Mixtapemotions

  • “Hallelujah” by Underoath, Saturday, April 28, 2022

    Musically, Underoath’s most recent record Voyeurist pays homage to different points in their 25-year career. On the band’s breakthrough album, They’re Only Chasing Safety, Underoath experimented with elements not always heard in Metal. One example was including a church choir on the song “It’s Dangerous Business Walking out Your Front Door.” According to Tim McTague on the episode of Labeled Deep Dives about today’s song “Hallelujah,” the Underoath guitarist said he made up a story about how the 2004 single had religious significance in order to record a youth choir in a church basement. Eighteen years later, the second song on Voyeurist prominently features a choir, this time in the chorus. But unlike “Dangerous,” Underoath had distanced themselves from the Christian music scene.  In an interview with Loudwire, Tim says that “Hallelujah” is about “struggles with everything – faith, life and so on.”  The presence of a choir on “Hallelujah” and the track’s title serve as a kind of musical and lyrical contrast. The lyrics offer title hope, except for the line superimposed on the song: “Hallelujah.” The song is an interesting approach to songwriting; interpolating religious themes from the band’s past and re-contextualizing them.

    WE’RE NOT DREAMING, THIS IS HELL. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word taken from the scriptures. The word’s most frequent occurrence is in the book of Psalms, the book of poetry that was often sung. Throughout the ages, countless songs have used this word or its Greek variant alleluia, usually in a religious context. From the Gregorian Chant of the Middle Ages to the Christian hymns of the 19th century to the most moving part of George Frideric Handel’s The Messiah, the word Hallelujah alludes to worshiping the Judeo-Christian God. But in 1984, when singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen released his single “Hallelujah,” which has been covered by countless artists, the singer reappropriated the word into a secular setting. The song was a new standard that both people of faith and people of doubt could resonate with. The first two verses of the song tell a story from the Hebrew Bible (or the Old Testament), about David and Samson, two men who have been judged for moral failure by readers and theologians. The third verse of the song addresses the speaker’s doubt, saying “Maybe there’s a God above.” Of course, Cohen’s “Hallelujah” doesn’t take the word completely out of its religious context. And neither does Underoath, a band who will be writing about their deconversion story until they break up. Lyrically, Underoath’s “Hallelujah” deals with the feeling of alienation after deconstruction. There’s bitterness due to the rules that the Christian music industry imposed on artists like Underoath. There’s anger toward the industry that covered up frontman Spenser Chamberlain’s drug addiction in order to continue making money on the band’s financial success. And there’s disappointment in a church that fosters an environment that says it wants honesty, but ultimately the honest get screwed. 
    THIS MADNESS MAY BE IN MY HEAD. Underoath isn’t alone in their deconstruction movement. Many former Christian bands and musicians end up in a place of doubt and recontextualization. In the past, the mainstream of Christianity dismissed this deviation as heresy. Denominations and cults started or individuals rejected religion or merely embraced an individualized spirituality. But never did the aggregate have to acknowledge the reasons why someone left the mainstream if they could just call that person a heretic. Today entire communities are forming around talking about religious trauma. There are deconstruction and ex-vangelical communities almost in the same way that there are denominations. There are probably as many reasons why people deconstruct their faith as there are deconstructionists. Common themes these days revolve around political Christianity, race, gender, and sexuality. Underoath’s “Hallelujah” makes me think of several stories in my own faith journey, but today I’m fixated on the contradiction I felt from reading William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Experience in my Christian university. The poem critiques the Industrial Revolution for its human toll on the poor, in the case of the poem, the children of the poor who had to work sweeping the chimneys. Many of the children died in accidents or contracted lung cancer. Rather than focusing on the need for social justice and the fact that this horrendous exploitation happened in a Christian country and that Blake appealed to the Christian compassion of his readers, the professor teaching the class merely scoffed at the literature and focused on Blake’s unorthodox, heretical religion. Eventually, the human suffering would be alleviated through ungodly socialism, we would learn in the course. The ungodly part wasn’t in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, but the instructor’s take on it. The words of Blake, though, reminded me of the Christianity that I wanted to be a part of, preached by Stephen Christian, Bono, and Underoath at the time. But it seems more and more that my professor’s downplaying human suffering is where Christianity has headed. No wonder more people are turning out like William Blake.
    Music visualizer:

    Digital Ghost performance:

    Lyric video

    The version featuring Charlotte Sands:

    Read the lyrics on Genius.

