Every time I get to pick an album (see: gecs, 100), or someone picks an album that carries great personal resonance (see: Leo, Ted) I threaten, either privately via digital correspondence to Mr. Puke or publicly in some venue (online, in-person), that I'm going "to go long on this one," that I am going to set aside my critical pretensions and just let the fucker rip and write and write and write and write about the album until my fingers fall off and I have said everything that I have to say about the record. Ideally, also saying anything that anyone has or ever could about the album.
This does not happen, and there are a number of competing reasons why, but the simplest might be that I find it much harder to blog than I used to. We are a long ways away from the social sharing that I came up with and the mediums that meant the most to me. When I was young and the idea of self-publishing online was relatively new, it felt good, if not weirdly empowering and natural to share much of yourself online. Sure, maybe your LiveJournal or your GeoCities site would only be viewed by the same family members and friends who you were talking to anyway, but it gave everyone a platform to tell whoever was listening how they were feeling, what they were thinking, in a relatively private, relatively consequence-free space. It birthed, I would imagine, a generation of writers who might not have otherwise thought to put ideas to page. That's a beautiful thing, even if the content created in that wave was largely boring, mostly bad, and meaningful only to a small conceivable segment of people.
But now I am older, and the means through which people communicate with each other online have changed. They move at a pace and with a rhythm that is not incomprehensible to me, but outside my skill set or comfort level. Imagine putting your face online! Imagine shooting a video of yourself! A life online before social media was largely spent, at least by me, in AOL Chat Rooms, playing Slingo, maybe downloading DOOM II from a website that would absolutely crab up the family computer beyond repair, or reading whatever some weirdo happened to write. There was anonymity to it, and a relative safety provided by it.
See, I write this whole thing out and I'm even losing steam for my own original point, because it isn't about being old (which I am) or about the methods changing (which they have). It's ultimately because this used to make me feel connected, and now it makes me feel alone. The entirety of the internet is exposure to someone else's opinion about something, someone else's perspective, someone else's recommendation, someone else's observation. We're all stars now, and all our ideas are out, everywhere, and it's all too much. How does anyone come to independent thoughts without feeling led by the invisible hand? How does anyone have any confidence that their opinions are their own? If everyone is talking, no one is. Even this line of thinking casts me too close to "it was better back in the day," which is not what I ultimately mean. But I do miss the time when being online meant I could see what my friends were thinking about, and if they wanted to they could see what I was thinking of. Now I turn this stupid box on every day, either the one at my desk or the one in my pocket, and I look at the same ten websites I always look at because they're the only ones that don't feel quite as corrupted by the larger information curation complex, and I wonder what anyone else I've ever met thinks of anything, because I would much rather hear from their thoughts, feelings, and reactions than I would any of the 100s of millions of faceless strangers who are either shouting into a social media void, posting their worst and most debased opinions on Reddit, or writing one of the billions of content farm non-content that passes for the remainder of websites. I look around this blasted information landscape and I feel as disconnected as a loner crushed by bodies at a music festival. Surrounded by people, drowning in noise, in complete isolation. At least that person gets to feel someone else's skin. At least that person is having a tactile experience. What do I get? What is my reward? Wordle, The New York Times Website, three or four music blogs, Bandcamp. What a miserable trade I made. I don't know what I gave up, but I know what I got sucks.
So, to walk all the way back to my original point, which I swear was hanging around somewhere up there a few hundred words ago: I find it hard to write about things now, especially the things that I like. I've become limited in my vocabulary in explaining why anything is good. So when I tell you that this long odds record has provided me consistent comfort in 20-minute bits since I first heard it back in May, I don't know how to explain why, or convince you that what I think is good actually is, or influence you to listen to it (or listen to it with different ears), or if there is a value in even trying.
So I'm doing this instead. I'm letting the fucker play and I'm writing as unbroken as I can for 20-minute runtimes and seeing what comes out. We're rolling out on "in the knees" now. Maybe next pass through, I can try to focus.
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Moving will make you crazy. Moving without professional help will make you crazy and mean. Moving without professional help in the course of two weeks will make you crazy, mean, and cruel. I'd estimate that my place is about 60% packed up, maybe a little more, but still some really annoying stuff to do: disassemble beds, take tables apart, bag up mattresses. All that shit can't really happen until the last day, and that's the same day that a bunch of dudes are coming over to help put the contents of my family's life into a truck I am not certain I can drive. There's an idealized version how this all goes and there's the realization that it's already, somehow, fucking Thursday and I will no longer be living here, one way or another, within approximately 50 hours, so you do the best you can to get somewhere in between perfection and despair. Not letting Great be the enemy of Good, and so on.
