SEVEN: Seven songs for your 7am morning commute in the summer of 2018
Less yawning, more listening!
You wake up sleepy in the early hours of the morning as you stumble through your routine and out the door, walking to the closest train station about thirty minutes by foot away.
It’s a strange time of life for you.
You graduated college over a year previous to this point in time and immediately moved abroad as the final ring on a multi-year causal chain snapped into place. You experienced a lot in that year-and-a-half (the least of which was your employer hiring you illegally and holding your visa status hostage), completely isolated from any sense of community; the genuinely beautiful and wonder-filled moments clashing with a profound sense of spiritual grief and practical isolation. What you thought was going to be a permanent move left you with no savings and no prospects, and you were able to scrounge together just enough cash for a flight back home.
You find yourself back at square one (but this time in much more debt!), living off of an acquaintance’s couch and commuting to work for your minimum-wage job close to three hours one-way each morning wherein you don wizard robes and point folks towards the post-rollercoaster gift shop. These mornings and evenings are brutal. As hard as this time of life is, you are unaware of what lies ahead in the coming years; the death of your father, burnout, and a global pandemic closing the door to another international move that you’ve spent a lot of time and resources preparing for (but also Baldur’s Gate 3!).
That’s in the future, though.
You yawn for the third time, and are dreading this overtime shift that lies at the destination of the morning journey. For now, you at least have both your headphones and the time to enjoy these SEVEN albums that you’ve had on repeat. A small semblance of contentment washes over you as you hit play, and the warm morning breeze starts to feel kind of nice.
And now for the grand reveal: this was my life in 2018, not yours! Life is in an okay place now, but these SEVEN representative songs from albums that I listened to daily always remind me of that strange, formative, and often Sad™ time.
Ayano Kaneko - Shukujitsu / Shukusai, 2018
This song is fucking perfect and I love it so much.
Throwing this album on the other day was the impetus for me writing this whole piece, and this song in particular deserves a highlight. It embodies light spilling into your bedroom on a day off, the dust particles of hope, melancholy, joy, and longing each illuminating momentarily between the curtains of a deceptively simple singer-songwriter acoustic banger.
Ayano Kaneko has always had my favorite voice out of her contemporaries; it has a raw and unpredictable quality to it that compliments her otherwise straightforward psych-infused folk writing tendencies, and while Shukusai as a whole is a phenomenal showcase of her and her band’s laidback and warm/hazy approach (and is the perfect summer album, so get listening!), it wasn’t until closer “Shukujitsu” that I noticed that the fundamentals of her songwriting capabilities had been elevated to a new level. I’d listen to “Shukujitsu” when commuting morning and night, when walking and sitting on a train, while sitting with my head down on my lunch break, and while laying in bed. The way she vocally builds into the chorus, drops momentarily, and then takes the fuck off never fails to stir something in me.
There’s nothing overly complex about it, it’s just good songwriting.
mewithoutYou - August 6th / [untitled] e.p., 2018
“Does it feel wrong to say a thought ‘metastasized’?”
For those of you that know me personally, you know that mewithoutYou is singlehandedly the most meaningful band to me. I’ll never be able to adequately express how much these weird Philly hippies and their music means to me, but, as with every previous album cycle of theirs, I found myself in 2018 mystified at how much every aspect of the untitled/Untitled project resonated with me.
There is a thread of gloom and instability present that, at that point of time, captured an aspect of the loss of mental clarity that I felt in myself. Aaron Weiss somehow sounded more cynical, more detached, more scared than he ever has on record. The previously warm spiritual undertones in his lyrics donned a slightly more sinister mask, as if unseen forces were tapping quietly on his window.
“August 6th” is prophecy fulfilled. It’s capital A Apocalypse, the unceremonious and nonsensical violence of both natural and unnatural things. The warm guitar tones and methodical melodic rumbling in the first half of the track appears gradually like a bright light in the sky that invokes reflection on memories long since passed, and then the blast wave hits:
Human foreheads all smashed
foreign cars upside down
insect mouths open wideI stared down a huge insect
bright red-glowing eyes
[does it feel wrong to say a thought “metastasized”?]
legs on both highway sides
S a i d i n s e c t w a s m e c h a n i z e d ! ! ! ! ! !
It’s a song about personal apocalypse, global war, and the coldness and finality of death set to blissful (almost cathartic) instrumentation. It’s a song I think only mewithoutYou could have pulled off.
Haru Nemuri - Sekaiwotorikaeshiteokure / Haru to Shura, 2018
Setting obliterated human remains and memories aside for a moment, let’s talk about a J-pop ripper!
Haru Nemuri had about as good of an entrance into the scene as you could with her debut album Harutosyura. Filled with the optimism and energy that youth gives, Haru’s blend of La Dispute adjacent post-hardcore-lite, alt rock, and J-pop staples made her debut one of the most re-listenable and enjoyable albums of the year for me. “Sekaiwotorikaeshiteokure” in particular is a good distillation of what makes the whole project so much fun.