  • "Swamp" by Mike Mains & the Branches [Content Warning: Discussion of Suicide], Friday, April 29, 2022

    Closing 2019’s heart-wrenching When We Were in Love, “Swamp” perhaps sums up Mike Mains & the Branches‘ third album in a single song: love, depression, and religion. Like the songs “Breathing Underwater” and “Around the Corner,” Mike Mains gave an intimate insight into his writing process on Labeled. Mains talked about earlier Tooth & Nail releases from mewithoutYou and As Cities Burn which helped to inspirer him to write darker Christian songs and push the genre of Christian Rock lyrically in order to open an honest conversation about mental health, depression, and questioning one’s faith.

    YOU HAD ME AT MERLOT. “Swamp” is the conclusion and the title-bearer of the album. Mike asks his wife, bandmate Shannon Briggs Bolanowski-Mains, “Do you remember when we were in love?” On the Labeled podcast interview, Mains talks about “Swamp” being about a fear that his wife were to leave him. Mains wrote “Swamp” after spending time in therapy and in couple’s counseling, when things were starting to pick up. The first line from the song was what his wife wrote on a Valentine’s card. While things seemed to be getting better, Mains imagines that all the progress the couple made was for naught, and Shannon becomes fed up with him and leaves anyway. In this dark fantasy, after leaving Mike, Shannon finds a man who is everything that Mike is not: a fearless, strong Christian who satisfies her every need. Continuing the narrative Mains talks about in “Breathing Underwater,” “Swamp” sees the singer graphically imagining his suicide by “pull[ing] the garage door shut and let[ting] the engine run.” 

    DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE IN LOVE? Speaking directly about “Swamp” in the interview, Mains quotes the song “Poison Oak” by Bright Eyes: “I’m drunk as hell on a piano bench/ And when I press the keys, it all gets reversed /The sound of loneliness makes me happier.” Mains says, “I wish it wasn’t, but it’s so true, but I love sad songs and they do make me really happy because they remind me that I’m not alone.” Interestingly, “Swamp” subverts the Christian art trope of writing a song in a minor key but ending on a major chord. “Swamp” ends with the lines: “Every day feels like waking up in the swamp/ Every day feels like waking up at the bottom.” And not only does the song end with that line and the sad, wandering piano, the album ends with that line. Mains could have ended the album with “Around the Corner,” a song that could put the grief in a positive context, but instead, “Swamp” is a song about processing the grief and it’s our realization that we are not alone when a day just flat out sucks. Some days you don’t want to be told that everything is going to be okay. And that’s okay. Also, mental health is not always as simple as illness and recovery. And that’s not a spiritual illness, just reality. “Swamp” ends the Christian Rock record we all needed back in the ’90s, but wasn’t released until 2019. Better late than never.

  • “Type Three” by Anberlin, Thursday, April 28, 2022

    It’s time for our mandatory dose of Anberlin. I decided on the song late last night, and I think “Type Three” fits in nicely after Shura. Anberlin experimented a lot on their latter albums, and 2012’s Vital is probably their most experimental album, and “Type Three,” is one of the vibiest songs on the record. In a Spotify audio commentary about the album, guitarist Joesph Milligan talked about listening to a lot of The National when recording the album, and vocalist Stephen Christian said that lyrically the song was born out of “listing a bunch of one-liners” on which he based the song.
    DANCING THROUGH THE FIBERS OF TIME. Last year, when the band performed Vital in their Heavy Lies the Crown lockdown livestream, Stephen Christian talked about the song’s title as a reference to his Enneagram Type.  The Enneagram of Personality is an increasingly popular, but yet-to-be-proven, lens for understanding personality types. The history of the Enneagram is unclear, having ties to Christian mysticism and the teachings of a psycho-spiritual leader (Óscar Ichazo) and a psychiatrist (Claudio Naranjo) back in the 1950s and ’60s. The popularity of the Enneagram seems to be tied with Christian and post-Christian movements, as teachers like Richard Rohr have promoted its use. And while there have been conferences and talks about it in academia–Stanford University c0-sponsored the First International Enneagram Conference in 1994–much of academia considers it unproven and “pseudoscientific.” Today, I hear talk about the Enneagram being a “spiritual tool” for better understanding God and humanity, but that seems like a real stretch. Given the Enneagram’s mystical past, I was curious to see what Seventh-day Adventists were saying about it. While the Adventist Internet is mostly quiet about the Enneagram, I found a few churches embraced it and another webpage (not Adventist?) condemning the teaching as pagan for its use of “pyramidology.” Sometimes it’s fun to have a good laugh at these ridiculous theories.

