Brady – You Sleep While They Watch | Album Review

On some level, it would be a disservice to call Brady “Greet Death 2.0,” given that the only shared member between the two projects is vocalist/guitarist Sam Boyhtari. Even still, Boyhtari’s voice is so unique that, when placed over a heavy stoner rock rumble, it’s hard not to hear similarities between the two. If anything, that comparison is a high compliment, given that I love Greet Death more than any reasonable person should. The Michigan shoegazer’s latest release, New Low, saw them growing sonically, artistically, and literally as bassist Jackie Kalmink joined, rounding the group out to a solid four-piece. As expected with a band as good as Greet Death, the results paid off in a phenomenal collection of songs that sprawl into multiple exciting new directions. That said, for die-hard fans like myself, the EP’s mere 21 minutes was not enough. I wanted to be immersed. I want to live in Greet Death’s world. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised with You Sleep While They Watch, it came out of nowhere and offered a more full-length way to scratch that itch. 

The elevator pitch for the band is taking Boyhtari’s distinctive croon and miserablist sensibilities, but placing them over something new, independent from his other project. Fans of Greet Death will still feel at home here, as most of the LP hovers around a baseline heavy rock sound. What’s surprising is just how much Boyhtari has to say and how he presents it. In Greet Death, there’s a focus on molten guitar licks, and an assumed nihilistic viewpoint that comes standard issue for most shoegaze bands. Here, Boyhtari reveals more about his inner workings than ever before. The songs feel more like dispatches from distant but familiar corners of our world, with Boyhtari directly reporting things he sees and then telling us how they affect him. Throughout the process, we’re let further behind the curtain than Greet Death has ever allowed. 

Much like the writing on his other project, songs like “Radon Blues” still center around a catchy but ultimately abstract phrase that listeners can either project their own interpretations onto or simply treat as an earworm. But to really understand this record, one should experience it front-to-back in full. On one end of the album, you’ll find “Twist The Knife,” a sludgy opener that drives a fish hook into the listener, keeping them entranced for the remaining 40 minutes. At the tail end of the LP, you’ll find a cathartic payoff in the record’s crown jewel, “Catherine.” But let’s start at the very beginning. 

“Twist The Knife” begins by depicting a scarred but ultimately true relationship. In just a few lines, this song deftly captures what it feels like to exist in love within the crumbling utopia of 2022. 

Let’s go for a drive
Scratch our names into the weeping night
Under lidless skies
Kiss me beneath the neon lights
Everything is fine
In the shadow of the great high-rise
Love will never die
I believe that’s what they’ll advertise

In this opening verse, the jagged edge of commercialism literally overshadows love. There’s both a desperation and an immediacy to the way our narrator describes this situation. The feeling of holding on to love for dear life is palpable, the crass indifference of the world threatening to undermine the very foundation of its connective power at any moment. 

The second verse of the song moves on to equally hefty topics, alluding to police brutality and the larger sense of cultural unease that we have all felt in recent years. 

Lyrically, both “Family Photos” and “Future Now” play out like protest songs. The former finds itself mired in the serialistic violence embedded in the fabric of our culture. It lays out a litany of offenses and violent imagery, eventually breaking off into a searing guitar solo. “Future Now” also reads like a revolutionary text, especially as it ends with Boyhtari repeatedly shouting “NOW!” over a triumphant and proggy rock riff.

Just as signaled by the title of Dixieland, you can still tell that Boyhtari has spent most of his life growing up near the car capital of the world. Roughly half a dozen references to specific car brands are sprinkled through these songs, giving the lyrics a sort of inescapable commercialistic bent. References like these, and even individual terms like “footage” and brand names like “Red Bull” poke out of the lyrics, granting Boyhtari an impressive economy of words. The best example of this is found on ”Power Suck,” where a bar like “Ford-tough, fucking clown” does so much with so little. In just four words, you can picture the exact kind of person Boyhtari is disgustedly writing about. 

My personal favorite example of this descriptive power comes in “Catherine,” as our narrator recounts an acquaintance making a racist comment, getting called out, and going back to Bloomfield Hills. If you’ve never lived in Michigan, Bloomfield Hills is essentially the wealthiest, most upscale neighborhood in Metro Detroit, perched about 30 minutes outside of the city proper. It’s very white, very rich, and (surprise) very racist. While you can probably pick that up via context clues, anyone in the know will probably get a quick laugh and a quick read of what kind of person this is. This allows Boyhtari to paint a surprisingly immersive scene and populate it with very specific characters, all with a single phrase. 

There are also telltale signs of fascism found throughout this album. There are references to incarceration, SWAT teams, high school drug-sniffing dogs, and police shootings. It’s an unflinching look at our world, crystallized, and reflected back at us through a warped, smoky funhouse mirror. 

