The New Pornographers – Continue As A Guest | Album Review

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It’s been 23 years since The New Pornographers’ breakout debut Mass Romantic in 2000. Since then, the band has earned their right to be called one of indie rock’s greatest supergroups… “Supergroup,” in this case, means a group of multiple knockout singer-songwriters who have years of output, either on their own or as a part of side projects, but still get together every few years to collaborate. Think of Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker) or Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo). The influential and iconic sounds of these bands would not have been possible without the creative input of each songwriter.

Spearheaded by A.C. Newman and Neko Case, The New Pornographers have achieved indie rock canon across all eight of their albums up to this point. Their most notable tenure was released on the legendary Matador Records before moving to Anti- in 2017. That year’s Whiteout Conditions was their first without founding member and the trifecta-completing Dan Bejar, who is most well known for leading the band Destroyer. Despite his absence, the band proved they could still release one of their best albums yet under a new permutation. That formula was shown to be inconsistent with the 2019 follow-up In The Morse Code Of Brakelights, their weakest crop of tunes all around. Apart from the outlier hit “Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile,” the album featured a general lack of energy and immediacy that was a hallmark of their previous albums.

Continue As A Guest is the band’s ninth LP and their debut for Merge Records. This label feels like a natural home for The New Pornographers; Merge has shared many artists with Matador over the years and boasts just as iconic of a back catalog. Newman and Case also dug into the archives and have worked in some unreleased Bejar material, which appears as the lead single and album opener “Really Really Light.” The track feels like a New Pornographers family reunion, containing fragments that date back to the Brill Bruisers days and very well could have sat comfortably in its tracklist. On the whole, Continue As A Guest is a notable improvement on its predecessor but still exists in a more low-key presentation, leaving behind the up-tempo power-pop that defined their most celebrated works.

In exchange, the band locks into some surprisingly groovy cuts, like “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies,” where Newman and Case share vocals on one of the most unique lyrical subjects for a Pornos tune in a long while. “Now you’re clearing the room just like Pontius Pilate when he showed all his home movies. All of his friends yelling, ‘Pilate, too soon!’” It’s sort of the band’s exploration of oblivious ego like Ben Folds Five’s “Steven’s Last Night In Town” or Ted Leo’s “The Little Smug Supper Club.”

Just as danceable, the song “Angelcover” is a borderline disco biscuit. The New Pornographers are no strangers to electronic elements– they’ve been incorporating strong keyboard lines into their songs on every album –but this might be the danciest they’ve ever gotten. The band muses, “Melody ain’t got nothing on the delivery,” but luckily, on this track, they’ve got a large dosage of both. Additionally, the title track, “Continue As A Guest,” is backed with a tasteful horn section that blissfully sways into the album’s second half.

While A.C. Newman is the primary vocalist, Neko Case compliments him as she always does on his tunes, but she also continues the tradition of leading a few of her own. Case’s “Crash Years” from 2009’s Together is my all-time favorite song in the band’s discography. Unfortunately, this time around, Case’s contributions are the weakest moments across the tracklist. The batch starts with “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” an underwhelming ballad that may have been better suited for a solo album. Case, who generally is an extremely bright lyricist and vocalist, completely misses in both categories on “Marie and the Undersea” in the second half of the album. “Marie, as the undersea calls out your name. Next thing you know, you’re flicking your cigarette out the window.” This song doesn’t strongly evoke the character, who’s presented in the middle of a crop of mermaidian clichés. It feels like she’s oddly playing below her strengths, and these moments only slow down the pace of the album.

For longtime fans, there’s still a handful of moments like “Really Really Light” that unmistakably fall into the band’s classic sound. “Bottle Episodes” could have come right out of the Challengers album with its focus on acoustic-based chamber-pop, with every member of the band clearly audible in the group vocals and strong instrumental performance. Newman warns, “when you’re dancing with the Devil, you don’t get to pick the song they play.” The album’s closer, “Wish Automatic Suite,” employs the same compositional techniques, with a melancholic tone shift at the end that’s expertly transitioned into from the strong refrains before it.

Both “Last and Beautiful” and “Firework In The Falling Snow” are the second to last songs in their respective halves of the album, which coincidentally seem to be Continue As A Guest’s dead zones. The two most forgettable songs here with nothing standout to latch onto, but also nothing too troubling to criticize. This effect is truly the Achilles heel of …Brakelights, but thankfully only carries over in a small way across the runtime of Guest.

