Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties – In Lieu of Flowers | Album Review

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Hopeless Records

Buffalo Bills faithful Aaron West can’t seem to catch a break these days—or ever. On In Lieu of Flowers, the third full-length album of Dan Campbell’s solo project, we find West most chained to his vices.

Anyone familiar with Campbell’s songwriting in The Wonder Years knows the man is sick with nostalgia. It pierces through his writing like no other, yet he continuously finds ways to keep it rewarding and refreshing. When TWY released The Greatest Generation in 2013, the pop-punk cognoscenti declared the band’s three-album run triumphant. The Philadelphian six-piece had successfully crafted a trilogy on growing up and, in the process, had created something larger than themselves that millions of fans connected with, even a decade later. Even with this achievement, the band continued to write and release albums, although they had largely laid their signature pop-punk sound to rest. 

A year after TWY cemented themselves as pop-punk royalty, Aaron West was born. Campbell’s construction of “Aaron West” speaks to the ever-growing nature and evolution of his songwriting. He carefully crafted West as a snake-bitten alcoholic musician from New Jersey who struggles in the way most of us do. His music career is faltering, his relationship is crumbling, and his loved ones are dying. At heart, Campbell is a storyteller who’s found his niche in songwriting, and as we come upon the end of yet another trilogy in his musical universe, there’s no question as to why everything he touches turns to gold.

Before diving into In Lieu of Flowers, I would be remiss not to start at the project’s debut album since the Aaron West albums all tell a very intentional chronological story. As a brief recap of We Don’t Have Each Other, the inception of Aaron West details the worst year of his life in which his father passes, his wife suffers a miscarriage, and his wife leaves him. This is all capped off with his contemplation of drowning himself in the ocean, chased by a Mountain Goats cover that acts as a palette cleanser. Now, another EP, single, and album’s worth of lore has conspired in the 10 years since that first dispatch, however, the most important aspect to know going into ILOF is that, despite slapping band-aids on old wounds, we find that West never took the time to properly heal from the events of that fateful year depicted on his first album.

ILOF kicks off with our nomadic protagonist claiming, “It feels like shit to be alone again.” Track one of the LP, “Smoking Rooms,” starts somber and explodes into an existential apex torn between the less-than-glamorous life of a solo musician and being someone his family can count on.

This, more than anything, seems to be the all-encapsulating theme of the album. On the project’s sophomore release, Routine Maintenance, we listen as the project grows from just Aaron West to Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. He comes to find family and meaning in what began merely as a solo project to sing his woes. Additionally, he finds meaning in life with his nephew Colin that he couldn’t find anywhere else. With both of their dad’s abrupt passings, West took it upon himself to be the father figure that both were suddenly lacking. Fast forward five years and West’s neglect of his mental health has begun to chip away at everything he once found joy in.

The third installment of Aaron West’s story leans into his folk-tinged americana sound more than ever. Track three, “Paying Bills at the End of the World,” most notably pays homage to this sound with West singing the blues set to the melancholic wanes of the lap steel. The lyrics update the listener on the lull in West’s life during the global pandemic of 2020. He sings the sorrows of every malcontent US citizen that year: dreaming of catching COVID and simply dying because we can't afford health insurance.

In spite of all the gloom in his world, Campbell still injects humor and irony into his writing. In the same song, we hear West whimper, “Of doves and palms and cartoon Jesus dying on the cross I say he must be running late.” Poking fun at his broken relationship with religion, the band’s music video for this song ironically takes place in a church. 

While this project is a concept at its core, it takes place in the world as we know it. West, like the rest of us, put our lives on pause while COVID ran rampant through the world. Campbell uses this to further push the authenticity of the project. He weaves truths throughout West’s story, as seen on track 5, “Alone at St. Luke’s.” During an IRL 2022 tour, the Twenties all caught COVID, with Campbell being the only one to duck the sickness. The band was forced to fly home and Campbell stayed in Glasgow to finish the tour solo. It’s also in this track where we get a call back to LP1 highlight “Get Me Out of Here Alive,” in which West now claims that “The stained-glass light just punched me in the chest.”

