Caroline White has played in a lot of bands that sound, to me, haunted: Julia Brown (who are one part folk, one part hollow, spacey synth pads,* one part reverb-laden vocals) and the tape-hiss bedroom pop of Infinity Crush both do; even her backup vocals and viola on teen suicide’s “give me back to the sky” are almost swallowed in waves of noise. Her music feels a bit like it’s on the edge of disappearing, already so far removed from presence, like a sun-faded photograph that’ll soon be blotted out completely. Or, you know, like a ghost.
So it comes as no surprise that on haloed, the first release of high bloom, her new “ambient pop” project with her roommate Hans Hoffman sounds just as on-the-edge-of-non-existence. Percussion, rather than grounding the songs, is heavy on reverb; pitch-shifted voices scuttle around and around in the background like wind blowing through a tunnel; synth leads are frequently buried under thick layers of ambient pads. Lyrics mostly revolve around themes of love, detachment, sickness, purity, dreams. There is so much longing in this record.
And one of the songs that longs the most is the title track, “haloed.” It begins with a high, muted synth line, just twelve notes and two measures long. For the last four notes, though, there’s just the tiniest delay, each note echoing a fraction of a second later. There’s a sense of detachment, of togetherness followed by a split, a desperate urge to catch up, over and over again. This image develops further when White’s vocals come in: “oh there you go just dropping your halo/and oh there i follow like i am your shadow.” Her vocals and the lead line are the two most present, foregrounded parts of the song (and even they sound distant).
New synths come in—synth pads fill the landscape of the song, droning on a single chord; soft, minimal drums join the mix. A barely-audible tremolo whispers in the background, shimmering like mirage. Slowly, all the new instruments overwhelm the initial synth line. Between the pads, the drums, and the vocal harmonies that join in at the ends of verses and chorus, we can still make out the opening notes—which haven’t changed this entire time—but it takes more work. Suddenly, what sounded foregrounded and (relatively) close is overwhelmed by distant, cold ambiance; the whole feel of the song sinks deeper into melancholy.
Apart from those notes being slowly buried (perhaps the layered synths falling over it like the “snow on the ground” in the final line), the song changes very little musically. The vocal melody varies a little across the verses, but it’s almost always built on sustained, ambient pads. This gives a sense of sameness, of stuckness, of the relationship between singer and the song’s “you” changing almost not at all over the course of the song. It’s also echoed in the lyrics: “I found out what roses mean/they don’t love cause they don’t move.”
The last lyrics of the song are “i try to make a sound/but it’s just snow on the ground.” Fittingly, White’s vocals immediately cut out. We’re left with only the lead synth and a few airy pads. Neither one is particularly dominant—they seem to share the space evenly. And if the delay is still on the last four notes of the lead, it’s been all but erased by the ambient sounds. We’re left with a sense of resignation, if not resolution. Perhaps the song’s narrator can’t speak, but maybe she doesn’t need to anymore. Maybe she’s left the situation entirely.
*Synth pads, in case you don’t know, are sustained synths, possibly with a slow build or slow decay, rather than a melody line; they’re more for atmosphere than anything. This may be wholly unnecessary, but I mention them a lot in the next few paragraphs (“haloed” is atmospheric as all hell) and I don’t wanna leave anyone out.
Boston-based, Chicago-originated Krill were known for their wholehearted distrust for both the (music) ‘scene’ and industry as a whole. This skepticism slotted them in neatly with many of their contemporaries (to be sure, Krill is not the first band to explore distaste with the status quo; on the contrary, they were only a more recent iteration of a long standing trend towards dissatisfaction with the whole musical factory).
However, Krill separates itself from the pack of dissenters by combining an unusual degree of musical talent with lyrics that, in general, refrain from being overtly targeted. Their second and final album, A Distant Fist Unclenching, is a fraught and precise work, the center point of which is the 7 minute 14 second “Tiger,” a sprawling and jazzy piece of musicianship that fits ceremoniously with its fable-like lyrics. “Tiger” is only one of nine fantastic songs on Fist Unclenching, but this track in particular does an excellent job of showcasing Krill’s nearly unrivaled ability to make the arcane widely accessible, and to create ‘pop’ songs in the most unlikely of venues.
The opening moments of “Tiger” introduce the song's central instrumental elements: a rollicking, off-kilter drum line that shares equal space with accentuated guitar notes. There is a remarkably clean guitar tone on “Tiger”—not something often found in other Krill songs, or in many guitar-driven rock songs in the independent/DIY scene that Krill inhabits—and it serves to create a delicate sense of reverence in the song. At points in the chorus a gentle fuzz is added to Aaron Ratoff’s guitar; otherwise his sparsely employed and twinkly guitar lines define the song through their clarity. They’re exceptional because they function in the opposite way of the drums (and bass, once it kicks in), which spend a large portion of the song maintaining an unexpected foundation on top of which everything else sits. This is not to say the drumming is monotonous in concept—the opposite is true; Ian Becker’s drum lines shift and vary, never compromising their nature as the integral backbone of Krill.
“Tiger” has volume swells and decrescendos, but the relative tone of the track is masterfully kept at an overall even-keel[1]; even in the b-sections, “Tiger” is never jarring, only perhaps more insistent on its place in rock. There are moments in other Krill songs (and from other bands in their scene and genre) in which songs approach levels of noise and feedback that almost certainly preclude them from being considered as accessible listening. Being precluded from the pop conversation is certainly not meant in a detrimental sense, but merely to say that there are expectations of popular music that, when not met, sound distinctly like Krill’s other songs[2]. “Tiger” never reaches this commercial breaking point, and in failing to do so creates a pop-ready accessibility that does not kneel to pop sensibility. In other words, “Tiger” is an intricate and expertly performed song that doesn’t deal in unrecognizable musical forms; it's engaging without being overly demanding.
Putting aside musicality for a moment, the lyrics of “Tiger” run somewhat contrary to traditional song structure. There is no chorus, although there is a b-section musically, and the only real repetition comes in the form of two separate macabre encounters. The first of these comes as “a villager expires…mauled by a hungry tiger” and then a small stanza occurs: “the tragedy is, the villager was well liked, the villager was well liked, by friends and family and tigers alike.” This structure is mirrored later in the song, where “there’s a fish life ending” as it is taken out of the water by an eagle, and again we hear “the tragedy is, the fish was well liked, the fish was well liked, by friends and family and eagles alike.”
This is objectively brilliant songwriting! The brain picks up positively on patterns in song structure and Krill provides none of this lyrically until these small patterns occur. Those stanzas are separated by minutes and yet entirely recognizable as reflections of one another, although grotesquely different in their respective realizations. A villager being mauled by a tiger is a tragedy, hence he was missed by his “friends and family.” On the other hand, a fish being picked up and eaten by an eagle is much less of a tragedy; there is not much room to feel sympathy, as fish being eaten is an integral function of nature. Yet, “friends and family” seemingly miss the fish as much as they miss the villager, thereby (in the world of “Tiger”) equating lives of all involved species. This redoubles on itself when considering that the villager was liked by not only his friends and family but also “tigers alike.” Since this is the case, tigers (and by later extension, eagles) are all similarly capable of empathy and remorse.
This theme of universality that defines “Tiger” can be seen as the lyrical keystone of A Distant Fist Unclenching as a whole. That phrase itself, “a distant fist unclenching,” actually appears in “Tiger” as the opening line, the embodiment of cathartic release: “I had a bad day, but at least it’s ending, and in the distance, there’s a fist unclenching.”
When considering all of the musicality and lyrics behind “Tiger,” it's hard to deny the unique and substantial quality of the song, and by extension the band themselves. There is something to be said about this brand of music (especially “Tiger”) and its place is the increasing world of strange-pop. Krill[3] have made their mark writing songs that shouldn’t come off as pop songs but do so anyway. These songs cover topical matters, have relatable lyrics, and don’t tread beyond reasonable sonic expectations—all traits of pop music as typically regarded. However, on songs like “Tiger,” they also have distinctive and innovative musicianship, lyrics that are relevant but still border on the absurd, and reflect the scattered discontent with the modern milieu. This hybridity is to the benefit of listeners and is carving out a space where songs can exist without being necessarily pigeonholed into the conventions of one particular genre. This is pleasant for friends, family, and Krill alike.
[1] All except for the ending minute long c-section that is noticeably louder and more sustained than any other portion of the song. It is, however, devoid of lyrics and added seemingly as a closing catharsis to the track.
