The Treacherous Experience on the Outskirts of Ordinary Life

What is the everyday mundane? How does mundanity differ from person to person, and how do we cope with something that seems so simple? We’ve survived well beyond a year of the same monotonous process every single god-forsaken day. The difference is that this mundane has been coupled with a deadly everlasting pandemic for the past year and a half. Stuck in what feels like an eternity, the weight of being a cog in the capitalistic machine has never felt so close. We’re all chronically burnt out, questioning what we know, and breaking new ground despite everything weighed against our existence. For trans folks especially, this year has been one blow to healthcare and human rights after another. It is exhausting, but we have to push through all the heartbreak, the loneliness, the gender dysphoria, and the identity growth if we want to find a happy resting state. Through the chaos of our reality, self-reflection and acceptance nevertheless persevere. We must learn the hard way that running from ourselves only makes things worse. 

Trans people push through the mundane while consistently juggling the social encounters and internal processes that come with the experience of transitioning. It is conflicting thoughts and feelings that haze over the mind on a consistent basis. What do we do on days where this is especially prevalent, and all we can feel is how much we don’t fit the everyday process? How do we escape, and what are we escaping from? Coming out as a transgender woman, Reade Wolcott captures every emotion in her experience transitioning with an album jammed-packed with trans ska banger after banger. Showcasing the crushing weight of a cookie-cutter existence, We Are The Union finds happiness in coloring outside the gender binary lines and creating a reality that is far from ordinary. If you need that iced coffee and estrogen straight to the veins, then We Are The Union is here to provide all that, and a whole lot of serotonin with Ordinary Life. 

This album sends you full swing into a ska-filled summer with opening track, “Pasadena.” Right off the bat, the listener is hit with catchy lyrics of a failed relationship portrayed in a manner that everybody can relate to. With a mental state cracking and causing division and conflict at every turn, Wolcott sums up the feelings of being mentally ill in a long-term relationship. 

and it’s a shame
your secret smokes in the alleyway
to numb the pain
to escape the everyday mundane

What’s so fun about Ordinary Life is how successfully Wolcott writes about the transgender experience in ways that everyone can relate with. Through catchy ska-punk tunes, this album conveys how similar the existential dread feels from person to person. Despite the upbeat instrumental, this opening track foreshadows the depth Wolcott reaches in showcasing what makes that experience unique for her as a trans woman.

Wolcott’s ability to sing about the transgender experience through relatable anecdotes makes for a conceptual album that is handcrafted and delivered for queer fans while easily digestible for the cis fans. It is a widely accessible album that never falls short in poignant prose but doesn’t hide the transgender experience behind any curtains or veiled analogies. Each song is far from anything in the realm of the ordinary. Instead, they champion transparency and complete honesty to create an album that fully grasps the transgender experience for everyone to hear. Ordinary Life demands your attention and holds it for 35 minutes straight.

With the lead single, “Morbid Obsessions,” we are met with the album’s thesis. As showcased in the music video, this album is all about burying your old self, laying the relationships that don’t serve you to rest, and becoming brand new. The concept of transgender feelings as morbid obsessions is cunning, especially with the analogy of zombies used in the video. It brilliantly illustrates how an overwhelming majority of the public views transitioning as some fucked up fixation. The quite literal zombie-like feelings come from the alienation felt by trans people in a capitalistic society that wants to shut you out completely. The metaphor of the plague doctor as a bouncer symbolizes sexual control and police brutality towards LGBTQ people enacted by the state. It also shows the religious right-wing’s desire to eradicate the trans community entirely. This video depicts the intolerance that queer people face whether they’re coming out, actively transitioning, or expressing their gender.

When you’re trying to stuff gender-related feelings deep down inside, interacting with others is met with fear of accidentally confessing and outing yourself. The cleverness of this band is exhibited in the “No Zombies Allowed” sign at the bar where the video takes place. Feeling like a sore thumb, Wolcott turns to leave but is stopped by Jeremy “Jer” Hunter, best known for their slapping covers over on Skatune Network and carrying the We Are The Union brass section. Through storytelling, “Morbid Obsessions” gives us a glimpse into discovering and redefining your gender around the people you love. 

Jer’s role in this video is riddled with underlying experiences of living as a nonbinary person. As Wolcott made an entrance with every zombie trait on display, Jer’s features are more subtle and easily covered by a hood. The experience of living in the in-between is best captured with this role and conveys the similarities in gender non-conforming and trans identities. Although not privileged with the same abilities to pass, Wolcott forges camaraderie with Jer and fellow zombie Gracie Pryor. Together, they break the bar rules and defeat the plague doctor once and for all.

now in come the drugs
in come the drugs and the booze
razors, wrists, and self-abuse
trapped like a rat, got nothing left to lose
she wanted a dress
like all the other girls
a head full of curls
they said “son, you can’t always get what you want in this world”

Whereas bands like Home is Where weave feelings through intricate metaphors embroidered in extrospective observations, We Are The Union capture the trans experience from the inside out. It feels like the band is processing each new emotion as they unfold. 