I don’t necessarily think The New Pornographers’ best days are behind them, especially since the highlights of this album, like “Pontius Pilate…” or the title track, are genuinely great songs. Newman and Case are songwriting veterans, and it would be foolish to assume their muses are totally fading. Continue As A Guest just happens to be a bit of a mixed bag. The moments where they’re stepping outside their musical comfort zone, to mostly pleasurable results, sound a little inconsistent paired with the more typical sounding tracks. The album advert describes it as “10 new, explosive, genre-defying earworms.” While I can’t dispute the descriptor that these songs are new, not everything is explosive, and in those less powerful moments, the earworms are not always to be found. At the very least, it makes it more interesting in some respects than their last effort. With Continue As A Guest, I’ll still continue as a fan.

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

The Best of Q1 2023

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A couple of years ago, I challenged myself to stay up on new music through monthly collections of my favorite releases. That was a fun exercise but proved to be exhausting and a little redundant as the months wore on. Last year, I decided to scale things back to quarterly write-ups posted every three months, which felt like a much better cadence to discuss my favorite albums throughout the year.

Early in 2023, I put out a call for guest writers, and the response was more heartening and overwhelming than I ever could have expected. Within the space of a week, the Swim Into The Sound “staff” quadrupled to almost two dozen writers, meaning the blog has been busier and more energized than ever before. We’ve been putting out reviews more regularly and publishing at least one article a week, oftentimes more. It means we’ve been able to launch fun new initiatives like Hater’s Delight, and it’s given me more time to be intentional and thoughtful with my own writing. Most relevant to this article, this influx of new writers also means we can spread the love even further when it comes to these quarterly roundups.

Instead of just me talking about the (mostly emo) records I’ve been enjoying throughout the first few months of the year, I decided it made more sense to turn this over to our newly-bolstered staff to get a diverse spread of opinions and musical recommendations. What follows is each writer talking about their favorite album released in the first quarter of the year, with just one paragraph or two devoted to spreading the word about the music they can’t stop listening to. I hope this roundup gives you something new to listen to and love, I know it already has done so for me. 

Black Belt Eagle Scout – The Land, The Water, The Sky

Saddle Creek

In a Q1 where some of my other favorite releases (Paramore, Caroline Polachek) have been relatively short (and full of singles I’d already heard!), this Black Belt Eagle Scout record has refreshed me with its expansiveness. Many of the twelve tracks meander past the 4-minute mark, encouraging the listener to hang out and explore. It’s been such a perfect album to put on at night when I’m chasing some elusive peace of mind—Katherine Paul’s voice is atmospheric, yet warm, and on songs like “Salmon Stinta” and the album’s lead single, “Don’t Give Up,” she even borders on meditative. The record’s not all softness, though; the drums and guitars of The Land, The Water, The Sky ground the songs and give them an urgency I hadn’t necessarily noticed from Black Belt Eagle Scout in the past. Specifically, the guitars’ spacious reverb gives the record a fun rock flavor without ever losing that crucial sense of serenity (or, at least, contemplation). My favorite track is “Understanding,” which is also the most rock-y track and sounds a bit like what would happen if Cat Power drank a few Red Bulls. I’ve found The Land, The Water, The Sky extremely easy to love and easy to listen to a LOT—it’s a beautiful place to retreat and linger a while. 

Katie Wojciechowski – @ktewoj


Dougie Poole – Rainbow Wheel of Death

Warf Cat Records

Rainbow Wheel of Death is the kind of record that reminds me why I love country music so much. This album is full of genius, with something for everyone tucked inside. Lyrics about waking up crying, oceans split in two, holding white lilies on the megabus. Collage album art that features Karl Marx. Poole’s voice is like salted caramel, rich and mellow on every track. The jaunty music injects feel-good rhythm into a nonetheless starkly tragic record; it salutes traditional country music while creating brand new formulations to thrilling effect. There are several perfect songs. The insanely catchy riff from “Beth David Cemetery.” The heartbreakingly tender lap steel guitar on the harrowing “Nothing in This World Can Make Me Smile.” The record includes my current contender for song of the year, “High School Gym,” which departs from the twangy country sound of the rest of the album, using electric keyboards and uptempo percussion to create a retro synthy energy. The upbeat sound belies the sadness in the lyrics; Poole describes a recurring dream in which he encounters all his departed loved ones–grandfathers, friends–in the stands of a gymnasium, asking him, “can’t you turn back time… so we can roll the ol’ dice again / oh, the house always wins.” This record is one of the most stirring and tender documents of grief and one of the year’s best releases so far.

