Khaki Cuffs – 3rd and Long | Single Premiere

Knowing when to end something is hard.
Knowing how to end something is even harder. 

Khaki Cuffs were a Delaware-based emo band that existed from 2017 to 2020. While the group started (as so many do) with a series of rough-around-the-edges demos and scrappy recordings, they had just begun to break through to the larger emo scene in April of 2020 with the release of their self-titled album. Obviously, the ongoing global pandemic prevented Khaki Cuffs from touring on the record, but that didn’t stop them from gaining a sizable number of fans over the last year. 

Khaki Cuffs was worth its weight in emo gold. The record effortlessly waded from screamo wails to affirmative revelations in a matter of minutes. Outside of the music, the band had some of the best merch in the game and went viral on places like TikTok and Twitter more times than I can count. Simply put, they were doing everything right. They tapped, they riffed, they got heavy as shit, but despite all this, they still made the difficult decision to call it wraps on the project by the end of 2020. 

Now, nearly a year after the release of their breakthrough album, the duo, comprised of Brody Hamilton (guitar, drums, vocals) and Drew Rackie (bass), have remastered and reissued their self-titled, completely redone from the ground up. The gorgeous vinyl, courtesy of Chillwavve Records, features new album art and contains one extra song that acts as the record’s new de facto closer. This brings us to “3rd and Long,” the final Khaki Cuffs song, which we have the honor of premiering here today.

“3rd and Long” begins with a hilarious clip from a Delaware state hearing in 2019 about Newarks’ anti-partying law. Samples like this have been a staple of the band’s discography for as long as they’ve been creating music, so it only feels right that their final song would begin with such a snippet that also pays homage to their home state. Similarly, “3rd and Long” has been a staple of the band’s live set for almost two years now, so this song finally seeing the light of day is truly a poetic full-circle moment.

This sample gives way to a propulsive emo instrumental that will immediately get your head bobbing along as if you were in a packed basement show. As the instrumental careens forward, Hamilton airs out their insecurities with lyrics that are equal parts regretful and uncertain. 

After another hard-charging instrumental push, a banjo emerges to accompany the second verse, echoing previous tracks like “how to turn your emotional anguish into cold hard cash.” This use of banjo encapsulates Khaki Cuff's dynamic sound within the emo realm and feels like something that only this band can pull off so well. 

The group hits us with one more chorus, and then the song drops out into a rolling instrumental stretch that paves the way for one final screamo outburst. As Hamilton rattles off a stream of consciousness in their unmistakable shrill wail, it feels like a reminder of what makes this band great. The way Khaki Cuffs manage to transition from boppy midwest emo to raw screamo confessionals has always been impressive.

Soon after this screamo passage, the instrumental snaps into place in the most satisfying way. The band manages to regain their composure just long enough to hit the listener with a hypnotic singalong bridge that carries the song out. And just like that, Khaki Cuffs is no more. Long live Khaki Cuffs.

“3rd and Long” drops on streaming platforms tomorrow, and Khaki Cuffs’ self-titled record is available for pre-order now through Chillwavve Records.

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. 

The Best of April 2021

Porch beer indie rock, surprise-released ska, and apocalyptic anti-capitalist sentiments make up the best releases of April.

Ratboys - Happy Birthday, Ratboy

Topshelf Records

For a day typically filled with fibs, fakeouts, and general tomfoolery, Happy Birthday, Ratboy is no joke. Surprise released on April 1st, the fourth album from Ratboys is a celebratory and reflective recreation of their debut EP RATBOY. There are gorgeous pedal steel contributions, well-observed slice-of-life portraits, and tales of elderly neighborhood cats. The second side of the album finds the band collecting long-unreleased tracks and rarities, all capped off by a sunny new song, “Go Outside.” Happy Birthday, Ratboy is continuing proof that ten years in, Ratboys are some of the greatest (and hardest working) ever to do it. 

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! 

Constellation Records

Godspeed You! Black Emperor has always been a punk band in spirit disguised as a post-rock band in practice. While they are technically instrumental rock, the message behind their music was always lying in plain sight in the form of sampled field recordings, album art, coded song titles, and the occasional interview. In the case of G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, the group released a manifesto featuring a list of demands ranging from dismantling the prison system to taxing the rich. They’re anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian, and those topics are a lot to break down without any concrete lyrics. 

