Review Summary: I want to d
History is just one fucking thing after another - Alan Bennett
It’s difficult to listen to music now. Maybe you’re listening to a lot of music, maybe you think otherwise, but that’s not the case. You’re wrong. Can’t be helped. Everyone has free time
including your favourite bands. Unprecedented scenes. If your musical heroes aren’t livestreaming their casual conversations and vague ruminations on YouTube right now this second, you need to reconsider your preferences quicksharp. Music is always out there and almost always easily consumable; we have entered a Time Period where the Olympics do not happen quadrennially, the US and China are no longer racing each other to see who can blow the environment to pieces the fastest, and Elon Musk and Grimes have potentially split up even though
literally no-one is talking about it. As a profoundly significant side-effect of all this, media that is not music and is less easily consumable under normal circumstances (the entirety of Terrace House) or usually unavailable (Covid-19 live news channels, that Tricot YouTube chat from last night) is now a moral imperative. Stay home and consume that shit, please!
What I am trying to hit on here is
who listens to blackgaze in the middle of a pandemic? Blackgaze is for pretending exciting things are happening to you when the broad details of your life suggest otherwise, daydream music for adrenalised hipsters with bad tattoos. Everyone is staring out of their windows right now. For all I know, everyone has bad tattoos by now (but you’ll never ever see them). Blackgaze is one of those built-in-obsolescence Imagine If You Were Different genres. If everyone imagines they were different, no-one is (thanks David Foster Wallace, or whoever). Precisely because everyone should be listening to blackgaze right now according to the circumstances, nobody actually is in reality. Case closed, end of maths paragraph.
It being logically impossible to listen to it at present, I can finally realise one of my Top 1000 Reviewer Goals: writing a
Sunbather review that doesn’t require a single jot of integrity. If the flagged review can get away with it in healthy times, so can I in times of plague. Overture. Lots of things can be said about
Sunbather. It’s the
Loveless of black metal: with blastbeats, audible bass and none of the sex appeal. It’s Envy but black metal: with blastbeats, tremolo riffing and even less sex appeal. It’s Pitchfork but black metal: with blastbeats, zero gender parity in the writing dept, and (ugh) a tad more sex appeal.
But something’s wrong.
Sorry to call out the elephant in the room here, but the whole point of shoegaze was to be music you could either fuck to or blaze to. The whole point of black metal was to reclaim a national identity that literally nobody writing with English as their first language understands shit about. This includes Deafheaven. They’re from a state in the United States. I forget which one; to be honest, I forget all epimusical stuff about this band. It’s distressingly boring. I tried to watch an interview* with their vocalist and had to switch it off after three minutes because it was the most uninteresting thing I’ve seen since that arthouse sci-fi film where the world gets overtaken by genetically modified potted plants apart from, like, not really. I do not want to sleep with them or blaze with them. Shoegaze is ruined forever.
Also, their melodies on this one are kindergarten-level despite being a distressingly prominent focus of their songwriting? Let’s expand on that. Let’s blow that shit up like a ten-tonne balloon, or whatever. So there’s this bit on
Feedbacker when Boris take something like 27 minutes of pent-up tension and blow them out three times harder than you at that summer camp back in lower sixth. At this moment time stands still
while still accelerating and senses fail and - critically! - there are no melodies. Well, okay, perhaps there are melodies, but
you don’t hear them because every tone is distorted to high heaven and the only part that can be easily transcribed is the vocal mantra - and this doesn’t need to be transcribed because that shit resonates deeply enough to be heard the other side of your Tinder profile. It’s better that way. Screw melody! It’s the most overrated component of music, and the main reason metal musicians continually get let off the hook for presenting scale exercises as riffs. Melody tells you how to feel - how boring is that?! My rule for everything ever except for critical writing is
show, don’t tell! This is an important rule! Here is why:
2 truths 1 lie
Truth: I once came a hair’s breadth away from starting a fistfight by quoting Protest the Hero lyrics overzealously in a chapel.
Truth: I once received money for arranging a hookup purely so that I could buy Dark Souls II on release.
Lie: I slept with Slex even though we’re second cousins.
See, that sucked. You had no chance to guess. There’s no fun if things are handed to you on a plate that way - no stakes if you know everything in advance. None of that shit needs to be telegraphed. This is kind of what it’s like trying to engage with Deafheaven’s lame-ass arpeggios on an emotional level. It’s like “yes, I
get that you very obviously want me to feel this, but, uh…” and then you unmatch and take your Tinder swiftly elsewhere. Fuck you, melody! Now let’s look at structure-
I pause the album for a second, so as not to lose track of whatever song I’m on’s structural complexity (I lied in Paragraph #1, sorry). I check the timestamp. Oh. I’ve been listening to the 8bit version on YouTube all this time? Fuck it, nothing to lose at this point:
Aimless distorted bullshit is better than most actual music, and I’d rather fight one hundred duck sized horses obviously lmao, you could run that shit over with a Scalextric set. Is an album
really influential if its primary accomplishment is teaching hordes of kids in bedrooms they do not own that they can turn the reverb up with one hand while dialling down the mids with the other? Cardboard is underrated as a soundproofing material, whereas your ex’s mattress was not worth the hype in that regard or others. West Virginia is the state with the smallest ratio of citizens who speak a language other than English at home. Iowa is the state with the smallest peni“I’m dying/Is it blissful?/It's like a dream/I want to dream” is so fucking corny you’d think Billy Corgan fucked Trent Reznor and gave the adoption rights to Lana del Rey. When Hilary Clinton read the word ‘sigh’ aloud off a teleprompter she was actually patched in to my inner monologue. I’m edgy enough that my liberal arts degree augmented my cache of post-Christian guilt instead of alleviating it, but it made arguments with my parents more boring. For real though, “The Pecan Tree'' is the best song here by a decent margin, but Pecan Pie is still the best American invention. More importantly, here are my top five Dream Theater songs: 1. Voices 2. Stream of Consciousness 3. Octavarium 4. Finally Free 5. Disappear. Let me know yours at the earliest convenience. Any tracklist with long songs interspersed with short songs is worthy of my respect, and that is a fact. It’s been ages since I last played a Nuzlocke run on Pokemon, going to have to get back to that soon. So I’m sorry if this has come at a bad time, but honestly it’s for th