    I DON’T WANNA WAIT FOR YOU ANYMORE. So, unable to sleep from a late afternoon coffee last night, I thought that I should finally figure out what my Enneagram type is, since so many of my potential readers and community takes so much stock in it. I remember when I first did the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) personality test in college, I felt that I understood myself much better. I’ve found that when I take my MBTI stays pretty consistent at an INFJ. If I’m a little more sensitive in the season of life that I take the test, I may score as an INFP, and on occasion I’ve scored as an INTP. Never an extrovert, and never in the sensing category. Since I’ve been in Korea the last few years, students have become obsessed with their MBTI. In some ways, I think it’s a useful tool to see how departments function. I certainly have a hard time getting along with S’s on a daily basis. So does the Enneagram add anything to this or is it just astrology? And astrology is a completely unscientific way to understand personality. I actually read my horoscope from time to time, just because it’s on Yahoo!’s homepage. (Yes, I read Yahoo as a sort of guilty pleasure). I still feel something deep in my soul that I shouldn’t be reading it, given how Adventists warn about divination and I heard all about that growing up. But I scoff whenever I read the Gemini section. It’s usually pretty good advice like “take it easy today” or “you should really build a connection with an acquaintance because something good may come of it.” Yeah, I guess I should. But there are two reasons why I scoff. First, I’m usually getting the advice a day late (Eastern Standard Time) when I’m 13-14 hours ahead of my home time zone. Second, my sister, who is a polar opposite to me is also a Gemini. So what should I do with the knowledge that I’m an Enneagram Type 9? I wonder if it’s more based on my circumstance now, because I’m in a situation now because of work where I’m just floating. I don’t think I’ve always been this way, but I find that I’ve been conditioned to be this way as a foreigner at a school that would rather me not express myself and makes it exhausting when I do. I wonder if I were truly valued for my contribution if I would be a Type 9? When I change jobs, I might take the Enneagram again.

     Vital version:

    Remix:

    Live From Williamsburg acoustic version featuring Daniel Chae of Run River North, formerly Monsters Calling Home:

    Heavy Lies the Crown version:

  • “What’s It Gonna Be?” by Shura, April 27, 2022 + Nothing's Real track-by-track

    Today is the third entry from Shura‘s Nothing’s Real album. In an interview at Austin City Limits in 2019, Shura said that her mother said that her mother said of her first album “It gets better the more you listen to it,” which Shura and the interviewer lightheartedly took as a  criticism of the singer-songwriter’s 2016 album. I agree with Shura’s mother, but not as a criticism of the album. It was great the summers of 2016 and 2017 when I first enjoyed Nothing’s Real. But the album was more than just a song fleeting song of the summer. To me, it gets better every time I listen to it. 

    IF YOU LET ME DOWN, LET ME DOWN SLOW. Today, I’ll provide a track-by-track reaction to each song on Shura’s Nothing’s Real much like what I’ve done with Acceptance‘s Phantoms and Turn Off the Stars.  My reaction isn’t meant to be extensive, and I will add to it as I choose more songs to be the song of the day. I’ll provide the Spotify version here:  

     

    1.  (i). The album starts with an instrumental. It’s ambient sounds. Guitarist Joel Pott adds a few notes. There are noises of sirens and faint samples from recordings from Shura’s childhood. It’s a little creepy.
    2. “Nothing’s Real.” The title track kicks off the album building off the noise from the first track. The song is layered with overdubs including a squealing young child, presumably young Shura. The song ends with a horn or sax synth sound. The song deals with Shura’s hospitalization when she dealt with a depressive incident. The song hints a nihilism, but the driving dance beat doesn’t leave us in that nihilism. 
    3. “What’s It’s Gonna Be” Today’s song further lightens the mood of the album. Shura talks about how the song was partially inspired by Janet Jackson and Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.”
    4. “Touch” was Shura’s first single. It blew up on the Internet and displayed a spirt of D.I.Y. pop music. For more about this song, read my post from earlier this year.
    5. “Kidz ‘N’ Stuff” Deals with a break up. Shura had invested a lot of mental energy into the relationship. The song is a bit slow compared to the previous bangers. But don’t skip it. The instrumental build up at the end bridges nicely into the next track.
    6.  “Indecision” Some publications have called Shura the Madonna for Millennials. But there’s a lot of reasons why this doesn’t work: Shura isn’t really popular; she doesn’t care much for fashion; she’s gay; and her voice sounds timid on these tracks. But maybe that’s exactly what a Madonna in ’10s would sound like. “Indecision” is a banger.

