.

44. Caribou, “Come Find Me”

Caribou songs sometimes seem arch, knowingly quoting club themes from a distance greater than the DJ booth; at other times, though, it’s a matter of simply surrendering to the euphoria of the sounds.

45. Metronomy feat. Miki and Faux Real, “Contact High”

Maybe the attempt to reconnect with a bygone hedonism (#17, #42) was a 2024 theme, but On “Contact High” Miki (in particular) doesn’t want to overthink things.

46. Been Stellar, “Scream from New York, NY”

Sam Slocum wants to sound listless or distant—these are supposed to be desensitising times—but there’s something softly sad, early-’00s-emo-tinged, here as well.

47. Advance Base, “Brian’s Golden Hour”

Just an Owen Ashworth song doing what Owen Ashworth songs do—shimmer, pulsate, yawp, tell a story without telling the whole story.

48. Maggie Rogers, “Don’t Forget Me”

It sounds like a backhanded compliment, but Maggie Rogers shows how to find truth in the tried-and-true, timeless wisdom in the time-worn.

49. Marika Hackman, “Big Sigh”

Given that Marika Hackman songs always feel big and sighing, this feels almost like self-mockery, but her lope and trudge, and her diaristic turns, also still feel necessary.

50. Shabason, Krgovich, Sage, “Bridget”

Elevator tones, gurgling pipes, a muted monologue, a summer day spent indoors.

[kentuckyanarchist]

“The ’00s were a bully”, Molly Lambert wrote some time ago, a decade that “revolved around the public and private erasure of consent.” She gives us Terry Richardson, Dov Charney and George W. Bush as proof: the decade’s culture and politics in the West were narcissistic, swaggering, macho, cynical. In the 2010s, things changed course in some ways; we had, famously, the #metoo moment, which tried to re-centre consent, as if in opposition to all the features that Lambert found in the century’s first decade. Exemplary, perhaps, was Fleabag, which admirably brought to the fore the fundamentally traumatogenic aspect of human relationships and human sexuality. This isn’t to say that consent was restored and re-energised, not in the slightest, but it might be fair to say it re-emerged as a problem, as a felt absence rather than a banal one, the construction of a culture of consent as a project to be attempted rather than a triviality.

What about music? We certainly wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but indie rock may have been where the 2000s’ sexual politics took its most depressingly banal form. Whatever hedonistic pleasure American Apparel ads might have symbolised in their time (and let’s be honest, they did; and so did Last Night’s Party, and certainly so did Skins, and let’s not forget that LCD Soundsystem came out of the same eye-rolling NYC space) was completely absent from, let’s say, “Sex on Fire”. The decade also had Bright Eyes and Sufjan and “Such Great Heights”—music I love by sad boys who probably would have failed their bystander intervention training. They provided a detour much more than a counterpoint, an alternative rather than a challenge.

Here’s where I’m going with this: “New Romantic” by Laura Marling (2007) and “Canopies and Drapes” by Emmy the Great (2009) are songs from the ’00s that went a different way. It wouldn’t be too strong to describe them as songs with sentiments, and modes of expressing those sentiments, a decade ahead of their time.

“New Romantic” is the more famous of the two. It wasn’t on Laura Marling’s debut album, too much a piece of juvenilia, but I remember it as a talking point: she was 17, give or take, it felt weighty and serious and DIY; a talent had arrived. “Canopies and Drapes” (it was “Canopies and Grapes” when we first heard it) was less immediate, more prone to ramble; it felt less like an announcement to the world and more like a note to self. “Canopies” is frantic and compendious where “New Romantic” is resigned and relatively laconic. “Canopies” is chorusless where “New Romantic” circles around its cod-modest mock-apology (“I’m sorry to whichever man...”). “Canopies” rattles off bands and artists’ names to (I think) gently satirise a name-dropping culture of musical fandom, while “New Romantic” offers just the one famous name, albeit an unfortunate one (Ryan Adams). But on certain questions they hit the same notes: never just confessional, they’re self-conscious about artistry too, the need to sculpt narratives that resonate.

