Getting into the Lore with Nate Amos from This is Lorelei

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Nate Amos is the multi-talented multi-instrumentalist known for his involvement in Water From Your Eyes and This is Lorelei (projects he refers to as “Water” and “Lorelei”). I have followed his projects for years, with the most recent Water From Your Eyes record, Everyone’s Crushed, topping my personal album of the year list. This is Lorelei is Amos’ solo project, and his transcendent new record, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is out June 14th and deals with themes of loneliness, recovery, and aching longing, adorned with innovative and beautiful music. 

During my first listen of the album, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, innovation, and vulnerability of the music, and felt I had to speak with the person who made it. In anticipation of the record, I spoke with Amos over Zoom about the process of writing and performing this music. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

SWIM INTO THE SOUND: You’ve had a whirlwind year.

Nate Amos: Yeah.

SWIM: Last year, you released one of the year’s most acclaimed records with Everyone’s Crushed. You’ve been touring back to back, dropping new songs from both projects along the way, and you’re set to release yet another best record of the year. How are you feeling?

AMOS: I’m feeling good! It’s funny how with [This Is] Lorelei as a project, everything used to come out immediately as soon as it was done, so this is a pretty weird experience, waiting while it slowly rolls out. I’m used to that with Water From Your Eyes at this point, but not with Lorelei. The first year I finished the album without it coming out, it was something I thought about every day, and now it’s something I keep forgetting is happening.

SWIM: You’ve referred to the This is Lorelei project as a sort of diary, did that play into the creation of this album?

AMOS: Yeah, I mean it’s always kind of been equally diary and song study stuff. I write the lyrics by myself, so it inevitably tends to be a little more personal, but also, as a project, it’s just a lower-pressure arena to try different things out, at least for now. So there’s a little bit of the diary thing, but in the past, Lorelei has been very informal in terms of how I’ve worked on it. And this was all still in my bedroom, with no real plan. I feel like this album has set a higher bar for stuff that would end up on it. Normally an album would be all of the sixteen songs that I was able to make in ten days or something, whereas this album was ten of sixty or seventy songs that I wrote.

SWIM: Really?!

AMOS: Yeah, and some of it should never come out. Some of it has already come out because this was made in May to late July or August of 2022, so anything that came out on the Lorelei Spotify or whatever starting in summer 2022 is actually stuff that was written for and cut from this album.

SWIM: Okay, so “Bring Back My Dog” was originally gonna be on it? That’s one of my favorites. It’s so crazy that you decided to cut that!

AMOS: I mean, it’s more like once all the songs were done, part of it was figuring out what songs I thought were good enough for it, and the other one was figuring out what kind of character the album was trying to be. And the “Bring Back My Dog” song, I just kind of couldn’t–it had kind of a different vibe to it. 

There were two songs on that EP… well, let me think, there were like two days when four songs got made. Two of them ended up on that EP, and two of them ended up on the album. I was also like, “Why shouldn’t this be on the album?” It just didn’t feel right. At one point, the album was like… I had to let go of a lot because it was 32 tracks at one point, and it was so, so long. And I was trying to figure out how to make it work, and at one point, had a voice memo phone recording explaining why the album’s so long and apologizing for it, and I was like, “This is ridiculous, I should just chill out and choose a group of songs that works,” and make an album.

SWIM: So it was a very intentional winnowing down.

AMOS: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SWIM: You’re a multi-instrumentalist, and on this album and for previous EPs you’ve released, you use a lot of instruments that aren’t typically in the rock suite. On this one, I caught string samples, piano, chiptune synths, and I thought I heard a child’s xylophone in there, too. Is that right?

AMOS: Let me think. Okay, so the thing that sounds kind of like a xylophone? That’s a toy piano that goes on throughout the song “Where’s Your Love Now.” So that’s just a phone recording of me playing around on one that I looped. I’m trying to think of chiptune stuff.

SWIM: Maybe it was just sped up.

AMOS: I’m trying to remember. There’s a lot of sampling stuff. Even though the album is way more straightforward than Water From Your Eyes, there’s still kind of a way I put things together. There are a lot of samples, loops, and instruments that I can’t play by myself, like orchestral string instruments and wind instruments.

SWIM: Makes sense. Do you have a favorite instrumental moment on this album that might be hard to catch on the first listen?

AMOS: I got a lot. It’s funny because I’ve listened to this album again recently, and now it feels different. I like the second-to-last song, “Two Legs,” a lot. There’s a song called “My Boy Limbo” that has an almost messed-up-sounding instrumental thing that I like. 