    Music video:

     

    7. “What Happened to Us.” So, I was in Syracuse Airport in 2016 waiting in Johnny Rockets waiting for my delayed flight due to severe weather, and I heard this song. It was the only time I heard that I heard Shura in the states. I was also a little shocked to hear the lyrics, which I was pretty sure that read like “I was never ready / Fuck your love,” but that’s not the words. “What Happened to Us” is an eloquent break up song about idealizing the good and forgetting the toxic. 
    8. (ii) breaks up the album with a dialogue between young Shura and her father, talking about her brother.
    9. “Tongue Tied” starts off with a grooving guitar and the bridge starts bringing the meaning home with an ’80s key/synth. Shura opens the song with “Your language got me tongue tied.” Shura is fluent in English and Russian. In the Genius annotation, Shura talks about how she was dating someone who spoke Dutch at the time, and though she spoke a little Dutch, she couldn’t express herself completely in that language. 
    10. “Make It Up” is another slow burn track on the album. It’s the natural follow up to “Kidz ‘N’ Stuff.” To read more, check out my post from last year.
    11. “2Shy” is the third single from the album. It’s not the most thrilling song on the album, but it does confirm the introverted pop star style that is lacking in music today. Check out the music video:

    12. “White Lights.” To me, “White Lights” is the song that sets the album apart from any other pop album. What pop star releases a ten-minute track with a jam session on at the end? Shura riffs on the theme at the end of the song, ending the vocals at around 5 minutes into the track, then the guitar jams for over two minutes before the track goes silent. We hear more of Shura’s experimental recording and then the hidden track “311215” begins. It’s a slow track about being worried about death.
    13.  “The Space Tapes.” The final track on the album is more sampling and experimentation. You can hear bits of the rest of the album, but unless you are in the car and are just totally into this album, you might want to spare the additional 9 minutes. Then again, I’ll probably listen to this album again and think this song is brilliant the more I listen to it.

     

  • “To Be Alone with You” by Fleurie, Tuesday, April 26, 2022

    Much of my blog is about nostalgia for different times in my life. Unless you are a futurist, most art is about the past. The ‘80s movies that I grew up watching were about events that happened in the ‘60s and the movies from the ‘90s were about the ‘70s. But suddenly I wake up one day and ‘00s nostalgia is a thing, in music or in the television. So when Hulu adapted John Green’s 2005 debut novel Looking for Alaska into an eight-part mini series, the writers and producers decided to keep the series set in the time of its publication, the early ‘00s. To build a believable setting to the young adult series, the producers created a soundtrack full of songs and covers of songs from the era. The soundtrack as released on streaming services was only a fraction of the music features in the series. Tracks by The Strokes, Phantom Planet, Modest Mouse, and Coldplay could be heard in the show, while covers of well-known hits of that time also appeared on the soundtrack. The original songs that appear in the series are mostly upbeat, while the covers are mostly solemn. Some of the covers are upbeat songs adapted to piano ballads, while others were sad songs reinterpreted in a new way. That’s the case for Fleurie’s “To Be Alone with You.”

    YOU GAVE YOUR GHOST. Looking for Alaska takes place at a summer camp in Alabama. The protagonist Miles, or “Pudge,” as he’s called, develops a crush on a typical John Green pixie dream girl, Alaska, who is compensating for a painful past by being a hipster and loving famous last words and the last lines of novels. The novel is broken into two parts “Before” and “After.” The novel doesn’t have a specific pop cultural references marking its setting, but the addition of an early ‘00s soundtrack helps to fuel a nostalgia for millennials and creates an emotional connection to turn of the millennium culture for younger generations. The solemn covers: Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” covered by Miya Folick, Franz Ferdinand‘s “Take Me Out” covered by Young Summer, The Bravery’s “An Honest Mistake” covered by Mating Ritual and Lizzy Land, and today’s song Sufjan Steven’s “To Be Alone with You” add an emotional weight to the story, a beautiful nostalgia, but also a deep dread and regret about the past.