“Canopies” feels so precisely like the jokes of the mid-late-’10s: the way they sidle up, self-deprecate, interject. The necessity of jokes to keep from crying, and the eventual lurch to something quite a lot like crying anyway: “there is this book he lent to me something like seven months ago / I’m going to burn it in the street be so kind as to let him to know / that I’m dealing / with this badly.” There’s something in the accretive form of the verses: always accumulating the detritus of life, relaxing briefly, only to contract once more, tighter and tenser still. There’s something, I think, in the way childhood preoccupations reemerge to counter the strains of grown-up life (“I feel worse than when S Club 7 broke up,” “drooling on my own again”). And there’s something genuinely momentous, and brutal, and dark, in the lead-in to the final verse: that bit three minutes in (I’m talking about the demo version) when Emmy’s voice returns, lower than before, and talks in ways that are suddenly quite profoundly unfunny about sleep, grief, convulsion, death. The song tries to get back on its chirpy track but you feel it’s changed and knows it.

“New Romantic,” meanwhile, fixates on youth, on teenage affects and ambitions. The “new” of “New Romantic” has to do with innocence, first times, “first love” (an Emmy song title too). “I’m the first to admit that I’m still pretty young,” Marling sings, as though to preempt praise for wisdom beyond her years; and the glottal colloquialism of “his girlfriend was pretty fit” feels like the sort of thing she’s consciously moving past. As in “Canopies” there’s the digression, here following the Ryan Adams line—“I’ve got this friend and he sounds just like him,” which moves the narrative sideways and opens onto another tangle. The key’s in the chorus though, not for its apology but for its matter-of-factness about frailty and inability. The apology’s not about the man it’s addressed to, it’s about Laura herself; it’s the facade that justifies her blues.

I’ve described this as a 2010s mode (and could narrow it down further: it’s really post-2016), but it won’t have escaped notice that we’re not in the 2010s anymore. Aspects of this structure of feeling have survived into this decade, but the post-pandemic mode’s probably still more ground-down. It’ll take a while longer to know what relationships between songs, sadness and sex might look like in the 2020s. For the time being then, there’s these two: wise, welcoming, shit far from together, possessed of an understanding which the rest of us are still grasping towards.

[kentuckyanarchist]

Songs of 2023

Here we are, a bit late, not quite as late as last year. 2023 was a busy year but somehow an uncomplex one for me—there’ve been worse years, there’ve been better. If the songs spoke to the times, they did so in obscure ways. Nonetheless: 50 favourite songs, 50 fuzzy thoughts, I hope you like them too.

1. Fenne Lily, “Lights Light Up”

Just the right amount of confidence and the right amount of caveats; just the right amount of magic and the right amount of realism.

2. Boygenius, “True Blue”

I love the matter-of-factness of Lucy Dacus’ diction here, putting friendship to words like it’s the most obvious thing in the world: “I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself, duh.”

3. ANOHNI, “Sliver of Ice”

Somehow, amidst the wreckage, it’s the elegance of ANOHNI’s rhymes that get me: view/blue, tonight/light, more/before; if only death was so simple.

4. Caroline Polachek, “Billions”

All I can say here, and it’ll sound silly, is that what’s happening in this song is an attempt to block off the curve from hedonism to cynicism.

5. Ratboys, “Black Earth, WI”

How is it that, with the mushroom cloud above and the ground opening up before them, Ratboys seem to have all the time in the world?

6. Julie Byrne, “Portrait of a Clear Day”

There’s a particular vocal style, smooth and blue like a lake surface, that you find in some English folk music, and in 2023 Julie Byrne was its sharpest, wisest practitioner.

7. Feist, “Hiding Out in the Open”

Homespun, delicate; thrillingly, almost uncomfortably intimate.

8. Slaughter Beach, Dog, “Strange Weather”

One for cataloguing, inventorying, totting up, working out where you stand.

9. Yo La Tengo, “Aselestine”

“Aselestine”’s two songs: the instrumentals so serenely flowing, circling, generative; Georgia Hubley’s vocals so clipped, terse, holding back.

10. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal ft. Samuel T. Herring, “FaceTime”

Could Billy Woods be our foremost imagist? “In a Station of the Metro” but the train’s derailed, bones snapped, screaming kids, twisted metal? I’ve already said too much.

11. Doja Cat, “Agora Hills”

The year’s best pop song, a delicate dedication from (is it fair to say?) unexpected quarters, smut and bravado doing the bare minimum to conceal its softness.