Additionally, Campbell did his due diligence in crafting the character of Aaron West. He describes the character as “a little bit of everyone I’ve ever met”. What makes Aaron West’s story so special is this genuineness. Campbell entwines truths and lived experiences into his fictional character, which contributes to its legitimacy. While there are parts of the story that Campbell admits to having happened in real life, we’ll truly never know what parts are and are not fictitious. Despite this, the listener doesn’t doubt that any of the events in West’s trilogy are fabricated because they deal with very real and dwelled human troubles.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

My favorite aspect of this album is how it contains the first-ever love song we get from Aaron West. After rekindling with an old flame from high school early on the album, we find the first occurrence of West showing even the slightest amount of interest in someone romantically who is not Diane, his ex-wife. A new character in the Aaron West story is introduced on track 4, “Monongahela Park.” Sam, whom West hadn’t seen in years, knows nothing of the West that we’ve come to know and love. Even with this opportunity to start fresh, West’s calloused heart can’t bring himself to let her in.

Believe it or not, ILOF is also the most emo we find Aaron West. He’s in a begrudgingly sour fight with himself and what he wants in life. Between the band, his broken love life, his lack of belief in a higher power, and his surging alcoholism, West is tearing at the seams. Tracks 6 and 7 are where we get the lowest of West. Hanging onto every last bit of popularity from the Twenties’ fizzling fame, West is burning every last bridge in an alcohol-fueled frenzy as he exclaims, “I’ll see you in the water.”

Regardless of how much West wants to give up and succumb to his addiction, the people in his life won’t let him. After checking himself into rehab on track 9, “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” West finds his next move. The track starts slow over piano, with West watching the Bills choke away yet another promising year. It moves into an upbeat and nostalgia-lined recap of his time in rehab. West acknowledging his fuck ups bring us that much closer to the album's penultimate track, “In Lieu of Flowers.”

The track was released as the first single with the announcement of the album, likely because it’s the most conquering track on the record, however, we now know that this song ties up all the loose ends of the album. Listening to this track before and after knowing the events of the album reframes the song's meaning. Kicking off the track with a catchy horn melody contributed by producer Ace Enders, the song hooks listeners instantly. It’s in this track where West is mending the bridges that he burnt throughout the album. Even though Sam, his nephew Colin, his sister Catherine and the Twenties “could’ve told him to fuck himself,” they encourage him to brush the dirt off the grave that he dug for himself.

Photo by Mitchell Wojick

There are a million story beats and easter eggs that can be found throughout the Aaron West discography, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable to dig into. At this point in his story, every track is a must-listen, not just for the musical brilliance, but to catch every detail that caps off what could be the end of the Aaron West story. The bookend tale divulges the struggles of family, love, and religion. Much like those Bills teams of the 2000s, West was struggling to get his shit together long enough to reap the harvest. He found support and solace in those he thought would leave him for dead.

What makes The Wonder Years everyone’s favorite pop-punk band is that they’re entirely relatable. Campbell finds ways to craft songs that are universal no matter the subject matter. The madman has managed to lap this feat and do it all over again with Aaron West. While little is known about the future of West, the listener, without a doubt, is rooting for him. He may be a fictional character, but West is as real as you and I: flawed to all hell, but is trying his best. 

Brandon Cortez is a writer/musician residing in El Paso, Texas, with his girlfriend and two cats. When not playing in shitty local emo bands, you can find him grinding Elden Ring on his second cup of cold brew. Find him on Twitter @numetalrev.

Fell In Love With a Guac: Making Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe

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A couple of months ago, emo band Michael Cera Palin made a jokey post about Pavement's hospitality rider on Twitter, and the internet rightfully couldn’t put it down. Between the quantity and the specificity of the items listed, the jokes practically wrote themselves. “forty-eight cold bottles of premium domestic beer,” hell yeah, brother. A couple of entries later, they list “two bottles of premium red wine” with a parenthetical that specifies “(nothing under $10.00 retail, PLEASE).” These guys know their stuff. 

Something else I love about Pavement’s rider is that there’s an abundance of emphasis, with some words in bold and others in ALL CAPS, lending the whole list a sort of manic Christopher Walken tone. You can practically envision the band members bouncing ideas off each other as they had a stoned brainstorm, throwing “5 cups assorted yogurt” next to “one jar chunky natural peanut butter.” The whole document is a rich text that you could spend hours parsing through and picking out individually hilarious items. Spicy V8? Why? “Authentic” pita bread? What’s the alternative? Four nine-volt batteries (Energizer)? I guess it’s nice to know where their brand affinity lies.

