Mixtapemotions

  • "Vampire Spy Film" by Lovedrug, Sunday, October 31, 2021

    Michael Shepard was in a band called Kerith Ravine, which dissolved in 2001. Shepherd explains the name of his next band when he gave up music to attend film school. He found that he couldn’t give up on music, and his love of it “dragged him back,” hence, his new band was called Lovedrug. The band signed with The Militia Group, and their first album, Pretend You’re Alive, brought the band in talks with Columbia Records alongside with fellow Militia Group band Copeland. However, Columbia underwent restructuring after signing Lovedrug and Copeland. The label shifted from the indie-wave of the early ’00s to more sure-thing artists of the late ’00s. Somewhat defeated, Lovedrug revisited their contract with The Militia Group and released their second LP, Everything Starts Where It Ends, which spun a college-radio single, “Happy Poison Apple.” But by the time it was time to promote their third album, The Sucker-Punch Show, The Militia Group had gone bankrupt.

    YOU’RE IMMORTAL AND A LITTLE BORED. After their label’s bankruptcy, the band went independent, releasing 2012’s Wild Blood, funded by supporters on PledgeMusic. After losing the support of a label, the band toured less, and became a part-time project for the remaining band members, which now included Michael’s wife, Jessica. The band would call it quits in 2018, but continued to release music, including last year’s Turning into Something You Were Never Meant to Be. For today, Halloween, we’ll listen to the second track on the band’s 2015 album Notions, “Vampire Spy Film.” Lovedrug started with a progressive indie-rock sound that was hard to draw comparisons to. Michael’s voice is somewhere between Adam Levine and Billy Corgan, often emphasizing harsh tones as dynamics in otherwise sweeter-toned songs. Songs on the band’s Militia Group albums were longer and featured musical experimentation. Lyrically, Shepard gravitated to violent metaphors in otherwise un-violent songs. The band’s third album’s reception was mixed. The lyrics were the most graphic and violent, and according to Shepard, many of the fans were “pissed off.” Shepard continued to use some violent imagery on subsequent albums, but hid it better under the melody. Music after The Sucker Punch Show sounds more optimistic.

    VAMPIRE IN A SPY FILM, SLINKING AROUND. After a three year hiatus, Lovedrug released in Notions September 4, 2015. The band’s sound had changed, refining the rough-around-the-edges sounds of their early records and not featuring Nashville-acoustic songs like Wild Blood, but the songs were catchy. Shepherd’s lyrics were catchy. He claimed that the band wasn’t a Christian band, but they were always lumped into the category because of being on The Militia Group (though many groups weren’t Christian on The Militia Group), appearing at Cornerstone, and touring with Copeland. Religious imagery always crept into Lovedrug’s music, and Notions is no exception. However, it seems that on this album Shepherd is tapping into a love of horror films and murder stories. “Vampire Spy Film” is a fun, dream-like song in which I imagine watching a 1940s film noir, while flipping through the channels on a boring afternoon on the cusp of twilight. I didn’t expect to get sucked into the old film starring a Humphrey Bogart sort in the stereotypical trench coat, but maybe the romance between the blonde or maybe the gunfight or maybe just the boredom of the afternoon has compelled me. In about the second-third of the movie, the devilishly charming villain tries to seduce the blond. She refuses his advances, but as she runs out of her dingy New York apartment, he bites her neck, revealing that not only is he a spy, but also a vampire. The twist is completely unprompted as the film blends genres. Maybe I don’t finish the movie. Maybe someone comes home and it’s time for dinner. But that night, in my dreams, I’m probably going to be in that movie. Maybe I’m Bogart or another detective. Maybe the blonde tries to seduce the character, but I know who she is–a vampire. Maybe it’s the handsome vampire that intrigues me. I seriously hope that this movie exists or could exist. 