Smack dab in the middle of the tracklist, “Power Suck” is a dustbowl crusher that gives off the same feeling as a Protomartyr track. The song’s lyrics eventually arrive at the name of the album, which Boyhtari prods the listener with a few times, provoking them into a meditative trance as the instrumental slowly unwinds. 

While it’s not all veiled condemnation and provocations, by the time “Big Future” rolls around at the record’s midpoint, It’s easy to find yourself disarmed. On my first listen of this song, as the lyrics were laying out lines like “I believe in the ease of destruction,” I realized that, up until this point, I had no idea what this guy actually believed in. You can tell a lot about a band through their lyrics, stage presence, and online interactions. Greet Death have always placed an emphasis on embodying a sort of nihilistic outlook above all else. They literally have an album called New Hell; you don’t go there expecting upbeat pop songs. Greet Death is also a very funny band whose stage presence deliberately undercuts the crushing weight of their music. My point is I’ve spent years following this band, hundreds of hours spinning their music, and I couldn’t tell you one concrete belief that Sam Boyhtari holds. That’s okay, I can make a fair number of assumptions based on the evidence, but it’s fascinating to hear him lay things out clear as day on this song. 

These statements of personal belief are punctuated by a chorus that just oozes a sort of jangly new wave sensibility. By the end of the seven-minute cut, Boyhtari breaks into an artsy staccato delivery before throwing to a rolling instrumental that allows Kacey Keith’s hard-knocking bass to take center stage.

By this point in the record, you’re pretty deep in the band’s dark desert trance. It’s here where they expertly embed “Radon Blues,” a master class in melody that could have easily fit in on the hypnotic back-half of New Hell. Much like “Entertainment,” this song begins with a lackadaisical strum before majestically picking up into a full-band trot. This picturesque instrumental keeps pace underneath flashes of evocative single-line poetry. Once the song’s title is introduced, the band drops back to just the guitar, now plucking a gorgeous, arid riff for a short instrumental break. After a bleak middle section, “Radon Blues” launches into a beautiful passage with a transfixing climax that rivals the best Greet Death song. 

From here, it feels like the album could go anywhere. What the band opts for is a rumbling and meditative two-minute instrumental called “Black Horse.” Presumably the figure depicted on the cover, this track is haunted and dusty, rumbling with a dark unease like a Hex-era Earth track. This instrumental paves the way for the epic 9-minute closer “Catherine.”

As mentioned above, “Catherine” is yet another song concerned with overtly heavy topics. While Greet Death tend to be mired in over-the-top hellish metaphors, this song directly depicts the new hell happening on earth every second of every day. A family death and reverberations of addiction. A local police shooting and unmistakable traces of racism in your community. One by one, these scenes play out, pass by, and wash over the listener, burying them in a weighted blanket of anxiety and dread. The lyrics essentially jump back and forth between the details of this police shooting and the aftermath of a family death, interweaving the two stories and urging the listener to connect parallels in the process. In one of Boyhtari’s most overt lyrics ever, he roots the song in proper nouns, memorializing Hakim Littleton with sorrow as he plainly states, 

I called my sister back, July 10th
She just got home from a protest
Another cop just shot a young man dead
He was twenty, his name was Hakim Littleton

Halfway through, the song drops out to just the guitar, allowing Boyhtari to deliver the story's pivotal moment at his aunt’s funeral. 

And at the funeral I was weak
Not because the body stared at me
But from the father’s homily
When he said that she had achieved something
That she found beauty, she found peace
She was giving, she had everything
I watched them lower her deep
And couldn’t help but think she left us nothing

Immediately after these sentiments, a squeal of guitar feedback kicks up, along with a slow drum build. As the instrumental mounts and the static swirls, you can practically feel the edges of your vision go dark. Just as the abyss begins to circle, a guitar solo erupts, ensnaring the listener and dragging them down into the depths. For the next two minutes, the band takes turns building around this instrumental, stretching the bounds of the song into different directions before disintegrating into feedback and tapering off for the album’s final 60 seconds.

It’s a gorgeous, all-encompassing song and a powerful thing to take in. “Catherine” is an odyssey that exhausts you and also acts as a firm period mark on one of the best debut LPs I’ve heard in a long time. 

While Greet Death offers a borderline-Doomer examination of feelings (or lack thereof), Brady is more like a series of observations. Gradually, the inner workings of our narrator are revealed, ultimately arriving at this dual-pathed narrative in the final song that offers little resolution but lots of catharsis. And I don’t mean to keep comparing the two projects; it’s just such a knee-jerk reaction as someone who’s already a fan. 

