For Every Spider You Don't Eat In Your Sleep I Eat Three
Posted: 11 March 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
I listened to the entire song after watching this, haha.
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Index
Everything I really liked has a * in front of its name, everything else runs the gamut from stuff I liked to stuff I didn’t. Movie writing is spoiler-y. No books this week!
Movies
Leos Carax - Holy Motors (2012)
Avant-Garde/Drama
Music
Home Is Where - i became birds (2021)
Emo
Intermission: Cat bands and dog bands
empire! empire! (i was a lonely estate) - What It Takes to Move Forward (2009)
Emo
* The Microphones - The Glow pt. 2 (2001)
Indie Rock/Experimental
*** Burial Etiquette - Out of Our Hands (2021)
Emotive Hardcore
Title Fight - Floral Green (2012)
Post-Hardcore
Thundercat - Drunk (2017)
Funk/Soul
* Oren Ambrachi - Grapes from the Estate (2004)
Ambient
Joustopäät - Jousti liikaa ja kärähti (2019)
Hard Rock
Broken Social Scene - You Forget It In People (2003)
Experimental/Indie Rock
Movies
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Holy Motors
This movie’s wild. Not a lot of movie trailers pull off the trick of showing absolutely everything that happens in a movie and, simultaneously, leaving you absolutely clueless. If you’d like, you could watch the trailer now and write down what you think the movie is about, then look back at those notes after watching the movie. Holy Motors really stands out in it’s originality, keeping you guessing throughout and sitting with you long after the finale.
I think the trick with Holy Motors is that it doesn’t hide anything from the viewer. It isn’t trying to misdirect or trick you with ambiguity, the plot is straightforward. We follow a Mr. Oscar (played incredibly well by Denis Lavant) as he is chauffeured around Paris to do his job; acting out various roles, unbenknownst to the general public. He receives a folder with information about the role he is to play, and his driver, Céline, makes sure he is on time and where he needs to be to play it. We see this happen nine times (this gets a little fuzzy and hard to keep track of near the end, but it’s definitely nine times) with a very unexpected, but welcome, intermission.
That’s it. The movie doesn’t have airs of pretension: it’s showing you nine interesting scenes (and constantly keeping you on the tip of your toes, wondering what’s coming next), segueing from one to the next in the limo where Mr. Oscar changes make-up and costumes. There are no secrets to uncover about this universe. It is not an incomprehensible Lynchian nightmare.
Despite the straightforwardness of what happens, a lot of the finer details are left muddled and unexplained. Why are there several people who look identical to Mr. Oscar? Where, exactly, is the line separating a scene Mr. Oscar is acting in from reality, particularly in the second half of the movie? Do people really die when they seem to die? Who is an actor and who isn’t? I think the more important questions are the ones about acting, and I think these are the exact questions the movie is trying to pose. Carax uses Holy Motors and it’s nine (ten) vignettes to explore what a movie is. It’s not about the minutea of how the world in Holy Motors works, it’s about what it makes you wonder.
It’s asking the same exact questions you are: What makes something a movie? How often do regular people just “play roles”? What is the difference between a scene in a movie and something you see happen in your daily life? What happens inside the mind of an actor? How difficult is it to separate a script from reality? How does a director understand their movie? How do they expect their audience to understand the movie? The writers? The actors? How do you separate people from characters? What is it like to look back on past work? What is the relationship between the actor, the viewer, and the content?
Holy Motors doesn’t offer any answers to these questions. They’re hard questions! And the answers are all, to some extent, subjective to you, the viewer. Holy Motors breaks down your ideas about what “a movie” is and helps ask these questions. It worms its way into your brain and unsettles something: what am I watching? What have I EVER watched?
Carax asks: what happens when we watch a movie? and somehow manages to upend any sense of normalcy in the world, if at least for a few hours.
Music
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Home Is Where - i became birds
A good chunk of Florida emo is very abrasive and kind of rubs me the wrong way, but I appreciate it for how experimental it gets and how much great music they put out. With this album, Home Is Where lean into a more aggressive, more Floridian sound with noisier choruses and screamier vocals, bookended by mellower acoustic songs.
Brandon MacDonald sounds great: the focus here is definitely on their singing, and the singing is raw and powerful, comfortable and free and expressive. The vocals are what guide you through each song, convincingly taking you through a huge range of emotions. Aside from the vocals, though, this album feels a lot less interesting than their previous release, our mouths to smile.
Their older songs have more variation, more little flourishes, more playfulness. Compare “long distance conjoined twins” to “venison” or “the scientific classification of stingrays” to “alsace-lorraine.” (Warning: these links might redirect you to substack, instead of just playing the songs)
“Long distance conjoined twins” consists of two chords played for three and a half minutes. A fuzzed up electric guitar kicks in around two minutes in, playing the same exact chords!!! I actually really like the song, there’s just a samey-ness to everything aside from the vocals. It makes it less interesting when two songs later, “the scientific classification of stingrays” cuts it down to just one chord for the entire song. I want the other instruments to have as much fun as MacDonald has singing and playing harmonica.