  • “Glass in the Trees” by Dead Poetic, Saturday, October 30, 2021

    Solid State Records released Dead Poetic’s debut album, Four Wall Blackmail with producers Barry Poynter and Jason Magnussen. The songs on FWB were rough. Poynter worked with Zao, Living Sacrifice, Embodyment, and Haste the Day to make some seriously heavy music. And with fresh, young signees with a hardcore name based on the 1989 Robin Williams classic, grungy screaming with intermittent singing worked in a certain scene of Christian Rock at that time. The problem was that none of the melodies were particularly catchy. The band turned to Aaron Sprinkle to produce their sophomore record, New Medicines. Sprinkle’s production transformed the band into one that listeners could sing along to. Rather than singing with intermittent screaming, New Medicines was the opposite. New Medicines was supposed to be the start of another Tooth & Nail success story. Yet, today, the band’s three studio records are hardly remembered because of lead singer Brandon Rike’s decision to walk away from music.

    I CAN STILL FEEL THE FRIGHT THAT NIGHT BRINGS. Formed in Junior High under the name “Self-Minded” and discovered by Solid State’s A&R at Cornerstone when the bandmates were still in high school, the band that became Dead Poetic hailed from the small town of Dayton, Ohio. The young men of the band were dead-serious about their mission as an evangelical band, often holding altar calls at their early shows as they toured churches across America with other Christian metal and post-hardcore bands. The band had formed at a local church in Dayton, and had gotten their message after losing several friends over the years to “small-town boredom,” as Rike tells Matt Carter in Dead Poetic’s episode of Labeled. Rike never defines what this boredom was back then, but he does say that bored small towns today have meth problems. The first tragedy Rike talks about is his friend’s older brother was killed in a car crash. “Every year it seems like someone died,” Rike says. “It gets a little hard to joke around after this stuff happens. At the time we thought Jesus is the answer to this pain, and that was what we sang about.” “Glass in the Trees” is a visceral portrait of hearing the news about a shocking death. The songwriting feels in the moment, even though the band had been processing all of this tragedy on their first record. Maybe the difference was that on the first record the tragedy was too raw to be organized into a descriptive song. Also, the band’s first album seems to spiritualize before describing, a no-no for any poet, living or dead.
    �AND STANDING AT YOUR GRAVE, I COULD HAVE CAUSED THIS. My elementary school was next to the high school, and I remember when I was in second grade, one day my teacher told the class that there would be a realistic, staged car accident in the school parking lot. Before seeing this demonstration, we had watched videos about drunk driving and drugs. I remember the D.A.R.E. program was reminding us not to drink and not to use drugs from kindergarten or first grade. They told us not to accept a ride with parents or older siblings who haven been drinking or taking drugs. The day of the staged accident, my teacher told us that the production was for the high school students, though elementary students would watch the event from a greater distance, probably to shield us a bit from the realistic blood. If memory serves me, one of the high school students actually performed in the demonstration as the drunk driver. The high school students were brought outside to watch…something, only for an out of control car to crash into a telephone pole. A teacher, goes to perform CPR on the driver and the police EMTs show up quicker than usual. The high school students stand in utter terror as it’s revealed that the driver is one of their classmates, and he is pronounced dead on the scene. Of course, the tragedy doesn’t go on much longer. A police officer speaks into a megaphone that this was only a demonstration. The classmate stands up, with his fake blood and crash-accident make-up and tattered clothes. We’re all reminded that drunk driving kills, whether you’re the one drinking, you’re in the car, or you’re on the road with other drunk drivers. This demonstration reminds us that at anytime, someone we love can be taken from us. Fortunately, my sheltered high school experience saw no deaths to drunk driving or anything else. But the horror the high school students must have felt on that day, seeing a classmate on a stretcher with a sheet put over his head, may have scared some kids into not drunk driving. Dead Poetic’s “Glass in the Trees” is another example of that message. And the band preached it for the length of their short-career. 

     

  • "Faded" by Alan Walker (ft. Iselin Solhein), Friday, October 29, 2021

    Watching Alan Walker’s performance at the Parookaville Festival in Germany makes me wonder if you have to be there in order to enjoy a DJ set. Unlike watching a band or a solo artist who performs with a band, a DJ set is all about hype. When I watch a band, I see chords and leads. When I watch a DJ perform, I have no clue what I’m watching. There’s a lot I don’t get about “kids these days and their music,” but when I found out that in 2016 “Faded” was one of the most searched songs on Shazam, I realized that I was probably in that number at the gym listening to melodic EDM songs over and over again until I started to like them. An Alan Walker concert seems to consist of dancing 20-somethings, lots of smoke and screen production, flawless sounds of what could be a studio version, and a not-particularly charismatic hype-man in a black hoodie and a mask covering half his face, before it was cool.

