Select Frequency #20

Time for slowcore: wallow through this late winter nadir with me!

Back in late November, I used my slot in this venerable series to deliver the perfect Power Holiday soundtrack to these coldest of months, a comforting mood-cushioning, feedback-addled alt/indie mixtape to fend off end of year blues and fuel that Christmas zip. Did it work for you? It very much worked for me, and I was projecting like an opera goddess. Good times.

Much better times, it would apppear, than those we have since emerged into. Leaving aside the geopolitical mayhem that has kicked off this newest of years (see last week’s installment if any part of your Weltanschauung is unfortunate enough to reside in the United States), the holiday season has been blown to smithereens and the arse end of winter is upon us. It is time for a Power Comedown, and I ask nothing more of you as such than to listen to slowcore with me and feel miserable. In we go…

1. Sugar Plant - “I Was You”

2. Mazzy Star - “Take Everything”

3. Low - “Coattails”

4. Arab Strap - “Glue”

5. Dntel - “Why I’m So Unhappy”

6. The Wrens - “13 Months in 6 Minutes”

7. SENTRIES - “Nails”

8. Salon Music - “nagisa nite”

9. 王忆灵 (Wang Yiling) – “拂晓” (Fuxiao; Dawn)

10. Boyz & Girl - “New”

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Sugar Plant – “I Was You”

from Trance Mellow // 1996 // slowcore / dream pop

Sugar Plant are one of many cautionary tales for why you should never judge a group by one algorithm-friendly record that puts them on the map at the expense of everything else in their catalogue, even if the record in question is as excellent as their 2000 lounge opus Dryfruit! There and elsewhere, this Japanese group trot out some of the most beautiful snapshots of languor I’ve heard in my days, of which “I Was You” is arguably the finest. Caught just as the band were transitioning away from straight slowcore into dreamier realms, this song makes a slight departure from their mellow fare and posits a major handkerchief risk.

I cannot stress enough the extent to which I would violently, motionlessly lose my shit to e.g. the way that chorus breaks in if it hit me at the right point in the right montage, were there any sequence long enough to accommodate it without sacrificing its impact. (Does it get any more slowcore than two choruses in nine minutes? The answer is yes, actually — flick ahead to entry #3.) Imagine this getting the Twin Peaks “Just You“ treatment in a context with even half the emotional resonance. Music is dangerous. Mazzy Star could never.

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Mazzy Star – “Take Everything”

from Among My Swan // 1996 // slowcore / country

Pardon my French, for Mazzy Star could, did, and have been well rewarded for it, even if their out-of-genre recognition only extends to two songs. Those are two worthy songs! “Look On Down From the Bridge” pulled every pound of its burgeoning, depressive weight in (probably) the single best episode of Rick & Morty back when that was something we all watched, while “Fade Into You” remains the perfect bedroom wallpaper to accommodate your first second-hand mandala drape. It’s a shame that “Halah” never caught the same traction (never has a breakup song been quite so cosy or so horny!), especially since you can actually sing along to that one without sounding like a stoned zombie, but I digress — two tracks at the heart of the smudged eyeliner/paisley scarf canon is hardly bad going.

By contrast, “Take Everything” can hang the entirety of its out-of-genre appeal on the contributions of guest guitarist William Reid (The Jesus and Mary Chain), which instantly and expertly broaden the track’s scope from a smudged Polaroid to a widescreen montage of bare tree branches, overcast skies, uncombed hair and crippling regrets. The rest of this thing is too bloody miserable to do more than stare at its boots — it’s an uncompromising country downer, and don’t the band know it! Take the leaden title refrain, which is borderline tuneless and likely wouldn’t land at all if Hope Sandoval weren’t God’s gift to aesthetic sadness, or the beleaguered drums, practically outgunned by the strummed acoustics when it comes to the track’s chief percussive force. Sometimes all you have to do is wilt successfully. I love slowcore.

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Low - “Coattails”

from The Curtain Hits the Cast // 1996 // slowcore

chords clang

heavier than air –

death knell

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Arab Strap – “Glue”

from Monday at the Hug and Pint // 2003 // slowcore

Sex without love is a good ride worth trying
But love without sex is second only to dying

Found yourself in the worst kind of dry January? This one’s for you. Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat has never been one to flatter his own human nature with a sense of romantic grandeur, and is there any better example of the dour home truths he’s built his name on than this unflinching depiction of sex as a necessary condition for a fulfilling relationship (for a chap of Moffat’s libido, at least).