This means every track possesses an introspectiveness sprinkled with a healthy amount of one-liners and humor. While Self Care sought to normalize mental health, Wolcott now takes on the task of normalizing the trans experience as a whole with Ordinary Life. The result is a record full of pop-punk melodies coupled with excellent 2-tone rhythms. It is honest, upfront, and genuine, with summer vibes bursting at every seam.

Best fitted for skanking your heart out in sweaty basements, Ordinary Life is a vibrant record that wears its heart on its checkered sleeve. The record’s sound is a far cry from the blacked-out, classic punk of Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues, but is so rich with the trans experience and solidarity that it brought me right back to the first listen of that defining trans album. However, with each listen of Ordinary Life, it becomes clear that to compare We Are The Union to Against Me! would be an understatement. These are two bands for different moods and different parts of the process. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the battle cry to transitioning with room to spare for letting out composed rage, while Ordinary Life is all about the messy in-betweens, fucking up, and dancing on the grave of your enemies and past self. 

We’ve arrived at a new era of trans-lead music that blends genres while showcasing brilliance in so many different types of writing and creative endeavors. 100 gecs took the past two years by storm, and Left at London released a fantastic new album on the same day as We Are The Union, to just name a few. The art that these bands craft follow varying lyrical, instrumental, and electronic techniques that are consistently inspired by the ever-changing world around them. Bands featuring trans musicians are captivating the world, with brilliant music that sticks in your head for months but also provides an umbrella for fans who identify as trans or nonbinary and have never had such an array of relatable music before. 

Being trans is never black and white, and every song off of Ordinary Life is a trans anthem that beautifully reflects that nonlinear journey. This path always circles back to the extraordinary. Still, the record is also mired in the mundane experience of transitioning within a society that wants to file you down and stuff you into made-up, categorical gender norms. As a nonbinary person, I cannot possibly understand the extent of transitioning. Still, I hope my ability to relate to the feelings of being controlled by the gender binary until you finally reject it speaks for itself. The overwhelming comfort I felt hearing these songs goes to show the universality in navigating the gender experience.

afraid to disappoint
so i fail everyone around me

Attempting to suppress conflicting gender thoughts is an all-consuming process. Short-circuiting occurs when these disconnected thoughts jump in the way every time you try to speak. As a result, you end up feeling jumbled, which leads us into the next track entitled “Broken Brain,” which reinforces the concept of absent-mindedness. Dulling the brain to get through the everyday is a consistent theme throughout this album. For example, the band drops lyrics about using vices to cope with mental health that contrast with survival tactics and medicine that help Wolcott achieve self-actualization. In what is perhaps the most iconic line of the record, “please inject me with iced coffee and estrogen / we’re panicking again,” self-medication and hormones are followed by the overwhelming sensation of failing to escape the ordinary.

lists inside of lists, a labyrinth
how do people do the things they plan to?
lost the day again laying in the grass
sweating every conversation i’ve ever had

What is ska if its brass section can’t transport you to another world? Jeremy Hunter delivers on this album with a killer trombone that carries as much emotion as the lyrics themselves. What perfectly pairs with a diagnosis of depression and dysphoria? A horn section that sinks deep into your soul. Flanked by Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, and multiple other trumpets, the brass section led by Jer is accompanied by Kevin and David Miller, as well as contributions from Scott Klopfenstein. The dynamic and emotive instrumentation on this album is not to be missed for the way it keeps you on your feet and sticks like glue to your brain.

With Ordinary Life, we get eleven tracks of unbeatable trans anthems tied together with themes of breakups, heartache, depression, and ADHD. The best part? This album provides the full range of emotions in equal parts universal and unique to Wolcott. In a BrooklynVegan interview, Wolcott touches on the goal to bring normalization of every emotion in an easy-to-grasp way that extends far beyond transgender struggles. She notes, “what I really tried to do was to frame the trans experience and frame dysphoria alongside things that are maybe more relatable to the general public, like heartbreak, like ADHD, depression, all the more common themes that we've kind of touched on in the past." Through this, we have a record that is dynamic, widely relatable, and full of songs for every mood that specifically hone in on the trans experience.

Are you feeling beat down, bummed out? Shaken all the good vibes out with the last few tracks and need to switch it up? “Make It Easy” is the love song of every queer’s dream. We got the perfect and undeniably adorable music video, catchy guitar and basslines, an alluring trombone, and Brent Friedman’s incredible percussions that act as the backbone of the tune, with Jer carrying the motif throughout. The drums featured in “Make It Easy” pull you in, push you out, and throw you back on your feet without missing a beat. The builds of the snare and floor tom in this song are sharply highlighted to make it feel like being lifted off the ground. These drums pair brilliantly with the crescendo of the trombone to close out the front half of this record with hopeless romanticism. 

