Tag: Bloc Party

Flying in the Mist: A Week at The Grammarsow

A little spot by the Nine Maidens stone circle

I’m on the twelve-hour CrossCountry from Penzance to Edinburgh. Penzance is the most westerly town in Cornwall and being this close to the edge of something calms me. I always sleep better by the sea. On my way here, on the Great Western Railway, a woman gifted me a glass sculpture with a rainbow inside it, as thanks for helping with her bags at Truro. ‘It’s for stirring your drinks’. For the past week, I’ve been writer in residence at The Grammarsow: a project which brings Scottish poets to Cornwall in the footsteps of WS Graham, who was born in Greenock but spent much of his life down here, making a home of Madron, of Zennor, of the moors. To say this has been a magical week is to say it changed me. I first came across Graham when the poet Dom Hale sent me a voice note of his elegy, ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, out of the blue; I immediately went out and bought another bright blue, the Faber New Collected Poems. There was something about that foxglove on the wall and the hum of some memory in childhood, watching the bees. 

Graham grew up in Greenock, on the Inverclyde estuary. A town where I used to teach writing workshops at the Inverclyde CHCP, taking weekly, then fortnightly trains with our chitty from Glasgow. That time in my life is a blur of shift work, seasonal overhaul, hopeless crushes. I’d get there early to look at the lurid flowers in Morrisons with Kirsty, my co-tutor, or visit the docks alone. Sometimes, I brought my little heartaches to the docks because the air felt smelted, or salt-rinsed, excoriating. The nature of these workshops was that people would share their life stories of such intensity we’d bear them home. I remember one woman writing a story about the moon, ‘we share the same moon’: the one thing connecting her, unconditionally, to her estranged daughter. Many people with stories of recovering from addiction through returning to childhood pursuits: the fishing taught by their fathers, the harbour walks, the musical grammar of language. Graham was trained as an engineer and spent some time on fishing boats, but dedicated most of his life full-time to poetry. The more I learn about this, the more I pine for the shabby romance of that clarity of pursuit. Not as a sacrifice but a great generosity from him, like a penniless rock star.

I’m sure it took a toll on his friends. Graham sent many a letter pleading neighbours and pen pals for the loan of a pound or a pair of boots, once thanking the artist Bryan Wynter for a pair of second-hand trousers. His letters are documents of a life lived in gleaning, bracing the elements, enjoying his wife Nessie’s lentil soup and of course, drinking. On a ‘bleak Spring day’ in 1978, by way of a quiet apology, he pleads with Don Brown, ‘I was flippant in the drink when you came with your news […]. Please let me still be your best friend’. He was often full of fire, a real zeal, taking poetry so seriously but life a strange lark, ‘speak[ing] out of a hole in my leg’. He wrote to his contemporaries — artists such as Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon, Edwin Morgan, along with family and friends — with bags of personality, a man self-fashioning in the long blue sea of ‘I miss yous’. As he wrote to Roger Hilton:

We are each, in our own respective ways, blessed or cursed with certain ingredients to help us for good or bad on our ways which we think are our ways. What’s buzzin couzzin? Love thou me? When the idea of the flood had abated a hare pussed in the shaking bell-flowers and prayed to the rainbow through the spider’s web. I have my real fire on. I am on. 

The real fire may have been a woodburner, sure, but it’s something lit within him. The letter as a turning on, turning towards: we see this spirit of openness and address in the poems. The real commitment to Lyric. I love the hare that shakes in the flowers with its rainbow religion. I love the flush of arousal from walking uphill at speed. I saw many a spiderweb and two hares chasing each other on dawn of Thursday. On the train home texting many friends as if to have the rush of being held again, ‘Love thou me?’, could I be so vulnerable. A foxglove shook in the wind. The line as a tremble is lesser felt in the steady verse. Clearly, Graham wasn’t afraid of sincerity, though he always took pains to remind his addressees of his roots. ‘No harder man than me will you possibly encounter’, he assures Hilton; elsewhere, after the death of Wynter, he writes to his Canadian friend Robin Skelton of the coming funeral: ‘Give me a hug across the sea. […] I am not really sentimental. I am as hard as Greenock shipbuilding nails’. In a way, the infrastructure of space inflects the language as its face. I’m reminded of a quote by Wendy Mulford which Fred Carter shared at the recent ASLE-uki conference in Newcastle, where she talks about ‘attempting to work at the language-face’. I wear the face of the land, Graham seems to say, and the build of it. At West Penwith, we face the end of the land, literally Land’s End to our west. It is sometimes a silver gelatine, other times a bright blue, a fog grey thicker than thought. A granite-hard land that nonetheless sparkles. I recall a rock on the beaches of Culzean, in South Ayrshire, we’d come across as kids. Mum called it a ‘moonrock’ or a ‘wishrock’. It was a perfectly huge dinosaur egg of white granite. I find this particular rock showing up in my dreams, even now; as if having touched it, I become complicit in a deep time that doesn’t so much store the past as bear its promise. What could hatch from within a rock like that? What could move it, or hold it?

Graham had the idea of poetry’s ‘constructed space’, what I’d call a lyric architecture for reassembling something sensuous in memory or emergence. That this space isn’t just designed (as in my idea of architecture) but constructed points to that emphasis on building. What kinds of muscle, time, effort of spirit and will go into this? The poet Oli Hazzard writes that one of the effects of Graham’s poetry is ‘that I feel like it allows me—or, creates a space in which it becomes possible—to see or to hear myself’. Graham’s poem ‘The Constructed Space’ opens with the line ‘Meanwhile surely there must be something to say’. I always hear it in the lovely vowels of his Inverclyde accent, assuring. Like he’s sitting with you in the poetry bar, two pints between yous, and the poem gives this permission to talk or make space to listen. I think of Denise Riley’s ‘say something back’. My own need always to blurt, interrupt, muse out loud what mince is in my head. It continues: 

                                        […] at least happy

In a sense here between us whoever
We are.

As I write this, light dances on the opposite wall of my tenement flat and it’s prettier than anything given to me by the window. Sometimes my love says I am harsh when they need delicacy, and so I soften the heather of my voice to listen. It’s true that I was happy while reading that poem, a happiness or lightness in the brain as precarious as the light is. Changeable and easily blown further west to let in what fog, or dimness. I don’t mind my brain when I’m in Graham’s poems. By which I mean, it’s no longer a drag to be conscious or sad; things move again, their metaphors in process. There’s a lightness to quietude, its intimate premise, that holds me. Nothing extreme is promised here, ‘whoever / We are’: lyric address sent through ether to find that ‘you’, held in the future’s new ‘us’. It’s better than a page refresh, reading the poem to think something Bergsonian of the self’s duration. I’m more snowball than the first maria who read this. It’s a kind of exhale, in a sense, like Kele Okereke singing ‘So Here We Are’ from an album named suitably Silent Alarm. Imagining my loves at the same time, out in Stirlingshire lying tripping by the loch, their eyes skyward, the high or low. I cherish that wish you were here / so here we are. I can look out from inside the constructed space of the poem. Wheeeeeeeeesht, you. You’ll find constructed spaces everywhere in Cornwall. The lashing blue skyscapes of Peter Lanyon, the abstract panoramas of Ben Nicholson, the ambient plenitude of Aphex Twin (especially ‘Aisatsana’ and most things from Drukqs). I want ambient or abstract art to give me the clouds in my head back to myself, with the light of it. Colours, gestures, fractals, lines. 

~

I’ve spent the past week schlepping around the moors and lanes, reading Sydney Graham’s poems and letters, cooking veg on my wee stove and eating simple marmite and butter sandwiches. I have this grandparent on my mum’s side who shared his name, who died of cancer before I was born. Sydney was the name Graham tended to go by, signing letters. It’s not that I’m looking for literary fathers but I stumble into their charismatic arms all the same. Is it guidance I look for, or perspective? I love the rolling enthusiasm, pedantry and chiding of his letters, as well as their cheekiness and charm. His dedication to writing and reading, his swaggering or boastful tendencies after an especially successful performance (coupled with an irresistible gentleness and warmth). His big sweet expressions ‘THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS IS CONDENSED – TTBB)’, ‘IMPOSSIBLE TALK’. TTBB is the slogan of Grammarsow and a familiar exhortation in Grahamworld, meaning Try To Be Better (the title of an excellent anthology of Graham-inspired poems, edited by Sam Buchan-Watts and Lavinia Singer). I summon my voices, I try to be; used to be; want us to be. 

There’s a quietude I love about the work, which suits the land and mind. After a summer of working three paid jobs, and two voluntary, I was ready for a gearshift into something relaxed and focused. I’d had enough of my own ‘impossible talk’. Being here was like being given permission to play and explore. Quickly I realised my time didn’t need to be ‘dedicated’. I lived by the cruising whim of the big sky, its scrolling clouds and moodswings. Saw the moon at two o’clock in the afternoon. I watched dragonflies dart between the lanes, listened to my neighbourly ravens at night. Watched big jenny long-legs make flickery silhouettes on the walls. Slept peacefully with spiders above me and the ravens being craven. I wanted all these things in my poemspace, and the poems themselves were initially scarce, then they began a familiar elongation that was comforting, with the swerves of a bus but also the tread of a walk. Some poems wanting to hide themselves between logs where I might later try and find them.

