My Year So Far:
Dad Rock, Psychiatry, Surrender
meddled w/ partial reviews of: Star’s Revenge, Intac, and Friends&
> January prevailed somehow, and we peel apart to dance. A.D.D. & blushing & scanning the room because a peck like that probably hadn't escaped our private company yet. 12:03am now throwing strangers into friends because Star's Revenge is blaring the sort of rocking punky mess that makes me feel 13, 17, 25 again. My ears are stenographers and that girl's guitar is a heated custody battle. It's saying so much more than I’ve heard it say with her other band (it's all love, though). It's telling me that I am ready to fully embrace this sort of harmony and form again. I've been trying to distill "rock & roll" back into my life. Sounds of familiarity and the past can hedge against our present's enshittification if you speak something sincere and necessary through its filter. You already know this, and that is why I watch you dancing so faithfully now. Star’s has made it easier to dance with a dancer. It is only love and only all that music needs. They're less than halfway through the set when our acid hits, but we've gathered all that we need - now our faces need fast air, our eyes to cry for Breakfast at Tiffany's, your new year's maiden kiss confession, and my lips glued shut smirking under scarf until the first sun rises
Pearls clutching, I left most things I knew behind in the first half of the decade. The band(s), the "label", a home I started and the first to feel like mine, Maryland, nearly all remaining family
365 days ago, I made a plea to someone’s God and by August my comet rock (moldavite) slipped to the bottom of a small pond + buried all the old Gods there with it. I'll tell you where if you ask nicely. My prayers were delivered in full, but every damn genie’s gotta have their “gotcha"
I still have not opened a DAW since Thanksgiving because I was in a partial hospitalization program for months. Something something stop the wheel from spinning and it snaps right off, only held in place so long by its own inertia
> Early February, I drove back to Brooklyn, to the same New Year's bar, & played my first and only ever solo acoustic set to a dozen strangers while everyone else watched the super bowl. It was more terrifying than saying goodbye to my best ever band with a crowd of hundreds in September. But I hadn’t performed since, so everyone said it would be good to get out again. Afterwards I jumped out of my skin so hard, my pal Jules had to run me around in the snow so I wouldn't explode. The next day crossing Whitestone Bridge, the treatment center calls to say they’ve fired my therapist. My entire nervous system wanted to swerve right into the East River, but I just don't think Samantha could’ve handled that on top of her sudden unemployment. Afterwards they started running group therapy with AI so i stopped going.
I am packing up the past 5 years, door locked, someone's on instagram reels screaming over noisy punk rock with their head in a 00s computer. they're doing a sort of corporate irony Tim & Eric thing that has me pissed I didn't go this aesthetically hard for Adblocker. The band is called Intac and their recordings are these cheeky analog minimal folk/rock songs. A whiplash juxtaposition to the chaotic live band which is hard to even register as the same act. What really sells me on these guys is that they don’t reduce themselves to the bit. It’s too easy to be 1-dimensional if you have a good schtick, but Intac is lightyears ahead of other companies because they just put the product before the profits (i.e. writing a Good Fucking Song first, autonomous from the bit). Cutting their poignant tracks straight-to-tape bare bones ass up leaves nothing to be questioned, so that live the computer-head guy can chase everyone around the stage and play with the projector. I don’t think I’ve seen a single performance clip that doesn’t include some kinda fight between band members mid song. I’d invest early if I were you, top market analysts predict huge returns this year.
Everything I own now in trash bags at the feet of a baby grand piano in the new home while I wait for my room to be cleared of the previous tenant’s stuff. He ran an experimental animation house in Cambridge in the 80s and spun Oldies as a guest host on MIT radio. The room is more of a record vault decorated by Betty Boop memorabilia where a bed crams into. Michael and my dad would’ve gotten along so well if either of them were still alive
> It’s New Year’s again (Lunar now, Year of the Horse), my first night back to work after months. There’s all this hype on twitter for the blue album with the red horse and they’re heralding it “the return of guitar music.” 90 minutes later, I’m left with a strange lucidity- what the fuck was even that? There are no rules anymore. Do I actually love my job? Do I miss my dad? I hate how good that Avicii sample sounds and that is a sentence I never should have been made to say. If “guitar music” has taken a new incarnation with the album Folx by Friends&, it’s in no way some champion or Messiah. It’s a hallucinatory spectre of hyperflipped dad rock samples, both torturing the album’s narrator and cradling them with promise of salvation. I say narrator bc the heavy use of “voice clones”, so much that it’s hard to differentiate the main singer from a clone generated in his likeness. At one point Jeff Magnum sings the word “meme” before morphing back into the Friends& voice. There’s plenty of Hatsune Miku and an entire “cloned” conversation with the narrator’s deceased father for whom the album is dedicated. While Intac wears corporate alienation like a cute mask or makes themselves the piñata at the company party, Friends& is an entire thesis on Labor and commodification of the Folk Song. The lyrics are nearly all 2-4 words per line of root verb commands detailing grief routines and boiling sentences down to their smallest computational form. Which is ironic given the entire accompanying essay of song titles and gargantuan Works Cited page. I’m playing the album for Maren in the car and she says “oh, there’s AI? nvm, I don’t fw it at all.” I lurch to explain how they’re self-aware and how the dead dad’s clone cries that he didn’t consent to his voice being used this way and scolds the narrator for talking to himself. But why am I defending it? I want to agree with her- I want every data center toppled and I want my real therapist back. I'm just too enamored to stop listening and decoding this thing my little ponyboy year of the headless horse with no name and rn I feel more like Crazy Horse than Young
i don't want to be sci-fi anymore, i don't care enough to create something aesthetically new because new things are all broken. i can say this and know it means something more than when the boomer afraid of change says it, because i am new and i am breaking along with the rest of the new things
There is some kind of through-line here, but I will choose not to chisel it in too hard because one Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skill I learned is Observation without action or engagement. I am not a music critic, but it's easier to explain my life through other people’s songs right now than through mine. I wonder what Micheal, rym user vinyljunkie, and my father would’ve shared had any of them ever met- or if any of them could dig these new artists’ revisiting old form. I do wish I could show my father that I finally got back into his favorites again. I can’t tell what he’d think of anything I’ve made lately, or this attempt at blogging. But then again, he lived his entire life without ever owning a computer
“When the city looks like this, you kinda hope the robots win / You gotta be a real piece of shit to fit in it”
-Intac
Star’s Revenge (performance)-
The only clip I got, 12:05am
Intac (band)- https://intac.bandcamp.com/music
Fav songs: Ted, That Boy Has Got Himself A Nice Head of Hair, Live Forever, I Want to Fight Oscar Isaac, Banking on Love
Folx (album)- https://dawk26.bandcamp.com/album/folx
Fav songs: All of tracks 11-19, track 33 (I walk the line), 60 (goodnight Irene)