This came hot on the heels of a wider discussion about how bands eat on tour, sparked by a snippy comment leveled at indie rockers Thank You, I’m Sorry. For days on end, internet commentators and armchair analysts filled my feed with criticisms, jokes, and accusations, all levied at bands with less than 100k monthly listeners on Spotify. The whole thing reeked of the (surprisingly pervasive) anti-artist stance that musicians should expect to be miserable on the road if they expect to break even on a tour.

However, one good thing to come from this was a rider posted by Charly Bliss containing Jack White’s tour rider. The list even starts out funny, with its first entry being “6 x cans of  Coke Zero.” Okay, skinnyyyy. The second entry moves from beverages to food as they ask for “1 dozen chicken wings” with a fun note specifying “(buffalo, teriyaki, surprise us).” Alright, these guys know how to have fun. One line later, we get to the main event, “1 bowl FRESH HOME-MADE GUACAMOLE,” with a note that there’s a recipe below. The recipe, which I’ll transcribe here in full, is a seven-ingredient, multi-step process that I can only imagine a put-upon venue employee begrudgingly whipping up. I knew I had to try it. 

Jack White's Guacamole Recipe

Ingredients

  • 8 x large, ripe Haas avocados (cut in half the long way, remove the pit–SAVE THE PITS THOUGH–, and dice into large cubes with a butter knife. 3 or 4 slits down, 3 or 4 across. You’ll scoop out the chunks with a spoon, careful to maintain the avocado in fairly large chunks. 

  • 4 x vine-ripened tomatoes (diced)

  • ½ yellow onion (finely chopped)

  • 1 x full bunch cilantro (chopped)

  • 4 x Serrano peppers (de-veined and chopped)

  • 1 x lime

  • Salt & pepper to taste

Steps

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl, careful not to mush the avocados too much. We want it chunky. Once properly mixed and tested, add the pits into the guacamole and even out the top with a spoon or spatula. Add ½ lime to the top layer so you cover most of the surface with the juice. (The pits and lime will keep it from browning prematurely.) Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until served. Please don’t make it too early before it’s served. We’d love to have it around 5 pm.

Sunday, May 26th, 2024.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I have four days off work. Summer is right around the corner, and love is in the air… wait, that’s just a combination of Tecate and tequila. It’s already been hot enough in North Carolina that it’s felt like summer to my Pacific Northwest ass for months; even still, I’m not one to look a gift horse (long weekend) in the mouth. After a few days of kicking back and celebrating, spirits were high, and I was getting tired of BBQ food, so I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe. 

My girlfriend and I hit up our local Harris Teeter to acquire all the fresh produce necessary to feed the man who wrote “Seven Nation Army.” Turns out eight Haas avocados are more expensive than I expected. As I was staring down the 30-ish dollar total, my girlfriend joked, “This is why Millennials will never be homeowners,” and I couldn’t disagree. 

It also turns out that eight Haas avocados make a lot of guacamole. I realized this as I was rinsing the tomatoes and peppers in the sink and looked over to see my girlfriend cutting each avocado in half, seemingly doubling the amount instantaneously. She suggested halving the recipe at one point, but I was determined to make this guac in Jack White’s image, to a tee, exactly as he instructed on the rider. I would have nothing less than perfection.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually written my fair share of recipes for my job. I don’t talk about my profession here often, but it’s wild how much of 2020 and 2021 I spent wordsmithing recipes for Starbucks while everyone was trapped at home and craving their cafe fix. If you ever wanted to know how to make a Cereal Milk Coffee or a Caffè Mocha, I got you. As such, I feel like I am uniquely qualified to comment on this recipe. 

As we dug into the instructions, this mostly seemed like prep, which was a relief. Whenever a recipe says, “Mix all ingredients in a large bowl,” it’s like skipping straight to the fun part. So we got cleaning and cutting and started dumping everything into a large bowl. 

In terms of the actual recipe and instructions, it’s entertaining how much personality comes through the writing here. The line “SAVE THE PITS THOUGH,” typed in all-caps, is very urgent and funny. That phrase became a bit of a verbal tick as we were prepping the guac, akin to “save the whales” or a motto that an armpit fetishist would champion. Elsewhere, specifying to slice the avocado in “3 or 4 slits” seems like a funny detail, though it seems to be in service of consistency. The band specifies at multiple points that “We want it chunky,” which reads pretty sassy, and I have no choice but to respect it.

I deveined the serrano peppers, diced the tomatoes, and quickly started to note the mounting pounds of guacamole filling up our bowl. I asked my girlfriend to invite some friends over because I could quickly tell that we would not make so much as a dent in this guacamole if it were just the two of us. I did the same, and we soon had a group of six ready to dig into Jack White’s recipe.

