#365songs (143 / 365)

Content warning: this track is extremely distressing to listen to. I'm not fucking kidding.

The singer of a previous entry called that song's album "barely music," but no: this is barely music. It comes in the middle of the onslaught of electronics, noise and harsh vocals that makes up Bestial Burden and is somehow still the most horrible, agonizing two minutes on it: basically someone having some kind of digestive/respiratory fit over a noxious beat and slowly swelling noise. It is the sound of someone emphatically not Loving The House They're In.

I don't "like" this but it is kind of amazing that (a) it feels somehow appropriate to the album it's on and (b) the artist Margaret Chardiet managed to make it even worse, more claustrophobic and suffocating, with a light frisson of "instrumentation." Every time I listen to this I'm shocked anew at how upsetting it is. Unforgettable.

#365songs (142 / 365)

Another case of "one lyric makes this song," and another Spencer Krug joint. Julia With Blue Jeans On is an interesting Krug album: solo piano and vocals, no overdubs, no funky shit. So the lyrics had better be good. They're more straightforward than much of Krug's work with Sunset Rubdown, which was often full of shit like buffaloes and leopards and actors and violins and trumpets (sung about but not actually present in the instrumentation) serving as incredibly oblique metaphors for personal tribulations, probably. Moonface leans a little more direct, in places.

The lyric I love is the opening one: "I regretfully withdraw my offer to try to improve myself. I sincerely believe the results would be a disaster." There's nothing oblique about that, and I've grown to appreciate the connection to the title: I have not yet withdrawn my offer to try to improve myself, but I have come to realize the importance of loving the house I'm in, in the meantime.

#365songs (141 / 365)

I had Things We Lost in the Fire in my music library since quite a long time ago, and thought I basically understood what the "slowcore" band Low's deal was. But then, a decade or whatever later, I started seeing press for their twelfth album Double Negative that described it using words I would not have expected to apply to Low, much less a Low that was twelve albums into their career: words like "blasted" and "snarling static" and "abrasive." I had to check it out and I was glad I did because Double Negative (along with its successor HEY WHAT) is an absolutely incredible album.

I could have picked almost any of the songs or song-like objects here but "Rome (Always in the Dark)" is one of the most song-like and the most thunderously overwhelming. The repeated low riff is vaguely reminiscent of one of my recent #365songs but, as with most of Double Negative, it's blown out and distorted almost beyond recognition. But on the other hand, the vocals in "Rome" are high in the mix rather than obscured by a sea of noise (see album opener "Quorum" for how daring Low are willing to be in this regard) and so it's a nice "reward" at the end of the journey this album takes you on. That it's a penultimate song, and part of a four-song suite that flows one into the other, is just a bonus. The embed here cuts off at the beginning and end. Doesn't that entice you to want to listen to the whole album so you can hear it in context? It fucking should!!!

#365songs (140 / 365)

I'm not a Big Thief devotee. I've only heard three of their albums and two of them haven't done a lot for me. But there's a lot of stuff to like on their ridiculously titled Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You and it's shockingly listenable straight through for a double album.

My favorite song on Dragon, though, is this one that seems uncharacteristic of them, which may have something to do with my not being bought in to their usual (folk rock, acoustic) deal. "Blurred View" is this murky, heavily-processed-sounding quasi-electronica, appropriately named for how the whole thing seems kind of shrouded in an obscuring haze. Appropriately, I guess, I have no idea what it's about or even what most of the lyrics are, and though I think a lot of Adrienne Lenker's lyrics are quite good, I don't really care what they are here. "Blurred View" is about mood and atmosphere, to me, and it does both those things so well I don't feel the need to complicate it.

#365songs (139 / 365)

Chop Suey might be the most well known SoaD song—it's certainly the one that got me into them—but as I got to know their catalog more it's started to feel like a bit of a novelty song even in a long list of goofy-serious songs that kind of fit that description. Toxicity's title track is the best showcase of the band at the height of their powers: still full of the unhinged mood swings that SoaD built their brand on, but built like a straight up pop song. Serj Tankian's voice has never sounded better than he does here, whether crooning in the verse or barking (zero point five seconds later) in the chorus. And the utterly surprising and over-too-soon coda is 100% vintage System of a Down puckishness.