[2] I love all Krill songs very, very much.
[3] and contemporaries, Pile, Frankie Cosmos, Porches, LVL UP, Spook Houses, Ovlov, Quarterbacks, etc.
Buddy Holly is one of those artists whose story often eclipses his music. We all know it: He died young—tragically young, all his best days ahead of him. There have been songs name-dropping his signature nerdy style, tribute albums, a biopic with an unfortunate lead, and even strange retellings of his songwriting in 80’s sci-fi dramedies. His image is an indelible part of American culture, but it’s his music that deserves to be remembered.
Buddy's early work mirrors the simplicity of the landscape of his West Texas home—simple guitars, short songs, straightforward melodies. But a shift came when he moved from remote West Texas to New York City; he met the woman who would become his wife, he rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, and he recorded some of his best work at a studio that now serves as a swanky condo.
Just four months before he died, in his last studio session, Buddy recorded four songs with a different sonic arsenal than he had access to in Texas. Most notably, guitar is totally absent from most of these recordings. Although some demos exist from tapes Buddy recorded in his apartment, the studio recordings show where he might have gone, given the chance. Among these songs is “True Love Ways” — perhaps the most emotionally pure love song in his catalogue.
The song starts with just Buddy’s vocals. He’s there, clean and unadulterated—as though he’s singing directly to you. He sings about the connection between two people, the type of connection that is unknowable to anyone but those two people. As strings join his vocals, a piano, harp, and eventually a saxophone enter the mix. In many ways, “True Love Ways” is far more Frank Sanatra than it is Buddy’s idol, Elvis Presley.
“True Love Ways” is free from Buddy’s signature hiccup but it maintains the accent and direct lyrics that mark all of his work. It’s straight forward—almost to a fault. He avoids the metaphor he’s often prone to overuse and reverts to pure expression. Over swelling strings, Buddy sings about the trials of life and the fortifying power of love. “Sometimes we’ll sigh / Sometimes we’ll cry / And we’ll know why / Just you and I know true love ways,” Buddy croons over legato instrumentation. The realistic view of what’s to come is there, but the cynicism so often found in modern pop music is refreshingly absent. The song maintains the optimism of its eternally 22-year-old composer.
“True Love Ways” acts as a foil to the morbid narrative that is often attached to Buddy Holly’s name. As with other famously dead young musicians, we tend to focus on the death instead of the actual cultural contribution. We mine the tragedy in documentaries and merchandise, often while erasing the triumphs. We get so focused on mourning the day the music died that we forget why that day was sad to begin with. Sure, it’s tempting to speculate on what could have been; what the music landscape would have sounded like had Buddy taken the bus instead of the plane. Ultimately, though, this speculation is fruitless and indulgent. Popular culture was altered the day Buddy’s plane went down in Iowa, but it was changed even more profoundly by the fact that Buddy made music in the first place.
The bookstore I used to work in had a satellite shop inside a clothing store. The bookstore portion was connected to a flower shop, which was in turn connected to a cafe. The music the clothing store played was trendier than what my usual workplace offered—in place of the two versions of "Canon in D" and "Montagues and Capulets" we got FKA Twigs and Passion Pit. The cafe was just slightly separated from the rest of the clothing shop, and their playlist—as if manually started ahead of schedule—was around thirty seconds ahead of our own. The choruses of songs would overlay ghostly on the verses, we’d catch snatches of songs yet to come underneath the outros of the ones still playing. It drove the people in the flower shop nuts, I think.
Hearing ghostly bits of songs in the wrong places is approximately what listening to "Inside your house; it will swallow us too" by Ricky Eat Acid is like. Pulses of reversed music fade in on a cloud of static before the insistent, forward-moving lead line joins them. New sounds appear. A piano melody, low then high, joins the mix, but the same insistence lingers. No phrase is longer than eight beats, but the hypnotic mix of tones keeps us going through the track. It’s beautiful. White noise scuttles about the track before scurrying away. Suddenly, at 0:56, the first low piano note is off; flat; wrong. From then onwards, the piano sounds warmer, more organic. We can no longer be sure that we’re listening to a loop at all. There’s another off note at 1:20. Everything feels more real, but somehow more sinister too—like being on a carousel while the calliope slowly goes minor key. As white noise loses its timidity and rises up, consuming the music (swallowing it too, perhaps), notes become more frequently flat and discordant. The instruments sound more strained, choked off. It’s like the effort of staying the course is slowly destroying them. If this song is a horror movie, it’s a slow-boiling psychological one, complete with a drawn out degradation of the psyche. The lead loops are beautiful, which makes their distortion all the more alarming.
New music—distinct from any of the loops we’ve come to expect over the course of the last two minutes—breaks through for a moment, just a moment, before the noise recedes and the familiar loops come back. They haven’t survived whatever sonic assault they’ve undergone, though; the notes are filtered, warbling, abruptly cutting out. They continue as such, slowly fading out, until they are cut off by what sounds like a record abruptly stopping. Even then, they linger for a second more, finally disappearing entirely.
There’s a haunted quality to the song, definitely, a sense of the past layered over the present, the strict confines of note and harmony and melody slowly breaking apart. And yet there’s that nagging, that persistence, of the same core notes. The lead notes, never gone for more than a few seconds, give us a point to hold on to while we hear the noisy ghosts of other music coming from the next room over, a point to hold on to even while it’s being swallowed, first by noise and then by silence. The sweet, sad, insistence of the song feels like telling yourself you’re ok over and over while becoming less and less ok.
The second tension—the noise coming from a third room, I guess—is between the notes played forwards and those played backwards. There’s a sense of stasis, not just because the notes stay the same for so long, but because every note played forward—hammered home before slowly fading away—is paralleled with one played backwards—slowly swelling into a punctuating burst of music. If the forwards notes are ellipses, the backwards notes are periods, cutting off abruptly, at the end of each note, waiting for the next forward note to pick up where it left off.
So, in the end, we’re left with the feeling of staying in one place until we’re swallowed. There’s a stuckness, haunted by change but never changing, the music never quite making it to the song in the other rooms. It’s all in the same house, but before anything happens, we’re swallowed.
The Low Anthem's 2011 album Smart Flesh was recorded in an empty pasta sauce factory in Rhode Island, where the natural reverb in the room and a freezing atmosphere helped the band create a truly haunting ambience. Nowhere is that resonance more apparent than on the sixth track, a clarinet trio entitled "Wire."
Jocie Adams' playing (not to mention her composition, obviously) is mesmerizingly melancholy. Her sound moves seamlessly between low, hollow dissonances and high-register swells akin to looking directly into the sun. She uses an impressive portion of the clarinet's range, in terms of both pitch and dynamics. It's also notable that while the piece has three clarinet parts, Adams was able to record them in such a manner that it really sounds like there were three of her playing together (this is no small feat for a piece of music which has no discernible time structure).
On the band’s bio page for Nonesuch Records, Adams describes what recording was like: “The cold cuts through to your heart, slows your whole body down. It made us focus. Some of our songs got slower. I wanted to create an incubator for my clarinet to keep it from going flat. I never did, but when I was recording 'Wire,' we had all of the space heaters around me to keep the clarinet in tune.'" This snapshot of the recording process makes the structure of the album make a little more sense; "Wire," a beautiful, yet methodically slow piece, comes after "Love and Altar" and "Matter of Time," two songs of similar speed (or lack thereof) and sleepy demeanor. And as if to really solidify this mood, "Wire" is followed by yet another mellow song, "Burn." Some producers might advise against ordering the tracks on a record to create such an extended period of this 'sleepiness.' But on Smart Flesh this soft quality is the emotional essence of the record, and at its core is "Wire."
So what is a clarinet trio, a piece of music which could be described as ostensibly classical, doing in the middle of an indie-folk record? In the title song* of Smart Flesh, which is the album's final track, the opening lines describe a "high wire man," and the song goes on to prematurely lament the creep of "lonely death." Maybe the most lethargic song on the album, it bears a connection to "Wire" on an intimate level: where the wire represents the place of work for this minimally described character of the high wire man, so does the song "Wire," in its tonality and atmosphere, seem to wordlessly symbolize the world of "Smart Flesh." By extension, it almost seems to represent the relationship the band has with their "brief but wonderful little world" of the abandoned pasta factory where the record was made. In short, when we take all of this speculative symbolism into account, "Wire" kind of comes to embody the soul of the record. It's both the glue that holds the album together and the piece that sets it apart from the millions of other quirky indie-folk records out there. And, need I mention this again, it's a goddamn beautiful piece of music.
