Chris Farren – Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Album Review

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Best known as the frontman of Florida indie rock band Fake Problems, one half of pop-punk duo Antarctigo Vespucci, and the powerhouse behind two irreverent, high-energy solo albums, Chris Farren has always had a flair for the dramatic. His work as a songwriter and performer is never *just* about the music (though said music is certainly strong enough to speak for itself if needed). From his contributions to the Craig of the Creek soundtrack (with the show’s composer Jeff Rosenstock, Farren’s longtime best friend and collaborator), to his use of elaborate projected visuals in his live shows, and, let’s just say spirited self-portraits, the non-audio companion pieces have always been as essential to the “Chris Farren Experience” as the music itself. Even without these visual elements, Farren has always been a very illustrative musician, creating vivid scenes that make his songs often feel like short films. It’s easy– often lazy –music writer shorthand to call a song or an album or even a particular musician’s songwriting style “cinematic.” If by “cinematic” one means ‘yeah, I could see this song being used in a movie,’ then the term becomes almost meaningless. But listening to  Death Don’t Wait, I feel confident in this word’s necessity and specificity because Chris Farren has soundtracked the greatest crime drama that never existed. 

Inspired primarily by Bond films and Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack to Trouble Man, Chris Farren has tried his hand at filmmaking– he’s just skipped over the part where an actual film is made. Though Death Don’t Wait does not exist in its full, feature-length, audiovisual form– no script, no actors, no footage –it’s not that far off to imagine it. 

As the album’s title track and only non-instrumental opens with sparkling strings and delicately tapping hi-hat cymbals, you can imagine the opening credits rolling in– “…and featuring the music of Chris Farren” unfolding across a background of rainy city streets at twilight. This track sees guest vocalist and frequent Farren collaborator Laura Stevenson going full Nancy Sinatra, purring over a ‘60s Spectoresque girl group progression with a voice as sweet and slow as honey. Tonally, this opener is a microcosm of the soundtrack as a whole– though it’s evocative of a bygone era, none of it feels outdated or stale. 

While listening to Farren’s soundtrack, I found myself watching the events of the story unfold, beat by beat. Even just looking at the tracklist, the song titles read as a sort of storyboard that maps out the rise and fall of a movie plot. Just the other day I affectionately described the Mission Impossible-esque “Red Wire Blue Wire” as “music to commit a heist to.” “Helicopter Shuffle” kicks off with a fat bassline, which gives our unnamed and unseen heroes a head start on their run from the cops before the drums start rumbling in. “Car Chase!” sounds like, well, exactly what the title would suggest. The moody guitars and suspenseful, rattling snare give “Chris Farren Noir” a “Riders On The Storm” vibe. This lonesome cowboy moment is further proof of Chris Farren’s versatility– he can be both a character actor AND a leading man. 

Farren’s multi-genre influences are apparent throughout the soundtrack. The fantastically titled “Attacked By Dogs” sees a crashing cacophony of horns and drums giving way to what almost sounds like a ska track towards the end, and that ska influence comes through the plucky, dissolving guitars on “Cash Is Heavy” as well. Evoking the ambience of a smoke-filled nightclub, “Here’s Your Disguise” bravely poses the question, “what if The Stranglers tried to make a lyricless bossa nova song?” (Answer: it would fucking slap). In “Night Walk (Harmonic Suite),” three haunting piano notes are repeated ominously over a slow-burning drone, building up a creeping sense of fear before the mournful, dirge-like horns come in. 

The film reaches its climax with “Hot Pursuit,” which kicks off with fluttering surf-rock guitars, a mad-dashing drum beat, and a fierce, doom-portending horn section. This is the turning point, the final showdown, the grand finale. But after our heroes make their great escape, as the slow, forlorn strings and piano notes of  “Cold Pursuit” fade in, we get the sense that it was a pyrrhic victory. This could all be just an assumption, though. With no film to accompany this soundtrack, Farren lets the listener choose their own adventure. Though it might be tempting, on a surface level, to assume that his intention is to parody, Farren’s admiration for his musical and film influences is apparent throughout. The genre tropes he employs are familiar touchstones that give Death Don’t Wait an arc that feels full despite what is deliberately missing. The white page, the darkened screen– these absences that Farren leaves us with are, in their own way, essential to the completed story. They give us– the listeners –the opportunity to fill in the blanks with our own imagination before letting the credits roll. 