    ETERNAL SILENCE OF THE SEA. I remember a couple of years ago, a student of mine was talking about music. She asked, “Is Alan Walker a woman?” I knew very little about the musician, but I explained that these days DJs make music and get credit for the song, even though they don’t sing the lyrics. In 2014, when Walker first released his instrumental “Fade,” he was in high school, too young to go to the club in his home of Norway. Born to a Norwegian mother and British father, Philip Alan Walker worked with several producers to make “Fade” into a pop hit. With the uncredited vocals of Norwegian singer Iselin Solhein, the song was a massive hit around the world and is still Walker’s best know song. Iselin sang several tracks on Walker’s debut full-length album, 2018’s Different World. The music video for “Faded” was filmed in an abandoned quarry in Estonia and has an eerie feeling. As of July 2021 it was the 20th most viewed video on YouTube and the 13th most viewed music video. It was the first EDM music video to receive 3 billion views. The song also is the 45th most streamed song on Spotify. These statistics are telling of a subtle shift in music being credited to artists to music being credited to producers. 
    THE MONSTER’S RUNNING WILD INSIDE OF ME. Alan Walker says that he takes musical inspiration from Hans Zimmer. “Faded” starts out as a piano-based tune and then adds electronic distortions by the chorus. When I spent my evenings in a gym that played a lot of English EDM, I noticed the similarities between the songs. So many of them were female sung-slow versed tracks that built to the chorus or, more commonly, the drop. “Faded” was a little different because of the minor key and the singer was quite captivating. There were a few other factors that makes this song capture an era for me, though. In 2016, I was in the middle of a rough year. I had work stress, a long-distance relationship, boredom from living in a rural part of Korea, and to make matters worse, I started getting neck and shoulder pain. One coworker said that I should start exercising, so I researched a gym and paid them a visit. The gym that I joined was in a neighborhood a thirty-minute bus ride away. The trainers were very friendly and attractive, so I started going. At first three days a week, and then four or five days a week. It was expensive, and I wanted to get my money’s worth! From March of 2017-December 2019, I was pretty dedicated to the gym. I liked how it made me feel. I liked seeing a scalped body. I liked seeing the scalped bodies around me at the gym. “Faded” was a soundtrack of that time. 

    Official Music Video:

    Performance:

    Restrung (acoustic):

  • "Erase" (Acoustic Cover of Copeland) by Charles Angell, Thursday, October 28, 2021

    A few Saturday afternoons circa 2015-17, I went down a rabbit-hole, looking for the best Paper Route, Anberlin, and Copeland covers on YouTube. This was long after finding artists like Tyler Ward who covered pop music. I wondered if anyone had recorded high quality covers of my favorite bands. It turns out that there were a few. These artists weren’t on the level of popularity of Kurt Hugo Schneider or Boyce Avenue. I had hoped to created a cover playlist of a Copeland album, but there weren’t enough high-quality covers on YouTube at the time. Charles Angell’s YouTube account has 7 videos, 77 subscribers, and the singer hasn’t posted anything in 3 years. From a quick Facebook search, it turns out that Angell is still active as a musician, with a new haircut and some designer rims, now under the moniker of Snarly (link to his social media presence). 


    YOU’RE STILL A BREEZE UPON MY SKIN.  Of the Copeland covers, Charles Angell’s version of “Erase” is one of the best. The finger-picking guitar captures part of what Copeland’s original masterpiece conveys, but in other ways, the calm acoustic guitar void of the band’s calculated injection of the disjointed beat on verse 3, keeps the song forlorn. Copeland’s version leaves the listener wrecked. It’s true; readers and listeners who are trying to catch me breaking my own rules and sneaking a second Copeland track in the same month, you caught me. Maybe Aaron Marsh has shown up more than Stephen Christian this year, given that he’s often featured as a guest vocalist, though I doubt he’s shown up as often as Aaron Sprinkle who has produced so much of my favorite music. Copeland’s comeback album, Ixora, surprised fans when the band decided to record new music in 2014. The album was released on November 24. The songs were more concrete and often more optimistic than You Are My Sunshine, and the band delved into some mature love song-writing. But by track 4, the album takes a turn. “Erase” may be the most gut-wrenching Copeland song. It reverts to strange imagery from prior albums. Why is the singer “tasting armor”? Moreover listeners wonder if there are spiritual implications to this break up song?