*The live performance linked here is great, but the studio recording, which is inexplicably absent from YouTube, is uniquely great and can be found on Spotify.
Downtown is a place in a perpetual state of becoming. Even if it’s falling apart as it is in many post-industrial American cities or redeveloping as with my home in Phoenix, downtown never ceases to be a place of opportunity and excitement. Majical Cloudz, the musical project of Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto, submits to getting lost in this constantly evolving place on “Downtown” (from their 2015 release, Are You Alone?) through the lens of a fragile and blissful relationship that could derail at any moment.
Everything about this song—from the use of a few basic chord progressions to the straightforward delivery of the vocals to the steady presence of a minimal drum beat—is simple, except perhaps the feelings that it elicits. It opens with an unassuming yet beautiful reverb-drenched synth melody that floats on a synth alternating between two chords before a steady drum machine comes in to guide the song. Welsh delivers the opening line, “Nothing you say will ever be wrong ‘cause it just feels right to be in your arms,” in such a calculated way that, despite the romance implicit in it, I am left feeling uneasy. The way the instruments float in the background while his voice cuts clearly through the center establishes a sense of intimacy in the track. Moreover, this almost feigned intimacy is so characteristic of our experiences downtown where at once we are both an individual within and subsumed by the whole of downtown.
As the chorus begins, an added synth pad and shaker expand this space which Welsh fills with cheeky rhetorical questions which seem to be directed at himself: “Is it really this fun when you’re on my mind? Is it really this cool to be in your life?” It's here that we first get a clear glimpse of the singer’s skeptical outlook on the relationship he describes. Contrasted with the first lines of the chorus which exude a sense of carelessness and a desire to get lost ("We’re going Downtown ‘cause we feel like running around"), these questions push us to consider the extent to which we can believe what he is saying.
In the second verse, Welsh expresses his desire and love through a more obsessive yet seemingly self-conscious lens as he sings, “If there’s one thing I’ll do if it ever goes wrong, I’ll write you into all of my songs.” It's almost as if he's planning for a tragedy and the inevitable change that is soon to come. The second half of the verse emphasizes this feeling of futility and nakedness by fading out the melodic motif—the song’s opening synth melody that I mentioned earlier—in order to isolate Welsh’s voice as he sings, “If suddenly I die, I hope they will say that he was obsessed and it was ok.” This line is the central moment of self-realization and acceptance about the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity that are produced through our constantly changing relationships and life circumstances. When thinking about Welsh’s epiphany in relation to how we produce downtown as a place built purely for opportunity, we question whether this fantasy might be too good to be true.
We can feel Welsh's sincerity as the song builds upon the fresh foundation of this barren, lucid moment with a reaffirming second chorus that reintroduces both the motif and the previous synth pad, along with newly added shimmering chimes reminiscent of the chorus in Joy Division's “Atmosphere.” The song concludes with a poignant bridge in which a defined synth emphasizes Welsh’s proclamation that “I’m going crazy, crazy for you.” It's here that Welsh's previous clairvoyance is fulfilled as he completely gives into his own insanity, and in turn, into the volatility of downtown’s perpetual state of becoming.
Majical Cloudz willingly accepts the uncertainty and the trials that come with being in any relationship by presenting them alongside the constantly evolving, complex imagination of downtown. But despite all of the volatility Welsh is navigating, to me the conclusion is clear: it really is this fun when you are on his mind, and it really is this cool to be in your life.
For someone who wishes she could write songs about anything other than death, Julien Baker’s “Everybody Does” from her chillingly beautiful debut album Sprained Ankle starts out sounding remarkably like a wide-eyed Taylor Swift song, complete with resonating open chords from an all too perfect-sounding acoustic guitar that can embed even the most somber of subject matters with a childlike sense of hope.
It’s within this naïve aesthetic that Baker spins an image of herself as a rotting, broken down house (so much for the Taylor Swift comparison), a scene that sounds more nostalgic than depressing when described in her pensive, almost detached tone. But as Baker grows increasingly frustrated by her inability to trounce the thoughts and feelings that inhibit her emotional well-being—the splinters right beneath her nails—we hear the chronic pain behind this vacuous, decaying sense of home/self reveal itself in Baker’s voice, as she replaces her once measured calm with a belt whose fury she only allows to scratch the surface.
After momentarily reflecting on the emotion she just allowed herself to show with some softly sung “I knows,” Baker roars back with a profound, yet elegantly simple, revelation about what she's learned from the loneliness of being trapped inside her own mind: “I know myself better than anybody else.” She delivers this line with more self-awareness than self-pity, the frustration and defeat in her voice acknowledging the harsh reality of her mind. Rounding out this moment of understanding is the entrance of a vocal harmony—which adds literal musical depth to complement the moment’s emotional depth—and the song’s only real deviation from its repetitive descending chord progression (strummed forcefully in a way that emphasizes the change), marking the phrase as audibly distinct within what is otherwise largely a straightforward one-guitar-one-vocal affair.
There’s an eeriness that envelops “Everybody Does” after this pivotal moment; steady, muted power chords replace the light openness of Baker’s previously bouncy strumming pattern, imbuing confidence and stability into a song that clearly has no idea how to achieve these concepts, and Baker’s return to a relatively calm vocal is cringeworthy in how reserved it feels, especially after having just heard how vulnerable she's capable of being.
But maybe this composure is real, the eeriness a result of its overly forward truth rather than an overt attempt to obscure it. Maybe the grim description of herself as “a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you’d never touched” and the gloomy conclusion that “you’re gonna run” from this “filthy wreckage” isn’t a self-pitying attempt to mask Baker’s emotional shortcomings, but rather an honest revelation about her relationship with herself and with others that requires a deliberate collection of emotional outbursts to truly understand.
Maybe Baker’s rotten, broken down house isn’t as unsalvageable as she thinks. In a complicated mixture of sadness, defeat, frustration, fury, and what almost feels like a little bit of self-forgiveness, the song finishes with the kind of nuanced enlightenment that only unmitigated clarity can produce: “You’re gonna run, it’s alright, everybody does.”
"Woke Up New/Older:" On Storytelling and Sad Song Kinship
By Marissa Lorusso
I started listening to The Wonder Years, a pop-punk group from Philadelphia, in late 2010. I was a college sophomore, spending most evenings sprawled out on my twin-sized college bed scrolling through Tumblr and trying to find music that would endear me to the cool kids. When a prominent Cool Guy on Campus started posting on Facebook about The Wonder Years, I started listening compulsively.
And then I got hooked. The whiny, sneering voice of their first full-length, The Upsides, combined with crunchy power chords and sing-along choruses reminded me of the pop-punk I loved in high school, while the lyrical content (which centered mostly on feeling too old for the dumb things you did in high school) rang almost too true. When the band released their sophomore full-length, Suburbia I've Given You All and Now I'm Nothing (a title alluding to Allen Ginsburg’s famous poem “America”) the following summer, I devoured it voraciously and settled quickly on summer soundtrack contenders.
One of those tracks was “Woke Up Older,” a song about coming and going, friendship, and teetering on the edge of adulthood—all things I, having just turned nineteen, was starting to acquaint myself with. The song’s deeply personal lyrics roped me in with their specificity, which allowed me to visualize the narrator’s experience and understand how similar it was to my own. Sometimes, the specificity was off-putting, as I had no idea what certain phrases referred to (Who was Jess? Where is Rittenhouse? And never mind that bridge lyric: “When John introduced ‘Woke Up New’ in St. Augustine / I knew I wasn't alone.”). But I soon learned to just ignore what I didn’t understand and adore what I did (“I woke up older / Carrying two years in the bags under my eyes” — Same, dude. Same.) while I played air drums along with the song’s insistent choruses.
Dan “Soupy” Campbell, singer of The Wonder Years, sings on Suburbia about being home from tour and figuring out what “home” even means. “Woke Up Older” includes lines about sleeping in a place that is familiar but not your own, and about being “a stranger on [your] street.” That summer, I was back in my suburban town, half-way through college and planning a future while tied deeply to my hometown friends. Listening to songs like “Woke Up Older,” it was nice to know that someone else was in the midst of trying to figure it out, too.