~

A grammarsow is the Cornish name for a woodlouse, or what we’d call in Scots a slater. I remember growing up and having this internal argument about language: was I to go with what my English mum said, or everyone at school? Aye or nay, yes or no. At some point I realised it wasn’t a question of scarcity and elimination, but abundance. The words became barnacle-stuck from all over the sloshes of life, swears and all, and I cherished their stubbornness. Even those gnarly, uncommon words and spicy portmanteau like ‘haneck’, ‘gadsafuck’, ‘blootered’ and ‘glaikit’. And yous: the juicy, plural form of you. Addressing the crowd, the swarm or many. A woodlouse is a terrestrial crustacean drawn to damp environments. I grew up with woodlice crawling out from under cracked kitchen tiles, unearthing raves of them hidden under rotten logs, finding them in tins of old paintbrushes or sometimes a bag of flour or sugar. I always liked the way their little legs seemed translucent, a little alien, and was especially seduced by their darling tendency to curl up into a ball, for protection, like Derrida’s idea of the poem as hedgehog. 

Across the English language, there are many amazing names for the humble woodlouse, not limited to: 

  • armadillo bug
  • billy button
  • carpet shrimp
  • charlie pig
  • cheeselog
  • chisel pig
  • doodlebug
  • hardback
  • hobby horse
  • hog-louse
  • jomit
  • menace
  • pea bug
  • pennysow
  • pill bug
  • roly-poly

What is this penchant for lists I share with Graham? I want abundance from something other than products. I’m dumbly monolingual and lists are one of the few ways I can accumulate nuances of meaning. My attention-disordered brain collects lists as procrastination for the Thing itself, what is it I should be doing, always on the tip of some other event horizon bleeding through the last and first, so nothing is really finished. I like that in West Penwith, to look at the Atlantic you don’t see any islands, so there doesn’t have to be an end. You have the illusion that there can always be more time. The sea as this list of limitless light, colour shift, unbearable senses of depth. You are here. 

~

The grammarsow crops up in Graham’s letters. In a missive to Robin Skelton, he muses: 

And what are we now? Maybe better to have been an engine-driver in the steam-age. A sportsman a shaman a drummer a dancer rainmaker farmer smith dyer cooper charcoal-burner politician dog bunsen-burner minister assassin thug bird-watcher poet’s-wife queer painter alcoholic ologist solger sailer candlestick-maker composer madrigalist explorer invalid cowboy kittiwake graamersow slater flea sea-star angel dope dunce dunnick dotteral dafty prophesor genius monster slob starter sea-king prince earl the end.

Again the ‘steam-age’ of other infrastructures interfacing language. Better to have been a wave engineer in the renewable(s) era. I find myself somewhere between the ‘ologist’ and the ‘angel dope’, strung out on critique, measure and the promise of sensuous oblivion. Not sure if the dope is connected to the dunce or angel, but I’ll claim it spiritually as something good: an enhanced performance. As in, those are dope lines I’m reading. Do you want some? ‘And what are we now?’ not who, but what. A question I want always to ask — it’s almost Deleuzian — with someone in my arms or the sea swishing up to waist height, a sea-star clung to the hollows behind my knees. What’s possible when shame is gone. I love tenderly Graham’s list of possible existences and wonder how many I might retrain as (O genius monster), keeping in mind Bernadette Mayer’s old quip that all poets should really be carpenters. I love the raggedness of letters, which is why I love blogs (letters to the idea of being read). Who are they for? We’re so lucky to have these old ones, bound for us, evidence to the material conditions for our wild imaginaries. 

~

In Cornwall, I love falling asleep. I love falling for new poems, stumbling a little on the rugged paths, falling for the air and water, for a little more mermaid’s ale or Bell’s, a blackcurrant kombucha or 100g of coconut mushrooms. In his essay for Poetry Foundation, ‘This Horizontal Position’, Oli Hazzard writes about a time Graham ‘went for a walk on Zennor Hill in Cornwall and fell into a bramble bush’. This falling was a repeat pattern: in 1950 he drunkenly fell off a roof and complained of his three-month hospital stay, ‘I hate this horizontal position’. In my DFA thesis I wrote extensively about lying down as a beginning for writing, the horizontal as a form of refusal when it comes to the upright requirements of an assertive ‘I’. It’s no secret that I prefer poetry in the mode of dreamtime, but that’s not to say I’m also a rambler. It’s a poetry of breath and of steps (of vigour!) I enjoy in Graham. Zigzagging and winding down well-trodden moor paths, stumbling upon bridleways that lead around the hills from holy shrines. 

I was the lucky poet to first bless a new writer’s cabin that my host, Rebecca, built on some land near the Ding Dong Mine. From the garden, you can see right out over Mount Bay. The skies are huge here. I’ll say that a lot. I saw a seal down by one of the zawns on the north coast, felt the fear of losing the moon in you, let my lips chap on the telepathy of remote secrets. I try to be better, regardless. My poems become languorous obscurities. All of the land has hidden depths.

~

There was a summer before secondary school when we were gifted an unlimited pass to Historic Scotland, meaning our holidays involved camping across Dumfries and Galloway, the Trossachs, the Highlands, in search of abbeys, monasteries, castles and holy sites in various states of decay. I was turned off by leaflets documenting the actual details of history, emerging sleepy-eyed from the car where I’d been navigating the turgid sentences of fantasy novels or playing platform games like Super Mario. There’s a particular form of carsickness that produces electrolytic effects conducive to imaginative ventures. What I mean to say is, instead of vomiting I overlaid the real world with the promise of portals to elsewhere. In Penwith, I walk off my city sickness and sit by the standing stones, quoits and old ruins of industry. What do I imagine but a ‘news of no time’, still to come? Zennor Hill is both poem and place. The more I’m here, the more a sort of aura thickens.

Swap Zoom for the view from Zennor

On my last morning, I wake to sunrise over the sea. Dew shimmers the rosehips. The air is earthsweet as ever and I don’t know how I’ll go home. Travelling is an experience of dislocation: here, I find home again in language, its caught habits, Graham’s words sluicing Clydewards. There’s a poise to his poetry, steadfastly composed as ‘verse’ and often by iambic measure. Making perfect prosody with the chug of the train. I was pleased to roll into Glasgow having bumped into my friend Kenny, the whisky god of the Hebrides, attuned to the flight-pulse of conversing again. Hungry, ‘putting this statement into this empty soup tin’ to say cheerio as Sydney would, lighting up poetry to finish it, the best thing of all, a warm scaffold to hold up how we missed each other. A quiet disintegration of cloud. What are we now?

With thanks to Andrew Fentham, David Devanny and Rebecca Althaus for kindness and hospitality. Long live The Grammarsow! 

Playlist: January 2021

Not long ago a blog was destroyed. Inside the blog was a forest; what they called forest but by all intents and purposes was more the unknown contribution to chronology which made up many pages of codes and trees. Codes and trees. The liquor in a small pool was seemingly endless dirty martini, where olives float in lieu of lilies. I meant to say it was destroyed and the incident being customisable, now to look back, I see a particular man at sunset wielding buttons. Pop, pluck, glock. Boys share the same blouse as me. Then gingham and dungarees to write in the blog another hour or more, sleeves rolled, plunging seasons into seasons. Keep yourself sewn. Don’t get shot. This winter will you change your life. This summer will you lose it. All of the paper incineration. Sound of artificial camera flash in the dark, razor the code from the trees. This change, not the life, not necessarily. Scrolling the trees. 

What will it take for the server to work? There was a dark room of my childhood filled with blinking lights, layer-bake hard drives, wires and cables. Bringing you coffee, I go there closing my eyes to the electronic warmth at the heart of the office. Whose office is this? How can I work there? Will you give me a job? I am a fine typist / I like the word ‘twilight’. 

But not long ago, a blog was destroyed. We were in generic city, you know the one with buildings, and something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? We kept left-clicking the breeze to stop, but the way your hair looked, lifted — I could’ve almost gone with it, the hum and song of the breeze just pink. Remembering lines like ‘January is endless’ and ‘the Northern Line is the loudest’ as I consent to give cookies, consent to be multiplied in the archive of giving me moments in capital city; where is my iPod? Small things you can do, exchange of fruit, the scale of it. Something swerved into us. I was scared at first, weren’t you? My blood was all scattering berries, clots, poisons. We knew the album was amazing. We said this many times. I said we have to see a doctor. Just a guess but the crescendo fucking kills me. I breathed too hard it was scary. The road was quiet but something swerved into us. Couldn’t tell if it was a truck or a set of emotions. Kisses from France. I was climbing to get to the good bit. This is a painful song coming on I won’t talk about further, being dull and adult, seeing old college friends lost. What is a moon. I said we have to see a doctor and we did, we got in line outside with our masks; it was a time before masks but I add them. Losing your pearls, losing your solace barometer. Remember X overmind of me. We were turned away at the last. Did not see doctor. Jellyfish. I wore the blouse that all the boys wore, proudly.

Driving to Brighton, not driving to Brighton.

The ocean washed up masses of cash, bank notes sticky with kelp and salt, tons of pennies in lieu of pebbles, bits of glass. I paid for a book of poems with a cheque signed on behalf of my father. I paid for my life. The blog lived inside of the sea. It was being destroyed and so the blog called tsunami. It had a world in it. Tsunami_93. Commission you tell me the endless failures of Wednesday, Thursday, watching the ants by the ocean accumulate broadband costs. Watching the ants and cash. Spiralling ants and cash. I said something swerved into us, it was fucking horrible. I saw it, the long hard crash of the numbers, upwards. The colony of allied ants just clicking away in the dark like we already knew them. A politician comes and goes from the hole where you fall through, nightly, clutching at sand. A burlesque of sleep. The patent glitter of policy, it gets in your body. The ants made a moat of the hospital.

