You may or may not have noticed that staires.org quietly switched away from Wordpress.
Why would you have noticed that? Perhaps you are very strange.
Either way, we’re back in action and after an extended break caused by Wordpress.com being very annoying (and expensive). Expect to see more posts, more frequently, and less extended breaks? We’ll see.
HEALTH has spent the past 20 years refining their sound and craft incredible soundscapes, this song now joining the ranks of, uh, industrial dance goth bangers. I’m just going to call them industrial dance goth, you can’t stop me.
Enjoy! I have nothing else to say but I did not want to just move all the current blog posts over without posting something new.
Back in 2019, Cheekface released their debut album, a record that’s difficult to categorize without simply listening to it. It’s kind of post-punk, kind of pop, and mostly spoken-word; it’s quirky, clever, and nearly danceable.
Now it’s 2025 and Cheekface has released their fifth album—but I just don’t have the stomach for it. Greg Katz is trying to move beyond simple monotone spoken-word vocals by singing a lot more, and there’s maybe even a hint of auto-tune on his vocals. It’s… horrible.
Cheekface has a rabid fanbase, so I say this with trepidation. I mean no offense to Greg Katz—it’s not that his vocals are inherently bad, it’s just that I started listening to Cheekface for songs like “Dry Heat/Nice Town”, and a song like “Living Lo-fi” is… not like that song.
They might as well be two entirely different genres, even if they share the same core components. It’s like ordering a steak burrito and getting a carne asada plate—similar, sure, but fundamentally different.
It’s unfortunate, but sometimes a band can only extract so much magic from a single schtick. Maybe the original Cheekface formula had a lifespan of two solid albums, one decent album, and now we’re two records into the (hopefully short-lived) awkward years.
Luckily, we can always revisit those two solid albums, then jump to the last track of their third, “Vegan Water“—which I’d argue is not only the last truly great Cheekface song, but possibly their best. It’s akin to how Arcade Fire closed out their last good album with their finest work, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)“.
Holy shit, this song is so fucking good. I don’t know what else to say about it. When I heard it for the first time, my ears pricked up, and my eyes widened. Will this already be my favorite song of 2025?
This is the kind of Vulfpeck song that I live for! When they get too soft and slow, they kind of lose me, but this song, and the rest of this live album, are a revelation. I don’t want to heap too much hyperbole onto Vulfpeck because there’s the rest of the world to do that already (and they do that already, check out this recent review of one of their concerts).
Not that it is unjustified in any way. Vulfpeck is most excellent. Enjoy!
I turned 40 this month, which, I’m told, is quite the milestone. As one of my friends said, “lots of people didnt make it that far so yeah yay it up”.
Yes, indeed, let us ‘yay it up’.
I want to feel some type of way about turning 40, but I really don’t, which, I suppose, is feeling some type of way about it. I could say that I never thought I would make it this far, but I said that when I turned 30 so it’s kind of a cop out to say it again. When I turned 30, it was pretty obvious I was going to make it to 40 and beyond. We’ve been smooth sailing for a while now.
Scott Lucas is turning 55 this year, and it’s crazy to think that I am older now than he was when I first saw Local H play back in June of 2004 (and have been for a few years). Though I suppose that is how the slow and insidious march of time works, so I shouldn’t be surprised. This day was always going to come. (And how cool is it that there is a great bootleg of that show on the internet? I love you, internet.)
I guess at the end of the day, I don’t have a lot to say about getting older. I feel the same that I did before, like I’m still in my early 20’s but for some reason there’s a lot more hair trying to grow out of my ears than ever before, and I hate that aspect of it more than anything, that I have to shave my ears now. What an indignity.
Okay, let’s just agree to pretend that it hasn’t been nearly four months since the last time I posted. I don’t want to dwell on it, you don’t want to dwell on it; quite frankly, we’re all tired of thinking about it. This is a new thing, but also an old thing, for both of us, it was bound to get going in fits and starts.
With that out of the way, I proudly present to you, my most listened to song of 2023. The previous song that I posted, My Room, did end up being my most listened to song of 2024, by a country mile. So, we’re sticking with the theme, we’re going further back in time.
I really, really love this song. I’m pretty sure it was the first Hamish Hawk song I ever heard, and it feels practically designed for me in the way most of my most favorite media does. This song dabbles in magical realism, personal myth-making, crippling self-doubt, and a deep longing to connect to something greater than yourself and this world. It’s just… so beautiful.