Is it weird to announce, sort of, that I am moving here on this blog post, on not even my own bespoke organic content mill, a couple hundred words into an especially emo review of an album I haven't even really started talking about yet? Assuredly, it is, but these are weird times. I take solace in that no one is going to read this besides Joe, and he might not even get this far. Sunny might find out about the move via this long blog, and that feels bad, but as much as I like Sunny, it isn't like he and I are long-time close friends. Not that I'm ruling that out, Sunny, let's go ahead and get this relationship rolling in earnest, it's not easy making friends as a man in your 30s.
So yeah, my family is moving out of Philadelphia on Saturday. Heading back to Rochester, New York, where I grew up and got out as quickly as I could. It's not a terrible place to live, and I am not sure why I was so hot to leave it when I was young. Chalk it up to delusions of grandeur, manufactured oppression, and a too-literal reading of "History of a Boring Town" by Less Than Jake. It's not a bad place to live. It's got a good children's museum. It's got minor league baseball. It's got a midwestern perspective on drinking and nutrition. It's an hour from Niagara Falls, three hours from Toronto (though a legitimate sign that where you live might have Loser Energy is that locals describe how close it is to other, better shit. I am looking at you, Baltimore, Maryland). But it isn't home. I moved to Philadelphia in 2004 and stayed. Nearly 20 years down here and this dirty town feels as much like home as anywhere has. I don't think I'll miss this house, but I'm going to miss this place. I'm going to miss its broken sidewalks and in-theory-only curb cuts. I'm going to miss its murals. I am going to miss having a back-hand familiarity with certain neighborhoods where I cut my teeth, made mistakes, did ugly shit. I'm going to miss the sound of the El, the "STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS" of the old Broad Street Line. I'm going to miss "wooder," hearing a pure and uncut hoagiemouth accent being uncorked in line for a sandwich. I'm going to miss mixed-race poverty, crass and disgusting and ultimately charming regional pride. I made a life here and I hate to leave it.
So why do it? I'm really out over my skis now. Might as well come out with it and hope it gets buried here. No, let's be a little cagey. Okay, so: a close family member has stage four cancer. When you move away from where you grew up, you eventually either implicitly or intrinsically realize that there is a certain number of times you can expect to see your loved ones again, assuming everyone stays relatively healthy and nothing major changes. When those two things don't happen, the number changes. The number would have gotten too low without this move.
It's not a fair thing, especially with a family of my own. It's not fair to move them up to a place they've never really known or loved. Not fair to ask them to change their lives for this. But here we are, doing it anyway, and whatever it takes to make it up to my loved ones, I'm going to have to do. But the words on the page, Stage Four, they can do a lot to move people, to clarify things. So the truck comes Saturday, we leave, and we start to do whatever we can, even if it's just sitting there, bearing witness. I want to ask questions. I want to film the answers. I want to save these details so that in two, three, six, ten years, I can know what their favorite song was, or what their first concert was, or what their favorite book was, or when they felt most alive or most afraid. None of that stuff brings anything back, but they help to get memory working, help to give outlines and shape to an idea, a person.
I should, for my own protection, at least write about this album for a second. I'm listening to "in the knees" right now, again. This is my favorite song on the record, and the one that makes it feel safe enough for me to write all this knowing it's going to be "published" somewhere. This is the kind of song that plays quietly in the background while people share secrets with each other. It's late-teens sleepover music, night-drive music, mix CD music. It invites. It provides a space, a cone of silence, in which people can be open with each other. That's such an easy thing to do when you're young. It becomes so hard when you get older, because you learn to be guarded, to not put your stuff on someone else. This is all I have ever really wanted, I think, the ability to put my stuff on someone else, and to have them put their stuff on me. To create communion. Try telling that to another 36-year-old man you want to be friends with (Sunny, don't read this part). "in the knees" makes me feel like I can, even though I know I can't.
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The problem with this album only really being available on Bandcamp, besides keeping Dwyer from his new favorite band, is that there is no easy way for me to play "mostly roses" on repeat ten, 20, 30 times. This is something I've started doing at work. It helps steady my mind, helps me think and write and process my thoughts without letting me get too deep into my emotions. I still have a clock I have to punch. "mostly roses" is the one I would want to keep listening to, just hearing the phrase "we can weed the weak ones out" over and over again for 45 minutes. Mind-destroying comfort, if only there was a way to do it that didn't require me to click back to the browser window every time the song ends.