12. Mitski, “Bug Like an Angel”

This song doesn’t have a chorus in the sense of a refrain but has a chorus in the Ancient Greek sense, a set of voices that interrupt in unison, sometimes using dramatic irony.

13. Big Thief, “Born for Loving You”

Sometimes we speak out of the sides of our mouths and sometimes we dissemble; Big Thief could never.

14. The Antlers, “I Was Not There”

The word sweep is a good one for songs by the Antlers: conveying breadth and inexorability, it’s cosy and domestic too; to sweep like they do is to upturn, to wreck, but to renovate, to welcome.

15. Lana Del Rey, “The Grants”

Philip Larkin said poetry was a matter of experiencing a vision then “attempt[ing] to express the whole of which the vision is a part.” For Lana there’s no whole or part, just vision.

16. The Pines of Rome, “I Am a Road”

Gnomic, wry, lamenting, ground-down but still kicking, a bit ornery but if you sit down at its feet you’ll learn something.

17. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Willow, Pine and Oak”

Stolid and unsappy, this tripartite scheme isn’t quite right, but it certainly is one way of looking at the world.

18. Lande Hekt, “Pottery Class”

This song says it’s about missing someone, but all those sighs, all those “again”s, all those “buts” make you wonder.

19. James Yorkston, Nina Persson and the Second Hand Orchestra, “A Forestful of Rogues”

“If I say so myself, and I damn well do”—when you start a line like that you can follow it up with almost anything.

20. M83, “Amnesia”

Big as stars and glistening like them; who, in 2023, does it better?

21. CMAT, “Vincent Kompany”

CMAT sometimes seems to want to be “relatable” but then snaps out of it and takes joy in being idiosyncratic, or a bit off, or, basically, really fucking odd.

22. Mannequin Pussy, “I Got Heaven”

Let it be known that in 2023 we snarled sometimes.

23. Shit Present, “More to Lose”

Shit Present, in the best of traditions, use monotone as a weapon: here Iona Cairns drags down what could be a soaring chorus in the most politically astute of ways.

24. Fever Ray, “Kandy”

The word could be skeletal: minimal, of course, but also spooky, schlocky, body-horror, prone to decomposition.

25. Girl Ray, “Hold Tight”

“Hold Tight” says it wants simple sedentary situations, “talking shit on the grass,” “get a Coke and sit on the wall,” all while it bounces and hops non-stop.

26. Charlotte Cornfield, “You and Me”

I’ll admit to preferring the more pensive Charlotte Cornfield, but no one’s surprised she can do affirmative too.

27. Shannon Lay, “From the Morning”

I love Shannon Lay’s confidence: there’s something ever-so-slightly irreverent in this Nick Drake cover, just the slightest smirk.

28. Jeff Rosenstock, “HEALMODE”

The sort of song you find under rotting wooden pallets in derelict parts of the city.

29. The Mountain Goats, “Fresh Tattoo”

The Mountain Goats grow old no worse for wear: still telling meandering parables, still making us feel right at home.

30. Samia, “Charm You”

“As You Are,” Samia’s paean to unconditional familial love, was my favourite song of 2021. “Charm You” works up the same giddiness about a new relationship but introduces a smidge of reticence.

31. Alex Lahey, “The Answer Is Always Yes”

A big year for affirmations in pop (see#4, #26, #46), but (1) this one’s so intricate too, and (2) this one knows what it’s up against too.

32. The Hold Steady, “Grand Junction”

Metronomic, “Grand Junction” declines to shift its swing, which is no problem as it keeps on hitting.

33. Arlo Parks, “Dog Rose”

Arlo Parks writes pop songs with an undercurrent, love songs that threaten to get a bit weird.

34. Holly Humberstone and MUNA, “Into Your Room”

A late entrant: one that toys with overstatement, knows it sounds a bit overblown, but wants to say what it has to say anyway and see how it goes.

35. Young Fathers, “Holy Moly”

This sounds like 2006 to me, a sticky floor and cigarette smoke.

36. Heather Woods Broderick, “Seemed a River”

This song’s weirdly verbose, maybe it’s indecisive? Maybe it’s keeping secrets?

37. Pearla, “Flicker”

Circularity like the seasons, like the sunrise-sunset, like fresh starts, like the worms.