Silently, you came to town in my closing dream which was killing our molars from kissing too much in any forsaken house by the sea, endless you climb inside me — figure this in, you figure this out. Sometimes the text at the bottom of the page just disappears. Tell you a blog was destroyed and my concern is for glutinous sentences, stretching. Planetary hardship was relative. Tell me, hold me. I write about dying in my diary, how will it feel to be six or five and not knowing about the dying, how will it feel to look back knowing you lived through it. Tear off the blouse the boys gave to me. There is a coming through of such dreams I have had, splashes of sick pink light, infinite distance — and can I say the animal I never met was nice, they were so nice, the album was amazing. The animal pronoun that therefore I am. Something swerved into us; it was the whole fat year of pink rain. Where a blog was destroyed, you put down the stone. It is shaped like a heart that needs convincing to beat.

Kept diaries of numbers kept easy job kept crying. Felt like portraits of femmes in rose blush and yellow and emerald green, leaking, felt like looking into you back from Matisse or wherever it was in generic city we saw what doesn’t is seen. Domestic bliss. I remember the wires in my childhood were totally opaque. Quiet symphony of dialup and call you. eBay and a “flurry of cosy ideas” says eye, closing for the last time, plated. Down a long gold tunnel and DNS error. “Are you alright? Are you alright?” I hate this question but whacking a drum and bass beat right HERE was good, if originally ballad but easy

to me, this song is less about a particular situation, and more about that feeling you get looking back
on things that have meant a lot to you, or you
feel could have meant more

I hide the application anyway. It is spring 2008, no forests exist, the bathroom sounds of lemongrass scent and harshest bleach. I’m sick. I’m sick of parks I want genuine forestry and a place to be lost and call you. I remember football on the low green, barging into silver, not knowing a wave meant more disease. Not knowing the waves as anything other than the earnest self-abuse of the sea. Salt heal. It hurt to listen by the long thin phrase of your cigarette, smoke getting up in the hours of my eyes. I remember kissing in tents / remember running home drunk from school. Remember who watched us. The man who squared-up for no good reason other than the sound his own voice made, which was a sound of bright cash howled from the sandy reminder. There are memory dunes where stuff piles up, stuff gets sucked or dragged away. Stuff gets pissed on. Something swerved into us and we did not phone the cops. I carried the hurt for a while instead. Walked from one end of the green to the other. Now in the city. On the mobile phone a big red sound passed beta-waves through us and you asked, “what was that?” and pleaded “please don’t die”. I minimise the year, I always reply. I fantasise portals to London.

Dreamt the prime minister was crying on Mars for the ninth time and it was a ninth wave and it was very bee loud it was glandular. Second wave, third wave, watch out for next winter. A man who swallowed all of the cash of the sea was blatant in wanting to touch this and ruin my life. It hurt to listen. A novelty sermon on visions, ecstasies, roses and bread. Something H.D. says about a jellyfish and will you sign up for infinity melt club — it requires the overmind, sad to miss, buoyed up by salt water always. We passed the number we wanted not to pass. Will Alexander writes that poetics is ‘a place where language becomes a fertilised concentration that explodes’. I’m talking about everything we used to do. Another life. Voice barely makes it to audible status. Every month I turn fifteen again and my mouth tastes of Yorkie bars, acid, ice cubes painted with crude sweet oil, Diet Coke, extra salt. Maria, it says, and I wonder. Someone is a shadow they are painting the walls with it, more and more, the paint fizzes up. Crude sweet oil, the blouse of the boys. Softly you bring me the water, more of it, enormous with cash, I hate it. I mix all the paint with us. 

That person who used to work, I miss her. January is endless. Should the blog be destroyed? It was Platonic like kissing the stone at the place where sunflowers grew upside-down by a crumbled temple, they let us go. You say, “this is wretched” then turn on the radio. Elliott Smith in front of a mural, covering The Beatles. That I a girl from Maybole would like to be consulted; would like consultation. Because. The doctor turned us down. The river was frozen. Salt. Pretzels of fallopian tubes. Someone on the radio said poverty. The blog consolation of be love because you. Remarkably clean air I remember? What comes next is older and older, how early the cruel was, forecast, thinking in paradigms and not glassware. “You look young!” It might be I always hold out. Still you smash, the failures of Tuesday, no melatonin. Blissing Chamomile Mountain. Payne’s Gray, Davy’s Gray, Naples Yellow. Salacious impression of what is a gesture. I have all these dreams about ladders like—

å̷͈̳̉u̵̞̰͊̐̕ba̵̱̺͌͊̏de

The problem of the marry a cloud of the martyred morning
In the soft-touching laminate space of the morning
The promise of a landing, striped by the morning
We edit cumulus, collect yon fish by the morning
A rain passed wetly over our morning
The actual cat got into the morning
My proletarian alignment against the morning
Is only a maths class happening this morning
Did you want palaces in the light of this morning
To feel you never got hurt this morning
When it swerved into you in the morning
Of comparative hotness at morning
Equivalent to mattresses morning
That planets lie down inside us, warming

And the flowery agenda of what they would do to avoid this scarcity. Kept saying science, science like a car advert, £500, kept you awake at night. Salt. The technology trusts us! Liberating production to what freeing from labour a person being careful would order milkshake. Water this artificial strawberry. Audit the communal blog was destroyed. Salt and oil. A wheat field in a movie. I remember aspartame sunrise at which close to the not-top of Louise Bourgeois’ many ladders was a droplet of hooch blood, red-to-punk-pink. Under the fairy lit trails of Tuesday, I said FUCK YOU to the motorist, I said OUCH! Today is Blue Day, tomorrow is Green Day; expropriation of serotonin to Bad Day, it is quite a state; put back ice that you stay on, tulips; a sugar-lift etch to keep say [“I miss the nineties”] belong to my early days of still love indie. Weeks become necklaces I am choked inside them. Tending the forest, drive out of the city. Impossible tacos in landfills pass us, having never harmed animals. Nothing swerved ever in heaven; you get really close.

Study the lightning-shaped graze on my knee. 

~

Burial – Chemz 

SOPHIE – Is It Cold In the Water?

Honeyblood – Super Rat

Billie Eilish, ROSALÍA – Lo Vas A Olvidar 

Sharon Van Etten – Serpents

Widowspeak – Sanguine 

Infinity Knives – In The Mouth of Sadness

Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over The Country Club

Xiu Xiu, Liz Harris – A Bottle of Rum

Fishtalk – Hummingbirds 

Los Campesinos! – Got Stendhal’s

Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away

The Antlers – Solstice – Edit 

Songs: Ohia – Boys

Field Medic – chamomile

Vagabon, Courtney Barnett – Reason to Believe (Karen Dalton cover)

Sun June – Everything I had

Coma Cinema – In Lieu of Flowers

This Familiar Smile – Flawed Fables

Hamburger – Supersad 

Donovan – Colours 

The Velvet Underground – Sweet Jane

The Replacements – Skyway 

Falling through Glass

 

3746713882_eb3e039a09
self-portrait//circa 2008

[An essay on anorexia, femininity, adolescent pain & writing the body]

I distinctly remember the first time I watched someone apply liquid liner to their eyes. We stood in the Debenhams toilets before a sheet of unavoidable mirror. She emptied her rucksack of trinkets and tools, drew out a plastic wand with a fine-tip brush and skimmed the gooey ink skilfully over her lids, making curlicues of shimmering turquoise. Her irises were a kind of violent hazel, whose flecks of green seemed to swim against the paler blue. She was very tall and for a while, very thin. She had a nickname, a boyfriend and sometimes she shoplifted; in my head, she was the essence of teenage success. Only later, in the maelstrom of a drunken night out down the beach, do I discover she’s heavily bulimic.

A year or so passes since this first incident, watching my friend slick her eyes with electric blue. I have since learned to ink my own eyes, draw long Egyptian lines that imitate that slender almond shape I long for. My makeup is cheap and smudges. I have grown thinner and people are finally starting to notice.

My mother goes quiet when we do the shopping. She tells me to move out the aisle and I ask what’s wrong. People are staring, she says. I turn around and there they are by the stacks of cereal, mother and daughter, gesturing at my legs and whispering: stick insect, skeleton. A feel a flush of hot pride, akin to the day in primary school when I got everyone to sign my arms with permanent marker—this sudden etching of possession. I am glad I lack this conspiratorial relationship with my own mother, reserving comments on others for the page instead, for my skin. My pain and frustration are communicated bodily: I slink into the shadows, sleeping early, avoiding meals. When people stare, they imbue me with a visibility I desire to erase. I should like better to float around them intangibly, diaphanous, a veil of a name they can’t catch. Instead it rests on everyone’s tongue, thick and severe: anorexic.

It took a week for all the names to fade from my arms; it takes much longer to erase a single label.

In the television series Girls, Lena Dunham’s character reveals that she got tattoos as a teenager because she was putting on weight very quickly and wanted to feel in control of her own body, making fairytale scripture of her skin. In Roald Dahl’s short story, ‘Skin’, an old man gets a famous artist to tattoo the image of a gorgeous woman on his back, the rich pigment of ink like a lustrous ‘impasto’. Years later, art dealers discover his fleshly opus and proceed to barter, literally, on the price of his skin. The story reveals the synecdochical relations between the body, the pen and the value of art. Everything is a piece of something else, skin after skin after skin. In Skins, Cassie Ainsworth gazes into the camera: I hate my thighs. With black marker, she scrawls her name onto her palm; she’s got a smile that lights up, she’s in love. Everyone around her rolls cigarettes, swaps paper skins like scraps of poetry. It feels dirty, the chiaroscuro mood of sunshine and sorrow. Her whole narrative purpose is the spilling of secrets, of human hurt turned to vapour, smoke. Wow, lovely.