Just the opening lyrics alone are poetry.
Back in the wretched day I was ill-shapen clay and suffering didn’t fit me
Is he talking about primordial, mythological or medieval times, or just what it is like being a misfit teenager? I could go on and on about what I think the song is about from there, but half the fun is sorting it out for yourself. So, go on then, what do you think it’s all about?
If the lyrics weren’t already good enough, you also get it delivered via Hamish’s voice, supported by the gorgeous instrumentation behind the song. It all works together seamlessly to craft a bizarre anthem that I’ll be singing to myself until the end of my life.
This is undoubtedly my #1 song of 2024. It’s already the top track on my Replay 2024, and I have no idea how anything could unseat it.
I’m not really a fan of Ty Segall, and I can’t say I even enjoy this album (Three Bells) very much, but this song (and one other, “My Best Friend”, paired with a video of Segall’s dachshunds) is a laser-guided missile directly into my id. I’ve listened to it at least 30 times, which is 2 solid hours of “My Room”, if you add it all up. So, yeah, I like this song a lot.
I love everything about how it’s structured, how the layers build and complement each other. I’ve been trying to make some of my own music this past year, and some part of my motivation is how insanely proud I would be of myself if I made a song of my own that I like as much as I like this song. It doesn’t have to sound like this song, I just want to like it as much.
I wonder if such a thing is possible? I feel like I’ve read so many interviews with artists who say they don’t watch or listen to their own work. (Are there authors who read their own books? Outside of when it is necessary?) On the other hand, I remember reading that one reason for the existence of The Dandy Warhols was that they wanted to make the kind of music they wanted to get drunk to.
I suppose it seems absurd, thinking about it more, the idea that some possible majority of people are making music that they don’t want to listen to themselves. You’d hope, since the act of creation is so deeply indebted to our influences (I, too, want to make the kind of music I want to get drunk to), that we’d always be appreciative of the outcome.
On the other hand, every time I hear my own voice singing, I am aghast, it does not remind me of any of my influences. But perhaps I have yet to discover the proverbial voice within me, that sounds unlike me even to myself, or at least that summons some reaction that causes me to call it “the voice” like Michael Stipe does. Oh, let’s set a low bar, shall we?
I’m a bit late to this one, as this album came out much earlier this year. I know about Rosie Tucker thanks to her very, very good 2021 release Sucker Supreme. I am pleased to say that her new release, Utopia Now!, is a suitable follow up and provides us with more of the same 90’s flavored indie rock, with whip-smart lyrics and a litany of “Rosie Tucker”-isms that permeate this very song. Major kudos to her and her collaborators (shout out to Wolfy), they’re consistently delivering albums that sound really, really good.
I don’t have much to say here. I can owe my fandom to Rosie Tucker to Cheekface’s Greg Katz, who promoted Sucker Supreme on Twitter all those years ago, so I consider Rosie Tucker part of the Cheekface extended universe, if such a thing existed.
I’m shocked, I’m shaken, and I’m confused that this Personal Trainer album (Still Willing) isn’t the hottest fucking thing across the entirety of the Pitchfork-reading crew of nearly-40-somethings that secretly run the internet. The YouTube videos for these songs have barely broken 1K in most cases, and how can that be?
Opener “Upper Ferntree Gully” sounds like a love song to every fantastic indie rock album I’ve listened to that predates 2010. It just makes me so happy, the shifts and turns, the pure musical adventure that the song goes through. It’s not too much, it’s just enough, and it sets the scene for an album that is so playful, earnest, inventive, and… I just don’t have enough superlative adjectives in my collection to really do it justice.
As soon as I heard it, I sent it to a friend of mine, offering it up as “like a modern Grandaddy or Pavement?” And that’s still the comparison I’d make, which seems apt as Willem Smit blatantly references Pavement, and maybe it’d be fair to accuse me of cheating–did I even think they sounded like Pavement? Or did I just hear the word “Pavement” and run with it?
Maybe I’m being too effusive. Truth be told, the album was a grower for me. I loved the opening track right away, but I haven’t listened to Grandaddy or Pavement in… nearly ever. I didn’t know how to feel about the second and third tracks, at first, because they’re not really like anything I’m currently listening to. But the fourth track, “Round”, felt good right away, with an infectious hook, a horn section, falsetto “ooh”ing, a singalong chorus–all things that I cannot live without, musical motifs that wormed into my brain and forced me to keep spinning the record again and again.