    SO YOU JUST COLOR ME TO GREY. When Gotye wrote “Somebody That I Use to Know,” he used concrete details, like “sending a friend to collect [his] records” to describe that awful feeling when someone you loved doesn’t recognize you anymore. Copeland conveys the feeling of being erased by someone, using fewer details. Marsh sings with conviction, though, stating that whatever happens now, the past is etched into him and he is etched into that other person. The song reminds me of the Bible story in Genesis in which Jacob wrestles the angel, not giving up, demanding that the angel bless him. In the same way, the singer of this song is telling his lover or possibly God that he refuses to be erased. Despite Marsh’s claim that he doesn’t write Christian or even spiritual songs, it’s safe to say that many of his listeners interpret the song in a spiritual lens. Which brings me to my first experience listening to Ixora. I was coming off a turbulent year in my faith. I was listening to the album on New Year’s Eve, 2014 on a train back from a vacation in Busan with my friend. That trip was a vacation from myself, from the broken relationships I gotten myself into. I had decided to be honest with myself since the beginning of that autumn, admitting that I was gay. But that admission came with a few months of catching up and making mistakes. Ixora was the soundtrack for me collecting my thoughts on the train, and “Erase” was a spiritual climax. I asked the question to God, “What does it mean if it’s impossible to live up to your standards? Am I just damned to Hell because it’s impossible to follow you?” But Marsh sings with conviction “You won’t erase me / So you just color me from grey.” I began to realize that my view of God as a strict rule-giver in the sky might be off. If I believed that he made me who I was, maybe he’d accept me for who I am. Maybe the truth that was in my bones, the truth that I saw, the truth of human psychology was real, and parts of the Bible were not. This freedom of belief was scary to my indoctrinated mind. But without that spark of hope, it was far scarier.
    Read “Erase” by Copeland on Genius.
    Copeland Original Version:

    Ixora Twin version:

    Ixora + Twin version combined: 

  • "The Infinite Abyss of Space" by Chris Ayer, Wednesday, October 27, 2021

    Chris Ayer has been playing guitar since he was 18 years old. A graduate of Stanford where he studied music and philosophy, Ayer also was a part of an all-male a capella group during his time in college. Moving to Brooklyn after graduating, he hosted a series of podcasts in which shared experiences during his time at Stanford that ended up in his songs. Ayer recorded his first full-length album in Nashville in 2006. His song “Evaporate” won the John Lennon Songwriting Folk category that year as well. In 2013, he released his second album, The Noise, which is his earliest recording available on AppleMusic. “The Infinite Abyss of Space” is the final track on The Noise. From a cursory look into Ayer’s music, it seems that the final track on The Noise fits into the space that Ayer grew into; whereas most tracks on The Noise sound a bit coffee shop, folk singer-songwriter, rather than a polished pop singer-songwriter. 
    I’LL FILL UP THE SPACE WITH SOMETHING. I was introduced to “The Infinite Abyss of Space” from NoiseTrade’s 2012 Holiday Road Trip Mixtape. The song on my coffee playlist got catchier and catchier, and today I thought, “This song is scary enough to make it to my Halloween portion of the playlist. In one performance, Ayer says that he wrote the song about an astronaut, lost in space with only a few hours left of oxygen. The song plays with the word space. In the first usage, it’s the space in a house or apartment building. The singer is experiencing a change, maybe a break up causing a vacancy in his life. Maybe someone has changed into someone he doesn’t recognize, but he’s optimistic about filling up the second mention of space, the absence of the relationship. Next, there’s “room left in [his chest]” meaning the space that allows him to love or feel something for another person. Finally, in the third verse, the singer contemplates the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe. He says: “somebody put the stars in their corners to fill the space with something.” The vastness of space, seemingly full of large amounts of nothing is carefully ordered into what it should be by nature or some divine hand. The hope in the song is that the singer will move on and “fill the space with something.” And as every failed Marie Kondo tidying up experience teaches us, clutter is going to happen. 
    THIS ONE TIME, THE COSMOS WERE BORN. I have two coworkers in my office. One is a conservative Adventist, the other is an atheist. My position is somewhere between. We usually get along pretty well, but sometimes they have a one-sided conversation about their beliefs, though.”I don’t know how the world is going to end, but it’s certainly not going to end the way it’s described in the Bible. The sun has about four billion years left before it becomes a red giant.” “We’re certainly heading for destruction before then.” “Well, it will certainly be climate change before beasts come out of the earth!” The tension lingers in the office whenever issues of anything dating back before 5,000 years comes up. “You can either believe that you came from something and that your life has meaning or that you came from a monkey,” she says. Having grown up as an Adventist and being taught that the Bible is literal, I am still undecided about what I believe. On the one hand, Adventism wraps everything up neatly, complete with an End-times message and fear-tactics to keep you in the pew. On the other hand, there are Biblical scholars in Christian and Jewish traditions that interpret the early scriptures as symbolic rather than literal. The symbolic approach leaves for a more nuanced spirituality. These days, I’m more inclined to believe the more nuanced approach. Why? Because I’ve realized that those who follow conservative interpretations in other aspects–sexuality and drinking alcohol just to name two–have lied to congregants and told them that the church has always has a singular view. For some, it’s comforting to follow the rules of a God who set the stars in the sky 6,000 years ago, who wrote a book that said everything you should do. Others wonder how much of that is an invisible entity and how much is actually just a political force that wants control over people’s well-being. 