In classic Strap fashion, the title “Glue” is a double-entendre for the metaphorical binding agent between two lovers and, uh, any other pearly viscous substance that may come to mind *wink wink*. The resonance of both meanings carries so starkly across this track that I feel stupid for having explained it, but that is a mark of good songwriting. So there you have it. The music is appropriately depressing, dressing Moffat’s dry narrations in mournful feedback and ear-catching accents while shirking the burden of a tangible hook. No gratification to be had on this one, unless you count an unwelcome feeling of validation.

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Dntel – “Why I’m So Unhappy”

from Life is Full of Possibilities // 2001 // indietronica

However gloriously on-the-nose this one’s title is, nothing less than brutal candour could do justice to the way Dntel modulates Rachel Haden’s vocals over the backend of this otherwise fragile collage of guitar arpeggios and flickering electronics. Has a voice ever sounded so lonesome under so much distortion? It’s a slow walk to the grave.

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The Wrens - “13 Months in 6 Minutes”

from The Meadowlands // 2003 // indie

Charles Bissell’s wrought account of a life-affirming party hookup turned strained long-distance romance turned awkward goodbye is, uh, not fateful or dramatic or even particularly interesting, but it does capture like nothing else that festering early-twenties feeling of being left behind by life at a time when it seems to have barely gotten started. Honestly, the significant other in this track is a more compelling metaphor for excitement and opportunity than she is a love interest, but if over two decades of cult classic status have demonstrated only one thing, it’s that Wrens fans really get their rocks off over sad, dysfunctional girl stories. So it goes that Bissell lays down his most insightful snapshot of the insurmountable disjuncture between his desperate self and our Tragically Ambitious Indie-Song Girl…

You’d graduate and leave for London soon
Your layover at Newark’s near my house
We met for dinner there
Just one hour to spare
Your twenties all mapped out
I’m in my driest drought
Feeling old and shot and how
And this is what I thought:
“I seem to still be caught”
I’m a footnote at best
I envy who comes next

…only to cap it off with a Shakespearean encapsulation of his past self’s consequent mentality:

Wish we could just make out

If nothing else, the immaturity is both honest and touching. Whether all this is profound, stirring, naive, a little stupid, or a mix of all four, Bissell’s tale of emotional sunk costs and regressive listlessness is at least a little seasonally appropriate.

However, music is the realm of higher things than maudlin relationship portraits — and whatever horror stories you’ve heard about The Meadowlands‘ infamously protracted gestation or the paralysis Bissell’s perfectionism inflicted on his future output, the guitar production on this track alone vindicates them a hundred times over. Any pathos in the man’s mumbled, inelegant words across the song’s verses, it pales against the lattice of squeaks, twangs, clicks and pangs that sustains the track from his guitar. As far as pure musicality goes, the arrangement is still a revelation in textural innovation and tasteful accents, but the raw effort that must surely have gone into putting such a thing together belies a deeper sense of anxiety: the sheer insistence Bissell shows to set-dress his own story with such absurd increments of detail is, in its own way, vulnerability incarnate.

This is most obvious when he shuts up and plays a guitar solo. ‘Guitar solo’ (one of my least favourite word pairings in English, and as a guitarist at that) is selling it short. The guitar solo here does what any good guitar solo should do and so few achieve: it produces a voice-beyond-a-voice, a distillation of a feeling that speaks more clearly and with more terrifying clarity than any verbal complement can muster and lays bare the emotional truth of a song on a level that, whether for a few minutes or the rest of one’s life, flatly prohibits hearing the world through the same set of ears. Playing over a small handful of ascending progressions and simple licks, Bissell eschews any cliched sense of taking flight or transcending the mope the song has hitherto laid down; he circles the drain, coaxing out every strained pang of nostalgia and regret imaginable as it bends its way up the fretboard.

It sounds perfect, but not in a way that invites giving a fuck about which notes are being played: its performance is so obsessive, so solipsistic that I find it utterly heartbreaking in how it makes me picture any number of lost, young no-hopers who stare down their past (whether at a doomed relationship or any comparatively banal disappointment) and see it as a long tunnel to nowhere without glimpsing a path ahead beneath their feet.

Is a winter mope a good excuse to reconnect with this early-twenties malaise? You can be the judge there.

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SENTRIES - “Nails”

from Gem of the West // 2025 // noise rock / post-rock

I said at the top of the page that we’d be staying away from politics here, but I can’t think of a single track from the last few years that better encapsulates what it’s like to reluctantly put one foot after another at a time when the while world has gone to shit. Across piercing distortion, gloom-eaten vocals and that all-important marching trudge, SENTRIES’ Kim Elliot nails a portrait of how the only way to rise to meaningless chaos is so often with the mindlessness of keep on keeping on. If that’s not your January, you’re in a different world to me.