Spinning the what? You’ll learn, you’ll learn.
Yet, somehow, inexplicably, I am posting “New Bad Feeling”, which hits like a gut punch right after the jubilation of “Round”, perfectly capturing the feeling of sitting alone in your room with nothing but your regrets and the white noise in your head. The soundtrack to those moments where you’d cry, if you could, but it would be a lie, because your feelings can’t even rise to the occasion, they’re not gonna break, the feeling’s never gonna cease, and you’ll always just be the same you, in the same place you always end up.
And then the song breaks, it says no, maybe not, maybe there’s something else, someone else–someone else outside yourself that you can draw power from. Then the album slinkily slides into “Intangible”, a funky R&B groove that’d fit right in on an Yip Deceiver album.
Anyway, I don’t need to describe the whole album for you, just go and listen to it, it’s a lot of fun.
Well, it didn’t take long for me to start slacking on writing entries over here, did it? But that’s kind of just how I do things. I start them, then I abandon them for a while, and eventually I pay a little bit of attention to them again. So, here we are, the cycle continues.
Jade Hairpins was formed by two of the guys from the hardcore band Fucked Up, who I don’t listen to because I don’t listen to hardcore. But this band, this band, maybe specifically this album, I listen to. A lot. It was my main album for the past couple weeks, ensuring several tracks (if not the whole thing) will be in my Replay 2024 playlist.
The album is a hodgepodge of 70’s UK rock styles, all smushed together in such a wonderful way. I don’t really think I’ve heard anything quite like this before. Like any truly great album, my favorite song has shifted several times as I’ve been listening to it repeatedly. At first, it was obvious crowd pleaser “Drifting Superstition”, then “Lost in Song”, and finally this song, “My Feet On Your Ground”, a Talking Heads-esque foot stomper.
I don’t know how to review music anymore! Am I doing a good job? Can I get a head pat? I’m still recovering from the flu, so I deserve some credit for even doing this at all!
It’s been twenty years since the release of Funeral, Arcade Fire’s debut album. Back in 2004, my life was just beginning, but also already in shambles, and it seems almost too obvious in retrospect that an album like this would resonate with me; an album about the innocence of youth, the loss of it, and the wild search for meaning that follows.
Funeral effectively changed music, and the internet, forever. I don’t know how much hyperbole I can truly spew for an album that seems so ubiquitous to the music history of people my age, it is like singing the praises of water, of air. Funeral composes a bit of everyone who has been listening to it for the past two decades. It is woven into the fabric of our lives, even if it was just one step on a long and evolving musical journey.
Arcade Fire would go on a long and evolving musical journey of their own, right out of my zone of interest by their fourth album, and they’d commit a series of faux pas around cultural appropriation in the process of expanding their style (26 years late to “world music”), losing much of their cool points in the process. Thankfully, the nice thing about recorded music is that it persists even long after the artists have stumbled their way out of the spotlight (or just our spotlight).
Unfortunately, a lot of the other things that were great about the internet in 2004 are decaying, abandoned, or simply gone forever. 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, which would hasten the ubiquity of social media in a very unpredictable way. If you want to communicate with others on the internet these days, you didn’t post on a personal blog, you post on social media, shouting into a void of impermanence. We don’t go looking for the pretentious opinions of music critics anymore, we look for opinions of the masses–Pitchfork, which was so influential to the music indie scene, is being “absorbed” into GQ, whatever that means, but it doesn’t sound like something that happens to a still-beloved institution.
I hate to swerve another post into old man complaining about the modern age, but if I revived this blog after more than a decade, it only seems appropriate to reflect on what has changed in that time. And it seems like a lot of things have gone to shit since then, which is impressive because 2004 was not just a depressing year for myself personally, but for many people in America–the Bush administration was really getting us down: Green Day’s American Idiot was released just a week after Funeral, and in the years surrounding we’d get Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Neil Young’s Living with War, and Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, several other albums preoccupied with our pessimistic political moment in the mid-aughts.