The acoustic guitar/harmonica led opening and closing tracks, “l. ron hubbard was way cool” and “the old country,” are fantastic: they’re minimal, but roomy and compelling. They let MacDonald shine. The middle of this album, stuck somewhere between simpler acoustic songs and angry emo noodle-fests, falls flat; Home Is Where seem afraid to take risks that they have successfully taken before. “Assisted Harakiri” is my favorite of the middle tracks, maybe because it doesn’t seem to bother with any build-up and slams the fuzz to 100 from the start, but it’s also a lot more straightforward than older songs; it doesn’t feel like a song that only Home Is Where could have written.
I became birds feels like a simultaneous step forward and back. When Home Is Where lean into the unusual (for post-hardcore/emo) instruments like the harmonica and brass, or when they let MacDonald’s singing to take the lead, they are excellent. I hope they find a way to loosen up and combine the confidence of i became birds with the compositional variety they showed in our mouths to smile.
Cat and Dog Intermission
Here’s a good thought I just had. Off the top of my head:
Cat bands:
Cap’n Jazz (“Kitty kit cat, kitty kit cat”)
Slothrust (“I like cats, do you like cats?”)
Dog bands:
Home Is Where (“I want to pet every puppy I see”)
Car Seat Headrest (“Do you have something against doooooooogs”)
Led Zeppelin (“Black Dog”)
Dogs on Acid (Dogs on Acid)
However, I have found that there is a band bridging this divide: none other than the great Blink-182.
Cat AND dog band:
Blink-182 (Cheshire Cat, numerous references to dogs which I will NOT list here)
Here is a visualization:
I spent two minutes thinking about this. Feel free to let me know any other bands participating in this cat vs dog standoff that I may have missed.
Late Additions:
Thundercat -> Cat Band
empire! empire! blah blah blah
Keith Latinen’s nasal whine might be what you like listening to. I don’t. This album reminds me of Sunny Day Real Estate, another band I don’t really like (I know, I know — blasphemy — but I have to be honest, here). It’s tough to put my finger on exactly what doesn’t click for me, Latinen’s voice aside.
Technically and executionally, the songs are all distinct and interesting. The instruments have a post-rock groove and feel, and are melodically complex. It’s just not for me — everything feels a little too slow, like there isn’t enough for me to sink my teeth into. I like my emo to have more of a punk sensibility.
The Microphones - The Glow pt. 2
Phil Elverum is a genius. “I Want Wind to Blow,” the first track on this shining accomplishment of an album, is enough to make it clear: this album is special. There are five hundred different percussion instruments that make an appearance, everything about every instrument is out of this world interesting, and it all comes together in such a unique and beautiful way. If the distorted drums kicking in at around four and a half minutes aren’t enough to convince you: I’m sorry.
And that’s just the first track! I’m not going to go into all twenty tracks in detail, but they all have these unique sounds that you just don’t get to hear that often, if at all. “The Glow, Pt. 2” swings from violent distorted drums into gentle singing over acoustic guitar and piano into yelling over an organ into twinkly noises. “The Mansion” and “(Something)” have a foghorn going in the background. “(Something) - 1” is like a Damien Dubrovnik song.
It’s not just that the sounds are interesting: Elverum is an excellent songwriter. Surrounded by all of this chaos, he manages to squeeze in relatively simple, beautiful, moving songs like “You’ll Be in the Air” and “I Felt Your Shape.” Every song sounds so good and feels so good to listen to. It’s a really incredible album.
Burial Etiquette - Out of Our Hands
I put three stars next to this one in the index because I really want everyone to listen to this band. They are unbelievably good. Everything they’ve released has blown my mind.
Paraphrasing the bandcamp description of this album: They sound a bit like Saetia and a bit like Unwound. It’s screamo that goes back to the roots. I can try to make a list of what I like about them:
They have a very 90’s emotive hardcore feel - the kind of tinny guitar, the really quiet screaming, the prominent bass. I really like how they sound.
Speaking of sound, they have such a huge variety! The songs on this EP are only around 3 minutes long but they feel like they have so much going on. Lots of depth and movement.
Quiet screaming! It really works for me in general when slower, more post-y screamo has the vocals mixed really low like this. I want to hear people screaming their lungs out, but I don’t want it to be all I hear. This is perfect.
I think at least three different people sing on this EP, sometimes simultaneously. And they’re not all men! Post-hardcore, it seems, is a genre dominated by male vocals, and Burial Etiquette really set themselves apart with excellent screaming and shrieking (!!!) coming from multiple vocalists. It adds so much depth to their music.
Between the maxed out gain and shrill vocals, they sneak in really beautiful, melodic guitar and bass lines. They open super agressively with “In Castles Made of Clouds,” but they don’t overwhelm you: there are gaps and pauses in the guitar line, and then around 1 minute in, it starts breaking off into little melodies, switching off some effects and moving entirely into playing a nice little riff through to the end of the song. They almost make me think of a more aggressive Long Drive-era Modest Mouse. Tell me you don’t hear it in the intro to “The Anguish of an Unsmiling Angel.”