38. Sparklehorse, “The Scull of Lucia”

A grandiose sort of lullaby, making short work of squally seas.

39. Joy Oladokun, “Changes”

I go back and forth on this one: it feels tailored for the Obama playlist, but it still charms me; sometimes it seems too smooth for the ugly world it describes, but there are more egregious sins.

40. Quinnie, “Security Question”

A missed connection that spirals from a whim into a crisis: the entire problem of other minds “at some party I wandered to.”

41. Black Country, New Road, “Laughing Song (Live at Bush Hall)”

On Live at Bush Hall BC,NR continued to be our best worriers, biters of nails, pickers of scabs.

42. Blink-182, “More Than You Know”

If there’s nostalgia here, and there may be, it’s for “Easy Target” or “Stockholm Syndrome,” the careful use of melancholy, the harmonies, Travis Barker drumming like a submachine gun.

43. Vagabon, “Lexicon”

Vagabon’s a rare songwriter who’ll admit to speechlessness, dumbstruckness, stagefright. But some things are unsayable, some thoughts do need to be expressed in deeds.

44. Subsonic Eye, “Machine”

Go on then, make it seem effortless!

45. The Milk Carton Kids, “Star Shine”

I suspect this one’s too hard on itself—there are big lies and little lies, gentle ones and harsh ones, after all.

46. Sufjan Stevens, “Shit Talk”

Somewhere in the ’10s Sufjan became a permanent presence: a waystation, a landmark, a totem, and on Javelin you feel he cautiously started embracing that.

47. Indigo De Souza, “Losing”

It’s one thing to say “less is more”, it’s another to model brevity like this, to just fill two minutes and nineteen seconds with five- or six-word lines that describe all the details of one thought.

48. Fred Again.., “Winnie (Rosslyn Crescent)”

I’m still captivated by Fred Again..’s soundscapes, his windows into London kitchen-sink scenes, and how much he leaves unsaid.

49. Sofia Kourtesis, “Moving Houses”

Fractured images, shards of life, but Sofia Kourtesis seems confident things can be put back together.

50. Oneohtrix Point Never, “Nightmare Paint”

Not an album where you can pick out one song, of course, but if I had to it’d be this pew-pew space opera, brightly lit and smoothly running, letting the unknown in through the airlock.

[kentuckyanarchist]

It’s been so nice to see Charlotte Cornfield get a little more critical acclaim, a little more attention, a little more prominence for each of her last three albums. But honestly, it’s her last-but-three, 2016’s Future Snowbird, that I first fell in love with and that I keep returning to. Where her more recent work’s been perhaps more contemplative, more willing to mull over its key questions and gesture at them, and has plainly succeeded on that basis, there’s still a lot to be said for the keep-moving-at-all-costs impulse that runs through Future Snowbird. “Aslan,” the first track, just doesn’t stop from when the bass drum comes in at 18 seconds or so (Cornfield is, among other things, a drummer, and Future Snowbird feels like a drummer’s idea of a folk album). It’s all slightly off-kilter literary references, sprightly subversion of expectations, stark declarations. Cornfield tells us: “IgotthekeystomanydoorsbutIcan’tfindthekeystoyou” like she’s been holding it in, like she’s been bursting to admit it. In her last couple of albums, the “you” of her songs is frequently a cosy familiar thing; in “Aslan” (and in much of the rest of the album, “Big Volcano, Small Town”—which is restlessly on-the-move too, but in a different way—in particular), it’s a glancing fleeting uncertain engagement, a thrillingly fraught one.

[kentuckyanarchist]

I made a note to listen to Fresh on the back of “Going to Brighton” in, let’s say, the very distant days of December 2019, when I was (reading between the lines) living in London and pining for the south coast. Since then, amidst everything else, I’ve moved back to Brighton for two years then moved away again and this week, one way or another, I got round to actually listening to them and it’s “Morgan & Joanne” that I’m fixated on. Half-listening to it for the first time I thought it was something very different from what it was: I thought it was a sad talking-head story, a suburban but nonetheless romantic story with a quantum of hope in it, a small story (and implicitly I probably took it as a hetero one too). Then I read the lyrics and the story behind the lyrics: “Morgan & Joanne” is about two women who went on a blind date for the Guardian’s blind date column and, I guess, were refreshingly and memorably frank in their discussion of said date. When I found this out I thought my first reading was wrong then I realised it was at least half-right.