“Nails” reminds me of another momentously downcast closer from a recent-ish effort, namely Vampire Weekend’s “Hope” — a song I’ve heard precisely once from a band I loathe (often specifically for their lyrics), but it’s based in a similar downcast plod musically, I think its lyrics touched on something essential in the irony-laced head-to-head it plays between doomerism and stoicism, e.g.:

The prophet said we’d disappear
The prophet’s gone, but we’re still here
His prophecy was insincere
I hope you let it go
The righteous rage was foolish pride
The conquerors did not divide
The call keeps coming from inside
I hope you let it go

“Nails” is not quite the same level of lyrical coup de grâce, but it’s no slouch either:

Green swirls inside your mind
The inner workings of the machine
And you find every time that you go searching
There’s a mirror right where your brain should be

It would have been great if Elliot had thrown in a few pointers for how to get the ol’ grey matter back, but I guess he’ll have to reflect a little harder on that one hurr hurr.

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Salon Music – “nagisa nite”

from M.A.S.H. // 1995 // dream pop / lounge

This may be every inch a comedown playlist, but you should know better than to mope without at least a dutiful slither of self-care. “nagisa nite” is where we turn things around and start to wallow with a little convalescence, and if its lounge stylings inspire undiscerning elevator music analogies, tune into those vocals! In a critical landscape that has long been covered by Beach House’s lard stains, I know it’s cliched to ascribe intimacy to any and all breathy, lower-range female vocals, but “nagisa nite” existed before any of that sloppy discourse/turgid algorithming, and trust me when I say that what vocalist Hitomi Takenaka does here is absolutely the real deal: the half-intelligible lyrics, the unpredictable chorus inflections, the way she emphasises the melody over her breathy delivery at exactly the right points — everything about her performance is pure enticement, and I can think of no other songs I’d rather be nourished by.

Beyond that, well, as my old pal Porc put it, that bassline alone could heal a shrapnel wound.

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王忆灵 (Wang Yiling) – “拂晓” (Fuxiao; Dawn)

from 枯萎颂 (Ode to Wither) // 2024 // progressive folk

I’ve never enjoyed or been particularly good at writing about cathartic, life-affirming music that makes me want to open your mouth at the sky and go AHHHH. This is partly because most criticism that attempts to go there is immensely hackneyed to me, partly because I’m a firm believer that the more enormous the emotional reaction one hopes for, the more suggestive one’s language must be in conjuring it — but mostly because it’s plain hard. Dancing about architecture is all well and good, but what do you do when the building in question is so huge that there’s nothing to do but spreadeagle yourself on the ground? What happens when the thoughts that run through your head verge on such intensities of hyperreality that expressing them approaches the sense of frustration and tedium you feel when trying to describe your dreams to an uninterested party. Aren’t some things better off being privately treasured?

If that sounds like the foundation for a just listen for yourself style copout, then I was certainly tempted — but this climatic revelation of a folk track both offers and demands so much more. The central highlight of Wang Yilang’s treasure of a debut Ode to Wither (watch this lady!), this thing hits its stride midway in a wailing vocalise that tramples gorgeously over any concerns of too much as it carries the song through a momentous linear build — building to what, given the right time and place, could well be an entirely fresh frame around the notions of elation, relief or joyous catharsis. Tears flow, words fail (...it’s a vocalise) and hearts melt. What, you may ask, is a track of such incorrigible brightness doing in a playlist this moody? Make your way through the brittle acoustics and anxious tangle of verses that preclude Yilang’s gamebreaking takeoff and (sorry) find out for yourself (not sorry) — no prizes for sussing out how such a flooring interpretation of dawn after darkness might fit into your mindset at this present moment.

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Boyz & Girls – “New”

from Boyz & Girls // 2010 // noise pop

…and to close our cycle of wintertide gloom, here’s one last banger from a band fronted by Yile Lin (whose work as the excellent Skip Skip Ben Ben kicked off my late-November entry). Boyz & Girls’ sole, self-titled album is an absolute riot when it comes to wholesome earworms played under absurd amounts of feedback, and I cannot recommend it enough as a whole package — but “New” gets my vote for the standout every time.

This song is like coming home to three or four separate songs you loved at some point but forgot somehow, and when it kicks off it packs all the joy and thunder of realising that all the things that once meant the world to you can still matter just as much for a few precious minutes and be none the cheaper for it.

I have no idea what possessed Lin to belt with such abandon over the track’s clamorous latter minutes (or even what she’s singing), but her performance here is a desperate burst of vitality at a time when nothing on earth could be in shorter supply. God, it’s electric. Purge your self-pity and fix your ailing heartbeat to this song this instant! Life is speeding onward! Catch up!

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