    YOU GAVE YOUR BODY TO THE LONELY. Like Sufjan Stevens, Lauren Strahm was born in Michigan and dabbled in Christian music for time before she started releasing music under the moniker Fleurie. Her music is a balance between electro pop and slow piano ballads and has contributed to several soundtracks. Besides 2019’s Looking for Alaska, Fleurie’s songs have appeared in Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger, Bones, Pretty Little Liars, Grey’s Anatomy, and Station 19. “To Be Alone with You” is a well-done cover of a well-done original. Fleurie’s take on Sufjan’s 2004 song from Seven Swans recontextualizes the song. It’s still subtly religious, but no longer homoerotic. It’s romantic and melancholy. In the context of the drama, it’s a siren song for a doomed character. Perhaps the inclusion covers is how the story is remembered, slight edits in the space-time continuum or a memory trick for the most intimate of scenes. It also establishes Alaska as an ahead of the curve hipster, enjoying a Sufjan Steven’s song on her iPod the very year he released his massive breakthrough hit record Illinois. Whatever the interpretation of the song, I’m glad that the cover exists if nothing more than to leave art open for interpretation. And given the way that Green wrote Looking for Alaska, it seem that the author is a fan of ambiguity, too.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.



  • “Timelines” by From the Airport, Monday, April 25, 2022

    From the Airport was a duo that formed in 2012 when guitarist Zee met DJ/Keyboardist Milo and the two started jamming together. Prior to the inception of From the Airport, Zee worked playing music for film scores and played guitar in progressive rock bands, and Milo worked in the studio with K-pop acts such as MC Sniper. Milo and Zee together create a dreamy sort of pop-rock that isn’t particularly cool, but full of wonder and excitement. It’s almost as if the band’s concept is waiting for the adventure that comes when traveling to the airport to fly away to an interesting place.

    DREAMING STILL NEXT TO ME.  Before releasing their debut album in 2015, You Could Imagine, they released singles and two EPs. The South Korean electronic indie pop group’s first single “Colors” gained some notice by foreign publications, including The Guardian in the UK. Today’s song is the band’s third single. Their second single “Everyone’s All Right” and its b-side “Raining” shifted the group’s sound from purely optimistic songs to flirting with emo. Today’s song, “Timelines,” first released in 2013, was the band’s third single and hints at a darker story about a friend who the singer couldn’t save. “Timelines” and “Raining” appear on the band’s first EP Chemical Love, released in 2014. The album cover art evokes a My-Chemical-Romance vibe, and the darker tracks, such as “Black Skies” and the title track give From the Airport a gothic vibe. But the next year when they released You Could Imagine, which included new songs and previously released singles, the album’s tone balances between the dark and light. One of the band’s darkest songs, “Flying Walls” is offset by songs like “Hit My Cash,” a light-hearted song about surviving the week until Friday. 

    WE’RE TICKING AWAY, CAN’T HOLD  ON THE TIME. How do you follow up a song like “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us“? I’m not sure that Sparks is an influence on From the Airport, but it seems that Zee is a fan of Dream Theater. I’d imagine that Chromeo is also an influence, and I can’t help but think of Flight of the  Conchords with some of their ultra-serious songs like “Inner City Pressure.” I could be wrong, though, it seems that From the Airport is taking their music seriously, despite what seems a little whimsical. It should be of note that in the early ’10s, both in Korea and internationally Rock music was probably at its nadir. Rock was seen as commercially unfeasible, yet From the Airport played into the ambiguity of whether is it rock or is it pop. The band chose to perform most of their songs in English which was both brave and a limitation. A song like “Timelines” is trying to convey a post-modern message about two friends cursed on different planes of existence. Something happened changing the timeline, but the singer is longing to follow a different timeline. The lyrics are feeble in comparison to the concept the song conveys, but the feeble lyrics almost work. But just as the minor key of the verse is lifted up into a glorious, uplifting chorus, let’s not focus on the ineloquent. Let’s focus on making the best of what we can in the timeline we have now.