That was kind of one of the challenges with this project because I was trying not to go nuts with cool sounds and Easter eggs; the whole idea was to really hone it in to be more about the song than the production, which I felt [was] something that had gotten–not lost in things I’ve done in the past, but because I enjoy music production and am a nerd, I would end up just thinking about that more than the writing itself. This album was definitely an attempt to A) worry about the content more than the sound, and B) focus on the individual songs rather than the overall concept, and have it be a cohesive album but very much a set of ten individual songs that don’t really rely on each other, but make each other stronger.

SWIM: That makes a lot of sense. I was listening to “Two Legs” again this morning, it’s so, so beautiful, and the lyrics are so vulnerable. It’s a little bit reminiscent of Elliott Smith in terms of the melody and also just the abject sadness. Is it hard being frank about heartache?

AMOS: Yes. But again, with this album, it was funny because there is a lot of earnestness to the lyrical content of the album, but part of the idea–or almost part of the bit, dare I say, was to zone in on these classic singer-songwriter archetypes in a way where the subject can relate to something I feel. But it’s more of like an exercise in writing that particular kind of song because that particular kind of song is this almost a standardized thing that has been attempted by all sorts of people over the evolution of pop music. Maybe it’s a combination of different things too, because it’s got some weird, almost Disney-like lullaby stuff going on. 

So it’s weird sometimes… it feels like a little exposed, but also I feel like maybe even if no one else knows, to me, there’s like a character that I’m playing on this album, so there are elements of me in it, but it also doesn’t feel entirely connected to me. Not that that song–every word in that song is true in one way or another, but something about participating in a tradition that belongs to so many people, you can reframe it in a way that feels a little less personal. I don’t know if that makes sense.

SWIM: Sure, absolutely. It has a core of truth, as Greta Gerwig would say. But the growth is maybe something embellished or imaginary. Speaking of operating in a tradition, the first song, “Angel’s Eye”… a country song. You write a magnificent country song, I was really surprised by that.

AMOS: Oh, thank you.

SWIM: Why did you choose to start the record off with that one?

AMOS: It just kind of made sense. So, that song was later on in the recording process. By the time it was written, there had already been a couple of versions of the album that I had thought were finished, but then I took it apart, and honestly, I really liked that one. It didn’t feel like it would work anywhere other than the beginning, and I didn’t have a first track that I was really attached to at that point. Then I tried it as the opener, and it was kind of like, “Yeah, okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

SWIM: You sing it in two registers, almost as two voices, in two separate worlds.

AMOS: Yeah, it’s a duet.

SWIM: So why did you choose to sing it alone?

AMOS: Because I was alone. 

[laughter]

AMOS: I like the idea… that’s something that shows up in at least two places on this album, where I am playing two different vocalists, essentially. And also I thought it would be funny. That is a very earnest song, and I do like it a lot, but it’s about an alien abducting a cowboy, and the alien and the cowboy falling in love, and then the alien has to drop the cowboy back off, and they’re both kind of like “what the fuck is this?”

SWIM: Wow, I thought it was about a ghost or an angel, actually, so the angel’s eye is a tractor beam?

AMOS: Kind of, essentially. I don’t know, I don’t have all the lore. [laughter] When the song’s actually being sung, the higher-pitched voice is the angel and the lower-pitched one is the cowboy, and the cowboy’s just kinda yelling at the sky.

SWIM: Yeah. Do you think aliens are real?

AMOS: I don’t know if I’m qualified to argue that anything is real. I think that the fact that we’re so sure about what’s going on to ourselves just means there’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand. I don’t know if I believe in aliens, necessarily, but I do believe we have no clue what’s going on.

SWIM: That’s a balanced take, I think.

AMOS: It’s more fun to think that way, I don’t know. I love conspiracy theories and alien content, and I don’t know how seriously I take it. And I don’t know how much it matters; it makes more sense to me than a lot of things people spend their time doing.

SWIM: I think my grandmother saw a UFO in Wisconsin in the ‘60s.

AMOS: Really?

SWIM: I think the government is hiding stuff from us.

AMOS: I’m about it. I’m here for it. I want to know.

SWIM: Same! Back to music…

AMOS: Okay, if we have to.

SWIM: Have you considered forming a country band or a country project?

AMOS: I grew up playing bluegrass music. My father is a bluegrass musician. So that music is very deeply ingrained in me, and I really do love country music, but no, I’ve never thought of starting a country band. There’s never been any long-term, consistent band for Lorelei just because, stylistically, it’s kind of all over the place. So it’s just been easier for me to figure it out show by show. But I’ve been playing with Al [Nardo] and Bailey [Wollowitz], who also play Water From Your Eyes live.

SWIM: The drummer?

AMOS: Yeah, Bailey plays drums, and Al plays bass in Lorelei and guitar in Water.

SWIM: A lot of your songs mention airports and foreign countries, are those taken from your experiences touring? You talked about this album as being from the perspective of a character.