Fast-forward just over three years to late fall of 2014. As the depression known well to college grads working unfulfilling jobs took hold of me, my music taste began to change. My emotional energy couldn’t keep up with the quick pace of pop-punk’s distorted power chords, so I turned towards the more melancholy, sparser comfort of folk music. With pretty much nothing else to do at my boring desk job (where I had been hired to support an executive who promptly quit two weeks after I started), I decided to educate myself on notoriously sorrowful band The Mountain Goats. I was familiar with The Mountain Goats’ more popular records, but their prolific reputation intimidated me. I ripped through their early discography: a whole month on The Sunset Tree, then working backwards; a few weeks on Tallahassee, then a few more each on All Hail West Texas, The Coroner’s Gambit, Full Force Galesburg.
Each song was a story, or part of a story, illustrated by John Darnielle’s exacting, poetic lyrics and vivid imagery. Some were dramatic and cinematic stories, with guns and drugs (or vampires), but mostly they were deeply real, human stories — of a couple’s pathetic attempts to salvage a hollow relationship, for example, or of growing up with an abusive stepparent. Often I couldn’t relate to the particular heartbreak or turmoil, but the details of Darnielle's lyrics made me feel as though the characters in his songs were people I had known for years, and the lessons they learned often seemed surprisingly pragmatic for me.
By the time the New Year hit (and I had sung everyone’s favorite Mountain Goats lyric, “I am gonna make it through this year/if it kills me” a few too many times), I had settled on a new album. Get Lonely is the kind of album that might be described as being “about one particular feeling…a sort of existential dread, the thing that happens when the most important person in your life walks out.” Initially, I found the album a bit off-putting: its first track, “Wild Sage” brings in Darnielle’s nasal falsetto too early; the plucky piano seems cheesy. But the song builds into the stirring image of a wandering, heartsick loner and so I decided to stay the course.
I was glad I did. As I listened to the album on my bus commutes to and from work, I would look over dirty, frozen, snow-covered Boston and frown, having been shoved onto a bus so early that I was half-awake, or so late that the sun had already set and the commuters were already grumpy. I was nudged into a seat, sweating through too many layers of winter gear, pressing my head against a dirty window and seeing nothing new. A musical expression of that single emotion—the existential dread of loneliness—was exactly what I needed.
I fell in love with the ninth track on the album. It opens with a strummed guitar at an urgent and light-hearted pace. “On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time,” Darnielle sings, “I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared.” The lyrics continue over the jumpy guitar, with our narrator explaining what he does to recover from the loss: talk to himself, make too much coffee, wear extra sweaters in the cold. The music is simple but beautiful—one strummed guitar with some more melodic bits picked over it—but most of the song rests on Darnielle’s voice. His delivery is soft but aching, and it builds throughout the verse to a reaching, falsetto chorus that asks: “Oh, what do I do without you?.” When the lyrics aren’t literal, the imagery is fresh and sharp: “an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space”, or, later, “the world, in its cold way, started coming alive.”
Danielle’s lyrics paint a vivid portrait, and his annunciation is so emotional that it is hard not to feel empathy for the narrator as, over the course of the song, he begins to recover. And the song resonated with me on a more personal level; while no important person had walked out on me, I felt like something had—the beauty of a New England fall, maybe, or my own faith in fulfilling post-grad adventures, or my college friendships, or the ease of the romantic relationship I was currently struggling through. The feeling of loss and recovery throughout the song struck me, and so I listened to it every day, on repeat, projecting my sorrow onto the narrator, absorbing his into mine.
While these two songs may seem quite different, there is a similarity between Darnielle’s storytelling and the lyrics of bands like The Wonder Years. Both are vivid and intimate, with an eye towards the perfect detail. This similarity speaks to my taste, I suppose, but isn’t exactly coincidental: After about a month of disappearing into that song off Get Lonely, I realized the title—“Woke Up New”—was contained in the lyrics of “Woke Up Older.” I repeated the line again to myself. “When John introduced ‘Woke Up New’ in St. Augustine / I knew I wasn't alone.” (So that, I thought to myself, what was that mysterious lyric was all about). Indeed: no coincidence that I had found similar comfort in The Mountain Goats as I had in The Wonder Years—the latter had, it seemed, picked up some techniques from the former.
And more than storytelling tools, Campbell had derived comfort from Darnielle, whose song had, by his account, made him feel less alone — the same as it had for me. This connection reminded me what good, powerful storytelling music sounds like, and made me realize the power of combining strong songwriting skills with these kinds of stories: it can make us feel less alone. These songs remind us that our struggle has been someone else’s, and that they got through it, and that we will, too. Stumbling upon the “Woke Up New” shoutout made me feel like part of a secret club of songwriters and music-lovers who see themselves and their pain in other people’s art, and who, through that recognition, are able to heal; and, maybe, after that, to offer their pain as a means of healing for someone else, too.
Pinegrove, an indie rock/emo revival outfit based out of Montclair, New Jersey, released their debut album Everything So Far in October of 2015. The band, fronted by Evan Stephens Hall, has encapsulated what many of us in our early to mid 20s feel—the harsh trudging into the next era of our lives. Pinegrove's music is simultaneously lamenting and trying to move through what a good friend of mine calls "the wilderness years," aka that period where everything is uncertain and we're free to explore our potential. Now, dealing with the end of those years, Hall expresses a confused regret on the album's sixth track, "Size of the Moon": "if I did what I want then why do I feel so bad?"
"Size of the Moon" begins with an acoustic, slow, and humming chord progression that seems to consciously reference "The Moon" by The Microphones. The song follows a cyclical structure that ebbs and flows; the guitar and drums build towards an emotional climax, then pull back away into a ponderous quiet strumming. Lyrically, each verse follows the same structure, starting with a proposition to someone from the past, immediately followed with a resigned and passive "fine." After this repeated exchange, the music builds and reflects the narrator's reminiscences back to a time in life that seemed optimistic and full of potential:
But do you remember when
In your living room
When we made some room & moved ourselves around in it?
It's how my heart resumed
The wandering thought then climaxes into a pang of regret: "we had some good ideas but we never left that fucking room." The cyclical stanzas in "Size of the Moon" paint a feeling of being stuck in an emotional limbo. The whole of the song is an elegy for these times gone by. The lyrics grieve the loss of a life full of electricity that surrounded him in the past. Finally though, at the end of the song there is an aching that's anesthetized where he hopefully and idealistically sings: "I wanna visit the future and dance in a field of light."
In "Angelina," arguably one of the most poignant songs on Everything So Far, we get more of an interior retrospective that explores a yearning for past times. The narrator of the song is thrown into the past by a fleeting image of "washing windows with Angelina." However, this at-first desirable, innocuous image ultimately seems to pose more distress than comfort:
I don't understand anything
Violent angles from side to side
How'd you get so tangled up in my life?
Musically, the song leaks wistfully; the guitar resonates with nostalgic pangs for another time: "I love you like it's the old days," he sings. These "old days" and Angelina are inextricably linked, the memory of this person being emblematic of a period in life that's over now.
The aptly titled Everything So Far is a catalogue of these years past and the struggle to move beyond them. It's a deeply personal meditation that anyone leaving the wilderness years can relate to.
The World Is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die (deep breath)—torch-bearing rockers of the emo revival—frequently make soaring, sparkling, emotional music. Their new album Harmlessness is no exception to this, including songs that range from churning tales of feminist revenge to seven-minute pop punk-tinged, violin-accompanied songs about climbing out of depression and anhedonia.
One of the most interesting and disarming songs on Harmlessness, though, is “Ra Patera Dance.” Its beat begins straightforwardly enough: four-four time with an accentuated third beat, guitars chugging away at perfect quarter notes (with the occasional break for slightly more noodling). One-two-THREE-four-one-two-THREE-four. Even when this changes, the song stays pretty predictable; not in a bad way, but rather it’s consistent, it’s comfortable. The beats slow down, falling on every other beat. One-.-THREE-.-one-.-THREE-.
As the music swells, vocalist David Bello sings “We keep ourselves in the dark,” and that’s where things become disorienting. As if echoing the uncertainty the lyrics describe, the beat becomes more jarring, harder to follow. It stops and starts in places we wouldn’t necessarily expect, having come to understand a simple pattern in the first two parts of the song. It’s certainly possible to discern a pattern, it just takes time, the same way the issues that the narrator of the song is dealing with seem to (moving from being “[kept] in the dark” to, eventually, “[letting] the morning light in”).