  • “I’m So Sick” by Flyleaf, Tuesday, October 26, 2021

     

    Flyleaf was one of the most diversely connected bands from their debut album cycle. The band started by opening for bands like Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, and Seether as well as Christian Active Rock bands like P.O.D. and Skillet. Songs like “I’m So Sick” and “Fully Alive” were played frequently on the radio, and the band even had a Top 40 pop hit with “All Around Me.” But if you happened to catch a Flyleaf show, headlining, or opening for a band like Korn, you’d hear lead singer Lacy Mosley (later Sturm after marrying Joshua Sturm in 2008)  preach charismatically. She’d throw her hands into the air, nervously talking about her relationship with Jesus, gaining confidence as she spoke. Lacy turned the darkest concert venue into a church service for the high and intoxicated who, in any other context, would go nowhere near a church.

    LET ME LIVE WITHOUT THIS. I first saw Flyleaf in September of ’06 or ’07 in Spartanburg’s Ground Zero, a graffitied building in the center of urban decay. Inside, it looked rough, too–black-painted cinderblocks and metal poles. The crowd was different from the Charlotte concert venue where I watched most of my alternative bands. Flyleaf headlined that night, playing a long set of songs that never made it onto their albums. Mosley told stories between the songs. These were songs about her or people the band had met. “Jesus loves you,” she’d scream from time to time to the intoxicated audience. The message was well received by most of the concert-goers, confirmed by the beer bottles raised into the air and the sound of cheering the band. Before Flyleaf received heavy mainstream radio promotion, RadioU, and TVU promoted many of the band’s demos as singles. Christian radio loved Mosley’s testimony. She told the story that on the day she had planned to kill herself, her grandmother dragged her to church. Lacy claims that the message of the pastor and the interaction she had with a church member in the foyer as she was trying to leave the church changed her life. With a high-profile salvation story, Lacy began speaking for the Billy Graham Foundation and a foundation called the Whosoevers, founded by Sonny of P.O.D. In addition to rock album features like Apocalyptica and Breaking Benjamin, she was featured on the CCM album Revelations by Third Day–an interesting collaboration, but it didn’t sound half bad at the time.  

    YOU SINK INTO MY CLOTHES. “I’m So Sick” is a grungy song. The radio single edits out the scream. As much as everyone was screaming on their 2005 records, the radio usually wasn’t playing those screams. Flyleaf was one of the most mainstream female-fronted rock bands that used screaming. Lyrically, the song fits into the themes that Flyleaf talks about low self-esteem and dark feelings. There is something extremely Christian, yet extremely secular about this song. Being surrounded by a toxic environment, but also realizing that you are a part of the problem was the sum of Hybrid Theory and so many other rock albums. “I’m So Sick” isn’t a song that offers a solution. Lacy will give you her solution to the problem, but she will be respectful of the listener who draws their own conclusion, at least that’s what she says in interviews. Today, Lacy Mosley Sturm writes books and music apart from Flyleaf. The grueling tour cycle of the band and her desire to spend time with her husband and children caused her to step down as the band’s lead singer. Her solo record, Life Screams, became the first #1 Billboard Hard Rock album spot to be held by a woman. Lacy was an inspiration to my evangelical days, and I can still respect her earnestness. I’m not sure if we’d still come to the same conclusions, but we can all agree that this world is so sick.

