Listening Diary #2: I Laid My Head on a Brick Wall
Hello! If you’re reading this, it’s because I pulled myself together enough to write about a few songs that just might help you through that difficult patch in your life.
Music is entirely subjective of course, and what might work for some may not work for others, especially considering that we all lead different lives and suffer through different experiences. With that in mind, here’s some stuff that I feel dependably works for me:
Don’t roll your eyes. I will readily admit that listening to Bon Iver’s first record while down in the dumps is cliche as fuck. It’s the image of a brunette in a pair of jeans and a crocheted sweater the color of eggshells, sipping weak tea in their two-story neighborhood home with a loft and a Monstera, reclining on a brand new navy-blue chamise and looking out a giant port window while a drizzle of rain softly graces the leaves overhead. At this point its basically playlist music, so archetypal in it’s vulnerable sad-sackiness that it provided a basis for countless acoustic bloodlettings, many of which are very bad songs.
I endeavor, as a principle, to avoid cliche whenever I can. There are also times when you have to relax your shoulders and realize that things become cliche for a reason. It’s not just that For Emma, Forever Ago was a blueprint for a certain breed of contemporary singer-songwriter folk, it’s also still kind of the the gold standard: its atmosphere as oppressive as it is cathartic, with Justin Vernon’s wounded falsetto as elemental as ever. I continue to believe that his approach to lyric writing is utterly pretentious until you’re not in a position to use your brain all that well, and then his loopy, impressionistic lines cover whatever ground it is you need covering.
I discovered this record just about ten years ago, back when I was finally starting to get into indie music. For some reason it always reminded me of back home. Its stark, simple melodies recalled a starker, simpler time, where I could picture the dirt roads branching off of the street I lived on, the ones I never explored, and could wonder whatever lay at the end of them. There was one particular moment during a summer break from college where I walked down to Grays Beach alone and gave myself a silent, deadened pep talk before coming out to my parents, and this record was playing in my Skullcandys. It’s designed so personally that it’s a miracle anybody can relate at all, and yet the language Vernon discovered helped himself become one of the most influential songwriters of the last decade. I have come to the conclusion that I am ultimately destined for failure.
It’s funny to me why I continue dipping into Cat Power when I’m in need of a set-me-down. Her songs mean something, but it’s never entirely clear what. It’s more what they portend, how her smoky voice forms cryptic lyrics as if she were a medium speaking for some long forgotten scorn. Her earliest work feels infused with some haunted power, the kind that threatens to seep into your spirit and drive you to self-harm.
There was a period during my last year in college where I had Moon Pix on repeat. It was a comfort during the nights I worked dorm security, when I’d take my shitty little speaker up to Butterfield or Grayson and jack in the aux plug for some reprieve from my boredom. Without any written homework to complete, I’d interpret what Chan Marshall was saying and write the lyrics in half-cursive, each perfectly perched on a blue line, cherished as if they were my own (although in reality my own paled in embarrassing comparison).
Later after graduation, when things became considerably darker, I spent a night drinking alone and decided to take my car – a ’96 Toyota Camry graciously donated by an aunt – to the park down a street. The brief length of the trip allowed me to justify the dangerous position I was putting myself in, and yet I pulled up to the edge of the woods and collided with the bumper at the edge of the lot. I tumbled out of the car, walked to the lake in the darkness, sat on a rotted log and listened. Backmasked percussion grazed the ears as a kick bounced like drunk hiccups. Curlicues of electric guitar formed veins around “Metal Heart”. I knew who he was, and was convinced why he turned down.
Up until Sun’s course-correcting gratitude, people understood Cat Power to dabble abstractly in the uglier side of the human experience, in places where the bottle runs out but the floor doesn’t. Moon Pix is as viscerally nightmarish as her earlier collaborations with Steve Shelley, but even more so thanks to a night of intense hallucinations Marshall experienced during a lonely night in rural South Carolina. It moves at a glacial pace, it wear silence like a cloak, and it scraped against the belly like swallowed glass. It’s ideal for when all you can manage is to wallow in whatever oppressive feeling is enveloping you. Maybe one day I can learn to live with myself.