Elizabeth – @OneFeIISwoop


Lonnie Holley - Oh Me Oh My

Jagjaguwar

I originally planned to write about my continuing admiration for Xiu Xiu’s haunting album Ignore Grief, but I found myself compelled to shine a light on Lonnie Holley’s powerful and poignant Oh Me Oh My instead. I was not familiar with Holley prior to this album and only checked this album out due to the folk art album artwork catching my eye. The second he began singing on the opening track, “Testing,” I knew I had stumbled upon something truly special. Holley’s voice sent chills through my body. He has the voice of a man who has lived through some of the heaviest hardships life can offer and shares his experiences through a voice, and lyrics, that bares it all with a certainty and understanding that can only come from being in the pits and living to grow another day. This album features the likes of Michael Stipe, Moor Mother, Sharon Van Etten, Jeff Parker, and Bon Iver, and not once do they outshine Holley’s mesmerizing performance and deeply moving prose. Oh Me Oh My deserves your time and attention. What Holley and co. have crafted is an important work that speaks to our current times by reflecting and grappling with a painful past that, in many ways, persists today. This is a triumphant work that is sure to be revered as time goes on and more discover it.

Christian Perez – @mildblasphemy


Nick Webber – All The Nothing I Know

Self-released

Henri Nouwen once said something like, “if you try to write for a wide audience, no one pays attention. But if you try to write with one person in mind, a friend who needs to hear one truth, the rest of the world leans in to listen.” 

Nick Webber, on his new LP All The Nothing I Know, tells a very specific and niche story - his own pain and confusion of growing up in and growing out of a particular kind of rural religious fundamentalism. But in making a record only he could make, he ends up writing some of the most beautiful, moving (and accessible) indie folk I’ve ever heard. Standout tracks are the existential bops “Night Terror” and “Parabola” as well as the very earnest and sweet “I Tried To Warn You.” If you grew up religious, you’ll find a ton of Easter eggs to pick up (pun intended), but even if you’ve never set foot in a church, there’s a lot to love here.

Ben Sooy – @bensooy


Plain Speak – Calamity

Self-released

My partner judges me for watching guitar pedal videos on YouTube. I (mostly) never buy them, but watching them is a lovely comedown from the stress of everyday life. Last year, as she herself decompressed by watching the beautiful, heartbreaking Call the Midwife, I discovered the Calamity Drive, an extremely versatile pedal with a second footswitch labeled “GOOSE,” which does just that. I took advantage of a sale on the Calamity Drive over the long Thanksgiving holiday after seeing that one of Plain Speak’s guitarists, Dan Pechacek of Old Blood Noise Endeavors, had a hand in its design. After listening to their first album, Foundations, I fell in love with the band. They made me feel the best parts of nostalgia, listening to early and mid-2000s indie and emo albums while feeling vaguely heartbroken about something I can’t place now and couldn’t discern then. After wearing that album out, I wanted more Plain Speak but was nervous, given that Foundations came out almost a decade ago. Shortly thereafter, the band serendipitously announced Calamity. 

Plain Speak’s latest album again evokes mid-2000s alternative, indie, and emo rock (think a heavier Death Cab for Cutie or a more agnostic Manchester Orchestra), but with more angular guitar lines (“Better”) and somehow nerdier and more universal-yet-specific lyrics (“Career Day”). Knowing the care and passion that goes into designing and assembling the Calamity Drive, it’s unsurprising how precise, crisp, and clean Calamity sounds. I thought the way Calamity makes me feel, though, used to be irreplaceable. Instead, the album made me fall in love again with the meaningful music from my years of formative development. Despite coming out on March 10, Last.fm already reports that they are my top artist this year. I know it’s early, but I don’t see that changing. 

Joe Wasserman – @a_cuppajoe


saturdays at your place – always cloudy

No Sleep Records

saturdays at your place seemingly came out of nowhere in late 2022, announcing their signing to No Sleep Records alongside their sophomore release, always cloudy. Lead single “tarot cards” had listeners hooked instantly with, in true Midwest emo style, catchy lyrics about being awkward at parties. While topics like these make for tired tropes, especially in this particular vein of emo, the band does an excellent job at taking familiar sounds and making them their own. Every track on the release has a ton to offer both musically and lyrically, however, I can’t help myself from coming back to track six, “eat me alive.” Conjuring aspects of acts like Remo Drive and Hot Mulligan in their songwriting/vocal melodies, always cloudy offers more and more on every listen. s@yp is here to stay.

Brandon Cortez – @numetalrev


Stress Fractures – Stress Fractures

Acrobat Unstable and Old Press Records

“Stress Fractures” by the band Stress Fractures off the album Stress Fractures was my first real obsession of 2023. The titular lead single was released back in December and quickly instituted itself as a daily listen. Whenever I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to listen to? Stress Fractures. Whenever I wanted to find a song or two to queue up in between albums? Stress Fractures. Whenever I wanted some high-energy emo shit? Well, you get the idea. Then I heard an advance of the album, and it cast me under the same spell. I couldn’t help but gush about the record in a review, but here’s the short version. 