AMOS: I mean yes and no; again, it’s like I was definitely in an airport not long before I wrote one of these songs, and I might not have written it if I hadn’t been in the airport, but I wasn’t like “I gotta write about this airport!” It was more like… going back to using archetypal song elements where you have name-dropping cities, methods of travel, talking about money, stuff like that. All these things have been beaten to death in songwriting to the point where they’re just tools you can use to do anything. And then there’s trying to develop your own little ideas that you treat as normal and use them in the same way, but they’re unique to the album. That’s something that can blur everything into a lyrical texture that I really like. Use stuff people are used to hearing, then aggressively use things they might not have heard, but smash it all together. So it’s like half and half. Sometimes if a place is name-dropped or a vehicle is mentioned, it’s a real thing. And half the time it’s just not.

SWIM: So what is it like being from Water From Your Eyes, which is a band where you don’t sing, and another project where your voice is on pretty much every song? Is that a strange asymmetry to navigate?

AMOS: I mean, it’s strange. I don’t know how difficult it is. They’re both projects that, at this point, I know very well, and I have a sort of particular mindset for each of them. And it’s kind of like playing two different sports. They’re just separate enough that they don’t really get in the way of each other. I definitely, as of now, have clocked more hours just playing guitar in front of people than singing. I don’t really like singing in front of people, but I guess if I’m trying to do this, then I have to. We did a back-to-back tour where it just flipped from one thing to the other halfway through, and it didn’t feel all that weird. It’s a different kind of fun.

SWIM: That’s great, I caught a lyric on “An Extra Beat For You And Me,” the little “water from my eyes” line. Is that a nod to your other project?

AMOS: Yeah.

SWIM: I was also wondering, do you know the “Buffalo Stance” song by Neneh Cherry? 

AMOS: No, I don’t think so.

SWIM: She has a little interlude where she goes “water from my eyes,” and I was like crossover moment!

AMOS: Oh, whoa, I did not know that. That’s cool.

SWIM: Anyways, I was curious why you included the little nod.

AMOS: I don’t know what the initial idea was. I just kind of wrote it, and then I was like, “Is that too silly?” Because it is kind of funny to nod at it, but I realized there’s this recurring theme where once every couple of years, I’ll write a song and just kind of sneak that phrase into it. The last one is a song that Water ended up doing called “When You’re Around.”

SWIM: Yeah! Yeah.

AMOS: Someone originally asked me to write a song for a movie.

SWIM: A karaoke scene, right?

AMOS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That song is the same thing. It doesn’t really mean anything that it’s in there. It just kind of happened that way.

SWIM: Is it crying? Is it sad crying or happy crying?

AMOS: It could be either. In that song, it’s more of an overwhelmed cry throughout it, rather than a sad thing.

SWIM: Yeah. Beautiful. I have another question about country music for you. We’re almost out of time. Growing up in a bluegrass environment where people were playing country music and country-adjacent music constantly… do you have favorite country musicians?

AMOS: Oh, yeah. I mean, in terms of traditional bluegrass, it’s not something I listen to all the time, but there are certain standard things in that genre that blew my mind, like the early stuff like Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and The Stanley Brothers. A lot of what I grew to love later in life was stuff that’s kind of like rock-country hybrid because I viewed those as such separate things, and at a certain point, was kind of like the purist mindset, where there’s like the old-time bluegrass music, and I didn’t like it when that was taken and applied to other things. But I got really into [it]. 

Discovering Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers was an interesting thing at one point because I missed them until later in life. Favorite country musicians… Townes Van Zandt. As I got older, I became more into country as a songwriting style in a way that I didn’t really think about as a kid, where it was more about the music itself rather than as a medium for writing that I might use.

SWIM: Do you think there will be more country music in your future?

AMOS: Probably! I don’t know, I have no idea. I never really know until the album is off and running. And this album certainly didn’t–the intention was not to open with a country song. But it was how I was studying Shane McGowan a lot, and I feel like that bled through pretty obviously in some of the tracks. But I don’t know; it depends on when I have time to make a Lorelei album again and what I’m into at that point.

SWIM: Yeah, it seems like you’ll be pretty busy for the foreseeable future.

AMOS: Yeah, I mean, ideally, I’d like to get on a schedule where I’m alternating and have some sort of album coming out every year alternating between projects. But we’ll see if that happens. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. [laughter] Probably more country songs, yeah. Not exclusively country songs.

SWIM: Well, I’m excited to see more country songs and non-country songs. Thank you again for taking the time.

AMOS: No problem, thank you for having me.

SWIM: Good luck with the rest of your tour and album rollout. I think it’s going to be historic.

AMOS: Thank you. I’m glad you like it.