“Morgan & Joanne” is a small story, self-consciously so; it’s a miniature drama that wants to move from the domestic to the political. I glossed “Tall Poppies” by Yard Act in a similar way and I continue to love that song; I gestured toward something similar in “Irreversible Motion” by Martha. I used the word “small” for the former and “little” for the latter: a grindingly matter-of-fact, un- or even anti-poetic song about a man who’s content with cosy mediocrity on the one hand, and a pensive, gnomic, hopeful song about the weight of the past on the other. What does it mean for a song to be about a small thing?

A brief momentary thing (a brief momentary fling?)

A local thing without broader consequences

Something doomed

But do small things hope to be big things?

“Morgan & Joanne” reminds me more of Martha than Yard Act. I’ve been long-term smitten with Naomi Griffin’s voice and Kathryn Woods sounds similar to me, especially when she sings the title. I think I want to suggest that “Morgan & Joanne” is small like “Tall Poppies” and small like “Irreversible Motion”; that is, it’s small in two quite different ways. It’s a small story to the extent that it’s a two-hander, not just set in a contracted world but about that contraction (“Tall Poppies” imagines a narrator out there in the wider world, and “Morgan & Joanne” vacillates on whether it’s imagining a narrator at all.) And it’s a small story in a less effable sense that has to do with its plaintiveness and sensitivity and—I think—its desire to push against bounds and restrictions and prying, pressing realities.

In other words: what’s gorgeous and, since we’re here let’s say it, queerly utopian about “Morgan & Joanne” isn’t the line “I wish that I could not give a fuck and be just like you” or the line “I wish the world could be more like us”, it’s the combination and the juxtaposition of the two. Because love does contain that inward impulse, that smallness in the bad sense, of wanting to be the other and fence off the rest. To connect this to the outward movement, the all-encompassingness of the second line is the remarkable achievement: to have the guts to posit an “us” and propose it as a model.

[kentuckyanarchist]

Songs of 2022

Year-end lists always seem doomed to become outdated. Am I really expected to have heard all the best songs of 2022 in 2022? It’s never going to work, they’ll seep through over the course of the following year or years. But giving it six weeks is better than nothing, so here we are in mid-late February.

1. Tomberlin, “Stoned”.

Stoned indeed: woozy, baffled, bodily undone.

2. Camp Cope, “Running with the Hurricane”.

Camp Cope perfected a bassy, blunt melancholy with How to Socialise & Make Friends; here they don’t so much break from that template as turn it to other—affirmative? aggressive?—purposes.

3. Caroline, “Good Morning (Red)”.

The year’s most something-new-on-every-listen song, its most capacious.

4. Christian Lee Hutson, “Age Difference”.

Lyric of the year: “Do my impression of John Malkovich critiquing food in prison / At first it isn’t funny, then it is, and then it isn’t.”

5. Big Thief, “Change”.

A panoply of possibilities on such a sprawling, immersive album by the absolute best in the game, but this most plaintive and stubborn lament just edges the rest.

6. Rachika Nayar ft. Maria BC, “Heaven Come Crashing”.

Sounds for the silentest disco.

7. The A’s, “Why I’m Grieving”.

A path not taken from an archive not delved-into; a peppy sad spurt of jolly heartbreak.

8. Black Country, New Road, “Snow Globes”.

I’m still not sure if this song’s about going mad, getting old, living through winter, all three, or none.

9. Arctic Monkeys, “Body Paint”.

Searching, insistent: like Alex Turner’s got you caught in a lie.

10. Stella Donnelly, “Cold”.

This could’ve been any of Stella Donnelly’s songs where the lilt of her voice is always dropping into conversationality, but this one, where she ends the conversation, full-stop, shuts me up the most.

11. Martha, “Irreversible Motion”.

So many of these songs are about little things, like the bones of the inner ear; this one maybe more than all the others.

12. Florist, “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)”.

A delicate retrospective collage, a slow bashful loving appreciation, a puzzled amazed asking-why, a cautious comfort.

13. Aldous Harding, “Fever”.

Aldous Harding’s songs have this wonderful, dignified refusal to cohere; this one just lopes, or loafs, in and out of view.