Stress Fractures is the brainchild of Martin Hacker-Mullen. You might recognize that name as one of the people behind Acrobat Unstable Records, playing bass in Clearbody, or half-a-dozen other ventures from across the Carolina DIY space. Stress Fractures, however, is Marty’s baby where they compose every note and exercise complete creative control. The record features Caden Clinton of Pool Kids on drums, a guest spot from Tyler Stodghill of Stars Hollow, and a guitar solo from Eric Smeal of Clearbody, but other than those contributions, this is entirely Marty’s record. The album itself is something of a “greatest hits” featuring re-recorded versions of songs from earlier EPs, splits, and demos dating all the way back to 2015. There’s some new stuff sprinkled in throughout there too, but this results in a strong showing where lots of these songs have been stress tested from years of performances and basement gigs. The whole thing clocks in at a blazing fast 25 minutes, making for an emo album that’s fun, bouncy, and breathless but also has some genuinely poetic things to say about evergreen topics of love, life, friends, connection, and self-betterment. 

Taylor Grimes – @GeorgeTaylorG


U2 – Songs Of Surrender

Island

In my short time at SITS, I’ve deep-dived on KISS, compared Andy Shauf to Burt Bacharach, and complained about pop artists trying to co-opt punk music. So I understand that me picking U2’s forty-track acoustic album for the best of Q1 might make it seem like I’m some Rolling Stone industry plant. Fear not, unless they let me run their list department, I’ll never be close. But I do want to make a case for how wonderful this release is. It’s not a cash grab, and it’s not U2 running out of ideas. It’s the companion piece to Bono’s tremendous memoir Surrender from last year. The book was 40 stories from his life interwoven with 40 songs from his band’s catalog. Songs Of Surrender is the soundtrack, although some songs have been taken out or added from the book’s picks. The stripped-down re-imaginings of classics like “Vertigo” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” prove that U2 is just as iconic as a pub band as they are stadium titans. Bono sings with passion, and the emotion can be felt through the speakers on ballads like “With Or Without You” and “One.” It’s a treat for diehards but likely intimidating for casual or even non-fans. I’d recommend just giving the songs you know a shot; perhaps these new arrangements will show you something you haven’t seen in the band before. If you’re looking for something not so corporate, the two new Ulthar albums for 20 Buck Spin, Anthronomicon and Helionomicon, are progressive-blackened-death-metal insanity and sound nothing like U2.

Logan Arcter Mounts – @VERTICALCOFFIN


100 gecs – 10,000 gecs

Dog Show/Atlantic

10,000 Gecs is the sonic equivalent of those strange TikToks I keep getting where the top half of the screen is Fidel Castro giving a political speech and the bottom half is someone playing Subway Surfers or making slime or some other weird sensory stimulation shit along those lines. There’s a lot going on in this album (and all of it within the running time of a sitcom episode), but all of it is in service of something that we could all get behind: having a good time living through the absurdity of our increasingly digital lives. I can’t really say if there’s any depth here lyrically, but who cares about depth when you have a hard-ass nu-metal riff or a ska-esque song about a frog on the floor doing a… keg stand? Did they sample the frog, or did he record his croaks live in the studio? 10,000 Gecs isn’t even remotely interested in answers- or questions, really- but damn, how could you not bob your head to everything on this record? It’s equal parts ridiculous and sincere; a heartfelt microwaved TV dinner that your best friend nuked for you in their barely functional microwave after a night out at the arcade. 10,000 gecs reminds us that the world is as gorgeous as a train wreck in slow motion, so we might as well have some fun art to soundtrack our impromptu exit through the windshield. 

Nickolas – @DJQuicknut

Hater's Delight – March 2023

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We’ve reached the end of March. Or, as I (a guy with a music blog) like to call it, “the end of Q1.” *pushes glasses up nose* That means this month, we’ve been treated to clumsy attempts at “important” albums from big-name indie acts, tasteless tour announcements from talentless hacks, and desperate swings from pop stars for an early bid at the “song of the summer.” In short, there has been no shortage of things to hate, but hey, at least the year is a quarter over, right?

If you’re joining us for the first time, Hater’s Delight is a micro-review column brought to you by our team of Swim Into The Sound writers and a guest or two. This is a space where we can vent about the things online and in music that have gotten under our skin this past month. Each writer gets a paragraph or two to bitch about their chosen topic, then once we expel the Haterade from our systems, we all go back to loving music and enjoying art. Speaking of which, if you’re more in the mood for some positivity, here’s a playlist of all this month’s new releases that I enjoyed (or at least found notable) to help you keep up on everything that’s happened in March. 