And yet, here we are, twenty years later, and it feels like we’ve come full circle. The political landscape is more divisive than ever before, and we barely even have a handful of truly great protest albums to lean on. The internet, which used to be a safe haven for the weirdos and freaks in the world, has now become a battleground for the attention spans of angsty mouth-breathers. The people who are in their 20’s currently aren’t listening to raw, energetic indie rock like Arcade Fire, but (warning: going to shout at clouds now) terrible mass manufactured bedroom pop built a top of mountain of reused samples and borrowed nostalgia. They’re screaming at endless derivatives of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who are singing almost exclusively about their past, present, and future ex-boyfriends; that are thrown onto Saturday Night Live for a live performance before their song stops trending in TikTok posts, and then disappear, never to be heard from again.
I hate it. But, you know, I can listen to Funeral, and I can imagine a time when it seemed like the bright light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming freight train, but a friend’s house, a warm place to spend the night. Maybe we’re on the precipice of this happening again, an age where popular music doesn’t feel so hollow and self-obsessed. But if pop music is a mirror, we’re pretty well fucked, because as far as I can tell our society isn’t veering away from superficiality anytime soon.
Damn! I tried to end on a positive note… but how can I?
Oh well. See you in another twenty years, for the fortieth anniversary.
Post-punk slash dance-punk is having a moment, and I’m loving it. I was tempted to start dropping the names of present day bands, but that’s silly. I’ll just post them as well. So, what do I say about Gustaf?
Well, now I’m stuck. Fuck! What do I say?
I’ve been thinking about this for two days now. At some point I lost the thread of what I am doing over here, just four posts in. Am I supposed to write about the artist? Do I write about myself? Do I write about the song (somehow, when the song has an internal logic I do not understand, like this one)? Do I write something else entirely and wait for inspiration to strike? Then I wouldn’t get anything done!
What would the staires.org style guide suggest? Hello, I like this song. Gustaf is a band from New York, part of a greater resurgence of art punk and dance punk, a thing that I love and am enjoying greatly. I was listening to music the other day and this song came on, and I thought, “yes, this is the Gustaf song I will post, it is weird and muscular and danceable and also sort of vaguely uncomfortable, but in a sexy way, and wait—-is this song from the perspective of the earth? Am I being told to touch grass? Whatever, who cares, just post this shit!”
I didn’t get into Spoon until 2004’s Gimme Fiction. I loved and still love that album, it would likely be home on any “Top 10 albums of all time” list you ask me to come up with off-the-cuff, assuming I am able to think of anything at all (as I am not great at remembering things on-the-spot, nor off-the-cuff, since we are hyphenating idioms now). Either way, my love of that album, and subsequent albums Transference and They Want My Soul blinded me to the brilliance of their earlier records, with their paired-back production and understated nuance–oh, crap, I’m already descending into hyperbole.
(You might be asking yourself, “Wait, wasn’t Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga after Gimme Fiction and before Transference?” and you’d be right. Unfortunately I’ve never liked that album, despite–or perhaps because of–it being their true breakout hit album and typically being declared Spoon’s best album. I’m here to set the record straight: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is not Spoon’s best album.)
It wasn’t until 2017 that I finally listened to Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight, their third and fourth albums preceding Gimme Fiction. They are both absolutely divine. In some ways, I am doing them a disservice, by picking this song from them to put on top of a post that is now about them. This song is not the best song on these albums, but it is one of my favorites and, in some ways, is perfectly exemplary of Spoon as a band.
Early Spoon oozes a laid-back coolness that is hard to describe, but this song sort of does it. Spoon is a fitted shirt hung on me–nothing else will fit right, or seem so directly applied. Every beat, every musical flourish in their songs feels like just the right thing, placed at just the right moment in time.
Unfortunately, not every Spoon album, nor every song, is flawless. Sometimes they stumble, and I think their constant flirtation with being big in adult contemporary pop rock kind of annoys me–the entirety of Hot Thoughts being very cringe, like a dad in aviators at a club hitting on a woman young enough to be his daughter. It says a lot that Britt Daniel’s track selection for Spoon’s greatest hits compilation only has the title track from that album.
Hot Thoughts basically killed my interest in the band, and I still haven’t listened to their latest album, 2022’s Lucifer on the Sofa. Why bother, when I can just listen to Girls Can Tell or Kill The Moonlight again? Listening to new Spoon would be like looking slouchy in a thin American Apparel t-shirt, instead of reaching for something tried and true, that fits right, like a fitted shirt.
I’m profoundly sad to see what has become of social media. Back in September of 2006, when I first signed up for Twitter, there was nothing that excited me more than the idea of a new blogging platform that more instantly connected me to random people via SMS. And I was right to be excited: I made lifelong connections and had numerous positive experiences because of Twitter.