14. Meg Baird, “Will You Follow Me Home?”.

The way Meg Baird’s vocals stay half-submerged here is what gets me: “Will You Follow Me Home?” goes from lazy river to maelstrom without you quite noticing.

15. Brian Eno, “Making Gardens Out of Silence”.

If you ask me, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” is a panorama from the time after humans, built from salvage by whatever-comes-next.

16. Hurray for the Riff Raff, “SAGA”.

A lot of these songs express a specifically 2022 kind of bafflement. “SAGA” doesn’t know how to get past this condition either, but it’s pushing against the boundaries.

17. Lana Del Rey, “Watercolor Eyes”.

You think you know someone’s schtick, but they surprise you.

18. Black Belt Eagle Scout, “My Blood Runs Through This Land".

Alternating between wordlessness and breathlessness, either way keeping on building to something.

19. Jake Xerxes Fussell, “Love Farewell”.

Stoic and stolid, Jake Xerxes Fussell bets on metaphor but could’ve made do with just rumble, growl and twinkle.

20. Ezra Furman, “Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club”.

Secret-telling in movie-theatre darkness.

21. Let’s Eat Grandma, “Happy New Year”.

Let’s Eat Grandma have the saddest synths but this one’s rose-coloured.

22. Joshua Burnside, “Louis Mercier”.

Time-travel klezmer-pop that jostles you like a cobbled towpath.

23. Beth Orton, “Weather Alive”.

When talking songs become singing songs so sylphlike and effortless.

24. Sault, “Life We Rent but Love Is Free”.

Sounds like certain small parts of London, for certain small moments, on busy summer days in the past.

25. Bill Callahan, “Coyotes”.

One for slickrock and sagebrush, which are not without their romance.

26. Yard Act, “Tall Poppies”.

A self-consciously small story, a kitchen-sink drama, a talking head, no denouément.

27. Angel Olsen, “All the Good Times”.

A rhinestone widescreen production, a road movie on a soundstage.

28. Beach House, “Hurts to Love”.

Generationally speaking, the ending of Skins series 1 still packs a fair bit of a punch, so rewriting “Wild World” by Cat Stevens makes more sense than you’d think.

29. The 1975, “The 1975”.

Imagine taking “All My Friends” and making it about your cock and it’s still good; that takes rare talent.

30. Craig Finn, “Birthdays”.

Comforting because it really is nice to know there’s someone in this world who’s always known you, and comforting because it’s Craig Finn doing Craig Finn stuff with his big dumb Craig Finn voice.

31. Julia Jacklin, “Lydia Wears a Cross”.

A bodily song: knees, eyes, clothes, adornments.

32. Anaïs Mitchell, “On Your Way (Felix Song)”.

You get the sense Anaïs Mitchell finds nothing all that difficult—eulogising, philosophising, doing justice to a life, picking out the pithiest reminiscences, in just under three minutes she bowls it all over.

33. Billy Woods, “Pollo Rico”.

Intrusive thoughts, compulsion to repeat. A personal history of madness.

34. Bright Eyes, “Arc of Time (Time Code) (Companion Version)”.

This year Bright Eyes re-recorded some of the songs from the 2000s I love/hate the most. “Arc of Time” gets remade without the beats or the keys, but stays smart and wry and death stays on its mind. 

35. Fred again.., “Berwyn (all that i got is you)”.

Fred again..’s songs are urban explorations, entries to London’s subterrene.

36. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World”.

Cosmic.

37. The Big Moon, “Ladye Bay”.

Supersized, tectonic.

38. Drive-By Truckers, “The Driver”.

Grimy, grunting noir.

39. Ethel Cain, “American Teenager”.

D. H. Lawrence would’ve liked Ethel Cain and her Great American Hauntedness.

40. Girlpool, “Butterfly Bulletholes”.

Such a shame to lose Girlpool in 2022 but they were four or five bands in just two people, they gave us a lot.

41. The Beths, “Expert in a Dying Field”.

This one speaks for itself.

42. Nilüfer Yanya, “Shameless”.

Breathless, almost somehow fleshless, rattling ribcage xylophone.

43. Mesadorm, “Soap Opera”.

Skew-whiff boiler-hiss robot pop.