Now, let’s drive a stake into the heart of March with another edition of Hater’s Delight.

“Mother” by Meghan Trainor 

I was reluctant to write about Meghan Trainor’s new song since it’s the easiest possible target, and everyone on my timeline has already torn it to shreds, but I can’t get it off my mind. With every second I listened, I kept thinking, “This can’t possibly get any worse,” and then, somehow, it would. Meghan’s really hit all her bases with this one: a clumsy and utterly sexless attempt at 2010s-era horny girlboss pop, TJ Maxx spring sale commercial production, the word “mansplaining” sung in a white lady riff, vague gesturing towards a possible Oedipal complex, a Mr. Sandman interpolation straight out of the Leah Kate school of songwriting, “You Need To Calm Down”-levels of shameless LGBTQ pandering (though I guess Meghan didn’t have the budget to hire RuPaul or Ellen Degeneres or anyone else from the Middle America-approved list of people who come up when you Google “gay celebrities,” so she had to settle for having two random twinks pop up in the background at the end of every line like Oompa Loompas). 

“Mother” is a once-in-a-lifetime dud, a perfect storm of horribleness that’s frankly impressive. It’s not easy to make a good pop song, but it’s also not easy to make a pop song that sucks this bad. It’s almost inspiring to see someone flop so spectacularly, I kinda gotta hand it to her. 

Grace Robins-Somerville – @grace_roso


Donn’t Namee Youur Bannd Liike Thiss

As a longtime metalhead, I’m used to the best bands of the genre forgoing conventional spelling. Kreator, Megadeth, Mötley Crüe, the list goes on. Even going back to two of the biggest bands of all time, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, improper spelling in rock’n’roll is canon at this point. But there’s a new trend I’m seeing more and more lately that I just don’t understand: adding extras of the same letter where one is not needed. Caamp, Miirrors, Siiickbrain, Slayyyter. I thought we were past this with Miike Snow and Wavves. Run For Cover Records has TWO current signees in this vein, Lannds and Runnner (seriously, how many N’s does this label need?). Both are relatively inoffensive bands musically but frustrating to Google or to recommend. All these bands have to live with their word-of-mouth promotion having a qualifier, “but with (x amount of letters) instead of the usual amount.” Seems counterproductive. While we’re at it, no more family band names (I’m looking at you, Great Grandpa and Grandson).

Logan Archer Mounts – @VERTICALCOFFIN


LEAVE PINKPANTHERESS ALONE

I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m old. I’m turning 30 this year, and PinkPantheress as an entity has only entered my life recently with the inescapable Ice Spice-assisted “Boys a liar Pt. 2” From what I understand, she’s a buzzy bedroom pop artist who blew up on TikTok thanks to her image, occasionally catchy tunes, and reverence for late-90s and early 2000s aesthetics. A few weeks ago, a tweet showcasing a particularly unenthusiastic PinkPantheress performance went viral. First off, she was (allegedly) paid just $250 for the concert. That’s issue number one, fuck SXSW, how little they pay artists, how they let the literal feds into attendance, and their lack of oversight allows creeps to run wild. But I’d like to talk specifically about people criticizing PinkPantheress for a litany of petty grievances. “She had her purse on her during the performance!” Gimmie a break. “She used a backing track!” So does every other pop star. Most egregious was the criticism that “she’s giving us nothing,” to which I say go back and watch that video… the CROWD was giving her nothing. She’s performing a song with nearly 300 million streams on Spotify, and I don’t see a single person moving. How’s an artist expected to give a decent performance when every single attendee in the audience is motionless, staring at their phone, trying to capture the moment for their own social media account? This is neither a defense of PinkPantheress nor a condemnation of SXSW; this is saying if me saying if you are a shitty crowd, you can’t give the artist too much shit for doing the bare minimum. Dance, bob your head, and move around. Be better. 

Taylor Grimes – @GeorgeTaylorG


Missed Opportunities - U2’s Songs of Surrender

U2 are a pillar of my musical identity. They were the first concert I went to. All That You Can’t Leave Behind was one of the first CDs I remember buying. Hell, I even took a class about them during my freshman year of college. I haven’t liked much of their output since No Line on the Horizon (it’s a good album, fight me), but I was intrigued when I heard they were releasing Songs of Surrender, a compilation of reinterpretations from their catalog. I thought it had the potential to have a ceiling of being really cool and a floor of being interesting. I was wrong. Songs of Surrender is neither of these things. Songs of Surrender is deeply boring. All forty songs are relatively stripped down, presented as Tiny-Desk-core singalongs. For some of the tracks, this would be a natural reimagination; think “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” and “Stay (Faraway, So Close!),” but when each song is in this style, it loses effect rapidly. Bono also does that thing he does in concert, where he adds new lyrics that (to him) might seem profound but mostly come off as wincingly embarrassing. I’m not sure if I’m disappointed in Bono and the boys or if I’m disappointed in myself for getting my hopes up. If you need me, I’ll be listening to my Zooropa CD in my car.