Let's complete the aside. Here are the songs I will listen to on repeat, over and over again, sometimes for close to two hours at a time if the work requires it or if my headspace is particularly rotten:
- "Restarter" by Torche
- "Good Drank" by 2Chainz
- "The Motherload" by Mastodon
- "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco
- "Get Right" by Megafaun
- "Goin Against Your Mind" by Built to Spill
- "Never Meant" by American Football (this is a real "break glass in case of emergency" deal, though)
- "Snookerd" by Dan Deacon
I’ll also listen to And the Refinement of Their Decline by Stars of the LID and a two-hour recording of a thunderstorm that I am particularly fond of, though these things are basically the same. All ambient music is basically rain sounds, is basically the music they sell at a Rainforest Cafe or The Nature Company. Someone should do a blog about the mall, one of these days. Someone besides Joe.
Alright, once again I have failed to write about this album that I selected and have even claimed as my second favorite record of the year. But I think I am writing about it in a way because listening to this thing frees me up, it jars something loose in my usually blocked mind, it tells me it is okay to be vulnerable and to share because it feels like very generous music in its approachability.
Approachability. That is close to the whole core idea I want to eventually land on here, the grand unifying theory of what will always compel me to listen to lo-fi music (even if it calls itself things like "shitgaze," come the fuck on, everyone. I know there are only so many words to describe so many sounds, but can't we do a little better than that?), will always draw me back to the weird way I choose to listen to music now (go to Bandcamp.com > Scroll to the bott > Pick a city > Sort by "new," then "last week," DO NOT SORT BY POPULARITY > click around until you find something you like). Speaking of Less Than Jake up there, this idea has its roots in punk philosophy. The three main tenets of punk music, if I had to identify them, are 1) fuck the man, 2) no one gets this but us, and 3) you can do this, too. Punk is not a leaderless genre, but it is perhaps the most inviting and user friendly outside of anything besides rap. Both of them have a minimal, boot-strapped quality to them. If you have a guitar and know where to put your index and ring fingers, you can write a song. If you can write three songs, you can have a band. It's even easier now that it used to be because you can write your three songs and record them directly onto your phone then put them out into the bottomless ocean of the internet for someone to find, like a guy combing the beach with a metal detector, only to find bottle caps in various degrees of oxidation. Let's set aside the internet part of this for a second: our changed minds, the content maw, the level of effort to push items above the froth into a place where they can be observed, to say nothing of appreciated, by anyone, anywhere, for any amount of time. The point is, if you want to make art you can do it right now, publish it quickly, and send it to your friends. That is a beautiful thing.
Lo-fi music is an extension and validation of that idea. It's a whole genre, a whole mode of messaging, that makes its limitations its strengths. Every fuzzy little record someone records in a bedroom studio or on a Focusrite input or some $400 warehouse deal with a 8-channel mixing board is another confirmation that you do not need all the big shit to sound good, to make a sound. You just need to want to do it, and if you have something new to say, or a compelling way to say the old thing, that's all the better.
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Part of this unquestionably has to do with my inability to understand how my opinions are formed, my unease with taking suggestions from people I do not trust or have not vetted. I have worked adjacent to PR and Marketing long enough to understand influence, and specifically the billions of dollars spent to convince someone they feel something. It is not disgusting, I don't think, but it does make me uneasy. I have so little control over my own mind, I want to do as little as possible to cede the wheel to outside entities, especially if they are paying out the nose for the privilege. Part of this probably also has to do with my own ambitions and compulsions to make music, on and off, for the last eighteen years or so.
Ultimately, what draws me to this kind of music is not just the democracy of it, but the stripping down of the thing to its core elements. I am not immune to the sound of the good drums, the swell of the impressive guitar, the acrobatic feats of vocal dexterity, the weirdness of the programmed loops, or any other special thing that a person has learned, worked hard, or paid someone else good money to do. But, to borrow a line, those things tell me nothing about my own life, look nothing like the gray around me. Now, on the other hand, something that sounds, purely on a mechanical level, like it was recorded through cheesecloth, but contains a simple earworm melody or an isolated lyric that can stick in my head and develop its own meaning over time? There's never enough stars? There's not enough stars? That's an everyday, commonplace miracle that suggests and affirms that the divine is within reach for all of us, that the meek really are inheriting the earth.
The hard thing with this stream of consciousness, repeat listening gambit is that I don't really know how to end the thing. I could conceivably keep writing about this forever as my head works around and through these eight endless replayable songs. I don't know what my point was and if I made it. As an advertisement for fine thread, this review sucks. So be it. It opens up my mind just a little bit, gives me a little bit of space to feel, safety. I listen to this album now and it gives me hope that the places I might go can someday become home, that there are small blessings awaiting me, that grace is within reach. See you all at the Algernon show. Philadelphia is not as bad as Philadelphians say it is.
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