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Jesus, I’ve restarted this three times now.
I’ve been trying to branch out my musical taste a bit, for a couple reasons. One is that I do a lot of driving with friends and the last year of my musical pursuits has been less than favorably received by company in my car (“Stuy Music” that elicits complaint usually falls into the Akron/Family, Andrew Bird, Jens Lekman realm, where songs I think are upbeat are actually dreary or repetitive to unaccustomed ears) so it’d be nice to find something that could please me while pleasing others. I’ve had recent luck, thanks to the discoveries of Saint Motel, Archie Bronson Outfit, Pela, and most of all, Holy Fuck.
Holy Fuck (and to a much much lesser extent Dan Deacon) made me realize that dance music can have texture and soul—and I’d be lying if I didn’t say 80% of the soul of ‘acoustic’ dance music (as I will so christen it) is the live drums—whether it’s because they use real instruments or samples of real instruments. MGMT’s album, while 30% unlistenable crap as far as I’m concerned, takes this idea and runs with it into territory familiar and comfortable for me: the sad song that can be misinterpreted as a happy song.
I find that to be one of the most striking things about MGMT, (with the exception of Electric Feel, which seems to be completely about fucking and nothing about consequence) their most upbeat songs are also the most sorrowful. It’s stuck with me, and it makes their music kind of hard for me to listen to, because it reminds me of sad things, be it my wasted childhood or how I’m never going to marry a model and throw a television out a hotel window—well, I could probably achieve that last bit, tonight, if I really wanted to.
Since then I’ve looked for it in other things, be it the specific characteristic of being an upbeat song about being sad, or just the general texture of music that evokes that bizarre combination of happy and sad, music you can get drunk to, that will drive you forward, but also remind you about the bittersweet shit in life. I suppose it’s not a coincidence then that so much of the recent music I’ve been listening to seems to have this same texture. Pela (atmospheric breakup music); Archie Bronson Outfit (upbeat ass kicking atmospheric breakup music); Red Wire Black Wire (80’s inspired acoustic dance synth rock with melodramatic/wasted life/i wanna fuck-style songwriting); and finally there’s Passion Pit, with their even more bizarre mix of pure dance, live drums, near-chipmunk vocals, relentless KORGs, children’s choir, and lyrics that are a great mixture of joyful moroseness, if that even makes sense.
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Things kind of took a shit for me a couple weeks ago, I made a couple bad calls and wound up alone and (though mostly voluntary because I have no interest in eating crow to people who didn’t have to put me in a situation where I would have to eventually eat crow) relatively friendless. So, of course I started drinking a lot on the weekends, and lately it’s progressed to other things that aren’t important to list, but how I’ve been distracting myself is by exploring the dark corners (and I mean that literally, not H.P. Lovecraft-figuratively) of Los Angeles.
This weekend I saw and went to a lot of cool places. Friday night a friend and I wound up in the hills above/inside Brand Park, looking for an underground system of drainage tunnels we read about on the internet. After driving pass a “No Trespassing” sign we continued on a dirt road where we immediately were stopped by a deer standing in the middle of the road. When it started up the hill out of the street I pulled up and, a couple feet away from the deer, crouching low in the darkness, was a gigantic fucking mountain lion. Spooked by my headlights—obviously foiled in its attempt to grab the deer, it ran off, and we kept going.
The first thing we came upon was a wooden sign with the word CEMETERY on it and an arrow pointing to the left. We followed it, of course, and wound up a small completely fenced in cemetery with a somewhat large pyramid (20ft high maybe?) in one corner of it. Brand Family Cemetery is where we were, where Mr. Brand and extended family is buried alongside their dogs (including the grave of a 1 day old baby buried next to her mother).
Continuing onward we came to concrete drainage tube, which I climbed up into and followed into the side of a hill for quite a while before I started to get too claustrophobic (though the tube was about 5 feet tall) and came back to my friend who couldn’t get up the steepest part. From there we followed the dirt road up the side of a mountain, which gave us an incredible view of Glendale and onward, skyscrapers in the distance shimmered like mirages.