Connor Fitzpatrick – @cultofcondor


It’s A “Good Time” To End This Whole Indie Sleaze Revival Thing

I wasn’t always so against this attempted revival of the manufactured indie sleaze movement. Crystal Castles were one of the first “indie” acts I ever got into, and I love plenty of music from LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Interpol, bands/artists from the early 2000s NY scene that have largely inspired where we’re currently at. But upon hearing The Dare’s “Girls” too many times at cramped bars and venue PA systems, I had enough of this fucking guy. His smug aura mocked me. But now it looks like the major labels are placing their bets on this indie sleaze revival, with The Dare being their top prospect with his signing to UMG and the release of his follow-up single “Good Time,” which is actually, in fact, a bad time! While the lyrical content of “Girls” was groan-worthy, at least there was a solid tune behind it. But “Good Time” is uninspired, as it so clearly tries to bite from Peaches’ “Fuck The Pain Away” but squeezes every bit of charm that song has. It could be worse though, as we’ll see if the industry tries to make Blaketheman1000 happen for real. Now that’s a truly untalented hack!

Matty Monroe – @MonrovianPrince


Using the Merch Table When the Band Isn’t There

More and more music workers are taking the opportunity to advocate for ourselves at gigs; we’re meeting the moment with reasonable requests, some relational, some systematic, all hand-in-hand with an appreciation of connecting in our shared meatspace again after years of the virtual. Here’s my lil’ addition, a pet peeve, to the choir, typed out between stops on my first post-lockdown run of shows: Please wait until I get back to the merch table before you buy my merch.

I really, really, love that you want to directly support me and bring home a token of a night we shared. It’s a small miracle! However, finding a few dollars underneath the sign that says, “Please wait until Andy’s back for merch!” or getting an unexpected Venmo notification while loading out, only to come back and find a shirt missing, rubs me the wrong way. At its most forgiving, it’s an “Oh, sorry, I wanted to grab a button, and you weren’t there” kinda deal. At its most cynical, it can become a slight, cold reminder of our transactional relationship.

Even barring the fact that I’m more conscious than ever of how touring finances move, it’s preventing an invaluable conversation that has become rarer in these pandemic times: a minute or two where you and I, across a [always… sticky??] table filled with stickers and Sharpie-written, “pay what you can” dollar amounts, get to push air – sure, from behind an N95 or two – and shape it into the form of “Thank you for stopping by!!!”

In other words, in-person networking. Just kidding. Haha ha.

Please… don’t fall into the trappings of an anonymous consumer. Let me know you’re here with me, and I’ll do the same for you. Or, at the very least, give me a heads-up before you grab a size large, black tee.

Andy Waldron – @ndyjwaldron

I Want to Believe: A Retrospective on Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher

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Dead Oceans

I live in the “downtown” area of my sleepy slice of suburbia- it’s not as busy as a metropolitan Red Light District, but it’s way more active compared to the rest of the city. The weekend nights are usually colored with crowds of people hitting the array of bars and hookah lounges down the avenue, with the rhythmic pulse of reggaeton coating the neighborhood air until the sleepy hours of the early morning. After the clubs and bars have closed and ushered the last of the guests out to the street, I can hear snippets of drunk conversations, of friends laughing about whatever happened hours ago, yelling to pose for a quick Insta story, stumbling back to their cars through the otherwise quiet neighborhood that surrounds the once-busy strip.

Of course, this setting changed dramatically at the onset of the pandemic. The first quarter of 2020 was a bloated corpse of fear, uncertainty, and isolation, wrought with waves of misinformation and hate being spoon-fed to us through opaque algorithms that keep the social-media machine turning. The bar-going crowds had disappeared into the ether, the reggaeton drums replaced with the silence of a city stuck at home. The only conversations I heard came through my gaming headset, as my entire social life was absorbed into cyberspace via Discord and webcams- a ghost of a social life that had so suddenly been eviscerated. 