Despite their status as the favorite band of Rate Your Music Boyfriends® the world over, Godspeed really is that good. They’ve become a benchmark for an entire genre, and that doesn’t happen by accident. The group’s latest album is centered around two twenty-minute tracks, each punctuated by shorter six-minute songs. The result is a powerful and moving 52-minute run time that ends on a delicate but (surprisingly) uplifting note. 

Wild Pink - 6 Cover Songs

Royal Mountain Records

I love Wild Pink. I also love a good cover song. Throughout 6 Cover Songs, Wild Pink bandleader John Ross culls together a half-dozen tracks that suit every style and tempo of music captured on A Billion Little Lights from earlier this year. Following up one of 2021’s best heartland indie rock albums with a collection of covers two mere months later is an unexpected move, but I suppose in retrospect, 2016’s 4 Songs and 2019’s 5 Songs had set out a clear pattern. What’s more, the song selections are nothing short of excellent. There are some artists who feel like a shoo-in for this type of thing: Springsteen and Coldplay, echoing recent covers by Waxahatchee and Hovvdy, respectively. There are also some batshit crazy wild swings like Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen that appeal to my inner poptimist and are pulled from various comps over the years. Perhaps most notably, there’s a 49-second cover of the Jeopardy theme song plopped smack-dab in the middle of the tracklist that acts as a sort of pleasant, wandering interlude. Show me any other artist who can do that.

Jeff Rosenstock - SKA DREAM

Polyvinyl Record Co.

Jeff Rosenstock announcing a ska rendition of his latest album on April Fool’s Day was funny. Actually following through and dropping it on 4/20 was even funnier. Falling back on the ska-based instincts from his Bomb The Music Industry days, SKA DREAM is a complete track-for-track re-recording of 2020’s NO DREAM, and it’s glorious. For what could have just been a fun, jokey novelty, the songs work shockingly well in this new context. There are skank-worthy “pick it up’s” on “Airwalks (Alt),” a woozy dub breather in the form of “Horn Line,” and even a Grey Matter-esque hardcore breakdown on “S K A D R E A M.” Plus, with guest contributions ranging from PUP and Deafheaven to ska mainstays like Jer Hunter and Fishbone, SKA DREAM is impressively diverse, shockingly faithful, and wonderfully inventive. 

Remember Sports - Like a Stone

Father/Daughter Records

The resting state for the fourth album from Remember Sports is unwavering boppy indie rock. As they grew from emo basement shows and rough-around-the-edges recordings, Like a Stone sees a band evolving into a finely-oiled version of what came before. Thriving in the space between the jangly country-tinged Ratboys and the confessional bedroom rock ethos of Adult Mom, this collection of tracks strikes a perfect mix between emotional and easy-going. It’s breezy springtime music that isn’t afraid to shy away from the harder feelings of life. 

Spirit of the Beehive - ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

Saddle Creek

The world is sick, and we are the ones who have poisoned it. More specifically, capitalism has taken in, used up, and discarded Mother Earth for its short-sited pursuits. These heartless, unfeeling corporations have perverted and discarded our home, all in the name of profit and appeasing shareholders. Much like the new Godspeed record, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is an album mired in the failings of the modern world. It’s a disorienting, uneven, and uneasy listen designed to emulate the feeling that comes from thinking too long about the system in which we are forced to exist. As sampled commercials punctuate the band’s electro-psych indie rock, one can’t help but wonder if we’re witnessing the death throes of a dying empire. By the time the record is over, it genuinely seems like death is letting the system off easy.

PONY - TV Baby

Take This To Heart Records

When I first heard “WebMD” back at the end of 2020, all I could think was, ‘where has PONY been all my life?’ Effortlessly catchy, disarmingly personable, and scarily relatable, PONY spends a vast majority of their debut album cranking out tightly-refined grunge-pop tunes in the vein of Charly Bliss or Colleen Green. The songs glitter and glisten, accurately reflecting the album art’s sugary sweet bubblegum pink color. The combination of Sam Bielanski’s sharp vocals over the fuzzed-out guitar proves to be a beguiling mix that will keep you coming back for more like a bowl of candy that you just can’t seem to keep yourself from snacking on by the handful.

BROCKHAMPTON - ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE

RCA Records

Even BROCKHAMPTON themselves wouldn’t deny they’ve hard their fair share of ups-and-downs. After a prolific three-album-run in 2017 led to high-profile lineup changes and a couple of rocky follow-ups, America’s favorite boyband is back and better than ever with ROADRUNNER. Welcoming a host of collaborators from Danny Brown to JPEGMAFIA, this record sees the collective leaning into a more West Coast style of rapping that suits them well. Each member has enough space to croon, spit bars, and produce without stepping over each other fighting for the spotlight. The result is arguably the most cohesive and crafted collection of songs the group has ever put out. 

Hey, Ily - Internet Breath

Lonely Ghost Records

When I sat down to listen to new music on Thursday night, I started with Internet Breath. That’s the kind of blind faith jump I like to take every once in a while, and boy did it pay off in spades here. Bearing a unique style of chiptunes-flavored emo, Internet Breath Is a six-track 17-minute excursion that defaults to catchy singalong hooks but occasionally vaults all the way up to a hard-hitting wall of distorted screamo. While emo can quickly wear out its welcome (even in 17-minute chunks), the electronic elements give this record a unique angle that feels refreshing from what’s going on in the rest of the scene. As the chiptune beats and autotuned singing depict a world of digital heartbreak, the electronics deftly shift between supplementary elements within the tracks to vital driving forces. A necessity.

Quick Hits

Noods - Blush - Effortlessly charming indie-pop bangers.

Lil Yachty - Michigan Boy Boat - An ice-cold, offbeat, and feature-packed “for the streets” tape from everyone’s favorite bead-adorned rapper.

Young Stoner Life - Slime Language 2 - Another collaborative compilation from Young Thug’s record label with Young Thug and Gunna serving as the Iron Man and Captain America-like figureheads. 

Taylor Swift - Fearless (Taylor’s Version) - A complete re-recording of the seminal pop star’s sophomore album with bonus tracks acting as the cherry on top of a (slightly tiring) near-two-hour listen.

Portugal. The Man - Oregon City Sessions - A long-lost 2008 concert film from Portugal. The Man comprised of one-take-only live tracks from their first three albums that did my PTM fanboy heart good. 

Sharon Van Etten - epic Ten - Disc one, a tenth-anniversary celebration of Sharon Van Etten’s sophomore album. Disc two, a track-for-track version of the same album with covers from everyone to Fiona Apple, IDLES, Shamir, and more!

Field Medic - plunge deep golden knife - It’s more Field Medic. 

The Berries - Throne of Ivory (Singles & B​-​sides) - Jaunty, jangly indie country that pairs perfectly with porch beers and wistful summer evenings. 

4AD - Bills & Aches & Blues - In celebration of their own 40th birthday, the longstanding indie label released this comp featuring current signees covering classic hits from alums.

Tilian - Factory Reset - The Dance Gavin Dance frontman takes center stage on his fourth alt-rock solo outing.

Trousdale - Look Around - Gorgeous harmonies and delicate sentiments make up this four-track folk-pop outing.

The Armed - ULTRAPOP - The once-anonymous punk band from Detroit that isn’t afraid to show their teeth while flexing their muscles on this bristling and artsy hardcore release. 

Dinosaur Jr - Sweep it Into Space - a shreddy, distorted return to form from one of the last(?) bastions of the grunge era. 

(T-T)b - Suporma - The first time I ever heard chiptunes, the genre blew my mind. Rock music and video game sounds? Suporma recaptures that magic with a slight emo twist. 

Origami Angel - Gami Gang - The sophomore double album from the emo duo with one of the strongest discographies in the scene. 

Manchester Orchestra - The Million Masks of God - Sad indie rock for emo dads.

Rosie Tucker - Sucker Supreme - Chill, folky, Sunday morning indie that (shockingly) wound up on Epitaph. 

Teenage Fanclub - Endless Arcade - Illusionary tunes oscillating from laid-back Silver Jews Americana to dirty garage rock.

girl in red - if i could make it go quiet - Norway’s answer to Billie Eilish unleashes her long-awaited debut album packed with heartfelt bedroom feelings. 

Gojira - Fortitude - Fist-balled, horns-in-the-air rock from the French metal quartet. 

DJ Khaled - Khaled Khaled - Look man, it’s DJ Khaled. There will probably be some breezy summer hits, some cool features, and some obnoxious adlibs.