One-two-three-four-one-two-three-.-.-two-three-four-one-two-three-. the beat goes. I could type more but the pattern repeats so slowly that it’d take up too much room. One-two-three-.-One-two-three.- The pattern interrupts itself. Bendy guitar notes break through the drums and we return to the four-beat, accentuated third pattern of the opening. “In the middle, we’re completely unsure” Bello sings, adding “I was holding on.” If you’re listening to this song when you’re out walking, or if you’re maybe tapping your foot along to the drums, these dropped beats are really disorienting. At first listen one wonders if there’s a pattern at all to it, or if these empty spaces are sprinkled at random through the middle of the song.
In large part the song is about this feeling of disorientation, of making it through the moments that disarm us, and when we do, we’re swept up in upbeat, dueling synth and violin lines. Eventually these give way to the full band pounding away at their instruments, the synth and violin joining together to create one beautiful melody. We’ve made it through the confusion (whether we’ve mastered it this time or merely been swept along until it’s done is another matter; the important thing is that we’ve made it). Bello is joined by co-vocalist Katie Shanholtzer-Dvorak, singing together “Today we are superheroes. Tonight we’ll just be tired.” The song follows this map almost exactly, cooling down from its ecstatic burst of energy into a more meandering, spacey outro. The music is full of energy, and momentum, and bliss, before wandering out, maybe a hint that these moments of fearlessness are only temporary, as terrific as they are.
By turns predictable and confusing, soaring and then tired, “Ra Patera Dance” could almost convey all of the emotions its lyrics embody without Bello uttering a word.
"Pulo, Pulo" and the Universal Language of Expectation
By Jack Rowland
O que você esperava?
Wherever we go, be it Rio de Janeiro or an article on the web, we bring along a set of expectations. These expectations can consist of humble communal traditions or grand scientific truths: for example, a family going out for their weekly Friday night pizza and, upon their arrival, a chef demonstrating gravity (“what goes up must come down”) with a toss of said pizza pie. The art of reading into these spectral bonds between present and future is perhaps a non-omniscient being’s only method of survival. Expectation, most importantly for the sake of culture (which I expect is why you are here), grants us all a feeling of control that, while illusory, ends up shaping our individual and collective experiences. And in that shaping of collective experience, expectation becomes a universal language, evoked in silent dialogue between audience and performer, ever chasing that Zeitgeist-defining white whale: the new “cool.”
The complexity of the “cool” (apart from the no-brainer of its positive nature) may be perhaps the greatest mystery most of us will never admit to contemplating. Of course, those of us who are not contemplating it probably already have it figured out. To be cool, especially where music is concerned, is to reside just outside the realm of expectation while remaining fluent in the realm’s language. In a manner of speaking, being cool means just that: “being” rather than “understanding” – composure over analysis, fluidity over knowledge. Cool, while ultimately elusive and arguably more marketable than spiritual, is an inference that a certain look, sound, or way of thinking is itself autonomous; in other words, the look, sound, or way of thinking is not constrained by cultural norms (the result of collective expectation). And this is where we jump into Jorge Ben’s “Pulo, Pulo.”
One would expect that Jorge Ben (pronounced “George”), an artist like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil who rose to cultural prominence amidst the radical strains of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement of the 1960s, must be a performer of explosive antics and leftist beliefs (performed slyly through double - sometimes triple - entendres). However, the truth is much simpler: the man is a masterful songwriter of the pop genre, playing on the expectations each listener brings to the listening experience. And, from the age of 21 with the recently Black Eyed Pez-remixed “Mas Que Nada,” Jorge made it look cool. Surviving through government censorship (due to his predominantly apolitical subject matter), Jorge became and remains of the biggest pop stars from Brazil, blending the West African grooves of Samba with a distinct, self-taught percussive style of guitar playing brought up during years in the army. And there is no better example of this style than on track five of Jorge’s seventh album Forca Bruta (1970): “Pulo, Pulo.”
Commencing with a clearing of his throat, Jorge blazes through the song in a chorus-bridge-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro format, throwing away the verse-chorus form for an alternative which places feeling and centripetal force over narrative. From the title “Pulo, Pulo” (meaning “Jump, Jump”), Jorge coerces the listener to provide their own cause-and-effect relationship born from expectation: if I jump, surely I must expect to fall. And in this case, as one would expect from most pop songs, Jorge really expects us to believe the classic romantic trope: if I jump, surely I will fall… in love. Yet, instead, his lyrics artfully trapeze the fringes of cultural expectation. He writes:
(Chorus)
Pulo, pulo, pulo
E não caio
Pulo, pulo, pulo
Se eu caio
Eu caio dentro do balaio
De flores do meu amor
(translated)
Jump, jump, jump
And do not fall
Jump, jump, jump
If I fall
I fall within the basket
Of flowers of my love
Jorge acts within and without the cultural norms of “falling in love,” working autonomously from our expectations while also very conscious of what those expectations entail. In his world of vibrations and vinyl crackles, if you jump, you don’t have to fall, but, if you do, you will certainly fall in love (a vision of love, worth mentioning, that Jorge chooses to present as a basket full of numerous angiosperms). The nonsense is the source of the listener’s empowerment, and the performer’s effortless sense of cool.
Melodically, the song works the same way, as the chorus follows the oldest play on expectation in music history: suspension. With the lowered seventh of the first chord, Jorge, bleeding the edge between preparation and actual suspension, leads you, the listener brimming with infinitesimal impatience, right to the resolving subdominant chord, as the seventh of the tonic rolls down to the major third of the subdominant. This creates a seesawing whirl of a groove, oscillating between two simple chords, stuck in an ecstatic confusion of expectation and reckless abandon. In less than three minutes of rather simple song-writing, Jorge defies expectation (becoming cool) while creating expectation within the context of the song itself, as found at the song’s incredible climax in the third chorus.
After repeating the mantra of jumping and leaping, Jorge, seemingly out of breath (after listing again the love-hamper’s assortment of flowers), takes on the last chorus:
Pulo, …
This void in the lyric defies the expectation set by Jorge himself, sending the listener on a virtual nosedive into silence. It is a daring and delectable feat that cements “Pulo, Pulo” as a song sung in Portuguese, and well-versed in the universal language of expectation.
One of the most talked about and widely adored albums to come out of the East Coast DIY scene this year was Palm’s Trading Basics, the first full-length effort from the Philadelphia-via-Bard quartet. Palm made their splash through a combination of immaculate live performances and a record that is in many ways a perfect meditation on dynamics and rhythm.
These two factors are perhaps best seen in the conjoined, but nominally separate tracks “Doggy Doctor” and “You Are What Eats You.” Both songs are stylistically congruous, and “Doggy Doctor” bleeds into “You Are What Eats You;” when performed live, they are often played together without a pause between them, as one continuous song.
A large part of the attention garnered by Palm has come from their innovative use of rhythm, which combines stuttering fragments of guitars and jittery drum lines into sound collages of sorts. The result is songs that sound like no one else in their scene (or outside of it, for that matter).
Palm's enchanting use of rhythm and texture is immediately noticeable on “Doggy Doctor;” a small sample leads a collected drop-in, with one guitar playing an outstandingly eerie melodic line (high-to-low), while the other guitar flies around jabbing in and out where necessary. The (traditionally monikered) rhythm section (drums and bass) sits behind the guitars and plows its own way forward, half referencing the guitars, and half playing at its own game. Palm is relying on its listeners’ ability to catch onto melody and rhythm at the same time, with the result being a massively complex and uncountable structure that somehow ends up deeply cohesive and indeed, catchy.
At the 3:07 mark in “Doggy Doctor,” everything shifts to a discordant accelerando progression that launches the transition into “You Are What Eats You.” The guitars play off each other, trading off-kilter rhythms as the drums liltingly and steadily punch behind; a moment of unlikely cohesion between all four instruments barrel jumps into the new song, the drums here providing the surface on top of which everything else wrestles.
Around the 2:00 mark on "You Are What Eats You" is where Palm makes leaps that differentiate this two-part composition from the music of their peers, as well as the other songs on Trading Basics; momentum that has been building since the tail end of “Doggy Doctor” finds fruition several minutes later in one of the most emotive passages I’ve ever encountered in “rock” music: a slight pause drops into a frenzy accentuated by periodically eviscerating jam-block double hits and guitar harmonics that unfailingly elicit a visceral reaction from the listener.