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @grace_roso.

The Slow Cancellation of the Future: 70s Cosplay in Modern Pop Music

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Despite only being two years into the decade, the music of the 2020s has already revealed a trend of artists relying on styles that other musicians have established long ago. In his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Mark Fisher described this phenomenon as “The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush.” Our expectations have been lowered and we rely on a formal nostalgia, perhaps, as Fisher speculates, because there’s “an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present.” 

Before Fear of Death was released in 2020, comedian Tim Heidecker had to convince his audience that this was not an elaborate setup — his intention was for this studio album to be taken seriously. “I’m like Dylan,” Heidecker bites, responding to a viewer question during his podcast Office Hours Live. “My name ‘Tim Heidecker’ means Dylan,” he elaborates while his crew chuckle in the background. It’s clear that Tim is not in on the joke. The music video for the titular single on the record is intriguing. In the first 20 seconds, Tim is “showing” the band what cords to play. The camera is directly in his face, but he never acknowledges it. It’s a similar effect to the illusion in documentaries where subjects are aware they’re being filmed, but do their best to pretend to be un-spectated. Shot in 16mm, Tim Heidecker sees himself as a rockstar; one or all of his 70s musical idols at once, a strange showmanship emerges, and it’s a pattern you’ll see throughout the entire record. 

Heidecker has a public playlist on his Spotify titled “Fear of Death,” though it features no songs off his own album. Instead, you’ll find Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” John Lennon’s “Mother,” Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and more. I want to praise Heidecker for wearing his inspirations on his sleeve, but sometimes when an artist says they’re “influenced by” something, what they really mean to say is that they have borrowed from it liberally. If you look up his songs on YouTube, the most popular comments consistently reference other artists. The top comment on “Nothing” compares Heidecker to Harry Nilsson, a prominent singer/songwriter from the 70s. A few comments on “Property” call the album Randy Newman-esque. Did I mention the record also has a cover of “Let It Be”? 

In a Washington Post article, Heidecker said he’s better at sounding like Dylan than himself. “My voice doesn’t have its own character,” he reasoned. Later, the article mentions how Heidecker felt his hair looked similar to “Wings-era McCartney.” In addition to this, reviewers and fans alike had no problem comparing Heidecker’s lyrical ability to that of Paul Simon or Stephen Stills. Is this not a tired precedent? Why are we placing these high accolades onto a comedian whose music career is a hobby, or at the very worst, an after-thought?

Fear of Death promises a pursuit of existential topics, but it has little to no emotional catharsis. Heidecker’s voice is loud, but what it projects is trite lyrics surrounded by equally loud but bland instrumentals. It’s an easy-listening album, but there are no elements that compel you to hear it out. Heidecker fears he lacks a distinct voice, and I believe he uses that as a shield from fully committing to a challenging artistic endeavor, instead settling for something that he can add to his resume, Wikipedia page, or whatever personal book of accomplishments he keeps for himself.

Elsewhere in the music industry, other even more established artists aren't immune to this kind of historical navel-gazing. The most recent albums from Bleachers and St. Vincent both struggle with the same problems. Bleachers lead singer Jack Antonoff also produced St. Vincent’s album, so it's safe to assume Antonoff was juggling both projects at once, and it shows. Both Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night and Daddy’s Home follow the same beats, right down to the album artwork and the costumes. Pop artists are chameleons, shapeshifting into new aesthetics to correlate with the sound of their album — it’s an extra step in branding that’s existed since the beginning of time. However, behind the Bruce Springsteen feature and rogue George Harrison worship, Antonoff reveals his agenda through the yelpy vocals and millennial pop beats. It’s a record tailor-made for alt-pop radio, but it hides behind these distinct influences, pretending to sound bigger than it is.