I confess I've gotten a bit addicted to first-listen reaction videos on YouTube, the best way to relive the feeling of hearing a song for the first time yourself. "Toxicity" has some of the best examples of the form. The transitions between the soft and loud parts of the intro and between the aforementioned verse and chorus vocals; the ridiculous sustained note in the bridge; that coda: the people reliably flip their shit for every one of these. What better evocation of our shared humanity? I still flip my shit for them too.

#365songs (138 / 365)

The bottom slice of bitter bread in a sandwich in the middle of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. The other slice is the title track. The sweet filling is the weirdly chipper pseudo-spiritual "John Saw That Number," which I always endured because I knew "Dirty Knife" was up next.

Fox Confessor as a whole is pretty opaque but a lot of its songs seem to circle around people suffering losses, driven to extremes or losing their grip on reality — and "Dirty Knife" is the starkest, darkest example. The first half is spare and foreboding enough with its lyric of "so suddenly, madness came," fingerpicked guitar and pizzicato upright bass, but shortly after Case intones the title it takes a turn for the macabre. The fingerpicking becomes frantic, the pizzicato becomes slashes of a bow. The singing becomes, rather hauntingly, Ukrainian. I like a genuinely scary song and "Dirty Knife" ain't no fuckin "Monster Mash."

#365songs (137 / 365)

Mitski has said that she wrote this song to give voice to "the patriarch in [her] head" and so between that and the self-deprecation that I love so much it was almost inevitable that it would be my favorite song on The Land Is Hospitable and So Are We. I'm into the lyrics, of course: "you believe me like a god / I destroy you like I am," hell yes, a cautionary tale about seeing your own power, that you never asked for, and how it can destroy both you and the ones you love if you let it, put it directly in my fucking veins. But musically, also, what starts out as a pretty straightforward minor-key acoustic guitar + low thumpy drums ditty turns into something much more impressionistic by the end, with the help of barking dogs, a choir, insects, and apparently some kind of toad. It's eerie and kind of inscrutable in a way I love: it has an almost redemptive sound to it despite that there's little redemption to be found in the lyric. Fantastic, affecting, mysterious song.

#365songs (136 / 365)

It was always inevitable that one of my #365songs would be one of my own; the only question was when, and which one. Honestly, every song I've written and performed has had a bigger effect on my life than almost any song I've only listened to, but it would feel a bit self-indulgent to write about them all. But "Mooney Doctor II," from the album I wrote entirely about fictional Blaseball team the Kansas City Breath Mints, sticks out in my mind as a unique song in my short catalog, and one that I'm uniquely proud of.

My voice, which I've never been particularly proud of, is front and center in this song, and I think it sounds as good as it ever has. The instrumentation is sparse and evocative like nothing I've ever done before or since and I think it really gets across the bleak feeling of isolation I was trying to convey. Like most Blaseball songs (thanks to The Garages, there are more than you might expect), it's not just about Blaseball: essentially, it's a pandemic song too.

I think about this song when I doubt myself. I think it's one of the best things I've ever made.

#365songs (135 / 365)

Most of what I listen to is from the 21st century because I want to hear what people are doing in music these days, but I picked up Big Science (originally released the year before I was born) probably on the strength of unlikely hit single "O Superman" and found it to be remarkably fresh-sounding even 40 years later.

"O Superman" took on added resonance after 9/11, but Big Science's opening track "From The Air" is the one with the most timeless appeal to me. "This is the time," Anderson repeats, "and this is the record of the time." And the plane crash depicted in the lyric feels like a record of the time, now as much as ever in my life: the traditional safety instructions disintegrating into a meaningless game of Simon Says; the feeling we've seen all this before; the weird reassurance that we are all going down, together.

#365songs (134 / 365)

A girl I met on OKCupid, with whom I went on a single chemistry-free date and then for a while maintained a tenuous balance between a casual friendship and a sizable one-way crush, introduced me to Fleet Foxes before their first full-length album was even released. I don't usually like "get in on the ground floor" with bands, since a lot of what I listen to comes from websites and so by definition has already gotten some press by the time I hear about it, and so Fleet Foxes were a rare exception. We went to see them at the 7th Street Entry of the famous Minneapolis venue First Avenue, a tiny venue of the kind that they wouldn't be playing for much longer. I think we both realized that they were something special but I at least didn't think the kind of gentle, pastoral folk they made would blow up like it did.

Anyway, that all is what I think of when I think of "Mykonos," the best song on the Sun Giant EP that was the only release Fleet Foxes had under their belt when I went to that concert with that girl. But I don't really think of it when I'm listening to the song, because it doesn't need a backstory to hold my attention.