    Performance Video:

    Live Performance on MBC:

  • “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” by Sparks, Sunday, April 24, 2022

    The way classic rock radio plays the same ten songs over and over again may lead you to believe that you know all the songs and bands from the ‘70s, ‘80s, or whatever era that station plays. And of course, the 10 bands have full albums and lesser-known hits, but you think you’ve come across every professionally recorded band at least. That’s a really dumb assumption I had having listened to enough music both hit and non-hit because of my parents and just loving music. But then earlier this year I was introduced to the pop/rock duo Sparks when the group broke down their 1974 minor hit “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” on the podcast Song Exploder (see below). In the introduction, Hrishikesh Hirway talked about the band’s accolades and their status as a “band’s band.”


    ZOO TIME, SHE AND YOU TIME. There have been several incarnations of the band Sparks, but at its core, the band is two brothers: Ron and Russell Mael. The brothers grew up in Southern California. Ron is the main songwriter of the band and plays the keys. Russell is the singer known for his falsetto. Many people think that the band is British because they saw most of their success in the UK. The band has had a long career of making whimsical music, which toes the line between serious and novelty. They are listed as an influence by various bands and collaborated with many bands throughout the years including The Go-Go’s, Faith No More, and Franz Ferdinand, even forming a super group with the latter called FFS. The band’s 1974 break out record Kimono My House featured what would become their signature song “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us,” but at the time it was only a minor hit in the UK. In the ’80s the band scored minor hits, including their entry to the Billboard Hot 100 by changing their sound to an electronic New Wave style. Scoring hits with singles such as “I Predict,” “The Number One Song in Heaven,” and “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” and later appearing on The Gilmore Girls and in a Dolce & Gabbana ad, the band has been around, but under the radar. 

    SHOWER, ANOTHER SHOWER. Song Exploder tells the story behind this song the best. I’m adding this song to my playlist because April is already filled with novelty songs and pop acts. I included this song on my Foolish Mix on April 1. The falsetto matching the piano along with the ridiculous lyrics makes the song whimsical. The guitar and production remind listeners of some of the whimsical tracks by Queen, such as “Bicycle Races,” “Fat Bottom Girls,” or even “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The song is all about a crippling anxiety for the speaker to talk to women. Building on the cliché from old Westerns, the speaker’s wild fantasies about life-or-death situations intensify whenever a woman approaches him. His voice goes from intense to shrill by the pre-chorus. And although he says “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us / And it ain’t me who’s gonna leave” listeners might miss that line. Today’s song is worth a laugh. It’ll get stuck in your head. It’s a reminder of our teenage awkwardness or maybe even makes us think of Raj from The Big Bang Theory who can only talk to women when he’s drunk in early seasons. Maybe it’s a great way to use humor to make us makes sense of anxiety, whatever it may be. We hear Russell belting out his fears up and down the piano keys, and it sounds pretty ridiculous. Maybe we can think of our anxieties as just that, irrational and ridiculous. Or maybe not.
    Song Exploder episode of this song: 

    Official Music Video:

  • “Enemy Among Us" by Paper Route, Saturday, April 23, 2022

    Today we have another piano-based slow opening track. However, unlike Acceptance’s Phantoms, promotion for Paper Route’s debut record Absence was mostly word of mouth from the band’s existing fan base and getting on major tours with Paramore, Mutemath, and others, despite the band being on a division of a major label. The band’s established fan base, curated through touring and social media, had already been introduced to the band’s evolving sound on the Are We All Forgotten EP released on 2008 from the folk-electronic sound of their early efforts. Absence though was full electronic progressive pop.