Antonoff performed some of these songs on Saturday Night Live earlier this year—dressed in cuffed jeans and a leather jacket, he feigns the rockstar aesthetic and sound, without any of the angst or true emotions that fill the songs he’s trying to replicate. There’s a desperation to it. The desire to stand out and be different. Young people don’t notice it because they aren’t familiar with the music it’s referencing. It’s akin to how tweens & teens listen to Lemon Demon and Jack Stauber before they find out who Oingo Boingo and Talking Heads are. Older people are waiting for something better to come along, and with their lowered expectations, they happily take St. Vincent in a Candy Darling wig riffing on a rejected Steely Dan instrumental over another Justin Bieber tune plaguing the radio. 

There’s an issue of class here as well. Both Antonoff and Heidecker come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, respectively. Juxtapose this to Bruce Springsteen (as he is an inspiration to both), who grew up poor in the 50s, which in itself led to a lot of traumas. However, Springsteen tapped into that troubled generational atmosphere as it was in the turbulent process of spiraling down. He earned the title of rockstar by performing with a fearless passion. He believed in what he was singing because he lived it, and the things he didn’t live he observed through the experiences of his peers and fans. He was a natural showman, charismatic, and in the business of projecting a big story. I don’t believe you necessarily have to go through intense hardships in order to write a good song, but in the case of Heidecker and Antonoff, their economic class and shallow life experiences lead to boring records. An isolated life leads to a limited perspective. 

I should also touch on Daddy’s Home a bit more. Annie Clark (St. Vincent) used her father's 12-year incarceration for his role in a $43 million stock manipulation scheme as the crux of this 70s pastiche album. She attempts to be educated about the faults of the prison system and how it affects the black community, but Clark exhibits a clear dissonance when she stumbles through a watered-down reference to Nina Simone and positions black backup singers to sulk about her white father who committed a white-collar crime. Clark, of course, kept this story hidden until journalists forced her hand. “People are flawed, but also are capable of change. We can’t just write somebody off,” Clark said in an interview. To cope, she dropped into a cobbled-together character based on stolen and reappropriated aesthetics. Clark went from a “white-haired, sadomasochist cult leader” to a “dominatrix at the mental institution” to a “Cassavetes heroine” in the span of three album cycles. She attributes this current phase as a tribute to the albums she grew up on, which is the case for all millennial / gen x musicians. There isn’t anything unique about listening to Joni Mitchell and wishing you could be her. 

Artists are perceiving the past as a mythical entity, which is contributing to the slow cancellation of the future. Focusing on aesthetics alone can lead to limited hindsight about an era and its ideals. Through appropriation, these artists are shrinking the possibility for an organic/original sound to emerge. This leads me to the next topic of discussion: Greta Van Fleet. 

Greta Van Fleet is a band from Michigan who is best known for being Led Zeppelin emulators. As this article states: “the music, the costumes, even the backlash against them — is crafted intentionally to appeal specifically to people who are too young to know that they’re derivative and people who are too old to care because they remind them of when they were young. They’re a band designed to be regurgitated by algorithms, worming their way onto “Recommended If You Like…” playlists and nabbing themselves the No. 1 rock album in the country without so much as an original thought. They themselves are still young — but old enough to know exactly what they’re doing.” Greta Van Fleet does not push the world of rock music forward; their art is stagnant and without any new or original ideas, concepts, and styles. There is no authenticity, experimentation, or excitement. They’re gliding into their rising popularity, and with the external increase of 70s cosplay within their peer group, there are no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. 

Whether they're creating rock, pop, or overly-earnest singer-songwriter fare, artists like Greta Van Fleet, Bleachers, and Heidecker take the aesthetics of the 70s and believe that is enough. However, the songwriters of that era implored a strong use of language and narrative. Randy Newman was known for his tongue-in-cheek satires, Harry Nilsson was known for his spontaneous imagination, Joni Mitchell was known for her equally heartfelt and intricate poetry. Excellent writing and a knowledge of how to use figurative language is the core of what makes a song compelling, memorable, and worthy of being passed down to a future generation.

