Sometimes life kicks you square in the face. Sometimes you need a rising build.
“Say it alright it will be okay…”
dry the rain
coffee
Amelia Meath got her start harmonizing a capella in Mountain Man. Here she is as Sylvan Esso on KEXP, performing a diametrically different breed of smooth, weaving, melancholic pop.
“Sentiment’s the same but the pair of feet change…”
these poems are crying
the fool road is one of such
rejection on rejection habit
can’t help but form to flinch
to withdraw not submit
to exposure i don’t submit
for publication anymore
and the full ride graduate
MFAs told me no, and no,
———-and no
and my ex-girlfriend
my lost love i reached
out for her in despair
despite knowing full well
what lay in that direction
i reached out in pain
and hope pleading for
something some solace
———-and no, and no,
and no, and no
and the shame from that
wasted weakness and work
a factotum at minimum wage
building other people’s slack
jawed commercial dreams
tried loving that work and no,
———-and no, and no, and
no these poems come out
to my horror not as i try
to live on a joke and a smile
for the beautiful absurdity
instead they come out
when i shatter as cathartic
lamentations when i think
other people would cry
i break and then leak
out this these terrible
poems are crying
my crying
forgive me.
oh! sweet nuthin’
Maybe the single most influential band in modern American music.
“Say a word for Charlemagne, he ain’t got nothing at all…”
you goin’ miss your candy man
Terry Callier and a funky bass line. It builds.
“Where you gonna go when it starts to storm…”
the last good day of the year
“Don’t tell me…
…that you get sick of living”
when the lights go out
What do you know, or think you know, about the Black Keys?
Once upon a time they were a revelation.
“You’ll know what the sun’s all about…”
ashamed
A heartbreaking song about how fucking hard it can be to buy a Christmas tree.
In the end, it’s not so serious.
“What a crying shame…”
b-side: i’m standing in the light
Dr. Dog, long ago, live and un-released.
“…well I’ve done my time for the ills I’ve caused,
and I’ve paid my dues in the bits I’ve lost…”
A-Side: Mystery to Me
to burn clean and shine
we were going out to buy drugs
walking hungover when a man
on the phone with two girls
skipping next to him said
off-hand “hold hands
when you gallop” and fuck
me they did they held hands
and galloped
and god
i thought exhaling smoke
that’s all i’ve ever wanted.
snow days
Real Estate, another band I saw on my birthday– This time in Brighton, living day to day on £5 bottles of wine at Tesco express.
Can you hear it?
Another time,
another place,
another life.
feel good hit of the summer
When I hear this song, the fleshy pile of demons in my head stirs, and an old familiar face crawls yawning from their midst. With a demented grin, he rubs his little red potbelly, raises his black-tasseled spear, and starts to dance by the flame in my mind. I’ve never known whether I’m going to fight him or join his dance. It gives me such nostalgia, I can’t help but smile.
scrawled on the walls of the box
all over the world i realize
i spend my days craving
solitude like addiction
unfolding my isolation box
but i’m reaching a point
i think finally of madness
after months amusing myself
with loud music and guitar
and bindle blogging music
and anti-depressants
and long video games
and even longer books
until there is nothing left
to read and the games
are uninstalled halfway
and my wrist hurts from guitar
which i can still barely play
and the bindle has slowed
to a crawl and i drink
myself drunk every night
and the neighbor just committed
suicide and i’m lonely
out here on the lake
writing poems like bad diary
entries on this beautiful lake
where i do yoga every day
with no car and no means
of escape it’s addiction
this solitude i can’t escape
it i always come back
to my box it’s exhausting
out there in the world
but here too in a way
a different way a missing
something always way
a guilty squirming doubting
way an addict’s way
which i am
in my head
in myself.
in dreams
“a candy colored clown they call the sand-man
tip-toes to my room every night
just to sprinkle stardust and he whispers
go to sleep
everything
is alright.”
my kind of woman
Principal Skinner: Uh oh, two independent thought alarms in one day. The students are overstimulated. Willie, remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms!
Groundskeeper Willie: I warned ye! Didn’t I warn ye?!
“oh, baby…”
Let the love inside you die
“Let the love inside you die;”
rise above your station–
I know, I know, I try.
First we ask the question why
to chip at its foundation.
“Let the love inside you die.”
Then climbing up we seek the sky
and burst our lamentations–
I know, I know, I try.
Chin up, my child, we do not cry,
we chant our invocation:
“Let the love inside you die.”
We ride the wind, we close our eyes;
we lead the congregation–
I know, I know, I try.
All that pain and still you lie
to raise the dead sensation:
“Let the love inside you die–”
I know, I know, I try.
i live my broken dreams
a Daniel Johnston song
wings
She is running
I try to catch up
I am running with her
We are talking,
“Did you see the news?”