This isolated world, under these bleak conditions, is where Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher found me. The first time I heard these songs was when I tuned into a Pitchfork YouTube livestream that Phoebe performed from her home in early 2020. I had never heard any of her work prior, but having been laid off from both of my jobs and being unable to leave my house, I decided to stick around for her performance. I was instantly captivated by her gentle fingerpicking, her silvery vocals, her devastating lyrics- it felt like she was addressing me specifically, an intimate performance between us two, despite the “NOW WATCHING” number creeping into the thousands. As soon as the performance ended, I opened up a new Chrome tab and looked for her music. Unfortunately, it would be a few months yet before Punisher would be released in its entirety. 

The studio versions of the songs on Punisher are, understandably, a far cry from the solitary duet between Phoebe and her acoustic guitar that I watched near the start of the year. Phoebe’s beautiful, gentle fingerpicking is present throughout the record, but it frequently brushes up against more experimental and digital production. Take the lovely “Garden Song”- a wandering melody, played at the volume of a whisper on a guitar that almost sounds like it’s deteriorating at the frets, is blended with a pulsating electronic noise that seems to reluctantly hold the rhythm in lieu of a traditional drum beat. On “Punisher,” Phoebe’s voice is multi-tracked with harmonies of her own voice that are so digitally artifacted that it makes her dreams of meeting Elliot Smith all the more devastating. Elsewhere, Phoebe expertly adds and subtracts pieces from her arrangements and brings them back in for an emotional eruption. “Moon Song” is marked by one of these masterful depravations, as Phoebe is joined by explosive percussion and strings as she wrestles with her lack of faith in the supernatural- religious or otherwise.

If the music alone isn’t enough for you to fully fall under Punisher’s spell, then the lyrics might just be the final ingredient needed. Phoebe is one hell of a writer, equal parts humorous, candid, and insightful. The lyrics found within Punisher are dreamlike, coating the ordinary in a thin coat of the surreal. “Wake up and start a big fire / In our one-room apartment,” she writes in “Savior Complex,” capturing the volatility of a relationship plagued by petty arguments in an impressionistic metaphor. “So we spent what was left of our serotonin / To chew on our cheeks and stare at the moon,” goes another line in the boygenius collab “Graceland Too,” turning our brain’s happy chemical into a finite currency that can be exchanged for fleeting moments of contentment (or perhaps it’s a slight nod to using MDMA?). Phoebe’s characteristic conversational delivery drives home how well-written these songs are, yet they feel like a cafe catch-up with a friend telling you about an exceptionally futile week. 

In fact, it’s difficult to escape the futility that forms the emotional undercurrent flowing underneath Punisher. But Phoebe is too great a writer to boil the futility of life into a one-dimensional pity party. As much of social media will tell you, there is much sadness to be found in this record. And yet, the vivid details Phoebe paints in her songs make you think that these small, painful moments are what make it all worth it in the end. Or, at least, that the constant pursuit of connection, whether romantic, familial, or platonic, is something that unites every single one of us. The world is devastating, cold, and cruel- but there are others here, and while they can sometimes be responsible for the strife we scrape against, they can also help us find our place in the world even when it feels like they are breaking it apart. 

Punisher ends with the apocalyptic “I Know the End,” a song dressed with colorful imagery of the world ending. The song ends with a cacophonous choir of cathartic screaming from Phoebe and others as the music crescendos in a wall of noise, making a significant departure from the quiet verses earlier. At the end of the song, we hear Phoebe exhaling at an exhausted rasp, almost as if she has given every fiber of her being to us throughout the record. Or, maybe, she is imitating the roar of a crowd after an emotional performance, an experience none of us would have until years after the release of Punisher. Perhaps even more brilliantly: a melody reminiscent, if not identical, to the one found on opener “DVD Menu” is heard before the exhausted silence is earned. A narrative circle has been created, a mirror that bluntly reflects our world right back at us. We find ourselves right back where we started. We’re ready to make the same mistakes- and live- all over again.

Nickolas is an artist based in Southern California. Described by a beloved elementary teacher as an “absolute pleasure to have in class,” his work wrestles with the conflict between privacy and self-expression in the digital age. You can find him shitposting on Twitter @DjQuicknut and on Instagram @sopranos_on_dvd_ 

M83 – Fantasy | Album Review

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The ‘Midnight City’ Band is, unfortunately, not a forgotten funk group from the ‘70s. This shorthand actually refers to the French electronic group M83, who formed almost 25 years ago. Their 2011 breakout album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming spawned the “indietronica” mega-smash “Midnight City,” which finds itself in playlists alongside other anthems of the same ilk. See “Walking On A Dream” by Empire Of The Sun or “Little Secrets” by Passion Pit.