When the needle hits the backside of the album, we are instantly met with a sensational syncopated nod to the roots of ska on “Boys Will Be Girls.” Complete with aesthetic references to Backstreet Boys, this tune breaks every single gender norm, gives a shout-out to nonbinary people, and smashes the deeply held fear of the trans community commonly upheld by the right-wing of the political spectrum. This single laughs in the face of fear. It laughs at the absurd notions held by small-minded people that being transgender is a plague or that the COVID-19 vaccine will turn kids gay or trans. Instead, “Boys Will Be Girls” is a triumphant and multi-colored celebration of the trans experience.

throw a tantrum, hold a sign
as the infantry arrives
we’ll take back the city tonight
the kids will be alright
your old ways will die
in the darkest depths we’ll stand here in the light.

The people who created and enforced the rigid gender binary are scared. As gender is the backbone of patriarchy, the threat of that crumbling invokes hatred towards trans and gender non-conforming folks. Old notions are left to retire as the common consciousness of gender shifts, with inclusivity and reason guiding the way. Forging new paths in identities that match the way we feel is the only way forward. 

From there, Ordinary Life winds from substance abuse on “Wasted” to finding solace in accepting the imperfect parts of your reality on “Everything Alone.” As the record winds its way to a close, the band ends with a rebuttal of the ordinary. Finally, after dredging through all of these feelings, mundanity, and coping mechanisms, Wolcott leaves the listener with a poetic articulation of the trans experience. 

change your clothes in the shadows
let nothing pass through lonely doorways
your sandcastle crumbles, but you’ve never been better
is it real if we don’t swim in the shame?

like a swing set in the sea
we are anything but ordinary

With these lines, We Are The Union charge forth in the undertow, looking for anything but the ascribed ordinary. Wolcott is triumphantly rejecting her ordinary, burying her past self, while using a garden as an analogy for sowing the seeds of a life that's anything but ordinary. As Wolcott so poetically sings, “the only difference between a garden and a graveyard / is what you bury in it.” With this, she finally lays her dying parts to rest, becoming brand new in the extraordinary. 

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Ashley Bedore is a disabled, queer music lover living in Denver, CO. They can usually be found with a record spinning, head buried in theory, and cats on either side. As a sociology major and community organizer, Ashley enjoys discussing accessibility and collective care in the scene to foster spaces where every single body belongs. Follow them on Twitter at @emomarxist.

Parting – Unmake Me | Album Review

Today will be different
Today will be the same
The same can be different
In some weird kind of way

The ironic thing about Parting is that Unmake Me feels like coming home. The self-proclaimed “original emo revivalists” display the return of Keith Latinen (Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate)), Ben Hendricks (Annabel), Gooey Fame (Dowsing), and John Guynn (Hawk & Son) asreturning flag-bearers of the genre. This isn’t fifth wave emo, but rather an evolution of your older sibling’s favorite bands from high school.

“Jesse Eisenbird” shows off a more refined version of Latinen’s voice while detailing the death of a family member between intricate, complementary guitar work. While the genre is known for making listeners feel things, this introduction to Parting breaks hearts and leaves one begging for catharsis.

While it feels cliché to call artists mature, “Ratt Michards” candidly recounts how the grueling life of nine-to-fives leads to depression. Despite this not being too crazy of a take, Latinen and Hendricks’s harmonies carry the notion over a driving bass line that teases the necessary catharsis needed after “Jesse Eisenbird”: “Knowing you need to change / is easier than / making changes.” You can almost hear the college crowd drunkenly belting this one back from the pit.

“Stapler’s Monster” slows the tempo for Parting just to show their strength as songwriters. After two solid, hook-laden songs, dueling vocal lines allow room for more vulnerability before our revivalists jump back into the hooks with “After the Fact” and “Maybe He’s Blinking When You’re Blinking.” The penultimate track, “He’s Obviously Beekeeping Age,” shows a more experimental, patient, electronic side of Parting. Think Jimmy Eat World’s “Pass the Baby” meets the trumpet fare of early Foxing.

Again, Unmake Me’s sequencing shines in this setup, laddering up to the catharsis of “Living Proof.” Like a feather floats to the ground, the gang vocals that kick off the denouement of the record are begging to be sung at the end of a late night. Yet it’s Latinen’s final words that bring us the closure so desperately needed after careening through the previous songs: “I’m living proof / of carrying through.” After what’s been a handful of rough years for myriad peoples, Latinen’s lines will hit home no matter what your background is.

Parting arrive just in time for the party, as though everyone was anxiously awaiting them. Then, immediately after the last note rings, they bow, leave, and make you wish they never left the stage. Unmake Me’s 18 minutes aren’t enough time with Parting, but you’ll want to flip this record right over and play it again after that final guitar chimes.

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Joe Wasserman is a high school English teacher in New York City. When he’s not listening to music, he’s writing short stories, playing bass for Save the Robots, or loving his pug, Franklin. You can find him on Twitter at @a_cuppajoe.

Downhaul – Proof | Album Review

Growth is hard to measure. It’s unquantifiable, it’s non-linear, and there’s no clearly defined endpoint. It’s also something that each person needs to recognize and undertake on their own. You can’t force a person to grow or change any more than you can stop the sun from setting or the rain from falling. Throughout PROOF, Downhaul ruminate on growth, filter it through the lens of memory, and ground it in physical spaces strewn across the wide-open sprawl of nature. 