Kevin Lozano: For as long as I’ve had a computer with some kind of access to the internet my mother has asked me to find her free music to play in her car. Why pay a dollar when my sons can get it to me for free.
And I imagine, most people I know haven’t paid for an album let alone a single of music since buying cellphone ringtones was still a thing during the heyday of the flip phone.
If anything I clamor around hasitleaked.com most afternoons at my job, trying to figure out if something I want to listen to has come out before their label said it would. The boom or bust ecosystem of free music on the internet is a place I feel at home. Not only with music, but with any digitally available and easily consumable object, finding the backdoor, and pilfering the fucking thing has always appealed to my disposition. And its a disposition informed by not being able to own all the music I wanted or watching all the movies I wanted to see, but wanting to learn from them anyway.
An entire generation of musicians, writers, and artists are raised on a mindset that whatever you need is out there floating in the digital soup. And shutting down access to information and content I think is an attack on the intellectual and creative development of many people. Recently AAAARG--a free online library--was subject to a hefty lawsuit which is slowly being fought back by the site’s founders after an emergency online funding campaign. There are many non-institutional scholars who are outside the paywalls of services like JSTOR, and AAAARG is one of the most important databases of scholarly work available. The library was a vital resource for scholars on the Indian sub-continent who had little to no access to many of the texts available on the site. But pirating by and large is seen as an act which takes away from creators. Especially in music and in film, the downloading of leaks is an attack on the livelihood of individuals. Who is actually losing out? Consumer or creator?
Jeremy Katzenstein: Since the rise of the MP3, the music business has famously struggled with how to engage with the inevitable flourishing of the digital marketplace. Instead of embracing the unprecedented access to its assets and working with the companies responsible for disseminating those assets to monetize these new distribution systems, the music industry has repeatedly inhibited the growth of its potential partners and ultimately itself; look no further than the fall of Napster or the disaster that was DRM-protected music on iTunes. Even Spotify, one of the first companies to create a legal, Napster-esque experience, had to wait years before it could launch in the United States due to intense negotiations with record labels.
Years of music industry follies and disputes--all of which appear to reflect the behavior of a once lucrative business scrambling to hold onto its crumbling power for the sake of its own interests--have legitimized the view that the music business is an enemy of the consumer, and thus, an entity that we can justify not supporting in spirit or financially. So why should we care about downloading a leaked album before an industry executive can profit from it?
However, as Kevin already mentioned, such a mindset neglects to consider the livelihoods of the music industry’s primary vehicles: artists. Can we justify snubbing “the man” if it means cheating the artists we love out of a living? Should our perception of the artist--how much we like them, how much money they make, how well-known they are--determine whether or not we pay for their music? Fascinatingly, the digital marketplace has empowered consumers to make these sorts of decisions, allowing for the formation of personal music-buying moralities that would’ve seemed absolutely ridiculous just 30 years ago.
KL: Oneohtrix Point Never’s most recent album Garden of Delete, was leaked months in advance of its release. The leak was plugged rather quickly at the time, but copies of the album were floating around the internet for a while. When it did leak, I remember kicking myself for not jumping fast enough on the download links. OPN has been one of my favorite artists for the last five years, and I have contributed my dollars to a few of his records: R Plus Seven, Commissions I and II, and many of his shows in the New York area, but for the most part I got his albums from friends at no cost.
Last week, Daniel Lopatin finally addressed the issue of his album leak, and his intense feelings for leakers in general:
[editor’s note: as of October 2017, the tweets referenced here have been deleted by the artist]
JK: It’s hard not to feel a little dirty in trying to respond to all of this. We are undoubtedly the “bottom feeders” who have “no article to write or show to put on if artists don't makestuff [sic].” But I guess we’re also trying to be a part of an “open discussion about what exactly is going on here” too, and we can’t do that in this way without being the “bottom feeders” that we are.
KL: And at the same time, it seems unfair to situate the artist as the one responsible for the entire livelihood of the industry. If anything, we all benefit from each other. We aren’t all just mouths to be fed by the artist. And I’m wary of Lopatin’s call for leakers to be punished. It comes off as not only angry but extreme in an almost conservative way. The availability of information on the internet is what makes it so vital. So much of the music he’s made in the last few years sounds like a 4chan board come to life and prettied up with an auteur’s sensibility. Not to discount his music, but the process of his music necessitates that his project benefits from the same economy of exchange on the internet that his fans leak his albums onto. What was more interesting than Lopatin tar and feathering his leakers, was the idea of leaks orchestrated from within the industry.
JK: Deliberate album leaks would definitely reflect our new artistic economy where, in such a crowded marketplace, exposure tends to justify a lack of financial gain (with the expectation that that exposure will somehow pay off down the line). For example, I have a friend who drums in a band called Harriet who had been working on an album called American Appetite for four years. Three days before the album was set to come out, it leaked on the aforementioned hasitleaked.com. But instead of mourning the fact that a piece of art he had worked on for years was released early without any financial benefit to him or his bandmates who had been working so hard for so long on it, he was “honored” that the album had leaked in the first place (and it also became a way to promote the album’s official release show).
Maybe Harriet will suffer financially from that album leak, but what they’re losing in money they’re theoretically gaining in exposure. Having an album that’s “worth leaking” suggests that it’s also worth listening to, and that sort of grassroots status is hard to replicate, if not impossible to achieve, with any other sort of marketing tactics.
The effect of such an approach even works with more mainstream artists. Look no further than Rihanna’s ANTI, whose early leak on Tidal provided the much anticipated album with a narrative twist that arguably made its reception even more explosive when Rihanna responded by releasing the album for free. The result: ANTI is awarded platinum status--1 million albums sold--in less than a day (though interestingly, it didn't immediately receive platinum status from Billboard and Nielsen, who don’t consider free downloads to be “sales”). So even though ANTI probably won’t be able to be as financially successful as it could have been, it is probably on more computers and MP3 players than Rihanna and Roc Nation could have ever hoped for. I have no doubt they’ll be able to turn that priceless exposure into ticket sales and merch sales that far outweigh whatever profit could be made from ANTI alone.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with this approach at all, but it’s definitely proven itself to be uniquely effective in capturing the attention of consumers.
KL: With that in mind, I’m not so sure leaking or pirating is necessarily so black and white. If you think of album leaks as a product of the music industry’s sleaziness, it’s hard not to see how it only works to fuck artists and feed the fanboys and generate hype. With Jeremy’s example it's the way the internet community chooses to celebrate artists by showing excitement in leaking their music. And in the way I’ve come to look at the entire messy business is that there is no shame in downloading music. And there isn't even shame in sharing it with friends over dropbox over sending them download links. I provide support to artists by going to their shows whenever they're in town.
JK: And that mentality plays right into the personal music-buying moralities I was talking about earlier. Instead of de facto supporting artists in every possible way, we now have the choice to support artists in some ways and not others, to buy their concert tickets but not their albums, to buy their merch but not their new single.
KL: I’ve always been very worried about the threat of punishment from trying to find music. It only seems like a matter of time, especially on days I’m feeling nice and paranoid. With artists taking up their pitchforks and torches against people downloading their music, it scares me. I really sympathize with Lopatin’s disappointment in his fans, but I have a hard time digesting his tone, because it doesn't paint him all that different from industry friendly hacks like Metallica who would have been more than happy to prosecute leakers and pirates.
Maybe there is one fix to all of this? Thom Yorke said that he thought “a lot of the time the reason people pirate, is they want access to good music. And they don't get it because the radio is so shit.” And this same thought has been echoed by Neil Young.
JK: Oh god, fixing radio is a whole other issue that’s arguably even more hopeless than fixing album leaks.
Rhythmic Dissonance and Intramusical Meaning in "Only Twin"
By Brendan Blendell
For many people (and certainly all of us here at Subdivider), music is one of the most important and ubiquitous parts of the human experience: it follows us into elevators and doctor's offices, it invades our favorites films and TV shows, and it surrounds us at parties and on road trips. Because of its omnipresence, we constantly make unique associations with certain songs and styles of music that affect our feelings when we hear them or similar pieces of music later on.