For a while, my name mattered less than my skin. There were levels of weight to lose, dress sizes which signified different planes of existence. Over and over, I would listen to ‘4 st. 7lbs’ by the Manic Street Preachers, Richey Edwards’ lyrics spat over a stomach-churning angst of guitar: ‘Self-worth scatters self-esteem’s a bore / I’ve long since moved to a higher plateau’. That summer, ten years ago now, I would walk for hours, the sun on my skin. All the fields stretched out before me like fresh pages of impossibility; my life was a mirage on the flickering sea. I thought of liquid turquoise ink, the friend in the mirror. I started to forget the details of her face, so she blurred into the impressionist portraits I wrote about in school.

Midsummer’s eve; I laid down in one of those fields. With bone-raw fingers, I counted the notches of my spine. Even in free-fall you never feel quite free.

I was obsessed with Richey’s ghost. He disappeared decades ago and they never found evidence of his body. I wanted to evaporate like that, leave my abstracted car somewhere along the motorway; step into the silence of anonymity. Richey wrote screeds of furious notes: ‘I feel like cutting the feet off a ballerina’. There it was: the dark evaporation of resentment and envy. Around this time, Bloc Party released A Weekend in the City, a record that uses Edwards’ lyric to express the racial frustration of being made Other by a racist society. I was acutely aware that the figure of a ballerina, the doll-like white girl, was a divisive source of symbolic desire. We inscribe such societal alignments on the female body, and shamefully I was more than ready to fall into place, to shed the necessary weight. But what I wanted was less the bloody violence of a crippled ballerina, and more the success of erasure.

In Zelda Fitzgerald’s only novel, Save Me the Waltz,the protagonist Alabama trains to be a ballerina late in her twenties, too late to ascend to any real career success. Here was ballet, the pre-adolescent world of waif-thin bodies and she was a mother, a woman—someone who once gave birth, who was strong in flesh. She reaches this frenzied state of beautiful prudence, honing her body to the point where every movement and thought is guided by the waltzing beat, the perfect arabesque: ‘David will bring me some chocolate ice cream and I will throw it up; it smells like a soda fountain, thrown-up, she thought’. I could attest to that. Ben and Jerry’s, swirls of it marbling the toilet bowl, clots of sweetness still clear in your throat. Fitzgerald’s sentences stream towards endless flourish. Alabama makes herself sick with the work, her desire is lustily bulimic. She gets blood poisoning, finds herself hospitalised with tubes in her body, drip-fed and cleansed by the system. I thought of how I wanted to photosynthesise, survive on nothing but air and light. Like a dancer, I was honing my new ascetic life.

Sometimes at night, the old ticker would slow to such a crawl and I thought it would stop in my sleep, sink like a stone. A girl I met on the internet sent me a red-beaded bracelet in the post and in class I’d twirl each plastic, pro-ana ruby, imagining the twist of my own bright sinew as later I’d stretch and click my bones.

I was small, I was sick. I used to write before bed, write a whole sermon’s worth of weight-loss imperatives; often I’d fall asleep mid-sentence and awake to a pool of dark ink, flowering its stain across my sheets. Nausea, of one sort or another, was more or less constant. Waves would dash against my brain, black spots clotting my vision. I moved from one plane or scale to another, reaching for another diuretic. I tried to keep within the lines, keep everything in shape.

Often, however, I thought about water, about things spilling; I drank so much and yet found myself endlessly thirsty. Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, trying to drown, being spat back out by the sea: I am I am I am.

 I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine. The familiar litany.

Something buoyed up, started showing on the surface. People could read the wrongness in the colour of my skin, all that mottled and purpling blood like a contrast dye my body had been dipped in. Against my pallid aquatic hue, I used to envy the warm and luxurious glow of other people’s skin. I sat on a friend’s lap and he freaked out at the jut of my bones. Someone lifted me and we ran down the road laughing and they were like, My god you’re so light. The sycamores were out in full bloom and I realised with a pang it would nearly be autumn. Vaguely I knew soon I would fall like all those leaves.

Anorexia is an austerity of the self. To fast is to practice a refusal, to resist the ideological urge to consume. To swap wasteful packs of pads and tampons for flakeaway skin and hypoglycaemic dreams. Unlike with capitalism, with anorexia you know where everything goes.

The anorexic is constantly calculating. Her day is a series of trades and exchanges: X amount of exercise for X amount of food; how much dinner should I spread around the plate in lieu of eating? It was never enough; nothing ever quite added up. My space-time melted into a continuous present in which I constantly longed for sleep. The past and future had no bearing on me; my increasingly androgynous body wasn’t defined by the usual feminine cycles—life was just existing. This is one of the trickiest things to fix in recovery.

Dark ecologist Timothy Morton says of longing: it’s ‘like depression that melted […] the boundary between sadness and longing is undecidable. Dark and sweet, like good chocolate’. Longing is spiritual and physical; it’s a certain surrender to the beyond, even as it opens strange cavities in the daily. The anorexic’s default existential condition is longing: a condition that is paradoxically indulgent. Longing to be thin, longing for self, dying for both. The world blurs before her eyes, objects take on that auratic sheen of desire. Later, putting myself through meal plans that involved slabs of Green & Black’s, full-fat milk and actual carbs, the dark sweet ooze of depression’s embrace gradually replaced my disordered eating. I wondered if melancholia was something you could prise off, like a skin; I saw its mise-en-abyme in every mirror, a curious, cruel infinitude.

In Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus asks: ‘shouldn’t it be possible to leave the body? Is it wrong to even try?’. What do you do when food is abstracted entirely from appetite? What happens when life becomes a question of pouring yourself, gloop by gloop, into other forms? What is lost in the process?

I started a diary. I wrote with a rich black Indian ink I bought from an art supplies store. The woman at the counter ID’d me, saying she’d recently had teenagers come in to buy the stuff for home tattooing, then tried to blame her later when they all got blood poisoning. Different kinds of ink polluted our blood; I felt an odd solidarity with those kids, remembering the words others had scored on my skin for years. Tattooing yourself, perhaps, was a way of taking those names back. In any case, there was a sense that the ink was like oil, a reserve of energy I was drawing from the deep.

Recovery was trying to breathe underwater; resisting the urge of the quickening tide, striving for an island I couldn’t yet see.

(…What I miss most, maybe, is the driftwood intricacy, the beauty of the sternum in its gaunt, tripart sculpturing. Thinned to the bone, the body becomes elegiac somehow, an artefact of ebbing beauty…)

I think about beef and milk and I think about the bodies of cows and the way the light drips gold on their fields sometimes and how I’d like to curl up in some mossy grove and forget that all of this is happening. Sometimes I worry that my body is capable of making milk, making babies; its design is set up for this nourishing. Hélène Cixous insists women write ‘in white ink’ but I don’t want to be that plump and ripe, that giving. I want scarification, darkness, markings. I want Julia Kristeva’s black sun, an abyss that negates the smudge of identity.

I try to find loveliness in femininity, but my hands are full with hair barrettes, pencils, laxatives, lipstick—just so much material.

As Isabelle Meuret puts it, ‘starving in a world of plenty is a daring challenge’. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Recently, I logged onto my Facebook to find an old friend, a girl I’d known vaguely through an online recovery community, had died in hospital. Her heart just gave up in the night. People left consolatory messages on her wall; she was being written already into another existence. Another girl I used to know posts regular photos from her inpatient treatment. She’s very pretty but paper-thin, almost transparent in the flash of a camera. Tubes up her nose like she’s woven into the fabric of the institution, a flower with its sepals fading, drip-fed through stems that aren’t her own. She’s supposed to be at university. I think of Zelda Fitzgerald, of broken ballerinas. A third girl from the recovery forum covers herself in tattoos, challenging you to unlock the myriad stories of symbol. Someone I know in real life gets an orca tattoo in memory of her sea-loving grandfather; she says it helped to externalise the pain. My own body is a pool of inky potential; I cannot fathom its beginning and ending. I wish I could distil my experience into stamps of narrative, the way the tattoo-lovers did. I am always drawing on my face, only to wash the traces away. I must strive for something more permanent.

Recovery, Marya Hornbacher writes in her memoir Wasted,

comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up and there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect.
And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

Every meal, every morsel that passes the lips, we tell ourselves: You are okay. You deserve this. Must everything be so earned? Still there is this girl underneath: the one that screams for her meagre dreams, her beautiful form; her starlight and skeletons, her sticks of celery. I try to bury her behind sheet after sheet of glass, lose her in shopfronts, the windows of cars and bathrooms; I daily crush out the bloat of her starched hyperbole, keeping the lines plain and simple. Watching others around me, I try to work out other ways of feeling full, of being free. There is an entry from 2009, scratched in a hand I barely recognise in the final page of a diary: ‘Maybe we are only the sum total of all our reflections’. I wonder what kind of sixteen-year-old wrote this, whether she is happy now and if that matters at all.

Top 16 Albums of 2016

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Top 16 Albums of 2016

It’s never easy to compile a list like this. Albums by their very nature are dynamic; like books, their significance shifts over time as we build up new associations from listening to them over and over. I know it’s corny but I can’t help but think of that quote from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: ‘I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind’. Well, you could say the same thing about records. Any good album stays with me a long time and it’s so interwoven with memory and place and emotion that I could no longer just glance at its cover in a shop and shrug, it’s a good album. Give me a copy of American Idiot and I’ll wax lyrical about my political awakening, aged eleven; when I first discovered what teenage angst meant, when I decided it was hot to wear eyeliner and complain about dead-end jobs. When I realised you could make stories with music and create characters from songs; in fact, a whole mythology.