Much like growth itself, the band does not begin the record with immediate progress but rather recognizing the need for growth in the first place. As these revelations unfurl throughout the epic seven-minute opener, “Bury,” the group does an excellent job of acclimating you into the gothic country world of the album. The song begins with a slow fade-up on an atmospheric howl of wind accompanied by a single jangly guitar and carefully brushed cymbals. As the cymbals grow louder and more intense about a minute in, lead singer Gordon Phillips emerges from the dense fog pondering in a Greet Death twang, “Did I waste the years when it all came so easily? / Was I standing still?  Did I slip at the edge of the quarry?” Soon after the first verse, the full band joins in, guitar, drums, and bass all falling into a towering and naturalistic riff worthy of a Balance and Composure song. 

The instrumental rises and falls as the guitar masterfully carves its path in the listener’s mind. The bass rumbles with a thunderous power, rattling underneath Phillips’ lyrics of backsliding and non-linear progress. As the story unfolds, Phillips begins to address some anonymous other, singing the album’s namesake and punctuating it with sentiments of despair and bitterness.

You wanted proof, you wanted
Lost sight of where we started
You denigrate your own, it’s so shameful
As you curse the ground that you came from
You wanted proof, you wanted...

The lyrics that end this song trail off, making them sound like an incomplete half-thought, but they actually do an important job of establishing the core concept for the album. As the listener hangs on this sentiment, the instrumental sputters out into a dusty, minimalistic stretch that allows for rumination. This use of negative space is something the band does excellently throughout the album and even within individual songs. These recurring instrumental stretches give the listener ample space to reflect on the lyrics and form their own meanings around the songs. 

After this long narrative pause, the next words we hear on “Dried” act like a flashback transporting us to a completely different time and place in the narrator’s life. Now on a sunny lakeside dock, the entire tone of the record shifts into a refreshing, youthful optimism in the vein of 2014-era Seahaven. Even though we’ve never been to these locations or experienced these events, Phillips’ lyrics do an excellent job of placing you there and making it feel as if you’ve experienced them in a past life. It’s a strange sense of familiarity and déjà vu. 

From there, the record changes tone within nearly every song. Even though the locations and people change, the sense that you’re experiencing everything from one single perspective is never lost. The sunny hard-charging desert drives of “Scatterplot” give way to blurry late-night trips through the heartland on “Curtains.” Lyrics range from textural to sweeping and address the relationships Phillips has both with himself and those around him. He writes about infatuation giving way to disillusionment. He talks about stagnation and contrasts that with the rewarding feeling of building something with another person. Songs zoom in on tactile things like stretchers and split-ends, then zoom all the way out to massive formations like shipyards and suspension bridges.

As we take in this full range of human emotion, these experiences all begin to fold in on themselves. A prevailing sense of unhappiness slowly emerges over the course of the album’s middle stretch. Feelings aren’t revealed. Things are hidden. People stop being honest. These relationships decay seemingly in real-time as you listen. Luckily, things take a turn for the better on “The Ladder,” where Phillips sings with newfound devotion over an understated acoustic guitar.

I’ve been backwards since I met you
Climb the ladder to impress you
All my clothes feel tighter when you
Say my name so I just let you

From this point on, things don’t necessarily get “better,” but a sense of progression begins to reveal itself. The lyrics start to come from a place of love, colors brighten, and the world warms up. Complications, while they still exist, begin to untangle themselves over time with a little bit of attention and self-care. 

PROOF truly comes full circle on the closing track “About Leaving.” After opening with a meditative slide guitar, Phillips wades into his feelings and emerges with a list of promises.

I’m gonna stand up straighter
I’m gonna leave and I won’t come back until I feel better
I’m gonna hang things on my walls
I’m gonna chase the ways we felt before this stood 10 feet tall
I gotta learn to leave

Here, everything from posture to interior decorating act as mandates for personal growth. Phillips has looked inward, found fault, and recognized the things in his life that he needs to address. Not only that, he’s promising to work on them. In the second verse, he continues this list with an even more challenging group of things to work toward, which all culminate in a soulful guitar solo.

I’m gonna stop comparing
I’m gonna focus on the people who have always cared for me
I’m gonna keep my head down
I’m gonna know when to recognize that this was all my fault
I gotta learn to leave

The final verse of the album ends with an epiphany that summarizes all of these resolutions with a beautifully poetic metaphor that both circles back to the first track and drops the album's title.

I’m gonna scale the canyon
Between who I thought I’d be and where I ended up
I’m gonna be more patient
Well you wanted proof, and I’d say that you got it

Scaling a canyon feels like an apt metaphor for personal growth. It seems monumental and near-impossible, but it is attainable if the desire is there… and that desire is a crucial first step. Landing on the line of “Well you wanted proof, and I’d say that you got it” both explains the album’s namesake and acts as an inverse parallel to the opening track where Phillips recognizes the need for proof but offers no such thing. 