Elizabeth is a writer and researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice—and makes electronic music in her spare time. She is from Northern Nevada.

Capstan – The Mosaic | Album Review

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Fearless Records

I was quiet growing up… Like, really quiet. It was a regular occurrence for people who didn’t know me to ask if I talked at all, to which I would nod, barely managing a “yeah.” I clung to the wall in social settings, and even among my friends, I was always the shyest of the group. College did a lot to bring me out of my shell, although I’m still very reserved. (I can talk to people now, I swear.) Because of my personality, it’s frequently a surprise to others when they find out I love heavy music. To me, though, it makes perfect sense - this music does the talking for me. 

Capstan is one such band that speaks for me. Their songs fuse emotional lyrics with crushingly heavy breakdowns and moments of devastating beauty. My favorite song of theirs, “Wax Poetic,” is an excellent example of this. One of just five tracks on Capstan’s brilliant 2016 EP Cultural Divide, this song brings the eternal grief inside me to the surface, perfectly captured by the incredibly intense entrance of the band as vocalist Anthony DeMario screams, “I woke up today / And figured I’d burn everything / That made me think of you / And the saddest part is / I was left with nothing by the time that I was through.” Catharsis washes over me like water, freeing the feelings I am ever challenged to express. The song wraps up with a beautifully meandering guitar solo, ending in a wash of bittersweet harmonies. 

Subsequent releases by the band have been just as fraught with emotion: on Capstan’s 2018 album In the Wake of Our Discord, the closing track “Denouement” is an honest examination of existence. Djent chords and intricate, interlocking riffs are the driving force behind screamed vocals until the song seems to end - and then a piano joins the ensemble, adding a sense of softness to the recapitulation. “I will not bow down to this out-of-touch reality / We live lifeless lives / Glorify your mortality / Hold on to every moment / When you’re overwhelmed and brought to tears / So out of touch and hardened / Why is it we can’t grasp these years? / Not the lost hope or sadness / But the burdens we’ve conquered in times of madness.” This song is full of achingly beautiful moments, and their juxtaposition against brittle and dissonant elements makes them even more impactful. 

With their release of The Mosaic, Capstan has continued to build on their incredible discography of heavy-hitting songs and heart-shattering lyricism. The band has been teasing what’s in store with the release of a whopping seven singles over the course of 2023 and 2024. As the title suggests, this album is a scintillating collection of colorful tracks that, up close, seem individual. However, when you take a step back, the songs all melt into a beautiful picture. 

According to the band, the music on their latest record draws heavily from their personal experiences in the last couple of years, such as new parenthood and battles with health issues. This insight into The Mosaic makes it even more compelling as these experiences are intensely human and relatable. It’s refreshing - comforting, even - to hear Capstan share their personal battles with us.

As you would expect from any Capstan record, the majority of the songs are full of weirdly fun metalcore riffs and skull-crushing breakdowns. “Undertow,” which features Finnish noise rock band Throat (yeah, I had to look them up too), perfectly balances a bright, bouncy chorus with a breakdown that features satisfyingly growled screams. “Bȇte Noire” is equally intriguing, with pinch harmonics, a bass line that I can only describe as spooky, and fry screams that sit just under the surface of the mix, haunting the song throughout. The breakdown is brutal, growing heavier and heavier until it cuts off abruptly and a swell of strings pushes the song to a close. And, of course, what would this song be without a blegh thrown in at the end? Something I enjoy about Capstan is that they consistently incorporate moments of softness into their music - the sudden contrast of the change in instrumentation or mood makes the heavy moments that much more impactful. This stylistic choice brings the metaphor of the mosaic up again - the album would lack form without the difference between the light and dark moments, as any piece of art would.

The Mosaic isn’t all brutality, though: tracks like “Arrows,” featuring UK punk rockers Trash Boat, is a song that feels like it bridges both metalcore and pop-punk. It’s a little more wistful and restrained, building to an expansive chorus that shouts, “You showed me things I never thought I'd see / 'Cause I believed there wasn't hope for me / Abandoned love but then your love discovered me.” A beautiful interlude called “Compendium” follows “Arrows” - it’s a warm, gorgeous arrangement of synth strings and orchestral percussion that made my classical-music-loving heart soar. The piece builds into a fever pitch that leads directly into “Bȇte Noire” (again, intense contrast!). Capstan does a great job making this interlude fit into the album by incorporating the same synth strings throughout the other songs.