We heard about Abalone Cove, a beach with tidepools that we assumed we could get to at night, so we headed there next. Friday night we didn’t get to Abalone Cove because we were spooked by cops who were busting someone parked in the lot for it, but we wound up on a separate beach covered in rocks. The waves broke on a shore composed of solid stone, etching lines and crevasses into the various layers. I kept walking down the beach, risking breaking my feet on the never ending supply of large slippery rocks, until I lifted up my flashlight to discover a large skunk staring right at me, teeth barred and back arched.
I backed up a couple of feet and the skunk moved away from me, and I shouted down the beach to my friend, who thought I was saying, “I’m stuck!” instead of “There’s a skunk!”. We walked back to the skunk, where it had seemingly vanished until it suddenly crawled over a small rock-wall and started trotting across the rocks directly at us. We ran.
Saturday night, he and I, joined by a female friend of mine, decided to try to go back to Abalone Cove. After parking in a residential section next to the nicest house I have ever seen in my life, walking down the street, taking the short downward bush-canopied trail, marveling at the smooth sandy beach, we made it to the tide pools. There was all sorts of crabs and other things I don’t need to name because you can imagine that the pools were inhabited by a wide variety of life. We were lucky we came while the tide was out.
Further down the beach was a group of flashlights moving among the tidepools, never progressing toward us or further away, but constantly hovering in the air while we progressed Northward along the coast. We debated approaching them, and without anything better to do we decided to keep going. A couple feet away we started to hear music coming from them, and in my paranoia I was worried we were coming up on a group of bros who weren’t going to be happy about us approaching.
Turned out that it was a three-piece group of Mexicans, one moving around the tide pools with a headlamp looking for starfish, another with a fishing pole standing at the edge of the pools with his line in the ocean, and another just sitting by the music—which sounded like it was emanating from under water itself. They had a couple starfish, and my guy friend touched it.
Back toward the beginning of the beach where we hiked down, there was a set of scaffolding that had to be about four or five stories up in the air with a staircase leading up to the top. I tried to climb it when we first got there, but the second my foot hit the stairs the security guard for the construction site pulled up and me and my friends ran out of there as fast as we could.
On return, I approached the scaffolding slowly, and could see the security guard texting on his phone inside his car. I figured if I didn’t make any noise, he wouldn’t be able to see me in the marine layer and the darkness, so I climbed. I got to the top and took the one wooden plank out to the outer edge facing the ocean and I stood, shivering, sweaty from the beach hike, the wind blowing the moisture in the air into my face, the dark rolling waves crashing on the sand below me, and everything felt pretty cool, but at the same time I felt that familiar tinge of emotion—I’m up here by myself, not sharing this with anyone, and this moment might be kick ass but it doesn’t change how goddamn alone I feel, and how stupidly empty that makes me feel.
On the drive back we listened to Passion Pit’s album, and it seemed to sum up the evening (and some of the serious discussions we had once we were back to the car—namely about how my ‘vanishing’ ex-girlfriend is now fucking the guy who considers me his mortal enemy, which is pretty funny because there’s no way to get a bigger ego than have some douchebag fuck your sloppy seconds in some sad backfiring attempt to one up you). There’s a lot of beauty in this world, but sometimes it’s a sad beauty, where you wonder if you’ll get to come back and do this all again alongside someone you love.
Manners is excellent through and through. I bought it off Amazon MP3 impulsively, even though the complete set of 30 second samples didn’t appeal to me at all, and by the second listen I was pretty much in love. I keep listening to it, and as I do, it becomes more and more clear to me that every song on this record is practically flawless. I don’t know anything about hype, or Passion Pit’s original EP (penned, as it were, as a Valentine’s Day gift for a girlfriend eventually lost), but I know that this album is pretty much legendary, children’s choirs, chipmunk-vocals and all.
But most of all, I miss you. I’ll keep standing on beaches at midnight and try not to think of you until it becomes natural, comfortable, to not remember anything about you in those quiet, temporarily-thoughtless, moments.