For example, most people could recognize the national anthem of Monaco as a patriotic song even if they've never heard it before; similarly, Adele's "Someone Like You" would probably come across as bittersweet just from hearing the first few seconds of piano. These types of associations are considered extramusical, because the meaning is contextual, subjective, and not intrinsic to the music itself. In other words, the impressions we get from music are often formed in regard to other pieces of art that have some sort of culturally agreed-upon meaning or from previous experiences that involved that piece of music.
Of course, the most obvious way we gain meaning from music is not from the music itself, but from the lyrics. Whether we're listening to Justin Bieber or a traditional Appalachian ballad, the vast majority of music derived from both the popular and folk traditions is heavily lyric-based.[1] That's why it's so surprising to us when a song like "Gangnam Style" becomes a big hit: for most American listeners, we have no idea what it's about. For many of the songs we listen to, musical forms generally follow the lyrical forms, making any type of purely musical meaning (other than genre, tempo, and other obvious characteristics) subsidiary to the lyrics.
Since musical meaning is often derived from playing into our expectations and then exploiting them, more experimental and unconventional styles can use techniques that subvert our understanding of musical tropes. Take, for instance, progressive rock. Prog rock is often associated with bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, and King Crimson, groups who were most successful in the 1970s. A new generation of prog rock bands have taken many of these techniques to the next level, including Oceansize, a now-defunct UK group whose style might best be described as "Radiohead meets Meshuggah."
Oceansize has a very diverse sound, but one of the most distinguishing elements of their style is the use of rhythmic dissonance, a generic term that refers to different rhythmic patterns or levels of complexity that clash in some way. While lots of contemporary pop songs use some form of syncopation, prog rock music tends to rely on more complex techniques like odd meters (where the beat structure is typically based off of prime numbers greater than three) and polyrhythm/meter (where there are multiple layers of rhythms that don't quite fit together). In the Beatles' “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” the "Mother Superior jumped the gun" section uses meters that switch between groupings of nine and ten beats, while the segment from 1:48 to 2:02 contains a polymeter between the drums (continuing the groups of two beats) and everything else (in groups of three beats). Similarly, the drummer in Demi Lovato's “La La Land” introduces a brief polymeter from 3:24 to the end of the song.
The song "Only Twin" from Oceansize's 2007 album Frames provides perfect examples of all of these techniques. It isn't really a song you can immediately enjoy because of the words, due to both their abstractness and incomprehensibility (full disclosure: I didn't even know most of the words until starting this article). Without diminishing the value of the lyrics, I would argue that most of the meaning listeners gain from "Only Twin" the first time arise from purely musical signifiers that are constructed in reference to each other, often called intramusical meaning.
The song begins with a soft electric piano playing a relatively slow continuous stream of notes. This line, especially as it initially only gets punctuated by quiet cymbal hits and sustained notes in the high end of the electric guitar, seems timeless, as if there's no broader sense of rhythmic structure in the song. In reality, the keyboard line is carefully grouped into fourteen groups of three notes and one group of four notes at the very end, which repeat for nearly the entire song. Before the full drum pattern enters at 1:12, the rest of the ensemble (excluding the vocals) organizes the grid of notes that the keyboard has already laid out into groups of two rather than three. This can be easily heard by counting the number of groups occurring between each bass note: 6, 2, 1, 6, 2, and 6.
Rhythmic structure in the beginning of "Only Twin"
By the time the drum beat enters, we've heard the electric piano line repeat over three times and become pretty accustomed to the rhythm and feel of the song, which is why it’s so jarring to hear the sudden rhythmic dissonance between the drums and the rest of the instruments. The technique used here is one of the most fundamental types of rhythmic dissonance: the 2 to 3 polyrhythm. A polyrhythm is defined as two or more rhythms occurring in the same amount of time that are not multiples or divisors of each other, so 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 2 to 6, and 3 to 6 would not be considered polyrhythms. In order to fit both groups of two and three within the same space, a subdivision needs to be created that is the smallest multiple of both rhythms. In the case of the 2 to 3 polyrhythm, 6 is the subdivision that allows us to count both the keyboard line and the beat. To complicate the rhythmic structure even more, the drums play a polymeter of five beats over the groupings of three beats.
Rhythmic structure after the entrance of the drums
At 3:17, a completely new section suddenly interrupts an instrumental repetition of the original line partway through. This new section keeps most of the established polyrhythm and polymeter patterns while creating a more rhythmically straightforward atmosphere overall by changing the keyboard line from an ascending/descending pattern in groups of (mostly) three to an inverted Alberti bass pattern in groups of four. The keyboard line now lines up more regularly with the beat (every four notes on the keyboard comes out to six beats), which allows the meter to have a more regular pulse (what musicians might refer to as 12/8 time). If you try counting along to every group of three beats, you’ll notice that each of these groups can be grouped further into four, creating a clear metrical structure.
Rhythmic structure in the middle of "Only Twin"
The climax of “Only Twin” starts around 4:15, when a choir takes the place of the main vocal line. At 4:37 an additional drum part briefly appears, pounding away at the same rhythm as the keyboard while the string section glissandos upwards. Right at 4:43, the drums immediately resolve both the polyrhythm and polymeter, finally matching the electric piano line that’s been playing continuously from the start. Since the keyboard rhythm was slightly slower than the beats before, the tempo also feels somewhat slower, helping release the tension that had been building up since the drums first started playing. The intensity gradually decreases over the last few minutes of the song, eventually ending at the same energy as it began with.
The key to "Only Twin" is its repetition: by reducing a seven-plus minute song to just two basic sections, our expectations change gradually rather than rapidly through the manipulation of texture over time. No two repetitions of the original section are played in the same way, allowing the song to continue developing and building up while also keeping a sense of stasis. There are twenty-three discrete sections within the song, seventeen of which are based off of the original electric piano line; the other six are located directly in the middle, separating the rhythmically dissonant sections from the rhythmically consonant ones. Oceansize’s juxtaposition of remarkably simple elements with fairly complex ones is the essence of a great prog rock song, one that creates just as much (if not more) meaning from subverting our musical expectations as it does from invoking extramusical associations.
[1]For more information on the distinctions between the popular, folk, and art music traditions in Western music, check out the chart on page 5 of musicologist Philip Tagg's article "Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice."
All Dogs describe the music they make as “loud pop songs.” Over the course of 2013’s self-titled debut EP and 2015’s masterful followup, Kicking Every Day, Maryn Jones and her bandmates have proven that they can make punk songs that you can’t get out of your head. In the pseudo-title track from Kicking Every Day, that catchiness is tempered by an ache; it’s a longing with a punch.
At a brisk 2:34, “That Kind of Girl” gives the listener just enough to beg for more. The opening lead guitar points to The Strokes, but as soon as the drums come in to anchor the song, the band’s grittier punk roots become evident. Throughout the track, the instrumentation sticks to the traditional lineup expected of a classic punk song: rhythm guitar and cymbal-heavy drum lines build the foundation while booming lead guitar fills out the upper register with a bending riff that's interesting enough to create an earworm but not distracting enough to outshine the lyrics.
As with her starkly beautiful solo project, Yowler, Maryn Jones’ lyrics take center stage in “That Kind of Girl.” When Jones’ voice enters the mix, her tone portrays the anger and defiance of her words; it's as if Jones is screaming over the firestorm of noise that surrounds her:
"You are better off not messing with that kind of girl"
What does that mean when they say stay away from me?
But the song doesn’t begrudge its subject. In the bridge, the instrumentation clears to a simple drumbeat and basic, low-tone guitar. Now giving the listener a chance to breathe and reflect, the clarity of the lyrics come through in a way that combines the emotional resonance normally associated with musical genres with slightly less edge than the loud pop Jones and her cohort produce. “If you’re wanting something else/then I hope you find it /clear water, love and health” the bridge continues, reusing lyrics from earlier in the song but hushed in a way that allows the listener to hear the deeper meaning as it builds into the song’s emotional apex: “I don’t want to drag you under/ Kicking every day.”
The repeating chorus at the end of the song not only hammers home its remarkable catchiness, but also provides a moment of triumph, a feeling of reward in the midst of all of this self-reflection. In this way, “Not that Kind of Girl” becomes an anthem for the self-aware. Its narrator knows that problems cannot be ignored, nor should they be. The song uses a bad reputation as a rallying cry, and its vulnerability as a source of strength. Jones, in the same vein as contemporaries like Mitski and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, finds power in brutally emotional honesty.