  • "Strange Town" by Neon Horse, Monday 25, 2021

    When Neon Horse appeared on Tooth & Nail‘s roster in 2007, the label gave no information about the band. The concept of the band was like The Gorillaz: a studio band that had no intention of touring. Also like The Gorillaz, Neon Horse’s aesthetic was cartoon drawings. However, keen listeners quickly recognized the vocal talents of Mark Salomon, who had been the vocalist for metal group The Crucified in ’80s and of the Active Rock band Stavesacre in the ’90s. Salomon shot a video for the band’s first single, “Cuckoo!” and it was also confirmed that Jason Martin, vocalist and guitarist of Starflyer 59 and Steven Dail bassist of Project 86 were involved. There have also been rumors that Martin’s brother Ronnie of Joy Electric played the keys and synths on the record. Neon Horse had two eerie albums, and today’s song was the lead single from the band’s sophomore album, Haunted Horse: Songs of Love, Defiance, and Delusion.


    PLAYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. On the first season of the Labeled podcast on an episode about Staveacre’s final record on Tooth & Nail, Speakeasy, we learn that the band was listening to Tool (they’re often called the Christian Tool) and that band was ahead of its time for the record label which didn’t yet have the capacity to get the band onto Active Rock radio. However, even post-Tooth & Nail, Stavesacre never saw the success that future Tooth & Nail bands like Thousand Foot Krutch, Underoath, Anberlin or even Project 86 or Christian Rock contemporary P.O.D had. Stavesacre called it quits in 2007, the same year that Salomon released the first Neon Horse record. Salomon has sung with many other acts before Stavesacre and after Neon Horse. In Salomon’s latest episode with Labeled, he talked about Neon Horse, and about his use of character voices. Salomon’s strange voices on the records were often an attempt to make Jason Martin laugh and sometimes to ruin his concentration on the guitar during practice. Sometimes Martin would be in the studio when Salomon recorded vocals. He’d do several takes, and the one that gave Martin the strongest reaction was what Salomon wanted. You have to be in a certain mood to enjoy Neon Horse, but it’s the season for ghoulish music and it fits nicely behind “Two Graves.”

    HOW CAN YOU BE FOUND WHEN NO ONE KNOWS YOU IN A STRANGE TOWN. If Stavesacre was Tool, then Neon Horse was A Perfect Circle, even down to the shoegazy guitars of Starflyer 59 (substituted for Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha). When Andrew Beaujon interviews Salomon in Body Piercing Saved My Life, we get a picture of a singer who was fed up with the evangelical music market and who had a different idea about where faith-based music could go. Neon Horse’s music wasn’t played on Christian Rock radio, but it’s still pretty Christian. Today’s song is based on Luke 15:16. The verse comes from the Parable of The Prodigal Son, a young man who demanded his inheritance and squanders it in the city, only to realize that he would rather be a servant of his father than a stranger “in a strange town.” His realization is after the money’s gone, and he has to resort to feeding pigs. He is so hungry that he himself eats the pigs’ food. “Strange Town” illustrates the story as a child who has been exploring the world, only to realize that it’s now dark outside and the world is much less friendly at night. The song also alludes to the parable at the beginning of the chapter, The Parable of the Lost Lamb. Rather than putting the emphasis of the story on being returned to the foal or to the father’s house, the song leaves the listener stuck in the strange town. It’s hard having grown up in a spiritual community based on following the rules to think of this parable as a metaphor for the church. It’s the fear that wakes me up some nights, realizing that the church was once my safety net. But then you realize that Jesus, too, was rejected from his safety net, the church of his day. The church is a place that accepts you if you follow its rules. But disagree with it, you’re cast out like a stranger in a strange town.