M83 garnered much blogosphere praise in the years leading up to Hurry Up becoming a modest household sensation. Pitchfork awarded their coveted Best New Music distinction to their sophomore LP Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003, with a 9.2/10 rating. 2008’s Saturdays = Youth was revisited by Stereogum in its 10th anniversary year, calling it “lush, overwhelming synthpop… more complicated than the handful of new wave and dream-pop giants everyone compared it to.”

So, the band had their longtime celebrators, and by 2011 they had amassed tons of new listeners. The long-awaited Junk appeared five years later in 2016, which writer Ryan Leas calls in that same Stereogum piece “zonked-out.” Between the album cover and title, I’ll take his word for it. And aside from 2019’s DSVII – M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez’s second installment of video game-inspired ambient music – the band hasn’t released a proper album in seven years. Fantasy scratches the itch instantly.

M83 approaches the idea of “fantasy” from beautiful and strange vantage points, both in the music and the imagery. Gonzalez explained further on Twitter, “I want to keep having fantasies about worlds that I don’t know and creatures I don’t understand, and that’s the story behind this record.”  The album cover spotlights a strange alien figure and juxtaposes it with shiny neon lettering, giving an unsure first impression of exactly what type of fantasy the listener is about to be taken on. The serene introduction of “Water Deep” leading into the first single, “Ocean Niagara,” is a prog-rock adjacent couplet that suggests a more positive trajectory out of the gate. An odd choice for a first taste, as “Beyond adventure!” is the only lyric sung across its four-and-a-half minutes of steady electronic bliss. If patient fans weren’t satiated by that first track, maybe they were when M83 released the entire first “chapter” of the album, six songs altogether, to stream on February 9th.

Fantasy has quite a few moments of songs blending into each other, enhancing the seamless feeling of a fantastical trip throughout the listening experience. Tracks three and four, “Amnesia” and “Us And The Rest,” are M83 doing what they do best, an emotive mix of dream pop and dance music, making an instantly comfortable listen. “Amnesia” is sung from a fantasy skeptic’s perspective. “I believe in the darkness, it’s just a sound. I’m in love with some sadness, it’s just a sound.” Later, on “Earth To Sea,” Gonzalez takes a more Seussian lyrical approach: “Where will you go? Just say it, you can let go.”

Chapter Two opens with “Deceiver,” a groovy, sparkly disco-tinged number that sounds like it could have been a b-side to the Daft Punk & Panda Bear collab “Doin’ It Right” from Random Access Memories. While I dig this song, I believe it serves better as an ending to the first chapter as opposed to the start of a new one. Especially with Fantasy’s title track up next, serving as a statement of intent just as “Oceans Niagara” did at the start. Tracklist placement aside, this song is an absolute dancefloor smoker. “Shout it! Fantasy! Into a fantasy, into a wasteland, living in a fantasy,” Gonzalez refrains throughout. It’s an outstanding centerpiece of the album’s core themes.

“Laura” is a very pretty ballad that has one of the many mentions of traveling with another soul in this fantasy universe. “Take us on a ride, I’ll take you on a voyage through the night sky.” In the previous “Deceiver,” this character is a “distance driver;” similarly, “Amnesia” pleads to “Ride with me, slipping through my virtual magnet.” Throughout the album, Gonzalez channels classics like Elton John’s “Rocketman” or David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” through a more millennial lens. It’s lonely out in space, but he finds his companions within the great wide open. One of these companions is “Sunny Boy,” the crown jewel of the album. It’s the punchiest dance number with the strongest and most overt spatial fantasy lyrics. With an almost ABBA-like phrasing, Gonzalez swoons, “Cosmic adrenaline, she’s young and fierce. / Such a radiant queen.” Its reprise towards the album’s end is a welcome callback after the eight-minute, blissed- and blipped-out, almost-all French “Kool Nuit.”

This all leads up to the Fantasy finale, “Dismemberment Bureau,” suggesting the fantasy we might all be living in is one of televised overload. Gonzalez repurposes the legendary Gil-Scott Heron mantra, “Do you miss the day of human revolution? What a good way to learn from the hand of a legend. An illusion on color television.” Musically, I love the synth tones being laid down and think the track’s pacing is a strong compositional wrap-up. But it’s a bit of a ham-fisted topical ending, being the only moment on the album where fantasy and reality interweave. Maybe unexpectedly facing reality was M83’s intention after an hour of electronic sonic escapism.

I love any record that takes you on an otherworldly journey that presents you with things you don’t get in typical radio or supermarket music. On the whole, Fantasy delivers that journey, with the exception of a few curious elements regarding how it’s segmented. However much of the seven-year gap M83 took to put this together, it was clearly worth the wait. Maybe fantasy, reality, and the cosmos are all one and the same. If they are, a band named after a galaxy 15 million light years away certainly has the authority to say so.

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.