There is a host of talented musicians behind Boyhtari, and I cannot give enough credit to how well the group collectively fleshed out such a defined corner of the heavy music world. If Greet Death is a project about depicting hell on earth through veiled analogies, Brady is an unflinching look at that same reality with a slightly more realist lens. These lyrics lean into abstraction in a unique way that allows Boyhtari to shine as a songwriter. These songs extend off nicely into the Greet Death extended universe, but still feel like a distinct ecosystem that works towards the same goal from a different angle. Even though, at times, the outlook of both projects is equally dismal, sometimes it’s just nice to hear another side of someone you’ve spent so much time listening to. You Sleep While They Watch offers a more profound insight into one person's semi-hopeless view of a bluntly-hopeless world. 

Whether it’s Greet Death or Brady, the seminal question at the center of Boyhtari’s work has always been, “how do you continue despite it all?” Throughout this album, Boyhtari finds solidarity in admitting he doesn’t have a grasp on the answer any more than we do. At least we’re in it together. 

The State of Pop Music

Stop me if I sound old. 

As we find ourselves on the precipice of fall, I defy you to tell me what the “Song of the Summer” this year was. I know that’s a nebulous term that can range from something as concrete as the most-streamed song in a three-month window to something as personal as your favorite song of the season. In fact, some people insist the Song of the Summer doesn’t even need to be released this year, a categorization that I personally reject. And that’s kinda what I wanted to talk about: where are the songs this year? Hell, what are the songs this year?

Sure, I have my fair share of summer bops I’ve had on repeat, but these are mostly smaller songs from indie labels and DIY acts. It might be hard to believe, but not too long ago, I was “tapped in” to popular music. My annual summer playlists were vast tapestries of culturally-relevant hip-hop and vibrant pop tunes. Back then, it felt like there was ubiquity to these songs, which meant that the playlists practically made themselves. You heard these songs coming out of car windows and venue speakers. You saw clever lines turned into memes, and music videos became internet-wide events. Now? I have to go to Billboard just to see what’s charting because I’m that far out of the loop. I guess what I’m saying is I used to be ‘with it,’ but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too.

Maybe I am just Grandpa Simpson-ing, but I think there’s something deeper going on here. Just look back at the oft-cited summer of 2016 and compare it to this year’s offerings. Six years ago, summer gave us (arguably the last great) landmark albums from big-name acts like Kanye and Drake. DRAM had “Broccoli,” and Rae Sremmurd had “Black Beatles.” Gucci was home, and Frank Ocean was back. Travis Scott and Schoolboy Q were mounting their careers with Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight, and Blank Face. Chance the Rapper followed up his smash hit Acid Rap with the great-but-not-as-good Coloring Book. Young Thug was on a tear of stellar EPs, and Lil Uzi made himself a household name with Vs. The World. Both Lil Yachty and 21 Savage introduced themselves to the world in earnest. It felt like an exciting time to be following popular music, and I don’t think that’s just nostalgia.

On the pop side of things, 2016 is still the last time we heard from Rihanna. Beyoncé was making headlines with Lemonade, and The Weeknd was following up the smash hits of Beauty Behind the Madness with the slightly poppier Starboy. Whether you like them or not, 2016 also birthed “One Dance” by Drake and “Closer” by the Chainsmokers, two songs remarkable if only because of how many records they set and how long they hung around the charts. 

To be fair, within the pop/hip-hop dichotomy I tend to fall more on the hip-hop side, so maybe I just have a myopic view of culture. To me, XXL’s 2016 Freshman Class is a perfect example of how the year was a peak for the genre, at least on some level. Meanwhile, what popular artists released music this year? Lizzo? Harry Styles? Yeat? Put a gun to my head, and I couldn’t even fake hum a single melody off Harry’s House, and I bet you can’t either. 

Maybe I’m just checked out of pop culture, but I’d argue that there hasn’t been any legitimately unifying pop music since 2019’s “Old Town Road.” Hmm, what ever could have happened in 2020 that altered our sense of community?

I’ll admit, within my personal music listening over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a decreasing emphasis on “popular” music in general. I say that not to sound cool or above it all, but because I legitimately don’t know what counts anymore, and that’s a problem. I wasn’t invited to every single party in college (shocking, I know), but even then, I could be anthropological about it. Especially throughout the middle and late 2010s, it was so easy to troll subreddits and Twitter to gauge what people were excited about. Now it feels like the whole of culture has shifted to something far less unified. 

Maybe that’s good. I’ve written before about the death of The Monoculture. Never again will we have a large-scale unifying act like Nirvana that comes in and shakes up the entire music industry, if only because there’s less to shake up. Music in 2022 is competing with the return of movies, a constant barrage of streaming TV shows, and of course, the ever-present deluge of social media. It’s a war for attention, and music doesn’t always win that fight. That’s not to mention how streaming services have made music consumption more on-demand and egalitarian than ever before. No longer are we beholden to what radio stations and MTV will play for us, and I think that’s unequivocally a good thing. 