Realizing that internal problems can ward off emotional intimacy can be devastating. “That Kind of Girl” is simultaneously a study in that devastation and a punk rock kick in the face. In the space Jones occupies, not only is it possible to be both; its revelatory.
During Thanksgiving I found myself going through old boxes of adolescent artifacts, tucked deep in the corner of my closet, piled up and kept. Upon taking one out and seeing what was inside, I was immediately filled by the vapors of misplaced memories: a journal from 8th grade, burnt CDs, and some photographs from high school football games, taken with distant friends. Each memory meant something, but as a whole, the box of things became a vessel in and of itself. It became an entity of it's own through an amalgamation of various potent, yet certainly composite rediscovered things; a collage.
Many of the most poignant songs by The Books share a feeling of age and memory, packed into a song. Like my box, they're composed as an eclectic mix of suggestions tethered together. This is due to songwriting that reverberates with a halcyon air: of distant memories, preserved as they were—as an artifact of memory. These songs hold the capacity to trigger the consciousness to a certain place and time. The Books are masters of incorporating, syncopating, and pasting together "found sound" into a piece that becomes something entirely new, the resulting music becoming an elevated vestibule of memory and sound that functions independently of their scattered parts.
"There Is No There" by The Books is a perfect melding of found sound and songwriting. It begins with individual electronic notes bouncing off of original guitar samples. This elaborate and clean introduction to the song quickly breaks into a dated monologue by Albert Einstein on the topic of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit. Not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
The fuzzy recording of Einstein's voice placed within the meticulously recorded samples might seem jarring and uncomfortable, but it's not; "There Is No There" functions as a whole, blending memory and music. Underlying this monologue, one can hear guitarist and singer Nick Zammuto's electronically tuned, ethereally enhanced voice consuming the sample of Einstein's voice into the song's entirety.
As the song progresses, Zammuto's multi-tracked vocals illuminate the space in between banjo and guitar notes before going back to a piercing and hyper-deliberate guitar style which creates all of the percussion needed in the song. This effect is achieved through their recording process: instead of sitting down and recording each instrument individually, they go a step further and record each note independently of each other, one by one. They then take the singular notes and paste them together creating what Zammuto calls a "collage."
What The Books create isn't merely musicianship with overdubbed voice clips; instead, the writing itself is structured and fundamentally predicated on the incredible deliberation behind each and every note placed in its perfect space. It's the found sounds that sampled by The Books that feel the most spontaneous. In an interview with Pitchfork, Mark Richardson asks, "Were you thinking at the time, 'I'm going to use these [found sounds] in a piece?'"
Zammuto responds by saying:
Not really, no. I think it's the same with Paul...we just have these things because we love them so much and it makes us happy to listen to them. The fact that they can fit into music is incidental. It's just so unpredictable how or if we'll later use a sample in music that, when you're looking for samples, it's important to just go for what moves you in one way or another.
Many of the vocal clips included in "There Is No There" suggest this incidental sampling aesthetic. The songwriting itself takes priority, then the pasting of field recordings can be tactfully included. Throughout their catalogue of music, these found sounds can range from old clips of their mothers speaking on tape, to Einstein wistfully speaking about Gandhi's cause—anything that "moves you in one way or another."
The Books manage to invoke a clean form of retrospection. Through their punctilious recording they invoke a pining in the listener, a yearning for sometime or some place, encapsulated in song. From a vast collection of their own field recordings and sound clips they're able to apply the last piece to their collage. Unfortunately, The Books are on hiatus, but what we do have is a perfectly packed box waiting to be opened.
A lot of people take indie rock tropes for granted these days. Deliberately out-of-tune performance, sloppy guitar playing, singing that’s more like a tuneful whisper—all these decades-old fixtures are either subsumed as meaningless signifiers of the dominant DIY aesthetic or derided as tired cliches.
I admit, when I first heard Izzy True, I was thoroughly in that second category. I was at a show in the back of a tiny record store in Kingston, NY, surrounded by two dozen pale bespectacled teenagers and mildly turned off by the lead singer’s self-effacing patter. But after giving Izzy True’s Troll EP a listen at home, I realized that she has a gift: an ability to transform tired tropes from inert genre markers into highly meaningful qualities that contribute to each song’s singular affect.
The EP has since become my favorite thing I’ve heard all year. I highly advise giving the whole thing a listen, but I’m going to zero in on track 2, “Cake”, which most fully embodies these attributes, in this case to portray an overwhelming sense of weeping insecurity.
Go ahead, give it a listen.
The track begins with a slow, languid drum groove punctuated painfully by a cowbell on the occasional upbeat. Izzy’s clean guitar, drenched in a depressive chorus, enters with a four-chord sequence with a descending melody. Already we have a pretty morose, though not lifeless, soundscape to work with.
Then the vocals enter, the singer’s mumbling only contributing to the mysteriousness of the lyrics. It’s hard to ascertain any sort of narrative, but I don’t think the lyrics’ effectiveness is dependent on the listener’s understanding in any literal sense. The verses, as per the song’s title, allude to cake-making, but obliquely: “Oh my sweet thing/Milky trembling,” Izzy sings in the first lines, whispering sweet nothings to her terrified virgin batter. In verse two, she flips an idiom on its head: “Grab a cold bowl/Greasy elbow,” she says, showing us that what we thought was admirable (elbow grease) actually might be pretty gross. The verses thus present an elusively foul sensuality that turns the literal sense of the song on its head.
This lyrical weirdness, when combined with Izzy’s careful melodic choices, contributes to a profound sense of instability. Although the verse introduces a steady pulse of 8th notes, the forward momentum they bring is tempered by the tentative vocal delivery, making the verse’s newfound energy more anxious than excited. Each verse is made up of two phrases of three lines each. The first two lines of each phrase rise, melodically speaking, forming what a music theorist might call an antecedent. Antecedents are associated with a sense of tension that is released with the consequent. The problem is that the consequent never really arrives. After the rising melody of the first two lines, we expect the third line to fall in turn, but it doesn’t. When Izzy sings “Here am I, still waiting,” the word “waiting” falls on the seventh degree of a major seventh chord. The major seventh chord is dissonant enough that even pre-1940 jazz musicians avoided it thoroughly, due to a distaste for the interval of a semitone between the seventh and the root of the chord. It is precisely this semitone that Izzy exploits here. She sings “waiting” a semitone below the expected root note, resulting in a melody that never truly resolves and feels marvelously unbalanced. If only she would rise to the root! But alas, we are left waiting forever.
To see what I mean, check out these examples: The first is an approximation of what we hear on the recording. The phrase ends shakily, on the major seventh of the final chord. Listen to the example here.
In the original, there is no release of tension traditionally associated with a consequent phrase.
Next is what we would hear if Izzy finished the phrase traditionally, on the tonic of the final chord. Here, the last note is one semitone higher than in the recording. Listen here.
With one small note change, tension is released in what sounds more like a traditional consequent phrase.
It's clear that in the second, hypothetical example, there is a sense of finality that the original recording lacks. It is this lack of finality that makes the verse sound so unstable.
This effect only intensifies in the chorus, which is arranged in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud form. “Dreamy dreamy dream,” she heaves, her pitch not quite fluctuating, her voice straining against itself in its low register. The guitar becomes more syncopated, increasing the anxious energy. “Beamy beam beam,” she pleads, and we hear the subtle genius that makes Izzy True’s music so damn effective. On the last “beam” her voice breaks free of the melodic trap she had set for it, rising and then falling a semitone, the same semitone used to such effect in the verse. What makes this particular instance so remarkable is that it sounds like an accident, hardly any different from the ordinary wavering in pitch that characterises her lachrymose delivery. We hardly notice it, making it all the more powerful.
We approach the loud part of the chorus, which solidifies the more forceful teary-eyed delivery suggested by the song’s previous sung whisper: “What’s a love machine?/I don’t have one, have one.” Izzy’s lack of a love machine is clearly traumatic, and we feel her pain as her deft imprecision combines with a vocal that, despite its strength, is carefully contained from breaking into a scream.
Of course, it’s not just these vocal subtleties that make this song so insecure. The guitar is often slightly out of tune, you can hear mistakes every so often, and the clean guitar tone, despite the chorus effect, feels painfully exposed. But it’s these elements in combination with her idiosyncratic vocals that give us this cohesive, tearfully anxious whole.
Next time I bake a cake, you will find my tears in the batter.