    HE STOLE AS BEST HE COULD. The disorienting intro to the song “Enemy Among Us” is a reverberated piano. In the living-room-filmed album promotional performance video (see below) shows a drum set a top the electric piano as Chad Howat plays the song. I have no idea how the band recorded the song, but Absence is an album that I would like to know more technical specifics about how they captured certain sounds. Besides wondering what that synth tone at the beginning of “Are We All Forgotten” and the dirty bass distortion on “Gutter,” I wonder about the looping and drum programming on “Enemy.” Unlike Acceptance who had built up a fanbase in the Seattle Emo rock scene, Paper Route fans weren’t expecting hard rock from them. Absence starts as a pop record and then transitions into rock before coming back to pop and flirts with EDM all along the way. The band’s second record, The Peace of Wild Things stays mostly in the territory of pop, while their third record Real Emotion starts with the rock song “Writing on the Wall” before completely becoming a pop album. Listeners never knew what to expect from Paper Route, but what could be expected is that Christian-leaning progressive indie pop bands (i.e. Copeland, Deas Vail, Cool Hand Luke) rarely amassed the level of fans as the heavier ones (i.e. Anberlin, Underoath, Norma Jean).
    FELL INTO A HOLE. What makes “Enemy Among Us” so appealing is how chill it appears on the surface, but how creepy it turns out to be. It’s calm, but never safe. The lyrics seem to draw on falling down the rabbit hole, reminding listeners of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. On their next album, “Rabbit Holes” seems to draw on similar themes. While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are fun and fantastical, they are not safe or peaceful. The rabbit hole in this song, though, introduces the listener to an enemy “who stole as best he could / our hearts.” It’s almost as if in the span of this 4:45 song, we’re introduced to a figure who is suspected to be the villain in a James Bond film or some film noir. You feel charmed by him, but you remind yourself to be careful about which information you give him. You are constantly telling yourself that although he’s friendly, he’s not your friend. You’re not sure what he’ll do with that information, but you certainly don’t want to be the loser in whatever this is. But Absence doesn’t appear to be a concept record. We don’t have the big reveal. We don’t have the fall out. What we have is the peace and the anxiety. We have the waiting. There’s interesting drum programming to keep us on edge, but the frantic piano and rock sounds of the following track, “Wish,” change the subject. Enemy averted?

    Remix:

  • “Take Cover” by Acceptance, Friday, April 22, 2022 + Phantoms track by track

    “Take Cover” is the opening track to Acceptance‘s debut and almost final album, Phantoms. It starts with a piano loop and adds momentum with the drums. Jason Vena‘s smooth vocals hit a high register which puts the band on good emo footing for the time, as a singer who could whine a few lines was essential for a band that makes it. Listening to Phantoms again today–as I’ve talked about this album at least three times before–I thought about one of the fatal flaws of the record: the track order. Even though, I think that this album is a perfect artifact of my last two years in high school, I can kind of see why this band wasn’t huge, and it has to do with the track listing of this album.

    SHE MAKES THE CITY SEEM LIKE HOME. Today, I’m going to do a track-by-track analysis of this album, and I’ll probably add to this analysis as I choose more songs to be song of the day. I may not have a lot to say about the tracks individually as I’ve already talked about my experience with the album and the band’s history, but today it occurred to me that in 2005, you don’t start a new rock band’s album off with a slow song. Save that for an established rock band. Sure, this was the time of OneRepublic and The Fray, but the record company did nothing to earn rock credibility before trying to break Acceptance into the rock market. And Phantoms, at its core, was a rock record. But the album doesn’t even start to rock until track 3, “In Too Far,” and the album again puts on the brakes with track 5 “Different.” I love “Take Cover” and think it’s a unique way to start an album, but when the band was aiming for an audience, confusing the fans with a different sound didn’t work in their favor. I guess that’s how generic always wins out in the end. Below is a link to listen to the album on Spotify and a brief discussion of each track and links to the song if I’ve blogged about that track.

    Listen to Phantoms on Spotify.

    Track 1 “Take Cover.” The song of the day. Read the lyrics on Genius. Also, check out the cover by A Day to Remember below. In recent years, this song and “So Contagious” have received a boost in streams when Demi Lovato included it on their Emo Nite Takeover Playlist on Spotify.

    Track 2 “So Contagious.” Is an even slower second track. The song wends its way from a slow pop ballad to a slightly more energetic chorus, which prepares us for track 3, a rock song.  Aaron Sprinkle also recorded this song for his solo record Lackluster.

    Track 3 “In Too Far” picks the record up to its rock status. Listeners can start to hear what Jason Vena’s voice can do with rock. The vocals are much cleaner than most groups, and Vena is said to be a perfectionist when it comes to vocal takes, according to the band’s Labeled episode.

    Track 4. “The Letter” takes the rock down a notch and introduces the northwestern-sounding melancholy guitar tones that the band has used throughout their career and guitarist Christian McAlhaney would also bring to Anberlin.