Here, the listener realizes that the entire album is the proof. This record is comprised of stories, emotions, relationships, and revelations that all lead to one inevitable conclusion about the need to better oneself. As we journey past bodies of water, seek shelter from summer storms, and interact with meaningful people over the course of this album’s 43 minutes, we also accompany the band on this journey of personal growth and self-discovery. This quest is a beautiful thing to witness, but most critically, PROOF prompts the listener to look inward and think about what they can do to improve within their own life. In an album littered with landmarks and grounded in physical spaces, the most important monument within PROOF is the one we are building to ourselves.

Growth may be hard to measure, but PROOF contains enough progress to last a lifetime. Improving yourself is work; it doesn’t happen overnight, and it definitely doesn’t happen in 43 minutes. It took Downhaul five years and six releases to get here, but the band’s second album is a document that speaks for itself. PROOF is an interactive, inspiring, and emotive retelling of one person’s march toward betterment. If just one listener takes the message of this album to heart, then Downhaul have done their job. 

Ten Years of Tunnel Blanket: The Definitive Statement on Death

What is death? We don’t know, and that terrifies us. We know that death is the end of life, but we are incapable of understanding anything beyond that. This ambiguity is a frightening prospect that has haunted mankind for as long as we’ve been able to comprehend it. Death may be a fact of life, but that knowledge doesn’t alleviate any of the dread that comes with it.

As humans, we’ve spun reams of text speculating and prophesizing about what comes after life. While some find solace in religion, others turn to art in order to process their thoughts and feelings about the afterlife. Whether it’s reckoning with their own eventual death or the death of a loved one, some artists have spent their entire lives trying to depict, understand, and grapple with the uncertainty the eventually greets us all.

Albums about death are often heavy, brutal, and filled with grief. That makes them far from a casual listen, but it has also resulted in some of the most powerful pieces of music of all time. Albums like Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me, which finds a husband bereft with grief after his wife’s passing. Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave depicts a father processing the tragic loss of his teenaged son. Japanese Breakfast’s Psychopomp sees a daughter working through the untimely death of her mother. There’s 808s & Heartbreak, Hospice, Funeral, and Springtime and Blind, just to name a few. Not to mention my personal favorite, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, a record I’ve already spent thousands of words meditating on. Death is one of the great human questions, so it should come as no surprise how much effort we’ve collectively expelled trying to understand it. 

These albums I just listed all tackle death from their respective artist’s genres. As a result, these records each do an excellent job of fleshing out different aspects of loss and grief in their own ways. Despite their unique stylistic leanings, one factor that ties all of these albums together is the presence of lyrics. Yes, every one of these artists, from the lo-fi grief of Mount Eerie to the fist-balling punk of Fiddlehead and the auto-tuned croons of Kanye, all work through death with the written word in one form or another. From where I sit (and despite the fact that I’m writing this currently), written language is inherently limiting when it comes to understanding something as large and cosmic as death. Death is bigger than any word, phrase, sentence, or sentiment. It just is. It’s inherently unknowable until you arrive at it yourself, and that’s what scares us. This wordless approach to understanding death is what sets This Will Destroy You’s third studio album apart from every other piece of art broaching the topic of the great beyond. 

This Will Destroy You first made a name for themselves in the mid-2000s with the release of Young Mountain and a self-titled record in 2006 and 2008, respectively. As great as these records are (I’ve written about Young Mountain as an entry point into the post-rock genre), they are, for better or worse, “textbook” instrumental rock releases. They follow the same cinematic structure laid out by fellow Texas post-rockers Explosions in the Sky with dynamic tracks that crest from subtle to sweeping in powerful ways deliberately designed to tug on your heartstrings. 

As I grew into the post-rock genre, I gradually worked my way through This Will Destroy You’s discography. While Young Mountain and This Will Destroy You offer logical extensions of the standard post-rock trappings, the group’s third album, Tunnel Blanket, threw me for a complete loop upon first listen.

Both Young Mountain and This Will Destroy You clock in at under an hour and had clearly defined song structures. The tracks begin, crescendo, and end the way that all post-rock songs do. They sounded like soundtracks to a nonexistent movie, and that’s what drew me to the genre in the first place. Tunnel Blanket, however, finds the band leaning more heavily into their ambient, drone, and shoegaze influences for a sound that the band described as “doomgaze.” This move away from traditional post-rock song structures led to a more amorphous (or, as I felt back then, boring) listen. Boy, was I wrong.

No song better exemplifies Tunnel Blanket’s shapeless approach to post-rock than its opener, “Little Smoke.” This 12-minute track begins with a pensive series of keyboard notes paired with a subtly-building swirl of distortion. These two elements plod forward, entwining with each other, then dispersing and evaporating like… well, smoke. As the keys dance, this cresting wall of white noise slowly begins to fade, eventually leading to a second of complete silence. Then, like being jolted awake by the sensation of falling, the full band thrusts into the track with a towering riff fitting of a Mogwai song. The cymbals crash, the bass rattles, and the guitar repeats the same high-frequency strum over and over again to a hypnotic effect. The riff lumbers forward with this sort of searing, distorted scream that feels simultaneously sharp with an acute pain and dulled to the point of numbness. After about six minutes, this swaying instrumental subsides and the delicate keys emerge once more, carrying the listener out of the track with a meditative and precious coda that provides a direct contrast to the brash sonic violence they just weathered. 