It’s becoming increasingly important to me to keep track of what I listen to. Month by month I’ve started to save new stuff onto Spotify playlists, where once I would fall back on the same old iTunes favourites, playlists I’d made years ago. Relying on shuffle or rehashing albums I loved five years ago and never bothering to look out anything new. Having a year away from university gave me the time to focus on music again; I realised that it used to be this massive part of my life that I’d since abandoned in favour of obscure literary theory (now I know they don’t have to be mutually exclusive…). I’ve started to write reviews for RaveChild , which has sort of taught me to listen to a song the way I’d read a text. I want to find the hook, the arrangement, the way all the different parts work together to evoke something. I’m listening for detail, texture, weirdness. It’s fun and sometimes hard work, but always rewarding. Now, often an actual musician will read a thing I wrote and maybe they’ll retweet it or like it or in some way show their appreciation. For someone whose writing has always been a solitary thing – confined to notebooks and extinct LiveJournal and MySpace accounts and only more recently a grownup blog – I can’t tell you how nice it feels for my writing to be out there, being noticed somehow. It’s so lovely. I really appreciate the opportunity to have a new outlet, and to discover so much good music while I’m doing it!

Anyway, to mark the end of the year like I did last year, here are my top 16 albums of 2016. I’m going to try and do them in order this year, bearing in mind the fact that this ordering probably changes in my head on a weekly basis. Basically, the first 16 are pretty arbitrary; I love all of the stuff listed and know that as soon as I’ve written this I’ll want to shuffle it around again.

1) Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

This is such a beautiful, highly-crafted album. For someone whose favourite Radiohead record is probably In Rainbows, but who also loves the jagged electronica of The King of Limbs as much as Jonny Greenwood’s cinematic compositions, A Moon Shaped Pool is a real treat. I remember when In Rainbows first came out and there was so much media controversy over its distribution method. I read about it constantly in NME magazine, without much sense of what the music was. Radiohead were a distant entity to me then, a kind of musical megalith that I wasn’t quite ready to approach. Well, a few years down the line I gave In Rainbows an actual proper listen (not just because ‘Nude’ was used in a Skins advert, I swear), and then fell in love. If you’re not properly acquainted with the band, you probably don’t realise how truly eclectic their music is.

A Moon Shaped Pool came as a surprise album to many, the prize release to all those who panicked over the band’s social media blackout. Still, the gimmick takes nothing away from the music. It’s so multi-layered, with orchestral textures and many lovely moments. It doesn’t reach the aggressive pitch as on some previous albums, and in turn feels more honest, stripped of the usual cynicism. A song like ‘Daydreaming’ feels like reaching a moment of nirvana-like sublimity, but it’s not an entirely happy state – its a kind of uneasy contentment, a bewildering dreaminess. ‘Burn the Witch’ is a fable for our times that provides a warning against falling back into what we so dismissively call the dark ages, when in fact 2016 bears the ugly imprint of small-minded times from history. ‘True Love Waits’ has been kicking around a long time now but I really love this mellow, slightly haunting yet effortlessly tender version.

I listened to this record all summer, walking home through the park after nights out, feeling the chords form soft over my inebriated senses. I began to crave Thom Yorke’s voice, the subtle croon and the way it bends so elastically over the high notes like rivulets in the tide. ‘The Numbers’ is a beautiful environmental song: ‘we are of the earth / to her we do return / the future is inside us / it’s not somewhere else’. Yet this is no hippie-dippy one world holism; there’s something unsettling about the future being inside us, about the world being up close, physically within us. The song’s rife with uncanny images, where anthropomorphism is reversed and where the boundedness of the human body is dissolved: ‘it holds us like a phantom / the touch is like a breeze’; ‘you may pour us away like soup’. Yorke forces us to confront these truths, but his tone is wistful rather than dramatic or didactic. You actually feel like you’re being carried away by that breeze as strings shimmer around you.

You can really fall into these songs, and they have a breadth (and breath!) that carries you away. The album feels loose, adrift, a little weary; but this refusal of tight structure and convoluted imagery is what grants A Moon Shaped Pool its sincerity. Pitchfork calls it ‘everyday enlightenment’, which seems fitting, since this album is less about cyborg dystopias and paranoid androids and more concerned with its humanist bent: whirlpools of emotion, the simple epiphanies reached in ordinary life. That’s not to say it’s lost its political freight; if anything, the themes of agency, government control, ecological disaster, technology and societal breakdown gather more strength for being more subtly disseminated.

READ FURTHER: ‘True Love Waits’

2) Angel Olsen – My Woman

Another album that more or less soundtracked my summer, or at least the tail-end of it. Olsen’s musical style really matures on this album but for me it was definitely a grower. I rather unusually fell first into ‘Heart-shaped Face’, a kind of quirky, languid ballad, sugar sweet even as it delivers something mournful. I love the album’s overall retro feel. ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’ is livelier than Olsen’s usual fare and is decidedly catchy and playful, with that haunting country voice doing its best gymnastics. ‘Intern’ feels a wee bit Lynchian, all atmospheric synths which satisfyingly never really build to a climax and instead dissolve into the jangly croons of ‘Never Be Mine’. It’s music to listen to while lying in a park, sure, or strutting down a preciously sun-drenched city street on your way to meet someone exciting. It’s also sophisticated enough to work really well live (Olsen had at least three guitars on her recent tour) and also to wrench your heart out in all the right places. Jewel in the crown track ‘Sister’ is a complete masterpiece. I might even go so far to say it’s my favourite song of the year. It builds up to this glorious solo and then the release that comes with the refrain all my life I thought I’d change is so cathartic, like doing something wild – plunging your head in freezing water to get over heartbreak. The video is glorious too – Olsen just has this devastatingly cute smile and the vibe is all cactuses, desert plains, pinkish skies and turquoise swimming pools. My Woman has a hint of psychedelia mixed in with its alt-country and indie folk, but ultimately it’s that beautiful warbling voice that really makes the record shine.

3) Kevin Morby – Singing Saw 

I first came across Kevin Morby on recommendation from a friend, and the song that hooked me was ‘Slow Train’, a lonesome, leisurely track which is duly adorned by the smooth melancholy of Cate Le Bon’s vocals towards the end. Singing Saw sees Morby developing the craft of atmospheric singer/songwriter folk, mixed in with a distilled tinge of Americana. Morby’s songs have an old worldly vibe, devoid of contemporary references and shrouded in a kind of wilderness mythology. A lot of the songs on this album are more upbeat than previous offerings and ‘Dorothy’ is really fun, a pop nugget as much as it is a song about music and the road. There’s a more expansive sound and the bass feels nice and crunchy, the harmonies always on point. Morby’s voice always has a kind of haunting depth to it which shines through as he stretches his vowels, as he threads his hypnotic melody over the pulsating beat of ‘Singing Saw’.  An album for listening to around a camp fire on a beach or rocky hillside; an album for toasting the end of summer to and glancing out towards the gathering darkness of winter.

4) Beth Orton – Kidsticks

This album, conversely, was perfect for kicking off summer. It’s bright, electronic; a little bit feisty, with plenty of pause for languid reflection. Orton has a way with surreal images, with unfolding a kernel of detail into an elaborated, looping song, as on ‘Petals’. Sometimes the album feels trippy, sometimes it feels very 1990s folk-tronica in the best way possible, all saturations of bass woven around Orton’s distinctly wispy voice. Still, the more focused commitment to synths feels properly contemporary, as on songs like ‘Falling’ which dabbles in a kind of bewitching minimalism. ‘1973’ feels super retro, while ‘Snow’ and ‘Moon’ are truly celestial super tracks, complete with super crunchy bass. It’s an album that you can listen to lightly, but also one that rewards more sensuous attention; its percussion and electronic elements are richly textured, with interesting effects. Overall, this album reminds me of all the sunshine we had in May, and all that time I sat lying in Botanics among the daffodils while on my break, looking forward to everything ahead.

FURTHER READING: Beth Orton live review 

5) Roddy Hart & the Lonesome Fire – Swithering 

A late-comer to the table, released less than a month ago, nevertheless Swithering managed to shoot its way up towards the top of my list. There’s something about Roddy Hart’s voice, its earnest attention to emotional inflections, its clarity which always sharpens and shines in whatever genre Hart applies himself to. Swithering is a really polished album, rife with loss and memories, with love and regret and empathy. The band have definitely benefited from Paul Savage’s input on production (see his previous work with, for example, Admiral Fallow), as the sound here feels more cohesive than on their debut. You can also tell that they’re growing more confident with expressing more traditional and indeed vernacular roots while having a bit of rock’n’roll fun, wearing their influences gleefully on their sleeve (everything from U2 to Aztec Camera and The National). This album got me through the difficult essay writing weeks when I needed something powerful to cut through the fog on long late night city walks.

FURTHER READING: Full album review 

6) Frightened Rabbit – Painting of a Panic Attack

Ah, good old Frightened Rabbit. I always think of them at this time of year, mainly because it brings back memories of December 2010 when I had a ticket to see them in Glasgow when I was still at school. All day I was looking forward to it, when during the last period I was sitting in the library and it started snowing. My librarian proceeded to gleefully torment me with the knowledge that all the trains would be cancelled, a fact she confirmed by duly consulting every available travel website and showing that trains between Ayr and Glasgow were having problems owing to the weather. I was so gutted that evening, watching the snow falling and wishing I was at that Frightened Rabbit gig. My friends and I sung ‘Poke’ at every party, deliberately mashing the words.