Another hit album of 2021 was An Evening with Silk Sonic. Throughout this release, the duo comprised of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak indulged in a faithful and committed tribute to the R&B genre. Though music videos and lyrical references throughout the album fetishize the 70s, it is clear that their revival of this sound is tongue-in-cheek; they’re aware of how well-worn this aesthetic is. The irony doesn’t absolve the album from fault, but is an indicator of how it was a passion project, never meant to be perceived as anything deeper. However, as Pitchfork mentioned: “any significant level of investment poses the question: When artists invoke music as beloved as Motown and Philly soul, how can anything they create measure up?” 

What is the purpose of 70s cosplay if not to invoke feelings of nostalgia? Even to those of us who were born way after that decade, the sounds and color palates still feel warm and inviting. It’s easier to accept false replications of the past than to conceive of something new. Why should you seek out new genres or singers when you can listen to an established artist that makes you think of being a kid, sitting in the back of your dad's car while he had the classic rock station on? 

What’s worst yet is that this 70s revival refuses to acknowledge the influences artists from the 70s borrowed. Bob Dylan thanks Jimmy Reed and Woody Guthrie for his career, Led Zeppelin wears the influence of Muddy Waters and Skip James on their sleeve, Joan Baez cites Pete Seeger and Odetta as an inspiration. It is true that no one is uniquely individual or without inspiration, but what's different about artists of the 1970s to the ones of the 2020s is that they elevated themselves with these influences while constantly reinventing, experimenting, and being brave enough to let their voice waiver without the clutch of reverb and electronic drum beats.

The culture of nostalgia has reached an evolved form with films, documentaries, and music celebrating pop auteurs. The past already happened. To recreate it is a futile attempt to capture a moment that was never really there. What glamor is there in recycled fashion looks or referenced bass lines? Is there no pride in swallowing your inspirations and channeling a new ambition from them?

It is in my humble opinion that inspiration can be found in idiosyncratic talent and artistic motives. It is more admirable to place recognition in the greatness of creatives before you and try to imbue their philosophy in the voice you project into the world rather than stand in as a cheap knock-off. You don’t have to dress like Marc Bolan and sound like Bowie to be alluring—you just have to possess a relentless passion for performing. Modern artists are so terrified to fail openly, and their music shows it. To do something that hasn’t been done before requires a certain bravery that groups like Bleachers and Greta Van Fleet don’t possess. 

None of these albums will make an impression. They will be forgotten in the same vein of how we remember The Beatles and not the hundreds of copycat bands that came to be as a result of them. These albums are the result of admiration — but it’s not a case of, as Brian Eno stated, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band" where the energy and attitudes were what was desired to replicate. Instead, this modern crop of albums represents the fetishization of aesthetic, recontextualization of the past in a contemporary lens, and carrying a pretense of leveling on the same heights as the artists they’re replicating. The lack of subtlety is tiring. These musicians assign themselves a self-importance because they are aware of the acclaimed arts of the past. The core issue with all of these projects is that they don’t understand the source material. They don’t understand the context in which the art they adore was made, and this self-indulgence prevents cohesion. What purpose does a referential album or gimmick serve in an age where all of history is accessible in three clicks? 

In the past, writers, musicians, and activists operated under a political sentiment of engagement. This is how counterculture was born. But as it stands today, we have no oppositional culture. We’ve surpassed the end of history in terms of chance for political upheaval or drastic societal change, and no one really knows what to do. Nostalgia, though well-worn and bittersweet, is a type of regression when liberally exerted. If artists keep dipping back into the honeypot, we may never witness the future. In order for the future to exist, we must participate in new thoughts and imagination and rid ourselves of styles we weren’t supposed to hold onto this long. 

Kaycie is a high school senior and writer. You can find them on Instagram at @boyishblues.

Feeling It All for the First Time

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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.

Metadata, Alienation, and Music Ownership

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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. 

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?

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

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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.