  • “Two Graves” by Anberlin, Sunday, October 24, 2021

    We usually like it when people and institutions keep their promises. But in 2014 when Anberlin vowed never to tour or record new music again, fans were hoping that the crossed fingers on the Lowborn album cover was an indication of an artistic fib. Four years after the breakup, though, the band played a one-off show, supporting their friends in Underoath who followed a similar career trajectory: burn out with the music industry, internal quarrels, a reunion, and a new album. After that final night of Underoath’s Erase Me tour, Anberlin started playing more and more shows throughout 2019 and were set to hit the road in 2020. When COVID canceled the tour, the band decided to start playing their albums live, selling tickets to their livestreams. During one of the livestreams, the band announced that they were quietly working on new songs, and by the final livestream, the event ended with the band premiering “Two Graves.”


    NO DOWN FROM ZERO. “Two Graves” is a heavily produced heavy rock track that seems to be very much influenced by their good friends in Underoath. The guitar and distorted drums give it a spooky sound. Stephen Christian’s vocals are on-point as usual, though adding more rasp than usual. For a group that has not been afraid to stretch themselves in genre, “Two Graves” is arguably one of the heaviest songs they’ve released. The band has been releasing heavy songs since their sophomore album, but “Two Graves” seems to look back through their discography, gleaning elements and reordering them into something that sounds new. One of the reasons the song sounds so heavy is that the song first slows down. Something the band tried on the opening track of Dark is the Way Light Is the Place. The song ends with crunchy guitars at the end of the track similar to Vital’s “Someone Anyone.” Unlike “Dissenter” from the last album, Stephen doesn’t scream the lyrics, but the production includes yelling and gang vocals–perhaps incorporating more of the band distinctively into the gang vocal mix than any prior Anberlin song. 

    BLOOD IN THE WATERLINE. The lyrics of “Two Graves” match the aggressive music. Stephen often relies on cliches, and this song is no exception. It seems that the song is built on around one central cliche: “If you want revenge, you’d better dig two graves,” but mixes in parts of others. In fact, the weakest part of the song is that every line seems to come from a different cliche. Anberlin is known for angry, aggressive songs on each album, from the teen angst of their second album, personal isolation in their third, and social issues scattered throughout their discography. So what has Stephen so worked up? During Cities, he was pushing back the evangelical response to the war in Iraq. In “Dead American” he was responding to American exceptionalism and consumerism. In “We Are Destroyer,” he calls out a generation that is destroying themselves through their entitlement. In recent years, Christian has become a music minister for several churches and released an album of worship music on Tooth & Nail’s CCM imprint, BEC Records. Christian has been virtually silent on the politics of the Trump presidency, except for a tweet criticizing artists for refusing to play the inauguration. He essentially said that artists could use the opportunity to promote their own agenda afterwards. The band has angered some fans during their livestreams for displaying the message “End Racism” at the end of their sets, discussing the importance of voting in the 2020 election, and why vaccine passports should be required at live shows. Perhaps, though, the anger is with the music industry, that was a major cause of the band’s initial break up. Perhaps the message of the song is that being bitter with the label ultimately is just the band’s demise. “Dig two graves. Dig two graves.” Maybe the best revenge is a successful comeback. 

  • "21" by The Starting Line, Saturday, October 23, 2021

    This is our third entry from The Starting Line’s Direction. I’ve talked about how this album was my summer of ’09 album, and I learned a little about the album’s producer. This morning, I awoke at “7 am” actually 7:30 rested, not wasted, to the blaring guitars of this song as my iPad alarm clock song. Lyrics like “21” and “Something Left to Give” make the 23 year old at the time singer/lyricist Kenny Vasoli sound much older. In “Something Left to Give,” the young singer thinks about leaving a legacy for his children and grand children–something many in their late twenties today don’t think about. In “21,” Vasoli worries that the rock star lifestyle is making him “already hazy.”