The final touch was “salt & pepper to taste,” to which my girlfriend questioned, “to who’s taste?” and quickly decided that the answer was Jack White himself. We tried our best to channel our inner pale Detroiter, imagining what the palate of the man who wrote Blunderbuss could possibly entail. We salted, peppered, and made a round of margs to accompany the main event. We set everything on the table and dug in.

So, at this point, I bet you’re wondering how it was. What did Jack White’s Guacamole taste like? Turns out… kinda bland. We were eating with a group of people mainly from the south, but even to my Pacific Northwestern ass, the guac tasted pretty unremarkable. If I’m making guac, I usually use Jalapeno peppers, so the serranos were a nice twist but not enough. 

Ultimately, the group deemed the guac “easy to fix,” and we improvised a bit by adding some more lime juice, additional salt, and four or five cloves of chopped-up garlic. We wondered why this recipe didn’t call for any garlic at all, which feels like a pretty standard ingredient for most guacs, and collectively agreed that Jack White is not beating the vampire allegations. After incorporating all of those additions, we were cooking with gas and everyone happily chowed down on our new and improved Jack White Guac. 

It felt a little bad to permute Mr. White’s recipe in such a direct way; after all, you wouldn’t go in and add another guitar to “Salute Your Solution,” would you? But the way I see it, we technically made it faithfully first before perverting it into something that tasted better, so I felt like we still achieved our initial goal.

All in all, Jack White’s Guacamole was a hit once we added a bit more zap to it. The recipe makes a lot, but it’s also for a touring group of musicians, so that makes sense. Does his culinary instincts match up to his musical brilliance? Not quite, but that’s okay; I’ll take Elephant over a middle-of-the-road guacamole any day.

Polkadot – …to be crushed | Album Review

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Count Your Lucky Stars

New Year's Eve is always a bittersweet moment for me. I don’t like the dreariness of winter much, and I find the parties fairly boring – instead, I usually spend the lead-up to the special day trapped in that weird mid-holiday liminal slump. More specifically, these past few years, I have spent that time leading up to New Year's Eve just sitting in my car, often in a parking lot with the music low, contemplating how my year went, probably against my best interests. Did I change? Did anyone change? Did something change? Should I change for the new year? 

Polkadot’s sophomore album, …to be crushed, asks the same questions and, despite releasing on the precipice of summer, already feels like it's destined to soundtrack that liminal time on the precipice of a new year. Using precise melodies and sharp motifs, each song operates with certainty against looming unpredictability, seemingly invigorated by the challenge to one day move comfortably with the passing of time. As a band largely concerned with feeling weird and trying to find the words for it, this album is full of “tweemo” hooks, fuzz, and group vocals that inch closer toward the answers through profoundly confessional lyricism.

 …to be crushed starts on “Left Behind” with just the haunting presence of guitarist/vocalist Daney Espiritu’s words and the distant pluck of a guitar. Espiritu welcomes the listener into the hazy world of the album and lets the rest slowly sharpen into focus. Lyrics about loneliness and self-worth weave together as they are joined by different members of the band, one by one. Together, these instruments mimic the evenness and clarity of the lyrics. It’s a stellar opener that prepares the tone of the rest of the album – contemplative, transparent, and just hopeful enough. It also introduces the collaborative aspect of the redefined band. While Polkadot originally began as Espiritu’s solo project, it has since become a full band effort, opening places to Anton Benedicto on drums, Jordan Jones on bass, and Matthew Estolano on guitar. The first song directly reflects this evolution and, over the course of two and a half minutes, dissolves the barriers around the frustrating aspects of loneliness.

What is Heaven to you? This is a mildly jarring topic Espiritu opens the second song, “New Friends,” with. It’s a vivid and contemplative suggestion that momentarily breaks the distance between musician and listener as we picture our different versions of Heaven. Espiritu describes Heaven with a specific list: karaoke in purple lights, crawling into your arms, playing cards at a bar with friends. This prompt is a scene-setting lyric that encapsulates and encloses themes of the entire album.