While this record is a stack of fantastic songs, The Mosaic is punctuated by three key ones: “I. Revolve,” “II. Revise,” and “III. The Mosaic.” The album is split into halves by “Revise” and bookended with “Revolve” and “The Mosaic.” The songs are linked - all three share melodies and build on each other lyrically, weaving a story through the course of the album. (It’s worth noting here that “Compendium” also features this melody.) “Revolve” and “Revise” are introspective, respectively asking, “Is all the sadness that I’ve ever felt / From expectation that I set for myself?” and “Is all this sadness that I’ve ever held / Merely fallout from a world so bereft?” These pensive lyrics are fittingly answered in “The Mosaic:” “Take all the sadness, still never quelled / Dissect the misery, let it meld / With all the traumas past, slow burn them to green glass / Abstract the contrast.” The concept of the album takes shape as the lyrics continue:

Under a lens you may see blood and bone
You’ll see the sorrow blur the edge of the whole
But if you step back slowly, widening your focus
In broken glass you’ll catch a glow
How does anything evolve before it decays?
How do you find the light when you sleep through the days?
How do you pull yourself together when fractured in so many ways?
It starts with learning to love
It starts when death turns to growth
It starts with holding on to life and never letting it go
We’re painted with joy, sculpted by grief
And tragedy can just be a path leading, weaving into beauty unseen.

The metaphor of life as a mosaic - of every experience, every pain, every joy melding into a bigger and more beautiful picture - is captured so incredibly throughout this album, and this final track pulls it all together perfectly. “The Mosaic” resonated with me, especially as I am a survivor of adverse childhood experiences and have been in therapy for the past year or so to address my past. As I heal and grow, the concept of being “painted with joy” and “sculpted with grief” have been life-giving: my experiences do not define me, yet they have made me into the person I am today. The pain and challenges I have faced have made me resilient, and healing has allowed me to see the experiences of my thirty-ish years as a mosaic indeed. The dark bits and pieces give form; without them, the light shards would not shine so brightly. 

Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @brittajoes.

Blab School – Blab School | Album Review

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Fort Lowell Records

When you grow up in the orbit of an older brother, especially an older brother who could be considered “cool,” there is a sort of unapproachable quality to the bands he listens to… Or at least I think that’s how it is; I don't actually have any older siblings, cool or otherwise.

This is a long walk, but go with me.

I was twelve years old in the year 2000, so all the cool older brothers in my orbit were into bands like AFI, Deftones, Green Day, Bad Religion, Nirvana, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, etc., etc. Being one step removed from these bands may have actually made them seem even more unapproachable and cooler to me. There was something about the scorching disaffection and pseudo-masculine rage of this era of music that I found dangerously alluring at the time. It felt like I was getting into these bands at my own risk, which was part of the appeal.

Blab School’s self-titled debut album reminds me of this era of rock music, not necessarily in tone and sound, but in pure, intimidating coolness.

So, how does one talk about a band whose defining characteristic is that they sound cool? They say comparison is the thief of joy, but this is a band that wears its influences on its sleeve. In addition to my projecting the likes of Deftones, AFI, and Tool onto Blab School, it’s easy to hear the bands they’ve been openly inspired by. In their bio on the Fort Lowell Records website, they namecheck the Wipers, Talking Heads, Joy Division, and Killing Joke as their sonic and philosophical progenitors. More contemporaneously, it wouldn’t be out of the question to see them sharing a bill with bands like Flasher or Protomartyr. This is a record that is steeped in nostalgia, but you’re going to have to adjust your idea of whose past lives we are talking about when we use the word “nostalgia,” this isn’t The Strokes or The Black Keys.

Blab School doesn’t have a narrative arc; that’s not the kind of band they are. In fact, the record is a pretty lean affair, clocking in at just over in just over twenty minutes. Blab School is not trying to tell a story with this record, but that is not to say that they aren’t trying to convey a feeling, and that feeling is chilly disaffection. This fire-and-ice combination of unattainable coolness and simmering rage puts them in a lineage with every band they have likened to by both me and the band themselves. It’s also a proven method for creating compelling music.

This can be heard from the jump with the first two tracks: “Small Simple Ways” and "Scrolls." The former sounds like it would fit beautifully alongside The Smashing Pumpkins on the Batman & Robin soundtrack, and I mean that in the best way possible. The latter is a particular favorite of the band, as it is the first song they wrote post-lockdown, which seems appropriate for a song about doomscrolling (“can’t seem to stop, I’m clicking on buttons, just staring at nothing, back to the top… scroll down, scroll down”). This feeling of dissatisfaction with modern society is on display throughout the record, from “Quit Yr Job” (particularly poignant to me as I write this article while on the clock at a job I’m getting laid off from at the end of the month), to “Never Enough” (we all hate capitalism in this house), to the closing track, “(Don’t Forget to) Give Up” (try the refreshing taste of nihilism today).