The following track, “Glass Realms,” opens with a fluttering wall of static that fades in and out over a backdrop of gorgeous strings. The orchestra hangs on pristine sustained notes as the static fluctuates from distracting to nonexistent. By the end of the song, the static has grown to subsume the strings, moving from one headphone to the other, jumping back and forth like a predator stalking its prey. Songs like these are what confused me upon first listen; no guitars, no drums, no bass, no nothing, just strings and a weird buzz of white noise. Hardly a post-rock song. Now, I view this song as a beautiful work of art, a meditative reflection that provides a gorgeous counterpoint to the brutality of “Little Smoke.” This song is where the record’s concept truly begins to emerge as it depicts the wholly unknowable notion of death itself, not through overt lyricism but a sense of inescapable and inevitable darkness. 

“Communal Blood” continues this train of thought, now with the band’s full instrumentation at play once more. Again, a subtle swirl of ambient reverb drives the track forward while the band members play their instruments with the utmost subtlety. The cymbals are barely brushed, the bass is gently strummed, and all of these notes are given enough breathing room to sustain and rattle out into absolute silence before the next. This song builds to a more traditional post-rock crescendo where the reverb grows and the intensity increases. All of this gradually picks up speed until the band reaches a triumphant cadence that shakes with some sort of wondrous and almighty power.

The rest of the album follows a similar structure. “Reprise” brings back the beautiful keys courtesy of Donovan Jones. “Killed the Lord, Left for the New World” pairs carefully-wielded reverb with a driving electronic beat, wind chimes, and a drum roll while disembodied voices float through the mix uttering unintelligible half-phrases. “Osario” acts as a brief mid-album stopgap featuring a warbling electronic beat that resembles the artificial breaths of a ventilator. While the album hangs together perfectly, “Black Dunes” was the one song that stuck out to me most on my first few listens. Possessing perhaps the most ferocious and forthright melody on the entire release, “Black Dunes” begins with a remorseful instrumental that eventually erupts into a brutal and crushing wall of unfathomable depth. It’s a song you can feel the full weight of, and that’s not something you get to experience in music very often.

Post-rock has always felt “cinematic,” there’s a reason why bands like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky get tapped to score films so often. This genre captures a sort of wordless power that can soundtrack anything from a high school football game to the zombie apocalypse. The beauty is that these songs can score practically anything you want; they are objectively beautiful and musical enough that nearly anyone can enjoy them, yet they are faceless and wordless, which lends them this amorphous quality. Post-rock songs generally have a hard time carrying out a concrete “concept” or a “message” because the dynamic crescendo-based instrumental is the message. At worst, this genre can feel like powerful music just for powerful music’s sake, but the flip side is that this “blank canvas effect” means the listener can project whatever they want onto the songs, and that’s a powerfully attractive prospect. This quality is both a blessing and a curse for the post-rock genre; it makes this type of music rich and all-encompassing, yet inherently unknowable. 

You could listen to Tunnel Blanket and take it at face-value as a more subtle and ambient side of the post-rock spectrum, but I think that’s a disservice to the band’s creativity. That’s how I spent the first few years interpreting this record and why I thought it was just a more boring version of what the band had done before. What sets Tunnel Blanket apart from other albums in this genre doesn’t reveal itself until the tail end of the release… and even then, it’s only there for those who are willing to listen close enough.

Album closer “Powdered Hand” opens with a short series of piano notes and a single resonant floor tom that echoes through the listener’s body. Spaced-out hi-hat taps keep time as the keys counterbalance this heavy drumming with an air of lightness. Working together, these elements formulate a bright and sunny melody that feels like the clouds opening up after a spring rainstorm. Again, a swirl of static emerges, pushing the track forward and giving the listener something active to focus on aside from the spaced-out drums and keys. Midway through the song, this static unfurls and reveals itself to have a slowed-down human voice. 

We can only make out a few words before the voice reverts to static and the instruments re-establish their melody. After a several-minute-long interjection, the static fades, and the voice becomes clear once again. It’s a little bit jumbled and still far-off in the mix, but what we can make out is a scientist, Temple Grandin, explaining the visual phenomena of death, specifically the spirals and tunnel-shaped visions that people tend to see right before they die. It’s here that the name of the album, and its topic, fully-reveal themselves. Though wordless and abstract for a majority of its runtime, Tunnel Blanket is an album about death, specifically about the phenomena of death. 

According to an interview with Nothing But Hope and Passion, this sample is taken from a documentary called Stairway to Heaven. The band explained the inclusion of this clip in the following quote:

[Temple Grandin’s] perspective on the “afterlife” (or lack thereof) is fascinating. Tunnel Blanket was meant to be a metaphor for death or the moment right before death. Despite what you believe, that moment will be the most true, the most raw flash you will ever experience. It will always be a mystery, and as much as human beings want to distract ourselves with material bullshit, religion, etc., the outcome will always be inevitable.

