staires!

I spent the last two days using AI to build out a tool which allowed me to go through and clean up all ~400 or so posts that used to be on this site. In the end, 369 old posts that were about single songs have returned from the grave, for better and for worse, though admittedly I left out some of the worst (or at least most questionable) posts.

Reading three years of your writing can definitely help put your life into perspective, a perspective you may have forgotten about. Most of my writing on this site was either complaining about women or lusting after them. Nothing really in between those two points, though there were a couple outliers where I complained about all the people I used to know back then.

And don't get me wrong, in this case, all those people were worth complaining about. It's 15 years later and I don't know any of those people any more, not a single one. A couple years after I hit the period of unemployment that led me to shut down this site, I cut all ties with my previous life and focused on building a new one, and it worked out fantastically. If you read this site back in 2010, you should know that I'm still depressive and angry, but my depression and anger tends to be externally focused, away from my life, and more toward the the people and systems that keep us oppressed. In some of my old writing, you'd swear I was supporting these systems of oppression, especially in some of the posts that I did not carry over from the archive.

On that note, I tend to be an archival purist, but, man, it felt like if I brought some of my old posts forward it would seem like I was condoning what I said in them, and I don't, so I left them behind. Internet Archive has them, so I'll never be able to run for public office without changing my political opinions about 180 degrees to match my prior rhetoric. I get that part of the allure of my site was the way I shared my life, no-holds-barred, but good lord, "who would want to be such an asshole"?

It was also interesting to go through the archive and see which bands are still around and which vanished into the ether. My batting record here isn't particularly great, as a few bands I said will undoubtedly be big ultimately went nowhere. But it was a pleasure to see Ha Ha Tonka release a new album just two years ago, which features this song about how quickly time flies. The members of the band have gotten married, started families, and watched themselves get old, which I've also done (except my children are dogs) in the same time. Other bands, like blog favorite Viva Voce, saw their marriages disintegrate along with their bands and music careers entirely. I luckily emerged from my 20's relatively unscathed, which I can say now that I've got a full decade in between me and my 20's; the scars have all healed or been replaced by new, different scars.

It's a trip. Who would have thought we'd be here, so many years into the future?

Wow, I can't say I've ever tried to listen to Cults since, you know, Go Outside, which felt like it was about 300 years ago, and was on the staires! summer 2011 mixtape. Well, good gosh, that may have been a mistake, because this song is very good. The piano is like a warm blanket turned sinister and spooky by (assumably) a synthesizer's pitchy swirly static, a voice changer, and some reverb. I don't know what the lyrics mean, but it doesn't feel like it really matters. The song is, as the kids say these days, an absolute vibe.

On one hand, I am glad that there are still young men making rock’n’roll music. On the other hand, “ELLiS•D” is a terrible name for a band and typing it is just enough of a pain in the ass that I guarantee it will cause harm in the long term. (But at least Ellis Dickson didn’t name his band “Andrew Jackson Jihad”, phew.)

This song is a lot of fun, and I really enjoy Ellis’ hyperactive ‘Gene Vincent on crack’ vocal stylings. But, being fully honest, it’s too much for more than a song or two. By the third song on this EP, I was over it, I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s as exhausting to listen to as it is to perform it, I’m sure. But, man, this specific song is a lot of fun!

I didn’t really think about how hard it was to run this website originally, having to come up with something to write about music. And now, doubly hard, that I am old, boring, and my relationship to music doesn’t have that urgency it did back when I thought liking music was something that was going to save my life in some way. This is now just the hobby of an old man, doting on his stupid website no one reads but will serve as good fodder to make an algorithm’s creative writing just a touch more interesting. Ah, yes, I am still egotistical, even well past my nascent years.

Anyway, none of that has anything to do with this song, a little delightful mashup of something that sounds a bit like a surf rock guitar riff and relatively modern south England Sprechgesang venting about microplastics. Ah, even Gen Z can sound a bit Millennial from time to time, eh?

Wow, what happened to pop week? One minute I’m here, next minute I am somewhere else entirely different. This was meant to be one of the songs in my pop week series, obviously. This song is loud, hooky, and maybe doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I want to know why that number is so specific. If anything it sounds like the narrator of the song is the pathetic one if they’re keeping track that precisely…

Let’s just call this pop week now, because we’re adding songs to the lineup that weren’t even in the original list of songs to post. But this song came up in my rotation, and I think it fits. It’s bombastic, it’s anchored by a simple riff, and the lyrics are infectious. It counts!

Good lord, I said it was the weekend of big pop songs and then I forgot to post this song yesterday. I bet the old staires didn’t post a lot of music like this, because my taste in music used to be a lot less fun. I don’t even think I liked LCD Soundsystem back when I was originally writing about music over here.

Anyway. This song rules. The bass, the bass, the bass, what else needs to be said? The song lives and dies by that bass and the Duran Duran chorus. I dunno what else to say, this song is just so much fun.

I have some weird soft spot in my heart for this style of pop song. I’m not sure if it can be considered a specific genre, though people credit the sound of this song to another band, Joywave, who partnered with another band to make a very similar song with Big Data that I should also post.

Anyway, this song is bombastic and a joy to listen to, and it comes at you out of left-field with a second chorus that feels plucked from an entirely different song… but it works! It works really well. I love the stuttering effect on the voice and the little triplet (I think) extra stutter that adds the right amount of rhythmic interest to it. I reaaaallly love the little glitchy guitar part they added to the second main verse, like the stereotypical high pitched funky pop guitar is being strummed somewhere far away over a broken connection. It’s just fun!

Maybe this weekend will be 2010’s POP WEEK.

A couple years ago, this wonderful video game came out called Paradise Killer, and one of the many fantastic aspects of that game is the soundtrack by the producer Epoch. Since then, I’ve kept an ear on what they’ve been up to, and for the most part it’s all high quality, juicy “city pop”, and no one does it quite like Epoch.

Imagine my surprise when Epoch, along with regular guest vocalist Fiona Lynch, put out a covers album. Unfortunately for my music cred, I only recognized one song name on the album, and my immediate visceral reaction to seeing “You Oughta Know” was to recoil in horror. A city pop version of Alanis Morrisette’s most grunge-coded song? It can’t possibly work!

But, you know what, it does. I mean, I’m biased, I like Epoch’s sound in general. And Fiona Lynch dials in a fantastic snarl we’ve never gotten to hear from her before. It’s fun! I can’t complain.

When I visited Amsterdam, my only real negative experience at a coffee shop was when I was sitting out on a patio listening to a group of very insufferable and obviously wealthy 20-something’s talking loudly about the imaginary woes of their affluent lifestyle. This was day two, after a day one where I met some very interesting people who exposed me to new worldviews, the stereotypical “sheltered American travels abroad” experience, so the shift was jarring.

I feel like this Lorde album will be very influential and important to that sort of person because Lorde sings very frankly and honestly about the experience of being one of those people. No real responsibilities, their entire twenties are just The Teens Part 2, pretending that there’s something poignant and significant in the way they looked at themselves in the mirror while brushing their teeth that morning. It’s… very annoying.

Which is a shame, because the production (or sound design, whatever the kids are calling it these days) is fantastic. This song specifically, “Man of the Year”, is a sonic journey, a tour de force. Her voice itself evolves as the song goes on, from raw to robotic. It’s stupendous. I love it. The rest of the album might not be quite as experimental as this song, but overall it sounds fantastic and no one could legitimately complain about it.

But good lord, the lyrics, sometimes my eyes are too busy rolling for me to really enjoy the music.