The flip side of this is that there are far fewer universal touchpoints than ever before. Drake, once the biggest artist in the world, is now about four albums deep on a string of releases designed to juice up streaming numbers with bloated tracklists and middling, inoffensive buffet-style artistry. Come in, take what you want, throw it on a playlist or two, and get the fuck out. No questions, no customizations, and no quality control. Look no further than the number one global artist on Spotify right now: Ed Sheeran, the musical equivalent to a Great Clips haircut. 

I’m not even trying to shit on pop culture; just asking, where is it? It feels like the pandemic has irrevocably stifled culture as a whole on some level. Just look at everything vying for our attention; it’s never been easier to tune out individual pieces of culture if you don’t like them, even culture as a whole to some degree. What I’ve found is that when social life was sapped and reset to zero in 2020, it felt like there was less incentive for me to keep up with culture. Not only that, but there was less culture to keep up with. 

I look back on my “Summer 2020” playlist as an exemplary relic of this time. A hilarious attempt to cobble together a string of hip-hop and pop hits of the era where each entry feels like a palpable shrug of ‘I guess…’ You’ve got “Toosie Slide,” “Rockstar,” and “WAP,” but man, who cares? I guess “WAP” is still pretty good and made a decent cultural impact, but that’s about it. 

Summer 2021 I tried even less, mostly just filling the lineup with songs that felt like they “should” be on a summer playlist. I still remember thinking, “I guess this new Lorde song counts,” and “people like this Megan Thee Stallion song, I think.” It was all a fool’s errand: trying to capture a moment in pop culture that never really existed. 

That’s why this year, I just threw on songs I liked that seemed to capture the summer vibe. I don’t care if only a few thousand people ever listened to the new Camp Trash album; those songs are summer to me. And that’s the dilemma with most “Song of the Summer” entries; is it the culture’s song of the summer or your own? 

Summer aside, I’ve felt less and less incentivized to keep up with pop culture as a whole over the last year or so. Maybe it’s just my age (hello, 30, I see you peeking over the horizon), but I've come to realize how ephemeral all this is. When people were rallying around “Old Town Road”  back in 2019, it felt like an event. When people discuss the 2016 XXL cypher with Kodak Black, 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and Denzel Curry, it feels like a shared cultural touchstone. Be honest with yourself: how many of those touchstones have you felt over the last two and a half years?

I’ll still check out the occasional “big name” pop album just to see if anything grabs me, but more often than not, I’m left with a feeling that it’s missing something. I listened to the new Weeknd album earlier this year and thought it was pretty slick and cool sounding, but I don’t think I’ve returned to it since February. Beyoncé dropped an album in July that I still haven’t listened to and feel zero pull towards. And apparently Harry Styles is doing like fifteen nights of shows in California, so I guess someone has to be listening, right?

There’s an odd symbiotic relationship between albums of this scale and people’s embrace of them. That kind of goes without saying (and technically could apply to any genre), but follow me here. To borrow a parlance from Stan Twitter, if an artist puts out an album and nobody listens to it, the record “flops.” It takes support and fandom to keep a piece of art relevant. But the symbiotic part comes in the form of affirmation and re-engagement. If I listen to a song and the chorus gets stuck in my head, I’ll probably want to go listen to it again later. If I am keeping up with an album’s rollout and hear the lead single while I’m out in the world, I’ll be more drawn to it in the future. If I recognize the song used in the background of a TikTok or some meme, I’ll feel a sense of payoff, as if my previously committed attention has been rewarded. 

Where is that connective tissue in 2022? Maybe it’s just harder to find in the ever-splintering media landscape, but it feels like few of these culturally-sustaining practices exist now. For an old fart like myself, it turns out I’m perfectly content to just stay in my realm of whiny emo and dumb indie rock. After all, what reason do I have to keep up with what’s popular? Furthermore, why would I listen to something that’s “popular” when it doesn’t feel like it is? 

And therein lies the problem: the feeling of popularity. That’s the draw of most pop music on at least some level; the knowledge that you’re participating in something bigger than your specific taste. You’re joining a club of millions, a worldwide network of people bonded by a specific chorus, verse, sound, or person that you all share an affinity for. That’s a hard thing for me to feel in 2022. 

Pop music needs to be more than just catchy and well-made in order for it to succeed; it actually needs to be popular. That’s a harder and harder thing to achieve in an increasingly fragmented world. I’m more than willing to throw on some bland, common-denominator music if it gives me some sense of connection to the larger pop-culture sphere, but either my time for that phenomenon has passed, or the world has become too divided for that magic trick to work any more. Maybe both. 

Carpool – Anime Flashbacks | Single Review

“Say somethin’ / say nothing at all / this is not what I wanted.” Those are the words that are about to be stuck in your head for the next 24 hours. Coincidentally, those are also the words that make up the hook to Carpool’s dancy new single “Anime Flashbacks.” Belted out in a bouncy cadence by frontperson Stophy Colasanto, the delivery is equal parts pleading, regretful, and catchy–the perfect cocktail for a late-summer emo banger. 