I’ve never heard an album tackle the bleak darkness of death quite like Tunnel Blanket. While artists have focused on describing deaths’ effects on them, this album feels like listening to death itself. 

Tunnel Blanket is a fuzzy, grey wall that fluctuates from somber piano to larger-than-life post-rock crescendos that all mirror physical actions of the body. These tracks breathe, feel, and reverberate in the same way that we do. From the heartbeat-like percussion to the constantly swirling ambient noise, the collection of eight songs on Tunnel Blanket represent an hour-long depiction of the experience of death. 

Tunnel Blanket’s wordless exploration of death works to its advantage. This record delves into death and finds a home within it over the course of its hour-long runtime, which is something I’ve never heard any other “death album” do. 

Yes, death is remembering the details of a loved one, missing the space that someone held in your life, and combing through all their belongings after they’ve moved on. Those are all true experiences, and none of them are wrong or invalid. However, they are all very grounded experiences. They are “above-the-shoulders” ways to process, talk about, and relate to death. Tunnel Blanket grounds its understanding of death not in language or retelling experiences of loss and grief but in pure feeling and emotionality. It seeks to portray death in a way that no other artist has. On this album, the band is concerned equally with depicting the physiological effects of death as they are with capturing its profound vastness. 

Tunnel Blanket offers an alternative perspective on mortality; it represents the other side of our Earthly experience, the universal that we will all face at one point or another. It’s objectively heartbreaking to listen to an album like A Crow Looked at Me and hear Phil Elverum talk about receiving his dead wife’s mail, but that’s a personal experience that relies on the listener’s empathy. It’s sad no matter how you cut it, but that’s just one singular experience on the cosmic scale. Tunnel Blanket tackles death by becoming it. This record explores death from the perspective of an ambivalent absolute. It offers no answers and presents no resolution. Much like death itself, Tunnel Blanket just is. 

Stars Hollow – I Want to Live My Life | Album Review

The message behind Stars Hollow’s breakthrough EP Happy Again was always sitting right there staring us in the face. “It’s not that you won’t be happy again, you just won’t be the same as you were before.” A poignant (and very emo) sentiment lying in plain sight for all to see. The words used to build this statement are scattered throughout the lyrics on Happy Again (and even contained within the tracklist) but don’t reveal themselves in earnest until the final song, where lead singer Tyler Stodghill cathartically belts them all out in sequence. This lyrical throughline acts as the conceptual cherry on top of an already fantastic midwest emo release and signaled early on that Stars Hollow were doing something more than your dime-a-dozen emo band.

This sentiment lying at the center of Happy Again came straight from Stodghill himself reading about grief while simultaneously processing his own. This revelation that comes at the end of the EP acts as a stand-in for the quarter-life realization that so many of us have following the wreckless, immortal years spent as a late-teenage/early-twenty-something. Whether it’s heartbreak, death, or something in between, eventually everyone arrives at their own understanding of the irreversible nature of life. Some actions can’t be undone, some things can’t be un-lost, and some relationships can’t be salvaged. Happy Again just happened to land extra hard for me because it arrived at a time in my life that I was experiencing this type of deep-cutting and irreversible loss for the first time. 

Happy Again is a whip-smart EP with a poetic throughline that manages to get its message across in less than 15-minutes. It’s a feat of the emo genre and topping it was going to be hard. The band followed this EP up with the one-off “Tadpole” in 2019 and rode waves of DIY success to nationwide tours with fellow fifth-wavers like Origami Angel and Niiice. Now, more than two years since their last song and six years into their career as a band, the group has unleashed their debut LP I Want to Live My Life, and it is jam-packed with emo riffage, poetic lyricism, and a conceptual throughline that rivals their groundbreaking EP. 

Much like Happy Again, the concept at the center of I Want to Live My Life is sitting right there staring you in the face. This time, however, the words are only half the story. While the band hinted that the album had a concept like their prior releases, it’s clear that they weren’t going to tip their hand quite as easily this time. 

As I studied the tracklist for clues, I couldn’t help but notice how many of the song titles seemed related. “Through the Windshield.” and “Out the Sunroof.” Two references to cars. “Stuck to You.” and “Beside You.” Two songs referring to another person. There are also similarities in how the songs are stylized, with periods after almost every song title. Even the mid-album “...” is a punctuation-based song title much like “,” off Happy Again…  but what does it all mean?

When the listener hits play on I Want To Live My Life, they’re met with a sort of music box-like melody. Soon after this maudlin instrumental sets the tone, Stodghill enters with a delicate croon bemoaning, 

It’s like something’s in my closet
Laughing at me
I’ll learn to love it
Without it
I don’t think I could sleep
I wish that my comforts
were comforting to me
I want to live my life
but I’ll be here waiting…

That’s a lot to unpack, but before you can think twice about it, you’re swept up in a whirlwind of tappy emo instrumentation and screamed vocals mere seconds later. That effect is very much intentional because the preceding four songs hardly give you a second to breathe. There’s bouncy riffage and gut-wrenching screams on “Stuck to You.” There are heart-wrenching realizations “Until I Bleed Out.,” and self-destructive sentiments on “Out the Sunroof.”