44. Porridge Radio, “Back to the Radio”.

Porridge Radio’s skills are in cacophony, cataclysm, crisis, ruination, disaster mismanagement.

45. Wet Leg, “Too Late Now”.

Every introspection needs a wise-crack or two.

46. Wilco, “Tired of Taking It Out on You”.

Aged 29, I had chickenpox recently; I recovered but it’s made looking in the mirror interesting, all these new small markings on the same face.

47. Plains, “Hurricane”.

The lyrics to “Hurricane” read like an apology, but Katie Crutchfield’s voice always sounds a little barbed to me; that’s what makes this work, I think.

48. Daniel Avery, “Higher”.

Frenetic travel in place.

49. Kevin Morby, “Bittersweet, TN”.

Kevin Morby hits all the requirements, he straight-A’s being a country singer.

50. Beabadoobee, “You’re Here That’s the Thing”.

In 2023 I resolve to continue to love silly rhymes, campfire rhythms, dewdrops and holding hands.

[kentuckyanarchist]

There are few albums as bipolar as Boys and Girls in America—few that combine euphoria and aching nostalgic sadness in the same way, and fewer still that do it both masterfully and in absolute earnest. The Hold Steady’s third record greets you right from the start with a double motion: the album cover, all kids with hands in the air, hot pink with confetti flying (“up to yr neck in the sweat and wet confetti” as “Most People Are DJs,” from Almost Killed Me, had it), cuts against the very first line, where Craig Finn riffs on Jack Kerouac to affirm: “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” Kerouac evinced the same bipolarity in On the Road, and Hemingway too, Steinbeck too, not to mention Dylan, not to mention Springsteen—it’s part and parcel of a particular kind of American lyrical masculinity that likes to bellow and wail about its sensitive seriousness. Writers in this tradition—and Finn, whose first four Hold Steady albums approach flawlessness, is among the very best of them—plumb the unchartable depths of sorrow that provide everyday hedonism with its uneasy foundation. They give voice to a pain that can’t be outrun no matter how hard their characters try, one that catches them up in solitary moments and/or comes to suffuse whole segments of lives.

It was a feature, no doubt, of Almost Killed Me, the Hold Steady’s debut from 2004; it was unavoidably present in Separation Sunday (2005), their high-concept dramatisation of that line from “Thunder Road” about waiting “for a saviour to rise from these streets”. But on Boys and Girls songs like “Hot Soft Light” pummel you with it: the drunken reassurances and unsubtle heavy metal references of the verses cascade into the nightlife typology of the chorus, where all possible encounters are reducible to ideal types, “the guys / with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high” and “the girls / that’ll come to you with comfort in the night.” “Hot” and “soft”, such a simple pair of monosyllables, do all sorts of work here: they’re a mellow high before it becomes a problem (“it came on hot and soft / and then it tightened up its tentacles”); they’re a callback to the summing-up of human existence as just “hot soft spots on a hard rock planet” (“Most People Are DJs” again); and, when the title drops in the final line, they’re the body and the blood, Christ himself at the centre of the cross. In other hands counterposing religious ecstasy with drug-induced euphoria might seem pat, or at least like a failed attempt to shock; in Finn’s it seems entirely sincere.

Songs like “First Night” trade in a kind of nostalgia that’s not without its darkness and drama. More than almost any other Hold Steady song “First Night” runs off of Franz Nicolay’s keyboards, but there’s vastly more there too, in the strings and backing vocals especially. In the quadrumvirate of characters (not forgetting the narrator), Holly aka Hallelujah aka the central character of Separation Sunday is central, and she’s still in rough shape. The flashforward from that first night, when Holly “slept like she’d never been scared”, to last night, with Holly disconsolate and trembling, echoes in the shaking keyboards, over which the album title becomes a mantra in falsetto. At which point Finn, who from Lifter Puller days is well-acquainted with the art of the sneer and the snarl, intercedes: “don’t bother talking to the guys with their hot soft eyes”—those two adjectives for the last time—“you know they’re already taken.” All of which is not to forget that in the phrase “she was golden with barlight and beer”, “First Night” also coins the most beautiful ever way of saying “she looked hot when I was drunk.”