Just a prelude to a 5-song EP dropping on 9/23 via Acrobat Unstable Records, “Anime Flashbacks” is a knockout lead single that both announces and reassures listeners that Carpool is back. Outside of a one-off Sheryl Crow cover at the end of 2020, this is the first we’ve heard from the Rochester-based DIY rockers since their debut Erotic Nightmare Summer, which this blog named Album of the Year back in 2020. 

It’s safe to say we’re fans of Carpool here, and we’re happy to report that the band has not spent the last two years slouching around. If anything, “Anime Flashbacks” sees the group tighter than ever before, leveling up far past the skill displayed on their debut album. 

The song begins with a pace-setting stretch of feedback, giving the listener just enough time to get up to speed. Within a few seconds, the band launches into the above hook, skipping straight to the bubblegum saccharine that made their first LP so good. Like pushing your friend into the pool on a hot summer day (making sure to grab their phone first, of course), Carpool wastes no time throwing the audience headfirst into this singable bit of punk rock. 

After a short dance break, little electronic bits begin to shimmer through, accenting the instrumental and casting the song in a slightly different hue. These keys come courtesy of Carpool’s newest band member Alex Ryan, whose contributions immediately feel complimentary to the band’s existing sound, fleshing out a corner of the Carpool Auditory Universe you didn’t even know you needed. 

“Anime Flashbacks” still bears everything you’ve come to love about the group so far: tappy guitar parts, a snappy rhythm section, and of course, Stophy’s unmistakable voice. Alternating between a remorseful croon and a violent sneer, they air out petty grievances over the pop-punk instrumental, effortlessly captivating the listener in the process. 

The emotional climax comes about two minutes in when Stophy belts, “I never shoulda… NOOOO,” letting their scream ring out for as long as their lungs allow. After this outpouring of emotion, we have one more instrumental stretch that winds down and feels designed to give the people in the pit a chance to catch their breath or go extra hard, depending on the energy of the room. As the song crests to a halt, it resolves on a bed of gentle synth notes that carries the listener out, leaving us salivating for more. Luckily, we won’t have to wait too long, given that a new helping of Carpool tracks will arrive in our streaming platforms a month from now. Until then, it’s time to keep the flashbacks on repeat.

Colleen Dow – Inside Voices | EP Review

What’s in a name? Colleen Dow already has a pretty good one in Thank You, I’m Sorry–a Minneapolis-based emo project that began with solitary bedroom acoustic recordings but quickly blossomed into a fully-fledged indie rock group. Regardless of the scale that TYIS took, Dow’s writing and voice always shined through as the transfixing centerpiece at both ends of this spectrum. Whether articulating the realities of depression or fixating on the woes of tour life, it was easy to find a home in these songs and empathize with Dow’s perspective within them. And now, thanks to a string of solo releases under their own name, there’s a new dwelling in which fans of Dow’s work can nuzzle up to their own anxieties.

When Dow released “Periwinkle” back at the end of 2021, it felt like a strange sense of deja vu. Given how unique Dow’s voice is, given that Thank You I’m Sorry started as a solo project, and given that it was being released on the same label, it was easy to see this single as an extension of Dow’s main band… that is until you listen to it. 

While TYIS songs tend to explode forward with nervous energy and feature noodly math rock riffs, “Periwinkle” opens with a woozy guitar sway and ignites in a dreamy synth beat. Glitchy vocalizations flit and flutter on the outer edges of the song, still recognizable as Dow but obscured by a cold, technological feeling. While relatively peppy, the song’s lyrics still bear the trademarked emotional struggle Dow often writes around, lending the piece a nice artistic continuity. 

A month later, things got even sadder with “Sorry,” a crushing song centered around a reverb-soaked Julien Baker guitar line and adorned with appropriately dour album art. For the first three months of 2022, Dow sent out monthly dispatches in the form of “Bumbum,” “Yeah,” and “Lists.” Each song leaned into a different style of electronic music, always guided forward by Dow’s voice, augmented by subtle guitar playing, and accompanied with awesome art courtesy of Sim Morales of Insignificant Other.

So what did Dow find in a name change? Freedom for one, lack of expectations for another. By releasing these songs under their own name as opposed to the up-and-coming indie rock band they front, Dow forced the listener to approach, listen to, and conceive of these songs as something different from their “main” act. Why feel boxed in creating a follow-up for your emo project when you can explore something totally new within the confines of your own name?

I figured this string of singles was essentially just a creative exercise for Dow; one-off pieces of music that they could drop with less pressure and more creative control. I should have known better. I should have Trusted In Dow because now we have Inside Voices, a 5-song EP that drops 13 minutes of new material at once, rounding out Dow’s solo “side project” to a solid 26 minutes of music, a collection that surpasses the very first TYIS release by about four minutes.