The chorus is a lab-made ear worm, with Haru taking the phonetically intimidating song title for Western ears and making it an anthemic chant set to chiptune synth leads and driving distorted guitar and bass. The unrelenting choral vocal pad sample that threads the whole song together is such a nice touch, and no matter my mood, I’m forced to start bobbing my head.
Grab the lightstick that is most definitely on top of your dresser and start waving, lest you look silly for trying to be too cool.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - There She Goes My Beautiful World / Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, 2004
Cave’s latter half career is probably my favorite of his musical output. While the violence and sharp edges of The Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds gave us a lot of cuts that stand the test of time, it’s also the addition of his transparency and vulnerability in the twilight of his career that solidifies him as one of the greats to me. His “Old Goth Yelling at the Clouds” persona has been earned through life experience, and where some artists get an immediate eye-roll from me for similar ways of posturing, Cave has an undeniable weight to the way he carries and expresses himself.
I’d go out on a limb here to pinpoint 2004’s Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus double album as the moment in his creative output that laid the blueprint for the esoteric and thoughtfully sentimental artist we have today. Hope is palpable in a lot of these songs (the gospel choir presence throughout many of the songs does the heavy lifting here) without downplaying any of the melancholy of the subject matter.
“There She Goes My Beautiful World” is everything I love about Nick Cave. It’s a little corny, and dips a little too hard into weird uncle rock, but good lord above does the pre-chorus and chorus come upon you like the Holy Spirit itself until your feet are stomping in celebratory joy while you’re singing back the lyrics about the wonders of humanity’s creative spirit. There are other songs on this album I think are more essential (I mean c’mon, Easy Money and O’ Children are on here), but the sheer kinetics of “There She Goes..” will make you want to pick up that pen, camera, or instrument, and follow your muse before she’s gone in the wind. It just so happens to be that in this context, my muse is a goth in his late 60s with a funny haircut and a suit.
Kashiwa Daisuke - April.#02 / April.#02, 2006
While most folks stumble into Daisuke’s Program Music I as an entry point into his discography, I find myself partial to introducing him through “April.#02” whenever the opportunity presents itself. I enjoy Program Music I quite a bit, but “April.#02” doesn’t feel as captured by time as that album or other entries do.
There’s an aura to .#02 that I don’t think Daisuke has ever replicated since. His ability to manifest grounded moments out of composition are stunning; be it sitting on a public park bench, reading at a coffee shop, killing a JRPG god, or taking a walk by a stream (the four pillars of life some might say), his use of timing and dynamics to tell a story have always been an aspect of his work that has set him apart.
It feels overblown to call something ‘transportive,’ but I think “April.#02” has earned the hyperbole. It’s the glitchy/neoclassical ghost I’ve hoped would possess him again ever since I first heard it, and while I don’t think he’s going to reach this height again by the standards of my personal taste, I’m perfectly content to continue to turn to reach for it when I want a little bit of an escape.
Bazan - Care / Care, 2017
“Care” is the type of song I can listen to pretty much every day and not get sick of. While not even my favorite of Bazan’s solo records, the songs on Care as a whole, and especially the title track, really come alive at the hours when it’s most quiet. Bazan’s low raspy croon over gorgeous and hypnotic synth melodies kept me grounded despite not resonating with the subject matter at hand. There’s a quiet self-destruction at the heart of a lot of his songs, be it autobiographical or not, but it’s the little bit of hope he always interjects that elevates his lyricism for me. Not much else to say about this, besides:
“All of us need major healing, come and get yours in the sun.”
Republic of Wolves - Worry If You Want (Yume) / Shrine, 2018
With Asian folklore being of particular interest to me, I was of course over the moon at the release of an Alt Rock record written by a handful of white dudes from Long Island using Shinto figures as a narrative backdrop to speak on existential issues, as all of us were I’m sure. The sun goddess Amaterasu acts as an impetus for the unnamed main character to go on a quest of literally finding himself as she pickpockets his soul, only to discover that the new version of himself that the journey created in the process is worth building upon.
Album closer “Yume” is the perfect capstone to Shrine’s themes, both sonically and lyrically. The dynamic ballad ebbs and flows with pleading vocal melodies as our protagonist has a conversation with Amaterasu about reinvention.”We all die every fucking day, so you can worry all you want,” she says, referencing his regret and resistance to growth, as an instrumental build up explodes into a guitar solo (in the Year of Lord 2018) to end the album. Brand New could never!
You know, my favorite sad Danish boy, Soren Kierkegaard, penned what has become my genuine life mantra in his collection Either/Or when he wrote (slightly paraphrased):
“Do it or do not do it, you will regret both.”
As someone that used to really struggle with action paralysis, this little crumb of wisdom sounds cynical on the surface but is deceptively optimistic. At a time where I was questioning every single choice I made at every potential fork in my life, it was freeing to know that regret will always exist in some form for every life decision we make. That doesn’t make those choices wrong (or correct), but it illuminates that the bulk of what matters to some degree is the action of making a decision with resolve.
These songs and albums act as signifiers both of this time of regret, and of the act of letting those regrets go; so thank you, dear reader, for taking action with conviction and regrettably making it to the end of this write-up.
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