Bibio is the type of artist that, to me, will forever remain Mr. Silver Medal: the hipster Moby, purveyor of “folktronica”, his myriad works consistently just outside the echelons of greatness. I suspect a significant number of people still believe that his best work came over ten years ago, in his sidechain-heavy Warp debut Ambivalence Avenue. There are others who shuttle him into the same category with Washed Out and Phantogram and Broken Bells, all spurious artifacts of rooftop-party culture where people pay well to look poor.
I’m of the opinion that Bibio’s catalog has actually aged pretty well, all things considered. It may not be substantive, but does good music need to be? The important thing is that when he decides to push himself out of his comfort zone, he actually succeeds more often than not. That’s why he’s responsible for one of my personal favorite ambient records of all time, the spectral Phantom Brickworks. Some incorporeal presence lurks in the grooves, like Moon Pix, but differently. It’s less possessed and more haunted, its lengthy title tracks cycling like slow Xeroxes of crumbled architecture. Songs self-assemble from the vacant ether and rotate hypnotically in a dense, weightless fog. Soft clicks reverberate in the background, like drops of rain from a stray hanging leaf or a cord being pulled from an amp. Listening feels like slowly examining wreckage from an ancient time, and yet there’s a resonance that undeniably grounds it in the personal. I wonder if it will ever stop hurting.
The good stuff. This is for when there is no other option but to lean into what’s ailing you. This is when you feel forced to savor it because it’s taken over your whole mind and there’s no distraction in the world that could keep you from feeling what you’re feeling. There are plenty of examples of this kind of music that will do the trick, including entire genres of ridiculously visceral music. This Canadian punk band already had one: their self-titled debut, which recalled Nirvana’s primal negativity so well that the fact it was released on Sub Pop is no surprise.
II is virtually no different from its big brother other than the fact that it’s less poppy and slightly edgier. Either one, actually, will do the job just fine, but this is the one I got to first, and I still use it to push myself way past my limits. It’s a great gym record. It’s mastered relatively quietly and with the harshest peaks sanded down, and in that way it allows (demands, even) you to turn the volume up as high as you can stand it and move your body without self-consciousness. The melodies aren’t terribly unique, but they’re performed with the force of a raging bull, and Alex Edkins has the nihilistic sub-floor scream down pat. I always go to this record if I need an aural cleansing, where the feeling of my eardrums ringing keeps me somewhat placated. No matter how many times I think about it, it will never not be my fault.
And now, something in the complete opposite end of the spectrum. If For Emma designed to elicit cutting introspection, it may not be possible to listen to Tatsuro Yamashita’s wild, Off The Wall moment and not start beaming. Yamashita is arguably one of the most talented pop writers in global history; after helping introduce Western musical sensibilities to a begrudging Japanese audience through his band Sugar Babe, he spent the rest of the 70s sharpening his toolset and anteing up on his ambition. By the turn of the decade, a big breakthrough arrived in the form of a Maxell cassette commercial, over which he layered an a cappella stinger (supported by comically-soaring harmonies), and on the strength of the game-changing technology a star was born.
General American audiences have only recently become aware of Yamashita’s command over the pop song thanks to the chaotic-neutral impact of the YouTube algorithm: better late than never, I guess. While For You is perhaps the bigger, smoother record, Ride on Time is not only his star-making moment but arguably his finest. It doesn’t bear the weight of all the former’s balladry, instead delegating its high and low energies onto its two sides. That A-side is just pitch perfect. “Someday” is jazz pop at its bounciest, blithest best, but with an element of weathered hopefulness that lifts it from being completely fluffy. I love the way Yamashita peppers the English words for colors throughout “Daydream”; for a non-Japanese speaker, it leads me to latch onto those hues like an abstract, allowing me to fill in the scene however I imagine. There’s “Silent Screamer” and its cheesy, funky ode to Speed Racer; there’s the outstanding title track, which plays like classic disco; even its later slow numbers bear a certain dignity that lift them out of the easy listening trap.
The best part about listening to music outside of your language is that you can better savor whatever else is going on in the music, as if you were cutting off one of your senses. This is especially useful when you can’t bear the sound of your own thoughts. And city pop perfectly fits this role in that its gorgeous, easy to listen to, and usually evocative of better times by virtue of its arrangements. It’s the best kind of nostalgic escape because its not your nostalgia; it’s a completely invented timeline where you can imagine yourself living in opulence, and that’s a good a distraction as I can think of. I let out a scream that ripped open my throat and still it did not end.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people