Throughout the new EP, Dow remains as honest as their previous work, equal parts charming and disarming. On the boppy opening track, “Bummer Summer,” Dow sings, “Banging my head against the wall / I can tell from your eyes that it’s all my fault / I’ve been staying up late and don’t ever call you back.” You always know exactly what Dow is struggling with because they find a way to say it plainly and calmly. While these lyrics might read as sad-to-a-fault on paper, Dow’s forthright approach is nothing but compelling within the music. 

And it turns out that labeling these emotions has paid off well; a few lines later in the same song, Dow sings, “I know better than to build all these walls / And it wouldn’t be that hard to just give you a call.” These lyrics make the solution clear; wisdom gained from having weathered these experiences and made it out the other side. 

This honesty allows for a surprisingly fluid train of logic that keeps the listener nodding along, wincing with pain as each line of the song adds a different brush stroke of ennui. These sentiments would be harder to swallow if they weren’t swaddled in such sweet instrumentals and packaged in such adorable album art. 

Guest appearances from fellow bedroom rockers Ness Lake on “Childhood Home” and Snow Ellet on “Radiator” help push the view beyond Dow’s perspective, fleshing out the world and adding a nice variety to the middle of the release. While relatively subtle and never show-stealing, these collaborations make Inside Voices feel more like a mutual support group as opposed to a solitary dairy entry. This is even reflected on the EP’s cover, which sees all the people from the preceding single releases coming together for a wholesome hug–a mini multiverse moment for the ever-expanding Colleen Dow musical universe… Dow-iverse? We’ll figure out a better name later.

Like the first sip of a sugar-free Red Bull, “Redline” injects some buoyant energy into the final stretch of the EP. The song walks a line between the kind of sad confessionalism we’ve heard up to this point but also acts as a (half) love letter to Dow’s temporary home of Chicago. That two-minute burst of energy paves the way for “Lil Kid,” an ultra-relatable song about finding a grounding sense of peace in taking a stroll while listening to Courtney Barnett on your headphones. Wow, they’re just like me for real.

As the EP’s final song wraps up, I come back to the question I asked at the beginning and think maybe a name doesn’t matter at all. Listening to Inside Voices, I’m just as taken with Dow’s artistic vision as I was when I first found Thank You, I’m Sorry. Especially when taken in concert with the preceding string of singles, it’s amazing to have what’s ostensibly a full LP’s-worth of music from someone you were already a fan of. Whether it’s in their main band, their solo project, or something totally new, the most important thing is that we are lucky enough to keep hearing from Dow.

Tim Heidecker – High School | Album Review

Tim Heidecker, still attempting to balance his livelihood as a comedian and prove his reputation as a musician, recently released a new concept album. High School is a compilation of autobiographical songs that tell the tales of classic missteps and boredom fueled by 80s suburbia. While the album offers little to no resolution, we are introduced to the characters of Heidecker’s world; the bands he listened to, the people he left behind, and the internal relationships fostered between himself and his understandings of politics, religion, and privilege. While other projects in vintage and modern music approach this concept better, perhaps there is something quaint and accessible about Heidecker’s world. It is hard to resist well-worn nostalgia, especially when accompanied by a warm musical arrangement. 

High School’s opening track, “Buddy,” finds Heidecker lamenting over a burnout friend from high school that he’s since lost touch with. Heidecker describes the friend as “gone” because he was the resident stoner. There is a desperateness to Tim’s inactivity as a character in this song – longing for things to work out for his friend but ultimately seeing him as a lost cause. This narrative choice is interesting, considering Heidecker has mentioned how he took psychedelics in high school. This isn’t a judgment on their activities, but rather an observation of the unfairness for Tim to position himself as a more aware person than his friend as if they were not partaking in the same coming-of-age activities. Heidecker unintentionally brandishes a naivety about why he was able to “escape” this lifestyle while his friend didn’t – never connecting the dots between his friend’s home life (“we turned it up, so you didn’t have to hear the yelling downstairs”) and his own (“Mom and Dad to hear me sing / they seemed to love it, they said it was great”). There is a privilege in not only having the means to escape your hometown and rebuke your identity as a teenager, but also having the support of parental guidance and untouched optimism. 

The fifth track, “I’ve Been Losing,” is where Heidecker begins to find his footing. His voice is his own, no longer hiding behind the impulse to slip into his Springsteen and Dylan impressions that get him guaranteed laughs on his call-in podcast Office Hours Live. His tone is sweet and wistful yet enveloped in an unavoidable melancholy. “Working myself up to the fact that my best days are behind me,” he sings in the third verse. This sentiment is common, not just as a punch in the gut for a performer, but as a symptom of the human condition. There is a real resignation in feeling that your peak has come and gone and that there’s no way to reach it, that you can’t go home again. However, my appreciation for this song is diminished by the outro, in which Heidecker sings, “Oh, I’ve been talking / talking too much / maybe I should stop and listen.” This is an ironic point of view for Heidecker to foster, considering the only other endeavor at the forefront of his current career is his podcast. Office Hours Live is fully funded by fan support through Patreon, though it operates under a Howard Stern-esque format, complete with interviews, listener call-ins, and a “comedic” bitterness that is appealing to a demographic that I don’t hold. In short, I don’t believe Heidecker is as self-effacing as he tries to be in this song, and the existence of his podcast is proof that he is more intentioned in finding a viewer to berate than listening and learning, or whatever he is trying to say at the end of this song. 