    WHEN THE MEDICINE THAT KEEPS ME WELL IS SETTLING. The Starting Line were signed when Vasoli was only 17 years old, and the band’s debut album was released a year later. The Pennsylvania band were a part of the Warped Tour scene from their first record. The second track on their album Direction, “21,” has been called the sequel to the band’s track “Bedroom Talk,” which may have been the song that turned me off of the band at first. The lyrics of “Bedroom Talk” are pretty funny, in retrospect. According to the band’s website at the time of the song’s release, Vasoli wrote “Bedroom Talk” from the perspective of a teenage boy in love with a girl he wants to lose his virginity to. At the time he was 19, and he said he was still a virgin when he wrote that song. The lines weren’t exactly poetry: “I’m gonna tear your ass up like we just got married.” In fact, it kind of reminds me of the awkward, sloppy movie lines at the time. The ending of the movie Friends with Kids, a few years later, ends with the lines: “Fuck the shit out of me.” Maybe I’m just a Puritan, but I like a movie’s dirty talk to be buried within the plot of the movie, unless I’m watching Austin Powers. As for song lines, I think Vasoli could have articulated the raw emotion of wanting to connect with someone for the first time a little better. The lyrics of “21” deal with an older Vasoli trying to clean up his act, not even sounding like the same kid from the last album.

  • “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd cover) by Andie Case, Friday, October 22, 2021

     

    Ah! The weekend: a time when many of us can breathe that collective sigh of relief, leaving our forty hours at the office, forgetting about the boss, and maybe making some time for Number 1. Before I read into The Weeknd’s 2015 hit, the upbeat track reminded me of catching a fresh cup of Guatemalan iced coffee before catching a bus to meet friends for a weekend in another city. One weekend, I was in a cafe in Hongdae that was playing covers of hit songs and I heard a female version of “Can’t Feel My Face” playing. I can’t be sure if it was Andie Case‘s version. However, after adding Case’s version of The Weeknd’s #1 hit, I think it gives an interesting, mellow take on the normally, upbeat song. It’s the alternate perspectives that makes YouTube cover artists and interesting addition to your music library.


    SHE TOLD ME ‘DON’T WORRY. ‘ The Weeknd is known for his melancholy, self-destructive tunes. Earlier this month, I covered his new single, “Take My Breath,” which made the original version of his song ineligible for the October playlist. However, Andie Case’s vibey cover feels like the prelude to a stay-in weekend. Andie Case is a singer-songwriter who gained popularity on her YouTube channel, covering artists. She has collaborated with other YouTubers, such as Boyce Avenue, Kurt Hugo Schneider, Alex Groot, and others. Unlike many of the YouTubers in Schneider’s circle, though, Andie Case often sings the explicit versions of the songs. “Can’t Feel My Face” is The Weeknd’s beautiful love song to cocaine. The numbness that the singer feels is a side effect to the euphoria. There are certain red flags in this relationship, namely the foreboding about “the worst is yet to come” and “the misery is necessary when we’re deep in love” in addition to the numbness. When the singer says “at least we’ll both be beautiful and stay forever young,” the ’80s song “Forever Young” comes to mind. The notion of staying young forever at its best is a Peter Pan-syndrome, but if drugs are involved, it’s probably about overdose or a tragic accident. 

    SHE TOLD ME ‘YOU’LL NEVER BE ALONE.’ “Can’t Feel My Face” is beautifully toxic, in a way that pop music has to be. If you wrote a song about going out and having fun with your friends on the weekend, it would probably not chart. But if you can add the undertones of sadness, desperation, or even tragedy, you might have a better chance at a hit. Likewise, songs about healthy friendships and relationships would bore us to tears. Instead, like Taylor Swift, we fall for the song about a guy who drives through the night with no headlights. Addictions to alcohol, sex, and drugs add to what makes a song compelling. We long for flaws because it makes us feel better about our Saturday nights, the partying or the lack thereof that we do. But we start to care for young Abel as he searches for true love. We scream at him to make the right decision. Listening to The Weeknd is the musical equivalent to watching How I Met Your Mother. Both Abel Tesfaye and Ted Mosbey continue to make the same mistake over and over. Sometimes we even wish that we were making those mistakes. So how does Andie Case’s version fit in? Well, it’s certainly a slow song for cocaine. Her version doesn’t make me think about going out and getting wasted and hooking up with the wrong guy. Nope, instead, it’s a book. I can’t feel my face because I fell asleep in that awkward position on the sofa reading a book. Is that toxic? Probably just as much. I’d much rather spend my weekend in, but I have a conflicted feeling about wasting my life.
    Andie Case version:

    Original Music Video by The Weeknd: