February 04, 2022

Feeling It All for the First Time

February 04, 2022/ Taylor Grimes

We are coming up on two years of a world-altering event. Two years of learning a new mode of operation. Two years of living alongside death and disfunction on a previously unforeseen scale. We have been witness to horrors and dreads that I could never have conceived of, and we are still subject to them every day. We’ve all learned to cope with this change in different ways, and I’ve only recently begun to recognize my own.

To that end, I’ve learned a great deal about myself over the last two years. I’ve started to recognize my strengths and my faults from a more objective distance. I’ve discovered what makes me powerful and unique. Conversely, I’ve also uncovered things I need to work on and improve. Things I want to work on and improve.

I’ve only recently realized that, over the course of my adult life, I’ve gotten increasingly detached from my feelings. First, it was to build up a protective wall against rejection both romantically and professionally. The romantic side speaks for itself, but I also work in a creative field, and it can feel awful when someone criticizes your thoughts or picks apart something you’ve worked so hard on. Regardless, in both of these cases, there’s nothing worse than putting yourself out there and being met with either indifference or flat-out rejection.

Over the span of years, those feelings, both good and bad, have all faded. At various points, I’d like to think that the gradual disconnect between my head and my heart has aided me immensely. Living through everything we have over the past couple of years has been hard, and being able to compartmentalize all of that trauma has been a method I’ve used to help continue onward. It may not be the right tool, but it is a tool.

But the thing about compartmentalization is that those compartments need to open up eventually.

Once I started taking stock, I realized I was sitting on massive caches of these little compartments. Years and years worth of bottled-up feelings that I’ve been stockpiling. Once I began to realize the scope of these unaddressed emotions, I had no idea what to do next. I’m not sure what I need to do with them or how I can even articulate them. It feels like an almost impossible task.

Despite all this, I’m an optimist. As arduous and improbable as this journey seems, the wonderful part is that being in touch with your feelings brings good just as much as it brings bad. You’re of no use to anyone cold and indifferent, and that’s what the world wants.

Once I started to realize this, I made it my mission to feel things more. First, it was a lot of pain and betrayal. Then it was anger at myself and at the world. Eventually, it scaled up to grappling with systematic problems and figuring out not only how I fit into those, but how I can reject or dismantle them. Ultimately, the conclusion I arrived at is that things may be bleak, but I still have hope. And that is enough.

Sure, you can bottle things up and pass through life. I can’t deny the appeal to that. It’s pragmatic and, in some ways, easier than the alternative. But after a while, you start to feel like a ghost.

So I’ve been grappling with all of this over the past few months. I’ve been trying to improve myself, consciously recognize my own thought patterns, and include myself in my feelings more often. Ironically, I realized that this whole time I’d only been rejecting myself. It’s been a hard process, but it’s work that I finally want to do. It’s work that I owe myself and the people in my life; I want to be better for myself and for them.

Just as I have been coming to terms with this process and found myself standing out over the cliff of all this, something beautiful has happened. I met someone who is sweet, and loving, and smart, and kind, and brilliant, and inspiring, and beautiful, and funny. I really like them, and somehow they really like me. And I don’t feel worthy of it.

I think that this is all happening at the same time for a reason. So I can embark upon this journey with a goal. To continue to feel these feelings and to use love as the carrot on the end of the stick. The same week that this relationship came to fruition, Black Country, New Road released Ants From Up There.

I’m not really a post-punk guy, but this also isn’t a post-punk record. This album has been on my radar since it was announced, but I wouldn’t say I was particularly excited for it. I didn’t listen to any of the singles, and I haven’t been revisiting any of their past work. The band name and album title have just been sitting there in my new music Google doc staring at me unfeelingly in a 12 point Calibri font for months.

This isn’t even really a post about this album. I’m not going to talk about the songs or the lyrics, or the lineup drama, or anything of that nature. Go to Pitchfork for that. This is a post about serendipity.

In listening to Ants, one thing began to emerge; the idea of feelings. It didn’t remind me of the band’s first album (which I liked fine at the time, but didn’t really return to much). For The First Time was artsy and winding and poetic, but it was also dark and mired in itself. Ants From Up There feels like the opposite. While the first album anguished in the details of everyday life, the group’s sophomore album feels like a direct counterpoint. This album is marvelous, soaring, and affirming. It reaches out for something beautiful and external as opposed to looking inward and digging out something dark. But I guess what I’m learning is that you have to do one before you can do the other. You have to do at least some of the hard work before reaping the rewards; otherwise, it all just rings hollow.

This album feels like breaking through the clouds and seeing the world from a new perspective. It’s feeling hope and love for the first time in far too long. It’s returning to your own feelings like the comforting warmth of a friend. It’s exhilarating, and it’s exhausting.

Once I finished the record, I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to just go on about my day.’ That’s something I haven’t felt in ages, but also something that I was lucky enough to have felt once earlier this week after sharing my heart with that same person I mentioned earlier. It reminded me how good it can feel to experience those things. It feels like a grand affirmation to have this album released the same week, and in so many ways, it feels like a sign. It feels like I’m doing the right thing, that I’m moving in the right direction. It feels like I’m ready to love and be loved.

In the wake of this album, I am writing a lot, but I am also speechless. Ants From Up There sounds like the totality of feeling, and for the first time in a long time, I am ready to open myself up to that. Life is going to be hard, but there’s a power to be felt in that admission.

There’s beauty to be witnessed alongside the horror.
There’s love to be held alongside the pain.
There’s triumph to be felt alongside the discord.
That’s what makes it all worth it.

I am awestruck by the size of it
I am small, and I am humbled.
I am daunted, and I am scared.
But I am also ready to open myself up to it.
Finally.

January 24, 2022

Metadata, Alienation, and Music Ownership

January 24, 2022/ Taylor Grimes

Let’s talk about metadata. That’s right, metadata; the least-sexy part of cultivating your offline media library, even for a geek-ass music nerd like myself.

For those unfamiliar, metadata is “data that provides information about other data,” which, yes, I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose as I wrote that. How could you tell? Within the context of your local music library, this includes things like song titles, album names, track numbers, artwork, and everything in between.

See, I first started cultivating my music library when I got an iPod Mini sometime around 2006. Gradually, my iTunes collection blossomed from a handful of Matchbox 20 singles and Weird Al albums into the sprawling 60k-file monstrosity that it is today. Over time, this library has been corrupted, lost, recovered, converted, moved between computers, backed up, digitized, and, most importantly, edited.

It’s the closest thing I have to a documented musical history. Sure, I have last.fm, but that just shows what I listen to and when. This collection of MP3 and ACC files sitting in my iTunes feels representative of my entire musical taste and, by extension, who I am as a person. I have music from every phase of my life: Bandcamp rarities from DIY bands, Myspace-era metalcore demos long since lost to time, a one-for-one replication of my childhood CD collection, and screen recordings of Tiny Desk performances that I’ve painstakingly spliced up into individual songs. It’s a labor of love, there’s no other way to put it.

Aside from the act of obtaining and listening to this music, a seldom-discussed aspect of curating an offline music library is how much work goes into actually organizing it. Not just the structured nest of Artist > Album > Song folders buried deep in my computer’s hard drive, but also the way that iTunes interprets, arranges, and displays these files.

Despite using Spotify almost every day, I’m still hyper-critical of the platform and streaming giants at large. First, there’s the issue of just paying the artists, which, any rational person will agree, is one of the most imbalanced systems in the entire music industry today. There’s also the far more amorphous topic of how streaming has adjusted the way we value and consume music, making it more disposable in the process. It’s also robbed us of things like hidden tracks and any sense of physicality related to our music. This perceived loss is one of the big reasons why vinyl, cassettes, and CDs have all regained popularity in recent years.

Another negative aspect of streaming that I’d like to talk about today is the idea of ownership. The music on your Spotify app is not yours, full stop. That company could go bankrupt, destroy your account, or go down tomorrow, and all would result in the same thing; you losing everything attached to it. All your saved albums, hearted songs, and carefully constructed playlists; gone in an instant.

That’s standard operating procedure for any digital-based company in 2022. You buy a game on Steam? Sure, you “own” it, but if Steam ever goes away, that shit’s gone for good. This is why companies like GOG and Bandcamp have gained extra momentum over the last decade because they offer the consumer a digital purchase without any DRM (digital rights management). That means when you buy a game or an album from those platforms, you can download it, play it, share it with a friend, back it up to a USB, and generally do anything you want with it short of going off to sell it again yourself. Those files are yours, and you are in control.

So how does this apply to Spotify and streaming?

Well, one of the recent downsides I’ve been grappling with in regards to streaming is how out of my control my library feels. God knows I’ve spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours just making playlists on Spotify. For the most part, these playlists only exist on that one platform, and that scares me. By contrast, the playlists in my iTunes library are based on actual files saved directly to my machine, which means they’re in my control. Hell, I can burn those playlists to a CD or export them to Unicode, XML, M3U, or even good ol’ plain text if I wanted to. If you don’t know what all that means, it’s okay. Essentially, even if my computer gets fried and my backups fail, I still have the playlists. This freedom is a massive benefit to cultivating an offline music collection.

This applies to everything outside of playlists too. I can import a CD, download my Bandcamp purchases, or rip a song off Youtube and then craft those files in my image. I can add the album art, adjust the song titles, change the album name, or give the songs track numbers, and all of that is my decision. If this seems overwhelming or doesn’t sound like something you’d do, that’s totally understandable. But when you’ve spent the better part of your life carefully curating and adding on to this collection of files, this freedom means the world.

If I like the physical cover of an album more than the digital one? I can change that. If I want to add a one-off B-side to the end of an album in order to keep the entire release in one place, I can. If I have a remastered version of an album where all the song titles end in “(Remastered),” then I can take that word out of every track and keep the song titles in their original form. Why would I care about this? First off, it looks nice. I’m a control freak, and it feels good to keep these files as clean as possible. Another very simple answer is last.fm.

See, in a way, my last.fm goes hand-in-hand with my iTunes library. My last.fm account might not be as longstanding as my music collection, but it still goes all the way back to 2010. That platform has recorded over a decade of listening history and statistics that I view as priceless. It’s cool to look back and see what I was listening to on a random Thursday in college, or what my listening habits were like over the summer of 2016. There’s value to be had in that kind of information, especially for a music nerd like me.

This leads to genuine anguish when I look at my music history on last.fm and see that I’ve listened to Nevermind by Nirvana a certain number of times, but those play counts are allocated to two different versions of the album; one simply titled Nevermind and a second one titled Nevermind (Remastered). This is aside from the other versions that exist on Spotify like Nevermind (Deluxe Edition), Nevermind (Super Deluxe Edition), and Nevermind (30th Anniversary Super Deluxe). Guys, what are we even doing? At a certain point, this is just bad stewardship of your own musical catalog, and for what? A twelfth demo version of “Something In The Way” to catch runoff streams? No thank you.

Spotify has really screwed up my https://t.co/bQgcmyHejO stats. pic.twitter.com/x8WpuoslEK
— taylor (@GeorgeTaylorG) March 31, 2019

This on its own is frustrating, but where Spotify gets even more cheesy in this metadata conversation is how little autonomy you have in what you want to listen to. To continue the grunge examples, let’s say that you want to listen to Gish by Smashing Pumpkins. Well, I hope you don’t mind listening to the two-disc 2011 Deluxe Edition with 28 tracks because that’s all that exists on Spotify!

In my mind, this destroys the sanctity of the core album experience as originally envisioned by the artist. Sure, you can still listen to tracks 1 through 10 on Gish and experience the album as initially released, but that’s not what Spotify wants. Most importantly, they don’t even give you the choice. Gish as it originally existed in its 1991 form with its ten tracks and non-codeine-colored album art does not exist on Spotify.

To keep using this one album as an example, this problem gets even funnier if you want to listen to those bonus tracks like the killer 8-minute version of “Drown” that ends with an alternate guitar solo, which is inexplicably not playable right now for some unknown licensing reason. You can listen to all the other 27 tracks of Gish (Deluxe Edition), but the last song is just… unplayable.

Sometimes, this even results in instances where an objectively worse remaster of an album (like Soundgarden’s Superunknown) will be the only version available on your streaming service of choice. Want to listen to the songs as they existed in their original form? Well, you can’t! Examples like this are few and far between but still highlight how little choice we have in the music that’s readily available to listen to on these services.

This is a horrible way to interact with music. It hurts the “vision” of the original album and poses more problems than it does conveniences. Sure, for the average music listener, these details are negligible, but when you’ve spent your whole life caring about shit like this, it’s hard not to notice.

At the risk of sounding like a doofus equating music listening with genuine human suffering, I’d like to relate this to Marx’s theory of alienation. For Marx, this theory essentially posits that the further workers are from the end product, the less satisfaction they will find in their work. It’s obviously a lot deeper than that, but that’s the best I got for a one-sentence summary.

If you’re a cog in a machine sitting on a computer all day and you never interact with the thing you’re actually making (or theoretically contributing towards making), what are you actually doing? More importantly, what do you have to draw satisfaction from in your work? Sure, you’re making money so that you can live, but you’re also making more money for someone further above you who’s even more removed from the process. You lose connection to your autonomy, so you become increasingly alienated from the goods and services produced by your labor, eventually estranging you from your own humanity.

Now, look at your streaming library through this lens. Your library is not yours. These files exist to play when called upon, but the entire thing could go away tomorrow, and you’d be left with nothing. Owning these files and having them on a hard drive I can hold in my hands is a satisfying feeling. Knowing that I can change these files, edit their data, and load them onto any device I please is a relief. Sure, there are lots of other things that could go wrong that would lead me to lose this data, but it’s my data to lose, not some mega-corporation.

The same day that I wrote the majority of this 2,000-word rant, the awesome Endless Scroll Podcast uploaded an episode talking about Spotify Canvas, album visualizers, and things of the like. One of the most poignant conclusions made about 33 minutes into the episode by host Miranda Reinert was, “Spotify doesn’t want you to have a library; Spotify wants you to use Spotify and perceive Spotify as music.” And therein lies the problem. It felt serendipitous to hear this the same day that I spent hours articulating my own feelings on the topic.

I write this, riddled with caffeine, not to shame anyone for using Spotify but to get you to think about your music collection. If you care about it, you might want to re-analyze what’s actually yours. When music is as integral to your identity as it is for me, it’s easy to spend hours thinking about this type of stuff. I’ve also spent countless hours doomsday prepping for a world without streaming. It’s a world that seems further away with each passing day, but one I’m willing to hold onto just in case.

Spotify is a bad company for many reasons, and it’s okay to ask for more. I still use Spotify almost every day… that said, if the service went belly-up tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose that much. Would you?

January 17, 2022

The Great Dismal: Falling in Love With Shoegaze and Finding Hope in the Darkness

January 17, 2022/ Taylor Grimes

It’s always odd when a single album is held up as the “definitive” work of a band or even an entire genre. It leads to this interesting phenomenon where prospective fans will become interested in said band or genre, learn that this single work is the de facto entry point, and dive in with skewed expectations. The problem then becomes; what if they don’t like that one album?

Let’s say someone wants to get into Radiohead. They might learn that Kid A is considered the group’s most groundbreaking record and give it a listen. If they don’t like Kid A, they might write Radiohead off as not “for them.” In reality, this hypothetical listener might have enjoyed a different Radiohead album more, and it may only be Kid A that’s not “for them.” There’s no accounting for taste, and there are few (if any) points of consensus when it comes to music.

This exact thing happened to me with shoegaze. It’s easy to see why My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is as lauded as it is, especially when you factor in its influence and historical context. But here’s a controversial sentence: I don’t really like Loveless. I can see the appeal, and I don’t begrudge anyone for digging it, but the record has never quite clicked with me in the way it has with others.

The problem becomes when a single album is cited as the groundbreaking masterwork of a genre, that must also mean that it’s the best, right? It almost feels as if there’s nowhere to go from there but down. That means when I listened to Loveless for the first time and didn’t love it, I thought, “huh, shoegaze must not be for me.” Au contraire. I spent the better part of 2021 immersing myself in shoegaze, eventually hitting an obsessive fever pitch sometime in December. While everyone else was getting holly and jolly in a month that’s usually reserved for my endless supply of holiday playlists, I was listening to some of the most dour shit imaginable and loving it.

I found something in shoegaze, something I couldn’t get anywhere else. While I’ve long been a fan of Greet Death, I hadn’t considered myself a “shoegaze guy” because all my love was allocated to this one band. Something about Greet Death’s macabre midwest lyricism and heavy-as-shit riffs clicked with my brain. For months I listened to their discography on a near-nightly basis. I never found any other bands that even came close until Wednesday dropped Twin Plagues midway through 2021.

Twin Plagues soon supplanted Greet Death as my go-to music for those times when nothing else sounded good. It was a record that lent me some degree of comfort and compassion in a year when I needed those things badly. If you’re curious to read more about Twin Plagues, I covered the album in greater detail in our Album of the Year countdown. For the purposes of this article, the important thing to note is that this record ended up opening the floodgates to a whole host of shoegaze bands. For some reason, Wednesday’s approach gave me a new perspective on the genre and I was able to approach shoegaze with an open mind. As often happens with music I love, my curiosity gave way to obsession.

With this renewed enthusiasm, I dug back through my own history and realized I had more brushes with the genre than I initially realized. I soon discovered that the dream-pop bands I’d been listening to for years like Beach House, Alvvays, and Slowdive were considered shoegaze-adjacent. I traced the genre back to grungy songs of my youth like “Mayonaise” by The Smashing Pumpkins and “Exhausted” by Foo Fighters, which were informed by the genre while it was at its commercial peak. I even learned that recent bands like Gleemer, Holy Fawn, and Clearbody all fit the bill as well. It turned out I’d been enjoying shoegaze for longer than I realized.

Once my mind was re-opened to the genre thanks to Twin Plagues, I went on an absolute tear, slowly uncovering (and subsequently falling in love with) different landmark albums throughout the genre’s history. I spent weeks obsessing over the bouncy Cure-inspired flavor of DIIV’s Oshin. I wrapped myself in the comforting crush of Cloakroom’s Time Well. Hell, even this silly TikTok got me to dig through Hum’s back catalog, and that’s not something I would have even considered a year ago. It’s been a blast.

This is all a (very long) preamble to talk about my latest and deepest obsession: Nothing’s fourth studio album, The Great Dismal. This is a record I listened to a couple of times when it was first released in 2020, but I only recently rediscovered thanks to this personal shoegaze renaissance. An unattentive or cursory listen to The Great Dismal will reveal many standard trappings of the genre; fuzz, feedback, and far-off vocals. Still, something about this record kept drawing me back in. At first, it was “Famine Asylum,” which opens with a burst of guitar distortion that rears its head up through the track like a powerful stallion. Then one day, while on a run, I caught myself singing the chorus of “Catch a Fade.” Soon after that, I became transfixed by the cathartic build of “Blue Mecca.”

Gradually, individual pieces of this album began to reveal themselves to me, and before I knew it, I was listening to the whole thing in full because every song hit a different fold of my brain. As I kept listening, individual lyrics and more subtle instrumental aspects slowly emerged from the dark swirl.

I think that slow unveiling is a huge reason why I kept gravitating towards The Great Dismal and why I’m writing about it now. Once the few killer riffs, earworm choruses, and bizarre samples become commonplace, individual words begin to unveil themselves. First, it’s just a single phrase that rises above the dreamy swirl like “Feed me grapes” or “Innocence preserved by death,” but soon, deeply poetic and philosophical sentiments appear from the ether. The aforementioned “Blue Mecca” hinges on a repetition of “Yesterday is a long way down / Leviathan but can't be found,” which I find both achingly beautiful and spiritually provocative. It’s also sung over a gorgeous crescendoing post-rock guitar which feels tailor-made for my taste.

Elsewhere on the album, there are musings like, “It’s amazing that my shell has kept its shape,” which embody a sort of ideological physical resilience. It’s snapping to in the midst of chaos, unplugging, and taking stock of your own being. Lines like this stand out like a lighthouse offering respite to weary sailors. It’s a nine-word observation that carries the same self-assured punch as the entirety of “This Year” before delving back into the depths.

Occasionally the group turns their gaze outward, like on “April Ha Ha,” where lead singer Domenic Palermo sings, “Isn't it strange / Watching people / Try and outrun rain?” which comes across as a poignant observation on the futility of denialism. In other places, Nothing prod at themselves, singing, “So stumble through / A work of art / Something simple and defeating from the start.” Lines like these speak to the futility of creating anything right now, given what we are all facing down.

On top of these incredible lyrics, the more I learned about Nothing and the history of this album, the more I found myself fascinated. Recorded in February of 2020 at the very beginning of quarantine, the band essentially sealed themselves in the studio to record this album. As the world outside slowly unfurled, Nothing crafted these crushing riffs and honed these cutting observations. It felt like a probe, investigating the human condition from a one-of-a-kind vantage point that has now long since passed us by. This is all on top of a tumultuous history of wrongful imprisonment, genre pivots, lineup changes, and general tragedy. At a certain point, recording an album while teetering on the brink of a global pandemic seems par for the course for a group who self-describes themselves as a “notoriously unlucky band.”

Side-note, the hazmat suit press photos that came out of this album cycle are downright iconic.

The Great Dismal bills itself as an exploration of “existentialist themes of isolation, extinction, and human behavior in the face of 2020’s vast wasteland.” In regards to its relation to the swamp of the same name in southeast Virginia, the band explains, “The nature of [the swamp’s] beautiful, but taxing environment and harsh conditions can’t ever really be shaken or forgotten too easily.”

That’s another reason I find myself pulled towards this album. While 2020 was one thing, we currently find ourselves on the brink of something potentially worse. That uncertainty has been plaguing my mind for the last few months, and I’ve ironically found some level of solace in the soundscapes of shoegaze. These songs mirror my internal landscape; dark, rocky, and not entirely forthcoming. They’re not nihilistic per se, but they still acknowledge the darkness that we find ourselves in. One of the reasons I essentially swapped my holiday playlists for shoegaze this past season is that it felt ingenuine to be celebrating or forcing warmth at a time when the world feels like it’s falling apart.

There’s plenty to be angry and upset about out in the world. Every day we face down fascism, racism, impending climate collapse, a worldwide plague, and an indifferent government operating an ever-growing police state. Even in the face of all that, I think it’s important to hold on to some sense of hope. If we don’t have hope, what’s it all for? The songs on this record may be sonically dismal, but they’re not hopeless. That’s the type of energy I hope to maintain this year.

On reading that, you might think that striving to maintain a disposition of anything sided with “dismal” might sound less-than-optimistic, but I don’t view it that way. Large swaths of our reality are tainted by abject horror, and we can’t shy away from that. Pretending things don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Things are bleak, terrifying, and dismal, but in the face of all this horror, there’s still a world worth fighting for.

January 11, 2022

Colleen Dow – Bumbum | Single Review

January 11, 2022/ Taylor Grimes

Blanketed in soft layers of reverb, the guitar intro of “Bumbum” is an invitation to a dream. A much-needed lullaby for the time when it’s a little bit too past your bedtime. Here, in the third single under their own name, Colleen Dow muses on a midnight daydream of falling asleep in a warm white room, listening to city sirens while wrapped in sheets and someone else’s embrace. It’s a fantasy I could only describe as “everything I could ever ask for.”

But it’s not meant to last. Even before the first verse comes to a close, Dow starts having doubts about the staying power of this situation. The guitar is joined by bass, drums, and a plunky piano that simultaneously maintain the bedtime tempo while creating a march. It’s giving pacing around your kitchen at one a.m. waiting for the water for your sleepytime tea to boil.

The song is a move away from the syrupy indie-punk of Dow’s main band Thank You, I’m Sorry towards a more intimate and inward sound inflicted by bands like Postal Service and Now, Now. Together with producer Abe Anderson, they’ve crafted a sonic treat that allows Dow’s personality as a songwriter to shine through these influences.

The second half of “Bumbum” is where the lyrics begin to hit a little *too* close to home for me. If the first verse is a cozy dream, the second verse is a rude wake-up call from Dow’s internal critic. Their fantasy turns to a vision of abandonment, loss, and fear of waking to find your partner’s bags packed so they can flee. Worse even, Dow begins to wonder if these anxieties are mutual.

Look, I’m no stranger to imagining worst-case scenarios and projecting them onto my partner's. I just wasn’t expecting to feel called out about it today. It is nice to know that the person I usually trust with playlist recommendations on Tik Tok has the same insecurities as me.

Historically, the kind of music I would compare to an anxiety attack involves a lot of screaming and thrashing guitars—the sort of thing you can see coming from miles away. But I’m actually pretty good at keeping anxiety attacks to myself. Sure, I’ll talk the ear off of anyone who will listen, but I mean this more in a physical sense. I wring my hands, I clench my jaw, and I carry it all in my chest. The choruses of “Bumbum” are an incredibly accurate representation of the feelings inside of my body. The tension of my chest lives in this bassline. Bum bum goes my beating heart. Even the layer of acoustic guitar is in rhythm with the wringing of my hands.

“Bumbum” feels like a reflection of both my physical and mental state at my most anxious. It’s as if Dow took my own desires, fears, and insecurities and wove them into a pop song. That may not be an experience most listeners would willingly flock to but, in addition to being catchy as heck, it really is incredibly comforting to have these feelings echoed back at me. In this way, “Bumbum” feels like an anxiety attack and a security blanket at the same time. It’s the sheets in a warm white room I look forward to wrapping myself in for the rest of the winter.

Cailen Alcorn Pygott is a writer, musician, and general sadsack from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He’ll tell you even more about his anxieties on his band No, It’s Fine.’s album I Promise. Tell him how brave you think that is on Twitter @noitsfinereally and on Instagram @_no_its_fine_.

December 31, 2021

The Year In Music: 2021 Month By Month

December 31, 2021/ Taylor Grimes

Back in 2018, I fell ass-backward into monthly new release roundups. This was spurred by a better-than-normal crop of January albums and soon evolved into a self-issued challenge. Could I write interesting and insightful descriptions about eight albums each month? It turns out the answer was yes, I could! It proved to be a fruitful experiment that allowed me to write candidly in short-form about everything I loved as I was enjoying it. From brand-new discoveries to the latest records from bands I was already following, I loved being “up” on new music throughout 2018 and documenting my excitement somewhere concrete. Those posts now read like a time capsule for where I was and who I was each of those months. While it was freeing to break the bounds of this site’s typical review format, it was also tiring, and I had no desire to do it again… until this year.

In January of 2021, we received a great crop of releases, including but not limited to Beach Bunny, Shame, and Cheekface. January is also a time where the music industry is in a (relative) lull as musicians and journalists alike are recuperating from the holidays and getting back into the swing of things. It felt like nobody was really talking about or celebrating these records, so I went ahead and filled the gap. Thus, another monthly tradition was born.

After two years off from these types of single-paragraph reviews, it was refreshing to jump back into this monthly tradition. I don’t think I’ll do it again next year, but it was fun (and often challenging) to try to get these roundups out in a timely and relevant manner each month. This post is simply a compendium of every monthly review roundup from 2021 so you can look back and see what I was excited about each month. Here’s hoping there’s something new here that you haven’t heard of or seen a million times on every publication’s album of the year list. Cheers and thanks for reading along this year.