“New Friends” is a song that should be, no, needs to be danced to. It has a heartbeat made for grabbing your friend’s hands and jumping around together under a venue’s rotating lights. It demands to be sung along to, face to face, or toward a stage. More than that, it’s sharing sincerity with you. Between the first two tracks, it is abundantly clear that Espiritu is operating with a level of trust between listener and artist, each lyric stitched together with an uncompromising honesty. But suddenly, the contemplation fades away, and the once-danceable melody turns into a thrashy moment to scream to instead of sway to. In “New Friends,” Espiritu sings about specific moments the listener has no reference to and no insight into, but it doesn’t matter; it’s magnetic, and for a fleeting moment, it's yours too.

There is a definitive confidence in Espiritu’s voice, one that suggests that what is being said has been considered and measured, yet an air of reluctance lingers. This makes the words all the more personal. In the bass-heavy “Baby Buzzkill,” Espiritu describes the crushing weight of your own worst thoughts that draw you to stay under your covers, hiding from what might be outside. The disappointment of the lyrics are ultimately drowned out by building distortion and even louder cymbal crashes, leaving the listener with a long buzz of static, which finalizes the emotional thread of the lyrics more effectively than words could. 

The album winds through its purple light-lit and fuzzy world before ending on “This Year.” Recalling the singular feeling of the opening track, “This Year” is a song once again started with just a distant strum and clear words; however, this time, it’s engulfed by lingering and almost eerie static – like a guitar left too close to an amp by a band that just left the stage for an encore. As Espiritu’s lyrics seem to reluctantly declare that the time for being jaded is over, a guitar whines ominously from behind, threatening an entrance into the song. A drum’s thud quickly follows as the guitar begins to weave over and under the lyrics. A cacophony is incoming, and it could happen at any time… But it doesn’t. Instead, group vocals enter and soften the blow. Together, the band repeats a single lyric, “This year is coming to an end, I don’t feel any different,” which is punctuated by a repeating kick drum beat. This is a lonesome lyric to end the album on, but the chorus of voices makes it familiar. Loneliness is tangible, yes, but it isn’t singular.

Long after the distortion fades away and the final lyric is sung, New Year’s Eve will come around, and I will once again be in that parking lot, music low, wondering if I changed. Did anyone change? Did something change? Should I change for the new year? But that has to be ignored because, from Polkadot’s perspective, it doesn’t matter. What matters are the fragments of feeling, the pieces of memory, and the persistent hope for something better. Time isn’t linear; a new year is just a new year, and there is always room for more (whatever more may be).

Caro Alt’s (she/her) favorite thing in the world is probably collecting CDs. Caro is from New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time not sorting her CD collection even though she really, really needs to.

DIIV – Frog In Boiling Water | Album Review

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Fantasy Records

I haven’t been doing well, man.

I’m having trouble looking people in the eyes, fretful they might reveal that unmistakable, embarrassing thread of desperation. Every morning, I wake up, and they feel sunken, like ancient craters on the moon. Immediately, they affix themselves to my distractions, working with whatever fits in the palm of my hand. Energy leaks from the pores in my skin like steam from the morning shower — I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and run my fingers numbly over the moguls of my ribcage. A roommate told me to water her Monstera every two weeks while she’s gone, and a month later, it’s still just standing there, forlorn and wilting in the corner. I told her I’d water it, I told her that. What will she think of me when she comes back? That is one raindrop in a torrent I have no protection from. The AirPods go right back in: to another video, another song, another opinion, another memory-clogging flash of synthetic color and sound.

I have to believe that when I agreed to write about DIIV’s fourth record, I was better. That was late February, maybe? Perhaps it’s fitting to soundtrack a routine bout of depression with such overwhelmingly dour music, but the downside is that the murky beauty underneath it refuses to resonate with me. That’s what happens when you live in a negative copy of your present — that, and the pull of homeostasis. A pool of icy water feels fine if you’re just as cold when you enter it.

I don’t know if we’ve ever heard the Brooklyn-based indie stalwarts sound as comprehensively solemn as they sound on their latest record. It’s not surprising. This is the trajectory the band has charted since their 2012 debut Oshin, which saw Zachary Cole Smith and company riding the post-Beach Fossils jangle revival all the way to Peter Parker’s dorm room. Years later, burnout and heroin addiction informed the fragile, misunderstood Is The Is Are, but it still produced a handful of singles in conversation with (or, more likely, in an obligation to) Oshin’s festival-bound buoyancy. Opiate addiction, for many people, is a point of no return, and regardless of whether or not you manage to stabilize, the phantom ache of electrochemistry haunts every good day thereafter, forever in danger of sinking the ship. And yet even 2019’s Deceiver, the start of Smith’s newly sober reality, sneaks in an uplifting turn of melody or two.