This leads me to ask: If this album is built on framing Heidecker’s adolescence from the perspective of his current adult self (mentions of regret, embarrassment, and longing are scattered throughout each track), then why isn’t there any redemption? It is reductive to focus entirely on the past without also building a bridge to the present and, perhaps in more proactive terms, the future. The crux of catharsis is not just unloading shame from your past but also uncovering the specific desire within oneself to transform or metamorphosize into an entirely new being. For the listener, there is little fulfillment in hearing a stranger wax nostalgic about the one who got away simply because it’s a story that’s been told (and lived) so many times before. It also provides a sense of tunnel vision to the album, which can limit one’s ability to find and apply universality to the sentiments Heidecker is singing about. 

The album bounces back and forth between a 90s alt-rock sound and light 70s country psychedelia. It also explores a wannabe 80s novelty song sound in the track “Sirens of Titan.” In my previous article, The Slow Cancellation of the Future: 70s Cosplay in Modern Pop Music, I detailed my disdain for artists' reliance on the aesthetics of 70s music and skewed cultural ideas. In that piece, I also mentioned how Heidecker’s previous album Fear of Death fell under the umbrella of liberally borrowing from 70s rocker influences and how those instincts tarnished my relationship with the album and made me question Heidecker’s motive for wanting a music career. In High School, he continues this trend, focusing his energy on name-dropping bands and musicians he found solace in. These references feel somewhat natural, albeit a bit stilted. It’s clear that Heidecker was mesmerized by the 60s & 70s era of classic rock staples as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, but the references almost feel invasive, as if he is working very hard to cultivate a setting without describing anything at all. He is relying on the listener to use their own association and viewpoint of those bands to tap into their own nostalgia. This is a tool that can be implored intelligently, but it seems that Heidecker does it because he doesn’t have anything of depth to say or explore within his adolescence. 

In “Sirens of Titan,'' Heidecker reveals that he was a “little right-wing” and “fiscally conservative” until he “got that college degree.” As a long-time fan of his comedy, Heidecker declaring he became progressive or politically enlightened doesn’t feel honestly representative of his post-college work. In addition to this, I cannot recall an interview in which Heidecker has ever mentioned college as a useful experience either in terms of his filmmaking craft or his political awareness. I believe Heidecker’s insistence of his now-honed liberal politics is compensation for the insecurity of his childhood ignorance.

 However, in tracks like “Punch in The Gut,” it seems that Heidecker’s activism is still reserved to only pointing out what was wrong, rather than conjuring a hindsight that offers a revolutionary ardor. The song details Heidecker witnessing a schoolyard brawl that targeted “the kid with the different skin.” His point of action was to ask the priest to intervene, and when nothing was done, Heidecker resigned. This song, in particular, highlights the glaring issue with the pattern of lyrical content of this album – Tim doesn’t have any guts. He didn’t advocate for his burnt-out friend in “Buddy,” and he didn’t stand up or involve himself with the classmate who was being bullied to the point of physical harassment. To this day, Heidecker still possesses the same lack of conviction he had in his adolescence, which is why these songs often feel aimless. Speaking of listlessness, late album cut “What Did We Do With Our Time?” channels the height of suburbia angst with the lyrics “I’m a weed-wackin’, lawn-mowin’, leaf-blowin’, snow-shovelin’ boy.” Oh, the horrors of maintaining your environmentally damaging lawn!

I think the exploration of Heidecker’s adolescent cowardness wouldn’t be frustrating if he made any effort to disparage his past self or the environment that allowed him to operate with such passivity. Songs like these have a build-up that needs a release, but instead, Heidecker usually opts to repeat a verse or two until the runtime has reached a respectable length, slowly letting the fade take over. This style can be done; Lucy Dacus’ Home Video comes to mind, where in a few tracks, she invokes more of the timber in her voice and harshens her word choice while still keeping the ballad-like instrumentals. Lyrically, Conor Oberst’s “Next of Kin” manages to name-drop Lou Reed and Patti Smith without feeling shoehorned in. This is because Oberst uses the identities of those two performers to allude to a larger personal theme, stating that meeting them didn’t make him “feel different.” Oberst’s disillusionment with these transgressive icons of his youth correlates with a loss of innocence; his internalized anger didn’t serve his art or his character well. In this context, the output of “meeting” these figures acts as a coming of age moment that’s been prolonged or put off in some way, which is why it works as a binding point between Oberst’s allusions to the death of a relationship and the inability to perform on stage in the first half of the song. This is also why there’s an earned victory and a sense of finality that he found his ‘way back home’ in the closing verse. 

Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender” from Born in the U.S.A is a masterclass in tapping into the generational angst that Heidecker is chasing throughout the runtime of High School. The song’s second line, “we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school,” accomplishes what Heidecker’s trivia-esque namedrops attempt but with more emotional resonance. Springsteen does the work to communicate the impact he felt when listening to music, somehow being both vague and specific, which is done purposefully. He is evasive in the act of not naming the record or artist because he knows that won’t serve any value to the song; the descriptor would just serve as a personal easter egg, which can distract the audience from the focused message of the song. This snapshot is just a tool to drive Springsteen’s point further; it is intentional in his choice to describe the experience of listening to music while being young. To write that a record is more important and beneficial to him than school, we understand multiple things: his relationship to music, his relationship to school, and what he desired in his youth. Right away, listeners are able to place themselves in his shoes – it doesn’t matter if they necessarily find resonance in his ideals and objectives because he frames it as a story with himself as a key character. Throughout Born in the U.S.A, Springsteen muses about his youth, looking back and alternating between present and past tense. In “My Hometown,” he relays his disillusionment with what he was told when he was young (be proud of your hometown) to what he saw later (tensions between races in school and firearm-related incidents) and what he sees now as an adult (vacant stores, closed down textile mills). Not everything on the album is factual or speaks to Springsteen’s specific experiences, but its aim is to preserve and communicate the realities of feeling abandoned by youth. In contrast to this, Heidecker focuses on being confessional above all else. The interpretation of one’s own personal narratives can be a liberating act. However, in the context Heidecker presents, it is creatively stifling. His desire to remain honest in his experiences sacrifices the creative edits that could be made for the benefit of the song's story. Poetic license can and should be implemented if it functions better than the original encounter at illustrating the narrative hook or learned moral truth being communicated in the song. 

Elsewhere in the album, Heidecker alludes to the political turmoil within himself as a young person growing up towards the end of the Cold War era. This point in time was significant in that, to the conspiracist or critical-paranoid, everything was a sign. Pop culture was flooded with fear and fascination, but that didn’t prevent people from searching for answers in it. Culture was and is a tool that could influence the masses to conformity or a soft rebellion. My assumption of this is perhaps overly reliant on Pynchonian redux, but if Heidecker is willing to reference Vonnegut at the forefront of this album, even having merch that rips off the stylized 90s paperback covers of his books, perhaps it should’ve been the leeway for constructing the atmosphere of growing up in this portion of the Cold War era. Postmodern literature (a response to the dishonesty of the Cold War era) explores paranoia, which can be considered a close cousin to helplessness. I don’t know any other time I’ve felt more helpless than when I was in high school. And it is not only this, but also the idea that technology has its own itinerary. In the 80s and 90s, the idea of people becoming subservient to technology became relevant in the modern context – not just in literature, but in film, television, and music as well. I think this concept could’ve been easily implemented into Heidecker’s songs on High School, especially when his analysis of his youth intersects and overlaps with pop culture and the intrusion of media. He was using music and literature to find meaning because all he found in the real world was boredom. 

The album closer “Kern River” effectively achieves what Heidecker has struggled to do in previous tracks; it brought on veritable feelings of nostalgia and wistfulness. For whatever odd reason, whenever I am in a moment, I can sometimes feel myself yearning for the memory even though I am in it, creating it. I’ve always been plagued by a severe sense of sentimentality; I am someone who ruminates on the present as if it’s the past. This song is a snapshot of that experience. It is the culmination of the end of summer, especially if you live in a rural area where kayaking or tubing down a river is a common activity. As Tim sees it, the end of the river is the end of his childhood. Through these obscure, albeit trivial, landmarks, I can notice cracks appearing in the metaphorical shell of my adolescence. The ages of 14 through 18 are difficult because you experience everything with intensity. You have plenty of time and freedom to do what you want, while also noticing the days falling away with a quickness that is only fathomable to kids and to parents who have to watch their kids grow up. Every situation you face and every emotion you feel is magnified because it is the first time you are encountering them. It’s difficult, but somehow you still find yourself prioritizing your teenage years over the whole affair of adulthood. 

If “Kern River” is any indication of the heights that Heidecker is capable of reaching, then I am cautiously optimistic about his future endeavors in writing music. I can only hope that Heidecker forgoes the struggle of trying to legitimize himself as a musical performer and person of strong moral virtue and instead focuses on building fully-formed songs with complete emotional depth.

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Kaycie is a freshman at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where she is majoring in English. You can find her on Instagram at @boyishblues.