But one of the most fascinating tracks on the record is “I Hate the Summer.” On this penultimate track, the band sings, “I hate the summer, I pray for rain. I hate the sunlight, mimosas, and champagne. I hate the beach and all the sand it brings. I hate the blue skies; I hate most hot-weather things.” They’ve got that summertime sadness! Now I’m from Ohio and Blab School is from North Carolina, so we experience very different summers, but I have always found folks that detest the sun and revelry of summertime a little… dorky? But you see, that’s what makes this song so important! In the context of the record, it might be the most important song of all. I’ve gone on and on about how impenetrably cool this band is for this entire article, and we get to the second-to-last song on the album, and it’s just someone whinging about how they’re too hot? It’s brilliant! It makes them human! It invites other dorky folks who get cranky when the weather gets above 72° to be like, “Yeah! They get it!” before bringing it back around to the realm of the unfathomable and the unflappable to wrap things up with “(Don’t Forget to) Give Up.”

Ultimately, there’s something to be said here about the anachronistic idea of “coolness.” What does it even mean to be “cool” in 2024 when the internet has rendered each and every one of us “cringe”? That may be overstating it, but at the very least, social media has revealed that most of us are relatively ordinary in our day-to-day lives... or maybe it’s just leveled the playing field. You can see pictures of Blab School all together as a band on their Instagram, and they look very normal despite the fact that they have made a profoundly cool record. They just look like me and my friends, and I appreciate them more for it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you can see that as a testament to everyone’s humanity. Just as your friends’ cool older brothers eventually become regular accountants, bitcoin miners, and managers at Chipotle, cool rock musicians are regular people, too. The coolness is part of the performance.

Brad Walker is a writer, comedian, and storyteller from Columbus, Ohio. Find him on the World Wide Web: @bradurdaynightlive on Instagram and @bradurdaynightlive.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Peter Bibby – Drama King | Album Review

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Spinning Top Records

I’m no stranger to drunken chaos. There’s the time in my sophomore year of college when I blacked out at a sorority pregame and was “asked” to please go home. Or junior year when my roommate took me to her date party, and I spent the whole time puking in the club bathroom after too many tequila shots. Or the many, many instances of chugging from plandles in frat basements and then promptly getting on a table for the rest of the night. What I’m saying is I, like many others, spent a good chunk of my late teens-early twenties leaning into a drunken menace version of myself and consistently ignoring my limits. 

Then, at some point, due to either a growing self-awareness or a developing anxiety disorder, embarrassment kicked in. I’d cringe at friends’ tales of my antics from previous nights, wonder what people were saying about me, and hope to god I didn’t run into anyone important. This started to happen at the same time the world shut down, so I took it as a great chance to get some distance from alcohol altogether. By the end of college, I would barely finish one drink on any given night. Nowadays, I’m scared to even get buzzed, and the last place you’d find me is the club. I soberly threw up from heat exhaustion at a Cass McCombs’ show at Union Pool last summer, and the number one worry I had was anyone in my vicinity thinking I was a messy drunk who couldn’t handle herself. 

The people’s prince of Perth, Peter Bibby, has gone through a similar sober renaissance as of late. His newest record, Drama King, chronicles his back-and-forth between leaning into the numbing effect of alcohol and realizing the damage it is instigating. Being recently sober himself, the Aussie rocker explores the internal dialogue that comes with overcoming your dependence on alcohol and getting increasingly dissatisfied with the partying experiences you once found life-changing. 

A through-and-through independent, Drama King marks Bibby’s first time working with producer Dan Luscombe, or any producer, for that matter. With this new partnership, the production and instrumentals are crisp, consuming, and chaotic, with sonic highs and lows that mirror the often unstable path to sobriety. There’s country twang on opener “The Arsehole” and B-side “Old DC,” near-metal guitar thrashes on “Fun Guy” and “Bruno,” and reflective ballads on “Companion Pony” and “Baby Squid.” These elements exist separately and together, like on “Baby Squid,” which takes a waltzy track brimming with strife and completely blows it out by the end, with a ripping guitar solo and guttural vocal delivery that perfectly encapsulates the duality of what it takes to get sober. “Fun Guy” gives a glimpse of the anger that comes with realizing substances aren’t working for you but not quite being ready to give them up. The track blends surf rock with death metal guitar riffs, similar to King Gizzard’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse, ripping through the speakers with an intensity that matches the pure disgust our protagonist has for his old party routine.

Bibby looks at sobriety from all sides, giving us POVs of him at his worst and his most confident. “The Pricks” tells a story of a bar fight, complete with slurring vocals that clash with the major key pop rock instrumentals. Meanwhile, the jangly opener, “The Arsehole,” provides a thesis statement for the entire album with the line, “No one seems to come and talk to me / ‘cuz I’m the arsehole / It’s plain to see.” Bibby has a vocal style akin to Courtney Barnett’s conversational half-spoken-word delivery, adding another layer of personality and emotion to the whole LP. 