In comparison, the water boiling the titular frog is fathoms deep, deep enough to stop light in its tracks. Rhythmically, the pace is sluggish; sonically, the colors run inky and polluted. Much of the inspiration comes from genres celebrated for their sensate qualities, which the band then beats into a bruised, cohesive paste. Lead single “Brown Paper Bag” is classic shoegaze with a clear MBV callback near the end and a visualizer whose downcast one-shot makes for a cheeky double metaphor. “Everyone Out” cribs the jugular thump and plucked harmonics of Sonic Youth’s “Shadow of a Doubt” but not its eroticism; instead, the band can only manage the gray line between optimism and cynicism, and that is about as chipper as they get here.

DIIV has a knack for delivering penultimate album tracks, and “Soul-net,” a song ostensibly about social media, hits hard here. On paper, Smith’s words seem to arrive at an epiphany. “I’m not afraid / I love my pain / I know we can leave this prison,” he offers as a protective mantra. The music says otherwise. There’s real dread pulsing through the song’s twin guitar lines and rotten kick drum, and instead of building toward catharsis, the minor key only clenches tighter, squeezing the life out of his voice. It’s not a clean split, not even close; it’s the familiar grip of addiction in all its forms.

Bandleader Zachary Cole Smith, having long ditched his blonde swoop and beanie for a short brown shag and boxy glasses, inhabits the role of a doomsayer on a street corner, muttering soft curses and hoarse self-lacerations underneath the roar of the band. It’s hard to hear a man pushing forty sounding so existentially crushed. “Remember they told us / the tide lifts our boats up / That ocean is dried out,” he moans on opener “In Amber,” perhaps indirectly recalling the band’s earliest and more innocent effort. The grand theme here is “cultural collapse,” as outlined in Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel The Story of B, from which the LP gets its name. “If you place [a frog] gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low,” they explain, “before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”

Smith alludes constantly to the ingredients of the soup: the threat of war, the raging cultural one, the pleasure suck of the internet, and the ongoing climate emergency, all of which make, in Quinn’s words, “customs and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young, who see that even their elders can no longer make sense of them.” You might get a glimmer of some focus, maybe in the mordant title track or the angsty “Somber the Drums,” but Smith’s lyrics are largely content to soak in the feeling of comfortable misery rather than specify what’s causing it. They circle the drain rather than the point, which is probably a good thing; the abstraction pairs well with the thick murk of the music, which feels more authentic and more succinct than anything Smith might explicate.

Some still believe the notion that our music ought to reflect the times, and they would be satisfied by the nebulous devastation swirling throughout Frog in Boiling Water. However, I question how effective that archaic approach can continue to be. We can be galvanized by music, enough to write about it. For the overwhelming rest of us, it’s part of the thing, not the whole thing. It tells us who we are and how we relate to everybody else; it gets us through long plane trips and treadmill sessions; it backgrounds our trips to the grocery store, the barbershop, and the local tavern. It’s there when we’re high and when we’re low, when we’re feeling everything and nothing at all, an unerring current running parallel to the anfractuousness of our lives. It is every sound at once, and it never stops, not even for a second.

It’s just another album. What feels more radical is absolute silence, the needle reaching the inner groove, the cease of the thrum that finally reveals how far we’ve grown from each other, how hot the water has become. But then, who can bear to feel the burn? And thus, we are cursed. The AirPods go right back in.

Rob Moura is from Seattle. He covers local music as the editor for WASH Magazine and writes for The Stranger, Earshot Jazz, and ARCADE, among others. Say hi to him on Instagram and/or follow his Substack. He also plays quiet acoustic folk as Armour; he’d love it if you gave his new album a spin.

Swim Into The Sound's Greatest Hits: A 400 Article Celebration

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With this post, Swim Into The Sound has officially published 400 articles! That’s pretty wild to me, especially considering we just hit 300 a year ago last May. Since we’ve celebrated 100 and 200 with similar fanfare, I figured it’s only fitting we continue the tradition and celebrate this as the landmark occasion that it is. Outside of just “cool number,” these intervals offer a nice reminder to look back and appreciate how much hard work has gone into this site and all the passion that’s helped us get here. 