Songs like “Party Pit” take up the mantle of ceaseless mobility from Kerouac (the tradition Deleuze describes in which “everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside”) and run with it, juxtaposing a wayward narrator with an old friend who never escaped the vicissitudes of the teen scene. (As a 16-year-old I cycled home most nights across the Carter Bridge, over the railway just north of Cambridge railway station, and the line about crossing “that Grain Belt Bridge / into bright new Minneapolis” became wrapped up with that quotidian experience. I don’t know if “bright new Minneapolis” is a joke or just a conscious bit of mythmaking—I’ve never been to Minneapolis but I don’t see it as a city with lights so bright they can be seen glittering from above—but the image resonates nonetheless. And for the record: you’ll find lyrics sites saying the line’s “brand new Minneapolis,” but it’s not. Listen to this version.) Finn’s narrator’s been away to school and come back (“to start a band, of course”) but the heroine’s stayed put, “pinned down at the party pit,” stuck going round and round in circles, “gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.” The party’s the site and source of sadness here and getting away’s jinxed too: coming home’s a bittersweet endeavour as much because of what’s stayed the same as what’s different.

And “Stuck Between Stations”, with its unpromising source material, its dated central metaphor, its shoehorning of a guilty-pleasure or problematic-fave author (as John Darnielle’s said—Darnielle being a man who knows his Berryman and knows his Hold Steady—the “sometimes in blackface” of Berryman’s Henry worries away at any too-friendly reading of that sad Minneapolis bard). It might not be the best Hold Steady song but it might be the one that most overtly strives for grandiosity in a Springsteenian mould, it might be the one that succeeds most evidently at making a bold statement that finds a way to hit home regardless of one’s circumstances. And the album’s clearest statement of ambivalence and bittersweetness is in the “buts” of its chorus: Berryman, at the time he took flight, we learn, “was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected / he loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters / he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration / most nights were kind of fuzzy but that last night he had total retention.” Strung out but at least having made something of oneself—at home but not all year round—finding the booze sometimes a chore—and sometimes somehow glorious! It’s all there.

Lyrically, I wonder if this is achieved through a sort of wilful mythologisation. Berryman, after all, probably didn’t really love the Golden Gophers, but why not flesh out his story with the claim that he did? “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” from Separation Sunday, delves into its heroine’s despair but also zooms out to describe the graffiti tributes made to her by other unnamed characters—to show her story’s a legendary one in its own universe too. Once again Springsteen got there first, this time in “Highway Patrolman,” which invents a whole fictional town and county, and a slow dance for the characters to wax nostalgic about, all in order to build a world in the song and thereby make something somehow universal. Across all the Hold Steady albums the same characters recur in different (not always that different) predicaments, but their stories never totally cohere. They have the feel, at times, of characters in your peripheral vision or even on the edge of a dream, cohering to make certain points then splintering once more. The stuff of strange, half-true legends.

And then there’s the god question. Finn doesn’t just see love, or hope, or beauty, or tenacity “in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers” (in “Citrus”), he feels Jesus there—and in so doing captures a sort of lowdown American pantheism found from Emerson to the Beats, not to mention in the final scene of Bruce Almighty. The particular form that the mystical takes in “Chips Ahoy” is not the same form it took in most of Separation Sunday, but in the narrative of the girl with a sixth sense for winning racehorses it’s there nonetheless. Even the stuttering puh-puh-puh assonance of “pinned down at the party pit” conceals a deification metaphor, its martyress fastened tight to the scene—as Lifter Puller more bluntly put it, she’s “nailed to the nightlife like Christ on the cross.” (As a disbelieving teenager I had a disproportionate number of Christian friends, I guess I was drawn to people who believed in things. It’s possible I thought I had something similar in certain bands, certain songs.) God, in America today, is as fiercely contested signifier as everything else, but it’s clear that the omnipresent God of Boys and Girls is also a personal God, not to mention a lenient, ecumenical one.

Boys and Girls met me at a particular time in my life, a couple of years after it was released, in summer 2008, which is probably the biggest part of the reason it’s stuck with me (other texts are sepia-shaded for the same reason: Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, the first Conor Oberst solo album). The rest of the first four Hold Steady albums are probably just as good, but this one works in certain ways that set it apart. It’s less cynical than Almost Killed Me, less weary than Separation Sunday, less nostalgic than Stay Positive, and more holistic than all of them. It turns out that the holism and the bipolarity amount to the same thing.