On “Bruno,” we see the distaste Bibby has for his party persona in lyrics like “Bruno is a piece of shit / He’s got no idea and nowhere to get one,” which show his frustration with the endless cycle of knowing you’re drinking too much but not being able to stop. Lyrically, Bibby is extremely blunt about his past. It’s clear he’s getting sick of his blackouts with the lines like “And all my dreams they fade away / No faces and no names / I’m getting tired of it” on “Old DC,” a track that juxtaposes Americana country twang with somewhat crass and unforgiving lines about being stuck in bad habits.

“Terracotta Brick” is one of the most revealing and personal tracks on the album. Bibby speaks to his lowest points through a metaphor of building a wall around him to block out any potential help, emphasizing the loop he finds himself stuck in when it comes to alcohol (“And you’re part of a vicious cycle / That keeps on spinning round”). You can hear Bibby’s inner turmoil in his vocals, with the guitar and piano sauntering around him and providing the truest ‘ballad’ on the record. “Terracotta Brick” is an emotional low, but it’s also a high in showing that Bibby is aware of his self-destructive tendencies around alcohol, which is necessary to push past them eventually.

Album closer “Companion Pony” explores Bibby’s desires for partnership and how alcohol had previously ruined potential relationships. Bibby compares himself to a lonely old racehorse looking to escape the intensity of derby life. It turns from a pretty depressing song to one with a hopeful end, hinting at a positive path forward. The track gains momentum and incorporates choral backing vocals and bright pianos, leaning into the idea of coming out on the other side of the uphill battle that is sobriety. The last lines of the record give a very ‘running off into the sunset’ happy ending to the whole story: “He’s gonna run / Over the hill / Around the bend / Jump right over the electric fence / Find that companion pony / And they’ll keep on running.”

Cassidy is a music writer and cultural researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including but not limited to rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Medium. 

Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties – In Lieu of Flowers | Album Review

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Hopeless Records

Buffalo Bills faithful Aaron West can’t seem to catch a break these days—or ever. On In Lieu of Flowers, the third full-length album of Dan Campbell’s solo project, we find West most chained to his vices.

Anyone familiar with Campbell’s songwriting in The Wonder Years knows the man is sick with nostalgia. It pierces through his writing like no other, yet he continuously finds ways to keep it rewarding and refreshing. When TWY released The Greatest Generation in 2013, the pop-punk cognoscenti declared the band’s three-album run triumphant. The Philadelphian six-piece had successfully crafted a trilogy on growing up and, in the process, had created something larger than themselves that millions of fans connected with, even a decade later. Even with this achievement, the band continued to write and release albums, although they had largely laid their signature pop-punk sound to rest. 

A year after TWY cemented themselves as pop-punk royalty, Aaron West was born. Campbell’s construction of “Aaron West” speaks to the ever-growing nature and evolution of his songwriting. He carefully crafted West as a snake-bitten alcoholic musician from New Jersey who struggles in the way most of us do. His music career is faltering, his relationship is crumbling, and his loved ones are dying. At heart, Campbell is a storyteller who’s found his niche in songwriting, and as we come upon the end of yet another trilogy in his musical universe, there’s no question as to why everything he touches turns to gold.

Before diving into In Lieu of Flowers, I would be remiss not to start at the project’s debut album since the Aaron West albums all tell a very intentional chronological story. As a brief recap of We Don’t Have Each Other, the inception of Aaron West details the worst year of his life in which his father passes, his wife suffers a miscarriage, and his wife leaves him. This is all capped off with his contemplation of drowning himself in the ocean, chased by a Mountain Goats cover that acts as a palette cleanser. Now, another EP, single, and album’s worth of lore has conspired in the 10 years since that first dispatch, however, the most important aspect to know going into ILOF is that, despite slapping band-aids on old wounds, we find that West never took the time to properly heal from the events of that fateful year depicted on his first album.

ILOF kicks off with our nomadic protagonist claiming, “It feels like shit to be alone again.” Track one of the LP, “Smoking Rooms,” starts somber and explodes into an existential apex torn between the less-than-glamorous life of a solo musician and being someone his family can count on.

This, more than anything, seems to be the all-encapsulating theme of the album. On the project’s sophomore release, Routine Maintenance, we listen as the project grows from just Aaron West to Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. He comes to find family and meaning in what began merely as a solo project to sing his woes. Additionally, he finds meaning in life with his nephew Colin that he couldn’t find anywhere else. With both of their dad’s abrupt passings, West took it upon himself to be the father figure that both were suddenly lacking. Fast forward five years and West’s neglect of his mental health has begun to chip away at everything he once found joy in.