For a Frabbit fan, this album sort of has it all. As critics keep saying, it definitely sounds more polished; but there’s certainly the same old twist of raw Scottish melancholy. ‘Get Out’ feels powerful and cathartic, while ‘Die Like a Rich Boy’ moves close to old favourite ‘Poke’ and deserves pride of place in the Frightened Rabbit sad ballad cabinet. While the lyrics trawl familiar themes – alcohol, depression, heartache, existential anguish and urban boredom/depravity – there’s a renewed musical energy here which leaves a residue of hope to even the most despairing songs. I find myself yearning for the effortless way in which Scott Hutcheson’s vocals do acerbically emphatic social commentary, soothing harmonies and lyrical witticisms. Few bands could pull off a bitter reflection on the death drive of a broken class system and turn it into a poignant love song, as on ‘Die Like a Rich Boy’. Yes it’s grey-hued, Brutalist, a little bit miserable, but all of these things make sense through Frabbit’s zealously lyrical dissection.

7) Cate Le Bon – Crab Day

If ever there was a better, spikier, weirder art-pop album! Welsh songstress Cate Le Bon isn’t scared of being a bit out there. She compares herself to a ‘dirty attic’ and feels like geometry; her heart’s in her liver, she wants to be someone’s tenpin bowl, love is a coat-hanger. It’s like she’s inhaled a bunch of surrealist poems and swallowed some Cubist art and then vomited it all out in glorious rainbows, complete with very tasteful thumping drums and keyboard trills. Apparently, the album’s title is a reference to a fictional ‘Crab Day’ conjured up from the imagination of Le Bon’s young niece. This childlike playfulness runs through the album and gives it its flying spirit. If it makes sense, you could say that the songs are geometric: all jagged guitars, syncopation, weird angles, tessellating lyrics. The percussion is fun in a kind of skittish, school-practice-room way, all zany, trembling marimbas and thrashing drums. The electric guitars are clean and Le Bon’s voice pulls off a combination of artful dodgery, aphoristic declarations and crooning, cat-like mews. ‘Love Is Not Love’ provides a slice of relief from the stomping revelry and provides a languid ballad with curious little spikes of guitar and subtle brass. Overall, a record to have fun and enjoy your summer with.

8) Crystal Castles – Amnesty (I)

Woah, where to begin with reviewing a Crystal Castles album! I suppose the band had a lot to prove, having replaced iconic singer Alice Glass for a third party, Edith Francis. Nevertheless, Francis stepped up to the mark and it’s certainly possible to listen to this album and still appreciate it as authentically Crystal Castles. Not only are the band donating profits from record sales to Amnesty International, but they’re providing a much-needed blast of searing catharsis to shock us out of the apathetic slump that 2016 has brought upon much of us. Opening track ‘Femen’ develops its looping, rasping rhythms out of a haunting chorus of voices which dwindle and build like sound blowing back against the distant ceiling of a massive church. The heavy pulse of bloated synths is back on ‘Fleece’, and ‘Char’ shows off Francis’ vocals at their purest, reminiscent of the dreamy 80s vibes of disco-indie outfit Chromatics. ‘Enth’ makes you want to thrash your hair and limbs around wildly and fling glowstick fluid across the room. Final track ‘Their Kindness if Charade’ layers fragments of vocal samples over shimmering synths which reach a kind of clubland pulse over muted drumbeats, withdrawing again into the melancholy quietude of Francis’ stripped back rendering of impenetrable lyrics.

FURTHER READING – Crystal Castles live review

9) Hannah Peel – Awake But Always Dreaming

I picked this album because it’s such an ambitious piece of art in its musical range, yet manages to return always to its thematic focus on memory, dementia, heartache and lost connections. It’s got an orchestral expansiveness, Peel’s cut-glass voice, the twinkling music box, showers of synths and a dialogue between energetic pop songs and atmospherically experimental tracks like ‘Octavia’. Peel riffs constantly on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and as such there’s a visionary element to her songs which maps the inner space of the mind onto fictional landscapes and metropoles. It reminds me of walking along the Clyde at night with the wind howling in my ears, a sort of mad feeling in the city as it bristles against the death of autumn and the coming of winter, the lights shimmering across the river.

FURTHER READING – Full album review 

10) The Pictish Trail – Future Echoes

Rather shamefully, I hadn’t heard of Johnny Lynch, aka Pictish Trail, until I opted to review his latest album, Future Echoes. In all honesty I picked the album because I liked the sound of the artist’s name; a customer at work once asked me if I was a pict. I’ve started telling the Mormons in the street that I’m a witch because I can’t be bothered being converted on my way to the shops. Anyway, Future Echoes. What an album! Johnny Lynch is a busy man; he runs Lost Map records which is based on the Isle of Eigg and houses an array of talent, including Randolph’s Leap, Kid Canaveral and Tuff Love. Still, he’s managed to find the time to put together an album which feels tight, exciting and something a little bit different.

It tackles time: history, futurity; things shifting, changing, preserving. It should be called pastoral psych-pop, because that is a generic label worthy of Pictish Trail’s particular brand of Scottish melancholy, based in a strong tradition of indie rock and inflected with ethereal dream pop vibes. Lynch has a distinct, sonorous voice which reaches some really heartfelt expressions amidst dramatic strings, pulsing synths and loops. There’s an honesty to the lyrics and a Twilight Sad atmosphere to many of the songs, but Future Echoes is also splashed with funk and disco. You could actually dance to it, especially on tracks like ‘Dead Connection’ and ‘After Life’. I thoroughly enjoyed dissecting this record for a review and the lesson I learned was to keep picking things I hadn’t heard of before because god knows there’s a lot of good stuff out there to discover.

FURTHER READING – Full album review

11) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree

I have to make another embarrassing musical confession and admit that this is the first Nick Cave album that I’ve really properly listened to all the way through. I once found some mp3s of his older stuff which my Mum’s friend had left on our computer, but I think I was too young at the time to appreciate that dark, resonant voice, the subtlety of Cave’s songs. This record has won me over. It’s rich and melancholic even in its sparsity. I’m detecting a trend this year with a move towards a sort of deep minimalism – think David Bowie’s Black Star and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker – which nevertheless maintain sort of jazzy vibes even as the mood is enigmatic and slightly sinister.

This is a very serious album, not to be taken lightly. Cave lost his teenage son in a horrible accident last year, and I don’t think it’s cliché to say that grief seeps through every note, even though most of the lyrics were written before his son’s death. Nevertheless, Cave never loses control; it’s a sustained release of emotion which trickles its mournful truth across spacious and poignant tracks. He paints stark images with thick, vivid brushstrokes, which curl back on each other as the lister is multiply interpellated by the lyrics:

You’re an African doctor harvesting tear duct
You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief now
You’re an old man sitting by the fire, you’re the mist rolling off the sea
You’re a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don’t you see?

Death here isn’t just personal, it’s cultural, global. ‘Anthrocene’ is a riff on the term ‘Anthropocene’ which more or less refers to the current geological age initiated by the human interference in the structure of the earth (basically triggered by the industrial revolution and the extraction of fossil fuels). It’s one of the most unsettling and beautiful songs about climate change I’ve ever heard. Like much of the album, it makes use of loops and dissonant synthesisers. On ‘Jesus Alone’, there’s the repeated drone that sounds like the hurt cry of a glitching, dying bird. ‘Anthrocene’ is spooky and hazy, imagining the dissolution of the earth from the position of dark forces, of animals and plants and the lost people who inhabit this broken earth. It tackles the sense of strangeness that relates to our coming to terms with ecological disaster; which, as Timothy Morton would argue, is a necessary stage of grief, a process of mourning: ‘When you turn so long and lovely, it’s hard to believe / That we’re falling now in the name of the Anthrocene’. What sounds like an address to a woman, a beautiful dancer, probably refers to the turning of the earth, the passing of seasons which still exist, lingering, even as carbon emissions pollute the atmosphere. The song is structured around Cave’s measured vocal delivery and the sweetly sad, rising and falling harmonies. ‘Rings of Saturn’ kind of reminds me of R.E.M (‘E-Bow The Letter’) drenched in a black black oil.

I like music which breaks with conventional song structures and Skeleton Tree certainly does that. It’s mesmerising, atmospheric, strange. You have to listen to it many times.

12) Blood Orange – Freetown Sound

A far livelier offering, yes, but one no less struck with historical trauma. It deals with the ever-prescient issue of racial injustice, but also joyfully samples a vibrant array of black culture, including spoken-word poetry and retro R&B grooves. There’s a fantastic drum solo on ‘E.V.P’ which glides in among the chorus of voices. Hynes’ voice is divine throughout and there’s something so addictive about lots of his beats. It’s quite an eclectic album, ranging from instrumental to the jazzy ‘Love Ya’ to funk to the dreamy nostalgia of ‘Augustine’ and fat synths and male/female dialogue of ‘Best to You’. You could compare this album to something by Michael Jackson or other fresh offerings of contemporary R&B. My knowledge of the genre is so limited that I’m not going to attempt to make comparisons. Freetown Sound feels really unique, a bursting bag of colourful tricks and collaborators. It resonates deeper than most pop records on the charts these days. ‘Hadron Collider’ is a looping ballad which sucks you in with its pure vocals and shimmering piano. I first came across Dev Hynes in his incarnation as Lightspeed Champion and that kind of melancholy blend of humour and sadness is retained somewhat in Blood Orange’s project, only now the message is more cultural than purely personal. It’s an educative album as much as a fun one.