Burial Etiquette give you a good amount of space in general with their music. They don’t drown you in noise, but there’s always a little something going on to keep you interested.
I can’t get enough of them. Check Burial Etiquette out, buy their albums!!!
Title Fight - Floral Green
If you are thinking “I want to listen to something that will kick my ass,” here you go. Floral Green is an aggressive post-hardcore album that leans closer to the hardcore than the post-, with some shoegaze thrown in to keep you guessing.
The songs all come in at a punchy 2 to 3 minutes long, they have really cool progressions, and they slam you with a non-stop wall of sound. There are two exceptions: the tracks “Head in the Ceiling Fan” and “Lefty” clock in at 4 minutes long, and they’re not as screamy, they’re more contemplative. They almost sound like they’re by a different band. I looked up interviews Title Fight did about this album, and this one with Spin actually answers exactly what I was wondering: [link]. The slower songs were written primarily by Shane Moran, one of the guitarists, and not by Ned Russin, who plays bass and also does most of the singing and songwriting. Very cool.
In that same interview, Russin mentions a few of his musical influences (Hum, Sonic Youth, Sebadoh) and how, like them, Title Fight really want their music to be interesting and push in different directions. They’re talented musicians, and I think they easily accomplish this with Floral Green.
Thundercat - Drunk
“Them Changes” is such a great song.
Drunk has funny and real and honest singing wrapped in the warmest, funkiest grooves around. I like when musicians sing about very specific things. Sure, there are abstract statements to be made about love and hate and misery and everything in between, but it’s nice to hear a song about getting a Goku toy from your dentist. There is something very specific and personal being shared with us. Songs about loving anime and relationships ruined by playing Diablo are separated by songs about feeling abandoned and worrying whether the cops will attack for the crime of riding a bike and being black.
There’s a lot of beauty and power in how Thundercat draws emotion out of everyday events. Maybe a little ironically detached, every sincere lament is surrounded by synthy bops and boops and jazzy bass lines, but what better way to send a message to an entire culture mired in ironic detachment?
Oren Ambrachi - Grapes from the Estate
We open with a low, humming bell, like an intercom beep before someone delivers an announcement. We progress to phone line beeps, and, eventually, brushed drums and something like a harp. I’ve written about my general inability to get very into ambient music, but this seems special. This is like, bells being rung for twenty minutes with some crackling static in the background. I’m on board with this. I felt a little hollow and missed Grapes from the Estate when it ended.
Joustopäät - Jousti liikaa ja kärähti
A little hard rock, a little desert rock, a little Ramones punk, unified with a consistently rich and sludgy bass. Aside from rock songs, there are two songs (“Rokkipumppu,” “Surupumppu”) that are mostly, for lack of better terms, balloon noises. It’s an interesting album but seems unfocused; they borrow a lot from old-school punk and hard rock, but I wish we heard more of Joustopäät doing something of their own.
I found this band through a forum post that linked to this video, posted by the YouTube account of a Finnish music venue. They have a bunch of stuff like this up if you’re interested in a more local Finnish music scene:
Broken Social Scene - You Forget It In People
Who needs “Harder Better Faster Stronger” when you can have “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me”?
This album sounds and feels very early 2000s. There’s a lot of musical direction here, but I think the overall vibe of the album is “cool indie rock band at a DIY venue.” Williamsburg was just starting to become the hipster capital of New York. It was a ~mood~.
There are some great songs on here, like “Almost Crimes - Radio Kills Remix,” the aforementioned “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” and “Cause = Time.” On the whole though, the album lacks a sense of unity, maybe because the band consists of “anywhere from 2 to 15 people at any point in time.” It’s music created by a collective, with varying musical direction throughout, almost like a compilation album.
Broken Social Scene gave up on consistency and cohesiveness and did something cool and original with You Forget It In People. Does it hold up? I probably won’t listen to the entire album again, but I have been muttering “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” to myself over and over while grocery shopping.
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[1] Continuing with the Holy Motors question of what it must be like for an actor trying to separate roles from reality, there was something I read a while ago about writers on this topic. I don’t remember the specifics well, maybe it was part of an essay, maybe it was short story, but the author was writing about how they would remember events but be completely unsure of if they were things that actually happened, or stories that they wrote, and that that is a really horrifying experience. Can you imagine getting to a point in your life where you aren’t sure if something happened to you or to a character you played on screen? What happens to your ego, your sense of self?
[2] I Became Birds - I have a lot of meta thoughts about this: I feel like I wrote way more than I needed to. I also had a tough time here because I like this band and support them! I think people should listen to their music! They’re trying to do something cool. There’s a Vice interview with Dylan Brady and Laura Les where Brady shares a perspective on how he thinks about music (paraphrasing from memory): “Imagine if a close friend of yours made the album/song/whatever. What would your reaction be?” If a close friend of mine made i became birds I have no idea how I would react. I would support them, obviously. I would be excited for them and amazed that someone I know is so talented. But this album isn’t for me the way their earlier one is. I feel bad being critical here. Maybe that’s why I wrote so much, to try to justify my feelings.
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That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. Tell your friends. Have a great day.