Our first-ever review was published back in 2015, and while I don’t necessarily recommend you go back and read it, I think it’s important to recognize where you came from, so I’ll link it here for completeness’ sake. While I consider June 15th, 2015 to be the true birthday of this site, it wasn’t until 2016 that I really committed to updating it regularly. If you were curious to learn some stats, those 400 articles stretched across nine years add up to roughly 640k words. A majority of those have been written by me, but also includes dozens of other contributors, guest writers, and friends who have been kind enough to let me publish their work.

2024 has marked a bit of a sea change for this site as I move from Swim Into The Sound’s primary writer to more of an editor-in-chief-type role. Working with a team of writers that’s now 20- to 50-strong has been a blast because it’s allowed us to be more prolific than ever. There have already been several weeks this year where we’ve been publishing a review, round-up, or something every day, and that’s amazing to me. Not only has Swim Into The Sound been more relevant and up-to-date than ever, but it’s also felt amazing to connect so many writers with opportunities to write about music they’re passionate about. That’s why this whole thing exists. 

Speaking of which, I’m currently in the process of finishing up a bigger project, something more involved and more expansive than anything else this blog has ever published. So, when I’m not working my day job or editing other people’s work, that project is where most of my time and creative energy has gone. I’m beyond excited to share that in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted to pause and reflect on the scope of 400 articles published over the course of nine years. 

While I’m immensely proud of this body of work, I also recognize that 400 articles is a lot of writing to chew through. Just look at this unwieldy page that lists everything in one place. I don’t think anyone besides me has read everything published on Swim, but if you’re out there, I want to meet you. Are all of those articles winners? No. Am I proud of them all? You bet your ass. It’s hard to quantify how much work goes into writing, editing, programming, and promoting an article. I do my best to make sure everything is said in earnest and that the music we cover is something I can put my weight behind, written about by people who mean it. 

Since there’s such an unwieldy amount of writing on this site, and we’ve been publishing more than ever before, I thought it might be nice to highlight some of my favorite things I’ve written over the last nine years. There’s always our Favorites tab, which is designed to showcase some of these articles, but I figured it could be fun to re-surface some of my personal favorites with a little bit of director’s commentary. I hope you enjoy this greatest hits collection, and if you’re reading this, thank you for supporting Swim Into The Sound and helping us get to 400 articles. I’ll see you when we break off the next hundo. 

Hey, did you guys know I like Wednesday? How about MJ Lenderman? Those two are some of my favorite artists currently working, and together, they’ve already made a sprawling collection of music that articulates a hyper-specific type of southern living. It’s desolate and dilapidated, collaborative and caring, humorous and honest, breathtaking and beautiful. This article attempts to recount my fandom of these two bands, their body of work, and the charming semi-fake cross-sectional genre their music has spawned. 

 

When it comes to writing about Sufjan Stevens, you know I had to lean in with a long-winded title and an overly-earnest explanation of my adoration. While I adore Carrie & Lowell, Illinois, and Age of Adz, I’ll always be a Michigan Boy in my heart of hearts. In this nearly 4k-word essay, I detail the hyper-specific way I fell into Sufjan’s music and delve directly into the masterwork that is his sophomore album. I even made a bunch of phone wallpapers out of the album art if that’s your type of thing. 

 

I love the indie/math rock outfit Minus The Bear. Throughout most of high school, college, and my twenties, I’d catch MTB in concert every time they came through Portland as they wound their way north back to Seattle. In this post, I rank all of their 11 official releases and use that as an opportunity to extol the virtues of various songs across their almost two-decade-long career. It’s long and heartfelt, but I still agree with the ranking to this day, so it’s nice to know I’m consistent.

 

An Introduction To Post-Rock

Post #132
Published April 24, 2020

I love putting people on. There’s no better feeling than recommending a band or album to someone and finding out that it connected. With this article, I wanted to give people an entry point into the post-rock genre. Since it’s largely instrumental and has tons of legacy acts, it can be hard to know exactly where to start with music like this, so I attempted to take my decades of fandom and hone down to an album (or two) from some of the genre’s most essential bands. The result was a collection of nine albums that will hopefully open the door to exploring each of these artist’s phenomenal discographies and the genre as a whole. 

 

Here is one of the first times I ever waded into music “theory” on this site. I say “theory” in quotes because it’s all very floaty pontificating, not music theory in the traditional, educational sense. Instead, what you get is a ten-point outline of how we come to like (or dislike) records. I pull from pop music, hip-hop, indie rock, and more to explore the concept of “growers” and how many extra-musical factors come into play with our fandom of any given artist. It’s a vaguely scientific analysis of what “liking” an album means, and I’m still proud of how thorough this feels.