    Track 5 “Different.” There’s a lot to say about their failed single, but I found myself skipping the track more times than not after listening to the album several times. It’s well-written and sentimental, but it lacks something to make me keep coming back to it. This is probably another reason why the band didn’t make it.


    Track 6 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” is the instrumental track that sets up the rock portion of the album. The moody track takes its name from Latin, meaning “To the stars through difficulty.”

    Track 7 “This Conversation Is Over” should have been the rock radio single that went before “Different.” In another reality, this song was played on college radio stations, and that reality was The Sims 2: University. 

    Track 8 “Over You” is a bit of a letdown coming off “Conversation.” The song has grown on me over the years, though.

    Track 9 “Breathless” isn’t one of the stand-out tracks, but a roommate in college said it was the only good track on the record, so there’s that. I thought the chorus and the bridge sounded like an ’80s song.

    Track 10 “In the Cold” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. The guitars build an atmosphere of coldness and Vena’s voice adds just enough warmth to make it cosy. I’m weird, I don’t see music in terms of color but in terms of warmth.

    Track 11 “Permanent” was a Radio U single when the band released an EP, Black Lines for Battlefields,  on the Militia Group, which was actually a marketing tactic to build indie cred behind the band. The song was featured in the game ATV Offroad Fury 3, and there’s a terrible music video for the song floating around on YouTube.

    Track 12 “Glory/Us” closes the album on a ballad. It starts out a little sad, but by the final chorus, the listener feels empowered with the line “Glory is waiting.” Sadly that would be the end of the band minus the promotional AOL Sessions EP until the band started teasing new music in the mid ’10s.

    Studio version:

    Sessions at AOL acoustic version:

    Sessions at AOL version 

  • “Golden” by Harry Styles, Thursday, April 22, 2022

    At first it may seem like an odd choice to release a summer album in December, but if the artist in question releases a big enough record, that artist can ride the success into the following summer, sweetening the spring along the way. However, if that album happened to be released in December of 2019 like Harry Styles‘ Fine Line, that following summer is going to look different. Fortunately for Styles, his album was a welcome reprieve for the hell that we were going through back then. And by the time the single “Watermelon Sugar” was released in May of 202o, the was longing for normal sweet, sticky fun.


    I’M OUT OF MY HEAD, AND YOU’RE STILL SCARED. But when a friend said, “You should check out that new Harry Styles record. It’s surprisingly good,” all I heard was static. My brain was trying to dump the useless information that I knew that there were five boys in One Direction, and that at one point Harry Styles allegedly dated Taylor Swift, giving us the song “Style.” I couldn’t tell the one direction boys apart, and Harry Styles with his long hair wasn’t particularly attractive to me. Only static registered in my brain like when I hear the names dropped of Dua Lipa, Diplo, or Demi Lovato–I couldn’t tell my pop artists apart. But last year, “Sunflower, Vol. 6” blew my expectations. On a closer listen “Treat People with Kindness,” “Adore You,” even “Watermelon Sugar” were quite good. The static started to clear. Today’s song with its fast-paced Doo Wop “da nah nah nah”s  and what would be a breakneck speed if not compared to yesterday’s song, “Panic Switch” opens the album and sets a mood for Harry’s new style: a ’70s inspired progressive pop with elements of disco and R&B. Lyrically, Fine Line deals with a break up and the death of his step father, which Styles talks with Zane Lowe on The Zane Lowe Interview Series, and today’s song could be interpreted about either loss. 
    HOLD IT, FOCUS.  Harry Styles’ eponymous solo debut flirted with old-time rock ‘n’ roll. And, listening back to One Direction today for research, I found that they were actually a more rock-focused boy band than the early ’00s incarnation of the boy band. I couldn’t name two One Direction songs as, like the Jonas Brothers as of the early ’00s, I could tell they weren’t for me. But I’m finding that I have to keep trying artists because they grow up and also my ears change. Today’s song made me think about the Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” just because the song builds a golden hue in its tone, and I think about the transient nature of life. I think about teaching my students that poem years ago. They struggled to understand the meaning, but as we unpacked it in class, the reactions I heard when they started to get it made me feel like a real teacher and that I was doing the good work of instilling an appreciation of poetry in my students. But that was many years ago, and those students are now senior in high school, and they will soon graduate. Styles runs in the video, chasing something, something golden. The lyrics frantically beg the listener to stay. But is this gold lasting?