“No,” I say.
“It’s horrible.”
She is running faster
Than me so I yell,
“Emma, wait!”
She closes her eyes
She starts to pull away
I can’t keep up I gasp
and clutch my sides
She leaps off the end
of all that she loved–
I gasp and clutch my sides.
black balloon
A song about heroin, clearly and entirely,
can be metaphor for many things.
“Let the weather have its way with you…”
things fall apart
“The lineaments, the heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd
Will gather and not know that through its very street
Once walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning
cloud.”
-William Butler Yeats
ape and coffee
Some coffee had gotten on a man’s ape. The man said, animal did you get on my coffee?
No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me.
You’re sure you didn’t spill on my coffee? said the man.
Do I look like a liquid? peeped the ape.
Well you sure don’t look human, said the man.
But that doesn’t make me a fluid, twittered the ape.
Well I don’ know what the hell you are, so just stop it, cried the man.
I was just sitting here reading the newspaper when you splashed coffee all over me, piped the ape.
I don’t care if you are a liquid, you just better stop splashing on things, cried the man.
Do I look fluid to you? Take a good look, hooted the ape.
If you don’t stop I’ll put you in a cup, screamed the man.
I’m not a fluid, screeched the ape.
Stop it, stop it, screamed the man, you are frightening me.
-Russell Edson
the battle of hampton roads
The Monitor is a concept album so grandly ambitious that I’m a little overwhelmed just trying to talk about it. That being said, it’s also up there with Hospice as one of my favorite concept albums, ever. So I will try. From where I’m sitting, the fundamental premise seems to take the American Civil War as a metaphor for a betrayal, and a break-up. The South seceded from the union, then the North declared war in pursuit of reconquest and restoration. This is the central conceit that ties the whole thing together.
The Battle of Hampton Roads is both the climactic finale to the story of this relationship, and the literal battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor, two of the very first ironclads, and the first to ever fight each other. After pounding cannon balls off their respective armor at point-blank range for hours, they both limped home with exhausted, inconclusive sighs. Can you picture a couple screaming at each other? Hurting each other? The futility of it? It’s complex, carefully crafted, and littered with excellent writing.
These are just broad strokes, there’s so much more here. Titus Andronicus–named after Shakespeare’s lone amateurish play–somehow mashed together literary intellectualism with a drunken punk rock mentality to produce something awesome in scope and utterly their own. I cannot stress it enough: Get this album. The Monitor is a masterpiece. I’ll leave you with the quote from Abraham Lincoln upon which it opens:
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or set a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be it’s author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever,
or die by suicide.”
Now that’s a metaphor.
diamond heart
A crystalline tessellated sadness; like the cracking of ice on a lake.
the rip
In 1994, Portishead came out with Dummy, this sort of smoky, noir-lady-singing-in-a-dive-bar-over-hip-hop-beats, sound. It was a melange that was novel, head-nodding, and haunting, and it became a seminal formative influence on an entire generation of musicians. Always averse to publicity, they put out one more album then went silent for nearly a decade. When they reappeared with Third in 2008, instead of re-treading their now famous tropes, they released a sort of psychedelic rock album. Despite all the ways in which that could’ve gone wrong, I found instead I could see her there as much as ever: singing sweetly in that smoky dive bar, a melancholic shining in the gloom.
The Last Full Measure
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
-Abraham Lincoln; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863
Once, long ago, we had a poet for president.
why won’t you be what i need you to be
this poor guy is losing it
a whole world he believed in
as she rips her way upwards
towards a light he can’t see
ripping right through him
through their marriage
which opened with her eyes
and her mouth and her legs
and little bits of her heart
and though he tells her okay
tells her he wants to explore
other women he really wants
her just to be what she
no longer is or never was
what he needs her to be
and i know this because
i’ve both been that poor guy
and fucked his wife’s mouth.
shadows dancing underground
if i could just leave it alone
call it quits on the digging
this doing of a real thing
right that would be ideal
there is no money in this
hole that i dug i just dug it
dug it with all of my might
then found myself in it
and if that doesn’t matter
if that caring doesn’t matter
well i’m learning to love
it down here in this place
of earthen walls and sculpted
arches and candle-lit caves
and dancing shadows that sing
as i sing and dance as i dance
across the mosaic floors.
we bros
Weird and wild and vaguely evil, Wu Lyf is the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation. Seriously. Though they recorded this in a church, what I see instead is a vast subterranean cavern, the ceiling lost in darkness, the walls lit by flickering torches while a swarm of bats swoop high across the airy blackness overhead. This is where they belong: the rising reverberating sounds of Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, the pounding of dancing feet.
B-side: Dirt
handkerchief tied to stick 