 

It Gets Brown: Swim Into The Sound's Guide to Ween

Post #47
Published January 24, 2018

Have you ever wanted to get into Ween? You know, the glue-huffing Spongebob-adjacent duo that changed the face of Alternative Rock for a brief window back in the 90s? They have a massive body of work that is vibrant, goofy, and hard to pin down. Their early work is rough and haphazard, but their later work loses some of the group’s youthful shine. As such, they have an ambitious discography that can be difficult to navigate, but with this piece, I try to lay out a path for prospective listeners to jump into their music with both feet because I truly believe it’s a journey worth taking. 

 

The Wonder Years changed my life. Hearing The Upsides for the first time in my senior year of high school didn’t just comfort and compel me; it tipped life’s hand and let me know what I could expect throughout college and my early 20s. That band remains incredibly special to me, but their sophomore album will always be The One. If you want to learn why (or read about my failed high school relationship), this article is for you. 

 

I don’t write many anniversary pieces for this blog, but I have a special connection with Tunnel Blanket. The third album from post-rock mainstays This Will Destroy You is a largely wordless meditation on death, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot to say. I wound up writing this love letter to their seismic third album, and by the time I finished the first draft, I realized that the record just happened to have a birthday coming up. So, with that happy coincidence falling into my lap, everything lined up, and I published my first-ever anniversary review ten years on the dot.

 

Okay, let’s do a silly one. Back in 2018, Migos were untouchable. Everyone was listening to “Bad and Boujee,” doing the dab, and whipping up stir fry. In the midst of Migos Mania, the group released Culture II, a two-hour affair that packed 24 songs into one release, for better or worse. In listening to the whole thing, it’s hard to ignore how often Offset name-drops Patek Philippe. It’s such a distinct combination of words, and the rapper does deliver them well, but after a while, the name starts to lose all meaning. Here, I try to compile all of the rapper's references to the watch brand in an attempt to answer the question, “Does Offset own a Patek Philippe?” I also took a bunch of old Patek print ads and put Migos lyrics over them, so that’s still funny to me. 

 

Justin Vernon’s Ascent Into The Artificial

Post #99
Published April 7, 2019

Like any good Millennial, I have an unwavering affinity for Bon Iver. Like so many other people in 2007, I heard “Skinny Love,” and it shook me to my core. I followed his career closely, eventually culminating in an absolute masterwork with 22, A Million, an experimental and electronic album that couldn’t have sounded further from the folksy strums of his breakthrough. In this article, I chart that journey and make a case for both ends of this spectrum being equally beautiful.

 

I love Portugal. The Man. That’s a sentence that’s even more embarrassing to say now than it was back in 2017 when I wrote this article, but let me explain. PTM was one of the very first overtly “indie” bands I ever loved, and the fact that they’re essentially a Portland group filled me with an immense amount of hometown pride. I love their early proggy post-hardcore stuff, I adore their 2010s dips into psychedelia, and I even admire them for everything they’ve been able to achieve in the last half-decade since cementing themselves as an alternative rock mainstay. In this article, I rank every one of their studio albums, though, again, it was really an excuse to write about how much I adore each one of their records.

 

The Stark Maximalism of Sufjan Stevens

Post #119
Published January 7, 2020

Okay, one more Sufjan post. What can I say? The guy’s influential to me. Here, I focus on the Carrie & Lowell era as a suite of releases, stacking the original album side-by-side with the accompanying live album and collection of B-sides and demos released throughout the back half of the 2010s. What drew me to this body of work is how you can hear any given song scale up or down; you get these beautiful original versions on the LP, then bombastic renditions when performed live, and somehow even more quiet and careful versions when the same songs are in demo form. It’s a true marvel, and I’m grateful to follow an artist who treats his own work with this much reverence. 

 

My Favorite Type of Song

Post #214
Published November 19, 2021

We’ll end this with my favorite. Not necessarily my favorite thing I’ve ever written here, but a post about my favorite type of music. Specifically, a song that is long, winding, and wandering, preferably with a big, expansive, searching instrumental. It’s not quite a jam, but it’s not not a jam. In this post, I simply try to articulate what that feeling is and why it hits my brain so nicely. 

And there you have it: a baker’s dozen of essential Swim Into The Sound articles for your reading enjoyment. I hope you have had fun on this walk down memory lane, and thank you again for helping this site achieve such a landmark milestone. Now it’s onward to 500!