Lead single “With Weight.” possesses the most fun, energetic, and dynamic instrumental on the record paired with some of the most remorseful lyrics the band has ever penned. This makes the party-hat-adorned music video feel even more apt as we watch the trio run rampant in a retro skating rink sharing birthday cake, sneaking gulps from the slushie machine, and racking up points on arcade games. These lighthearted childlike antics contrast with the group’s sweat-covered, emotional performance under the rink’s glittering disco ball. As the instrumental rises and falls around Stodghill’s wails, these two opposing feelings combine to evoke warm childhood memories of birthday parties as well as the cold, modern-day realities of adulthood. The song acts as a reminder of a time when fiscal responsibilities and emotional conflict seemed far off. It’s also a call-to-arms for the listener to suspend their disbelief, even just for a minute or two, and recapture this innocent feeling despite the looming dread of a never-ending pile of responsibilities. 

The record’s second half begins with the aforementioned “...” featuring a gentle guitar line that allows the lyrics to set a scene:

I took a step back
When I saw the window cracked
I pulled it shut
And I went back to my room where
I think something’s in my closet
Laughing at me
It’s hard to love
but without it
I won’t fall asleep
I hope someday my comforts
Will be comforting
I’m not sure if life
Is meant to be waiting…

Here, the imagery of an open window sits alongside the familiar scene established in the record’s opening track. As the guitar plays out the same music box melody, we realize the meaning in some of the phrases has shifted. Then, similar to the intro track, the band sweeps in with a bounding instrumental that leaves little time to reflect on the lyrics or the exact changes from their first iteration.

Throughout the next three tracks, the band winds their way from everything as physical as blood-soaked car crashes to things as existential and haunting as cold sweat nightmares. This feels like a good time to point out that each of these songs is masterfully crafted. Whether it’s Stodghill’s emo tapping, Gavin Brown’s buoyant basslines and phenomenal low screams, or Andrew Ferren’s precise drumming, the trio never falters once in their respective contributions. 

These songs all wind their way to the record’s inevitable conclusion on “But Better.” By the time this closing track rolls around, only 20 minutes have passed. On paper, that feels like hardly feels like any time at all, but then you look back and realize the preceding 20 minutes were comprised of life-threatening accidents and existence-altering revelations. Hardly emotionally recharging events. The record’s final song opens with a delicately plucked guitar as Stodghill sets the scene once more. 

I let out a laugh
When I saw the window cracked
I pried it open
But you pulled me back inside
Said “Life’s not kind”
I want to try

These lines depict the album’s cover, revealing the full context of this scenario we’ve been watching unfold throughout the record. After a beat, Stodghill continues with a verse that mirrors the opening track’s lyrics:

There’s something in my closet
Laughing at me
I’ll never love it
Without it
I could fall asleep

Now setting up a clear inverse parallel, Stodghill works his way up to the album’s namesake, singing,

I want to live my life
But better
I’ll face everything
I want to live my life
But better...
I’m tired of waiting.

After this final freeing cry, the group strikes one more resonant chord and lets it ring out for as long as their instruments will allow. As the guitar and bass fade, the same music box that led us into the release now shepherds us off into silence. This twinkling childlike instrumental provides a nice bookend to the album despite how different the two sentiments sitting on either end of the tracklist are. Sure, they may look similar, but the meanings behind these words could not be more different.

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What’s so different about wanting to live your life and wanting to live your life but better? The biggest difference is, in one, you’re merely surviving, but in the other, you are improving. In one, you’re living life for yourself, but in the other, you recognize there’s more than that. It’s one thing to live your life, but it’s another to want to live it better. Striving for improvement is a form of self-actualization, and that’s a far cry from remaining stagnant. 

Sometimes just wanting to live your life in the first place is already an uphill battle. Once you’ve reached the point of wanting to live your life, you are faced with a decision: do you maintain or improve? It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; you have to work your way up the ladder in order to become the most fulfilled version of yourself. 

Wanting to maintain your life is fine; after all, why risk losing something you’ve fought so hard for? But wanting to live your life better is a mission. It’s admirable. It’s never-ending. There’s always something to be working toward and always something that you could be doing better. 

Wanting to live your life but better is hopeful. It’s the realization that you might be making it farther in life than you thought when you were seventeen. It’s the highest form of self-preservation. This is not just the mere animalistic instinct to stay alive, but a uniquely human desire to improve. 

Over the course of I Want To Live My Life, we hear one person’s journey between these two states. On the first song of the record, Stodghill hesitantly sings, “I want to live my life / But I’ll be here waiting.” In the final song, we hear the same person sing, “I want to live my life, but better. / I’m tired of waiting” with full conviction. What makes up the journey between those two points is everything that you hear in between. It’s the car crashes, the chipped teeth, and the concrete. It’s jealousy, regret, and doubt. It’s learning how to navigate life through a series of errors that Stodghill somehow manages to twist into lessons. The end result of all this suffering is a realization. At the end of all this is a reason to live.