Early Twitter asked you to post about what you were doing, encouraging you to talk about your life. Over time, the objective of Twitter shifted from talking about your own life, to talking about what is happening in the world around you. Twitter realized that the act of witnessing the world could be a powerful instrument of change and encouraged people to do that, during a blinding moment of techno idealism. There were some genuine moments of cultural change that came from this, like the idea that Twitter had something to do with the Arab Spring.
This evolved, and what Twitter was for shifted again. Instead of talking about what is happening in your life, or about what is happening in the world around you, Twitter became a place where you talk about other people and what you think of them. If Twitter’s “what’s happening?” was on a macro-level originally, the new perspective was on a micro-level, encouraging detailed dissections of others. This moment had some fun and important cultural moments, like that woman with the off-leash dog in Central Park, #metoo, and BLM.
Unfortunately the moral outrage component of this era of Twitter became very sticky and we’re now in the present age of social media, where what seems to drive the most engagement on the internet is creating outrage, moral or otherwise, and conveying that outrage to as many people as possible.
In some ways it’s obvious it’s meant to be a community bonding experience, uniting us against a common enemy. Twitter is now dominated by fear-mongering against the “liberal agenda”, and over on Threads the common enemy just seems to be “other people”, with an algorithm that prioritizes relatively benign but still somewhat irritating content that makes you want to respond, “are you really this stupid?”
It’s just a lot of noise. But we’ve been told that being informed is what makes a person intelligent and respectable, and that we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and that you can’t just bury your head in the sand or else, really, you’re part of the problem. To turn your back on social media feels like a radical act, in a moment where the richest and most powerful people in the world are strongly insistent that social media is the only place worth being.
At some point you have to step back and think about the people who are pushing all of this on us and why they’re doing it. All the politicians, businessmen, social media influencers, and some journalists, are parasites, and they need attention to feed. The social justice roots of social media convinced us all that we’re doing something important by using these services, but those days are long behind us now. Our continued use of social media is only propping up a system that encourages others to victimize our attention, to ruin our mood, to distract us by using our emotions against us.
Our Two Minutes Hate isn’t government mandated, it’s something we do to ourselves all day long, every day; and worse, in this non-fictional real life dystopia, it has ads!
After a little over a decade, Alex Winston returns with a new LP, and somehow whoever was squatting this domain name forgot to renew it this year, so I’ve returned as well. Welcome back to ſtaires! I have no idea how you ended up back here, but it’s a pleasure to see you.
Alex Winston’s King Con is one of my most favorite albums. It’s the kind of album that I listen to a few times a year ever since I first heard it many years ago, and I never skip the songs when they come up in my shuffle. The songs are basically in my blood, a core part of my identity, which is weird, since the best songs are about sexually groping a portrait of Elvis and the experience of being a sister wife, eager to come out as top waifu.
Her new album, Bingo!, is much less quirky, both lyrically and musically. King Con was clearly infected by the late 2000’s quirky instrumentation pastiche, dialed up to eleven, in a way that makes me assume that some sort of mad genius producer was behind it. Bingo, on the other hand, is fairly straight forward, with occasional flirts with strangeness. Don’t get me wrong, a very talented producer is at the helm of this album, but I think the album is lacking in character. I’ve picked “Swampland” to feature, the third track off the album, because it is one of two songs that I think still contain some of that quirkiness that made King Con so memorable. (“Run On” is the other.)
Unfortunately, it seems like Alex Winston has had a rough decade. In interviews, and in the songs, she paints a portrait of a woman somewhat lost in Southern-themed dive bars, bouncing between disaffected men and sometimes being left behind by them. The songs can end up feeling a bit navel-gazing, a bit sad-sack, and I’m not really here for those songs.
But quirky narcissist anthem “Special Feeling”, and the two main lead singles, “Hot One” (which is made to be a crowd pleaser with plenty of inserts for state and city names) and “Where My Cowboys At?”, are pretty damn good and the combination of those three songs, plus the two extra quirky ones, makes it easier to look past the couple of dreary tracks.
I hope it’s not another decade before we get a third album. And I hope that Winston faces better days ahead, so that the next album feels more like a suitable follow up to King Con’s celebration of strangeness, and less like an exhausted sigh at the end of a rough night. (It would also be fun if her unreleased pop album–the real second LP–showed up somehow, too, but I don’t want to be greedy, or open up old wounds.)