13) Conor Oberst – Ruminations

This album sort of came out the blue for me; I’m normally hyper-aware of any imminent Oberst recordings on the horizon, but it was a pleasant surprise to hear that not only could I get my hands on a ticket for a UK tour date but also that I could access some new material. Ruminations is old school Oberst mixed with a new, bittersweet maturity. Don’t be fooled by the harmonicas; while there is a political undertone to his lyrics (especially on ‘A Little Uncanny’), Oberst is here focused on introspection as opposed to outward-looking troubadour. The recordings feel a little bit strained and raw, but this is the kind of authentic frisson old-school Oberst fans crave. The sort of warbling attic recordings from the pre-I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning era. As the title implies, these songs are all extended thoughts which extend the personal to the political. Despite the minimalism, Oberst doesn’t hold back on the visceral lyrics. Where songs seem to paint a vision of isolation, of wandering confusion, there’s always something powerful to hint at possible connection: ‘Tomorrow is shining like a razor blade / And anything’s possible if you feel the same’. In ‘Tachycardia’, thoughts hit ‘like cinder blocks’.

The passing of time is a major theme of this album but there’s a sense of timelessness to the songs, as if they open up the compositional space of the wee hours where all the dark thoughts pour. It’s quite hard to listen to these songs in daylight; not because of some gothic spirit but because out of the cover of darkness these songs make the real world seem a little too obscene – too cluttered, crowded, vibrant, excessive. While the narrator of Oberst’s songs notices sweet little everyday details – ‘the checkout girl has a thing for me’ – all these miniature epiphanies are swallowed up in a general apathy: ‘I just wanna get drunk before noon’. Still, Oberst’s analysis of modern life bears an honesty which transcends pure nihilism. In ‘Gossamer Thin’, his warbling voice recounts a clandestine relationship where two unexpected partners come together. The narrator admits, ‘it’s no business of mine / They can love more than one at a time’, but this open-mindedness is qualified by an acknowledgment of the thinness of our emotions in an age when we constantly push ourselves to the edge, wearing our identities down as we spread them freely across the world and the internet: ‘you are who you are and you are someone else’. Whenever Oberst brushes up against philosophy, he never seems to make a didactic point but rather leans into the yearning for transcendence: ‘’Cause the mind and the brain aren’t quite the same / But they both want out of this place’.

14) Cat’s Eyes – Treasure House

It’s been almost a decade since I last bought a copy of NME with Farris Rotter (aka Badwan) and the rest of The Horrors plastered extravagantly across the cover. I’ve always been slightly in love with his dark, seemingly careless yet somehow still tender voice, the beautiful, New Romantic hair, the hint of eyeliner. Cat’s Eyes are an alt-pop duo, combining Faris’ sultry croon with the ethereal soprano of Rachel Zeffira, an Italian-Canadian composer. Obvious comparisons include 1960s girl groups (The Ronettes), but there’s a haunting dissonance to Cat’s Eyes lulling, cinematic style. Tracks like ‘Be Careful Where You Park Your Car’ and ‘Drag’ epitomise this jangly sixties vibe, but then you’ve also got the celestial minimalism of ‘Everything Moves Towards the Sun’, a song which hinges on delicate xylophone arpeggios, Zeffira’s melodic voice and faint drumbeats. This album feels vintage, a little bit gold standard. I like to listen to it at nighttime, when the sky clears and if you get away from light pollution you can see the stars in the park. Treasure House gilds everything around me in a kind of grandeur. I bought this album  after first hearing ‘Treasure House’ which sounds like opening a beautiful music box and melting into the taste of rich Belgian truffles, laced with a kind of muscle relaxant which makes reality slow down into a silken haze. It’s a real treat, a tender record that has its fizzy, upbeat moments as much as its mournfully reflective ones.

15) Palace – So Long Forever

I had the pleasure of catching Palace recently for a headline gig at King Tuts. While they’re a band who really come into their own onstage, all elasticated vocal harmonies and twinkly guitars, So Long Forever is a really solid debut album. It feels polished and atmospheric in the way that The Maccabees’ Marks to Prove It felt more expansive than its predecessors; here, however, Palace have skipped the cutesie twee-pop phase and delivered from the start a fresh kind of bluesy-indie. The record has a lot to offer. There’s the languidly jangly ‘Live Well’, the kind of song you want to listen to on the last day of summer, waiting for the sun to set with your school friends, nostalgia glowing on the distant horizon. Sweet and upbeat. Then there’s the looser ‘So Long Forever’ and the trembling urgency of ‘Break the Silence’. While Palace have an array of decent singles, they don’t crowd their album with them and instead give space to lots of new songs which melt together in a carefully detailed bluesy masterpiece. As you can say, I like the word bluesy, and keep using it because I feel it perfectly describes the loose, hazy feeling of the songs, the way they are tied to their lyrics and melodies like a boat on a complicated river. ‘Bitter’ is just perfect. It’s catchy in a strange way; you find yourself falling over the stretchy chorus, the bright guitar, the clean bass. Plus Leo Wyndham has such a lovely voice. Sometimes it sounds a bit like the lead singer of Little Comets; in fact when I first heard Palace I assumed they were also from Newcastle. There is less of the rush of a fast-paced London indie scene here; instead you have a refreshingly chilled collection of tracks which really take their time and pay attention to detail.

FURTHER READING – Live review 

16) The 1975 – I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It

Please don’t judge me for choosing the pink-hued bombast of the 1975’s sophomore effort for my list. It’s more than just a guilty pleasure; for me, it represents a glint of hope within mainstream pop music. It shows there’s room to do something interesting beyond constant rehashes of what we now derisively call EDM, the auto-tuned formula perfected in Radio 1-loving R&B. I won’t rant anymore about that (you can hear much more eloquent rants on the subject from Laura Marling on her excellent podcast, Reversal of the Muse). The 1975 showcase an array of influences, from Bowie to INXS, but they don’t just flaunt their inspirations with a citational ironic sneer; rather, they recuperate 80s music, its pomp and flamboyance, to comment on the narcissism of the selfie-era, to make self-referential pop that actually seems intelligent but still deliciously fun and sugar-coated enough to become a chart darling.

From the Pete Wentz-worthy album title to lengthily indulgent instrumental tracks, this is an album which unashamedly revels in itself, in the album as an elastic art form. It’s definitely a love/hate thing, and somehow I’m drawn to it. It’s simultaneously painfully honest and ridiculously silly. The way Matthew Healey sounds so vulnerable on ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘Nana’, the pop crooning of ‘She’s American’ and the melancholy ‘A Change of Heart’. Then there’s ‘Love Me’, the extravagantly OTT and catchy lead single completed with twangy INXS guitars, cheesy 80s synth flourishes and a playful vocal delivery. It’s the kind of album that makes your teeth hurt, but there’s plenty of wee gems in there to savour.

And everything I couldn’t include but still loved dearly:

Agnes Obel – Citizen of Glass
Biffy Clyro – Ellipsis
Black Marble – It’s Immaterial
Bloc Party – Hymns
Bon Iver – 22 A Million
C Duncan – The Midnight Sun
Diiv – Is The Is Are
DJ Shadow – The Mountain Will Fall
Emma Pollock – In Search of Harperfield
Fair Mothers – Through Them Fingers Yours and Mine
GoGo Penguin – Man Made Object
Honeyblood – Babes Never Die
Jimmy Eat World – Integrity Blues
King Creosote – Astronaut Meets Appleman
Leonard Cohen – You Want it Darker
Let’s Eat Grandma – I, Gemini
Martha Ffion – Tripp (yes, it’s an EP and not an album but I’m gonna cheat with this one)
Minor Victories – Minor Victories
Modern Studies – Swell to Great
Mogwai – Atomic
Pinegrove – Cardinal
Polica – United Crushers
Randolph’s Leap – Cowardly Deeds
Soft Hair – Soft Hair
Sunflower Bean – Human Ceremony
Teenage Fanclub – Here
TeenCanteen – Say It All With A Kiss
The Avalanches – Wildflower
The Last Shadow Puppets – Everything You’ve Come to Expect
Warpaint – Heads Up
Wild Nothing – Life of Pause

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Seven Songs from the Vault (1)

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~ Seven Songs from the Vault (Version 1) ~ 

  1. Suzanne Vega – ‘Marlene on the Wall’, Suzanne Vega (1985)

Partly to blame for my writerly obsession with long, m-beginning girls names (Meredith, Meredana, Marianne), this song was one of the first tracks that brought me to music – brought me to music in the sense of listening to it and discovering something new about the world through it. It’s a story of a dangerous and probably ill-advised love affair, told through an impression of symbols; the singer urges the listener to ‘observe the blood, the rose tattoo and the fingerprints on me from you’. The line between desire and violence blurs here and there’s something about Vega’s cool, whispering voice: an intimacy that is at once conversational but also steadfastly aloof, refusing the self-aestheticising of vibrato and instead fixing itself on the delivery of its sharply observational lyrics. In an age where big, operatic voices dominate the popular music scene (think Adele), Vega’s vocal style seems comparatively and indeed curiously fresh. When she returns, angrily, to the chorus, there’s a real, mesmerising venom to her delivery.

The song was on an acoustic compilation CD I’d nicked from my Mum’s car and I used to play it over and over again, my nine-year-old mind trying to make sense of the song’s darkness; its ‘danger zone’, the urgent guitar strums and insistence on silence – ‘don’t talk about it later’. By successfully striking the experience of ambiguity in desire, twisting pop’s conventional picture of love to one more sinister, Vega draws you in and in again to her characters. Who’s Marlene? What does she mean by the wall? Who are the soldiers, and the ‘things I cannot see’? I still have no idea.