The third installment of Aaron West’s story leans into his folk-tinged americana sound more than ever. Track three, “Paying Bills at the End of the World,” most notably pays homage to this sound with West singing the blues set to the melancholic wanes of the lap steel. The lyrics update the listener on the lull in West’s life during the global pandemic of 2020. He sings the sorrows of every malcontent US citizen that year: dreaming of catching COVID and simply dying because we can't afford health insurance.

In spite of all the gloom in his world, Campbell still injects humor and irony into his writing. In the same song, we hear West whimper, “Of doves and palms and cartoon Jesus dying on the cross I say he must be running late.” Poking fun at his broken relationship with religion, the band’s music video for this song ironically takes place in a church. 

While this project is a concept at its core, it takes place in the world as we know it. West, like the rest of us, put our lives on pause while COVID ran rampant through the world. Campbell uses this to further push the authenticity of the project. He weaves truths throughout West’s story, as seen on track 5, “Alone at St. Luke’s.” During an IRL 2022 tour, the Twenties all caught COVID, with Campbell being the only one to duck the sickness. The band was forced to fly home and Campbell stayed in Glasgow to finish the tour solo. It’s also in this track where we get a call back to LP1 highlight “Get Me Out of Here Alive,” in which West now claims that “The stained-glass light just punched me in the chest.”

Additionally, Campbell did his due diligence in crafting the character of Aaron West. He describes the character as “a little bit of everyone I’ve ever met”. What makes Aaron West’s story so special is this genuineness. Campbell entwines truths and lived experiences into his fictional character, which contributes to its legitimacy. While there are parts of the story that Campbell admits to having happened in real life, we’ll truly never know what parts are and are not fictitious. Despite this, the listener doesn’t doubt that any of the events in West’s trilogy are fabricated because they deal with very real and dwelled human troubles.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

My favorite aspect of this album is how it contains the first-ever love song we get from Aaron West. After rekindling with an old flame from high school early on the album, we find the first occurrence of West showing even the slightest amount of interest in someone romantically who is not Diane, his ex-wife. A new character in the Aaron West story is introduced on track 4, “Monongahela Park.” Sam, whom West hadn’t seen in years, knows nothing of the West that we’ve come to know and love. Even with this opportunity to start fresh, West’s calloused heart can’t bring himself to let her in.

Believe it or not, ILOF is also the most emo we find Aaron West. He’s in a begrudgingly sour fight with himself and what he wants in life. Between the band, his broken love life, his lack of belief in a higher power, and his surging alcoholism, West is tearing at the seams. Tracks 6 and 7 are where we get the lowest of West. Hanging onto every last bit of popularity from the Twenties’ fizzling fame, West is burning every last bridge in an alcohol-fueled frenzy as he exclaims, “I’ll see you in the water.”

Regardless of how much West wants to give up and succumb to his addiction, the people in his life won’t let him. After checking himself into rehab on track 9, “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” West finds his next move. The track starts slow over piano, with West watching the Bills choke away yet another promising year. It moves into an upbeat and nostalgia-lined recap of his time in rehab. West acknowledging his fuck ups bring us that much closer to the album's penultimate track, “In Lieu of Flowers.”

The track was released as the first single with the announcement of the album, likely because it’s the most conquering track on the record, however, we now know that this song ties up all the loose ends of the album. Listening to this track before and after knowing the events of the album reframes the song's meaning. Kicking off the track with a catchy horn melody contributed by producer Ace Enders, the song hooks listeners instantly. It’s in this track where West is mending the bridges that he burnt throughout the album. Even though Sam, his nephew Colin, his sister Catherine and the Twenties “could’ve told him to fuck himself,” they encourage him to brush the dirt off the grave that he dug for himself.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

There are a million story beats and easter eggs that can be found throughout the Aaron West discography, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable to dig into. At this point in his story, every track is a must-listen, not just for the musical brilliance, but to catch every detail that caps off what could be the end of the Aaron West story. The bookend tale divulges the struggles of family, love, and religion. Much like those Bills teams of the 2000s, West was struggling to get his shit together long enough to reap the harvest. He found support and solace in those he thought would leave him for dead.

What makes The Wonder Years everyone’s favorite pop-punk band is that they’re entirely relatable. Campbell finds ways to craft songs that are universal no matter the subject matter. The madman has managed to lap this feat and do it all over again with Aaron West. While little is known about the future of West, the listener, without a doubt, is rooting for him. He may be a fictional character, but West is as real as you and I: flawed to all hell, but is trying his best. 

Brandon Cortez is a writer/musician residing in El Paso, Texas, with his girlfriend and two cats. When not playing in shitty local emo bands, you can find him grinding Elden Ring on his second cup of cold brew. Find him on Twitter @numetalrev.