2) Bloc Party – ‘I Still Remember’, A Weekend in the City (2007)

Like a Roald Dahl novel, rife with endearing surrealism, you sink into this story of young love with a queasy mix of confusion and warm familiarity. The guitar riff that kicks in with all its clarity is a comfort, even now, listening back almost ten (!) years later, and the song lilts between the energy and languidness of longing. The relief that comes when Kele Okereke breathily sings that first line, ‘I / I still remember / how you looked that afternoon / it was only you.’ It’s a love that touches on the unspokenness of queer desire, the possibility of falling for your best friend: ‘we left our trousers by the canal / and our fingers, they almost touched’. It’s almost Blakean in its very pure, stripped-back articulation of innocence: ‘you said “it’s just like a full moon” / blood beats faster in our veins’. It’s draped in childhood nostalgia: ‘and on that teachers’ training day / we wrote our names on every train’. With all these images, you can’t help but remember such experiences from your own youth, those simple days and strange feelings.

When the song builds up with the thrashing drums and the insistent refrain, ‘I still remember’, all the campouts and nights out and beach drinking and endless hanging out come flooding back. Okereke’s love exists now only as a metonymic collection of details, sentimental objects and memories: the playgrounds and rooftops, park benches, school ties. There’s a terrible bittersweetness to the song, its sense of regret, of unrealised, forlorn desire: ‘You should have asked me for it / I would have been brave’. Sure, the album came out in January 2007, but in a way it’s a song for autumn: the aftermath of summer holidays, the return to school, the always problematic sense of fresh beginnings, of leaving a certain era behind. The golden haze of nostalgia, and all its futile longing. The dissolution of that final shining chord.

In my head, it’s inextricably tied up not just with my own adolescence but with that even earlier exposure to frustrated love. I think of the ending to Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, with Mary’s endless stories, the ‘quantum leap’ that is love’s realisation, her talk of negative capability and the unravelling of Proustian memory, decades deep from a piece of marzipan; then Lyra and Will, after so many adventures across several universes, admitting they love each other, their first kiss like the taste of the ‘little red fruit’ and then the devastating revelation that they love each other and yet can literally never exist in the same world and live. I remember vividly sitting on my bedroom floor on a Sunday night, picking flakes of paint from the floorboards, anxiously devouring the last of book of the fantasy trilogy that had consumed both my summer and winter and feeling this weird immenseness of sadness and relief all at once. I think it’s the expression that counts; the only overcoming of such feelings. That’s why Bloc Party’s song’s so good. It’s cathartic.

3) Belle & Sebastian – ‘Dress Up in You’, The Life Pursuit (2006)

For me, The Life Pursuit is one of Belle & Sebastian’s most obviously ‘chamber pop’ albums, it’s lush and glossy and upbeat, featuring vocal contributions from both male and female members of the band. Its production is shiny and the mood (for once?) is cheerful.

Probably not surprising that the song I picked is one of the album’s most melancholy, however. We can all relate to ‘Dress Up in You’, in a way. It’s a song about jealousy, about our problematic relationship with the friend that always dazzled,  the one with a ‘beautiful face’, that was always destined for great things, while you were stuck back home, ‘knitting jumpers’ and ‘working after hours’. There’s a bitterness to the song’s tone but at the same time the relaxing cadence of the piano riff and the upliftingly sweet horn solo keep the sadness in check: ultimately, the song’s message is one of admiration. The ‘singer in the band’ paints a vision of her friend, the one who ‘got lucky’, who forgot about her, as a beautiful idol: ‘if I could have a second skin I’d probably dress up in you.’

We’ve all wanted to be someone else at some point. It’s probably part of the human condition that we’re mostly doomed to be dissatisfied with our own skin, to long for where the grass is greener, where there are airplanes and style and ‘the essence’. What I love about this song is its contradictions: the bitter lyrics and the sweet music, the sense of absolute friendship (deals signed in blood, understandings, love, the sense of missing someone so much they give you stomach pain) and jealousy/resentment, the contrast between stardom and failure. It carries them off perfectly and there’s a satisfying relief in the way the song closes with the rallentando leading into ‘they are hypocrites, forget them / so fuck them too’ and then all those carefree la la la la las, harmonised lovingly with the accompanying brass.

It’s a song that reminds me of sitting up till 5am on friends’ sofas, passing round the laptop and its weighty iTunes library, drinking the dregs from a bottle of gin and feeling a bit miserable for ourselves but also kind of paradoxically content with the feeling of discontent.

Notably, it’s also the song that plays over the credits to Stuart Murdoch’s film, God Help the Girl, and I like that the film’s ending is pretty open, just like the outcome of the song—does the friend become an actress? Is she a success or a failure? 

4) Frightened Rabbit – ‘Poke’, The Midnight Organ Fight (2008)

2009 and 2010. Two winters so cold the roads and rivers froze over; so cold we wore coats in our classrooms, the heating system of our leaky-roofed Victorian school building packing in in tandem with the collapse in temperatures. These years all a blur of computer screens and studies, of long walks round town and into the hills with friends. I had tickets to see Frightened Rabbit at the Barrowlands in December; I was in school, reading Sylvia Plath for my English dissertation, when from the windows of the computer suite I saw the first flakes of snow, falling from the sky like a promise. They came thick and fast and soon everything was draped in white. Something inside me soared, even with the sad knowledge that the trains were cancelled. I couldn’t go to the gig.

At parties, we would mockingly sing the words to each other: ‘poke at my iris / why can’t I cry about this’. Sometimes we’d mishear the lyrics. We wanted a reaction from each other, perhaps, a way of making sense of that weird desire to be poked in the eye, to be stilted from our drunken reveries. Or maybe it meant something deeper, weirder. Maybe that was our own ‘brand new language’, a semiotics of stupid expressions and warbling voices, the way we’d brush up against each other’s hands as if we wanted to hold them.

‘Poke’. It’s an elegy of sorts; an elegy for the disintegration of a relationship, the frustration of striving for closure, caught between an animalistic need for freedom and that enduring residue of whatever was there before: ‘Why won’t our love keel over as it chokes on a bone? / And we can mourn its passing / And then bury it in snow’. It’s that wintery, rural Scottish numbness, the refusal or even inability to admit feeling – ‘Why can’t I cry about this?’. There’s the tender, Burns-like romanticism of this love – ‘it’s got lots to do with magnets and the pull of the moon’ – kicked viscerally in the teeth with all that suppressed violence that we bury in the darkest dullness of our relationships: ‘Or should we kick its cunt in / and watch as it dies from bleeding?’. Scott Hutchison’s poetic, sometimes growling croon is softened in this song, even as he refuses to hold back on the emotion, it unravels perfectly in the expression of paradox that governs the end of a relationship: ‘But I hate when I feel like this / And I never hated you’. The sudden severance of that connection that was almost familial, blood-strong in its longing. The interludes where Hutchison sings his Ooooohs with that perfect, withdrawn sorrow are like the movements of the sea over the steady rivulets of the guitar picking. I always wanted to be able to play this song on guitar. It sounded so simple and sad and pure.

5) Wild Nothing – ‘Paradise’, Nocturne (2012)

I used to do double shifts most Saturdays and Sundays and it was a grim affair without the aid of some good music to brighten the restaurant where I found myself pacing endlessly, lifting plates, taking orders, polishing glasses, picking litter and leaves off the floor, scraping candle wax off tables, dusting the gantry, moving zombie-like between tables with the same forced fresh, maybe fragile smile.

My friend Douglas would bring stacks of CDs in and leave them for me on the bar top while he was away working in his section. In the midst of sensory deprivation, I would pore over those CDs like they were exquisite treasures (which, fuck it, they were). For one, it was lovely to find someone else who shared my passion for the actual tangibility of the compact disc. The sleeve and the notes and the design printed on the disc itself. I liked the sheen of plastic, which felt solid in my hands. It was 2013 and Douglas had a music taste that ranged from the up-and-coming heroes of alt-pop (Grimes, Lana Del Rey) to the more left-field and experimental/electronic; looking over those CDs reminded me of the world I had missed while immersing myself in nothing but literary theory podcasts and James Joyce audiobooks for two years solid. Now there was Bjork, Angel Olsen, Poliça, Wild Nothing.

I asked to take a few home to borrow, mostly based on my attraction to the album artwork and the titles of songs. I’ve always been drawn to song titles and artwork, probably because I am literary-minded but also because I love it when artists actually pay attention to building up a particular aesthetic that’s appropriate to, or even spins a whole new meaning on, their music. I love thinking about how the title of a song changes everything. It’s weird because I find it really hard to title my own work, but I guess that’s a common problem…

Anyway, one of those lucky albums was Wild Nothing’s Nocturne, which is a blissful array of buttery, colourful dream pop songs which mould together as perfect as the lunar cycle. The standout track for me is ‘Paradise’, a five-and-a-half-minute ambient starry-eyed disco epic which, if the album is meant to sort of capture ‘a sleepless state of mind’ (hence the album’s title, Nocturne), is that moment when the endorphins kick in and you reach that precise state of euphoria that occurs when you have not slept for say 40 hours solid. Maybe you’re travelling, airborne to distant lands. Maybe you’ve been boozing through the night and morning. Maybe you’ve just been on your feet all day and are reaching the 11th hour of your shift…

For me, this is sort of The Cure drenched in pastel tones; the meticulous crafting of those dark synths and celestial reverb; Joy Division staring into the refracted galaxies of a crystal ball that would predict a brighter future. Jack Tatum’s voice here acquires a much stronger, more sonorous quality than on most other Wild Nothing tracks, and there are definitely Ian Curtis comparisons to be made here. The mood perfectly balances its bouncy drums, uplifting synths and twinkly 80s guitar riffs with a controlled and almost majestic lyrical delivery which is rather melancholy in theme, the refrain ‘love is paradise’ framing most of the song, as if striving to reach some sublime point where paradise would be reached. If you check out the extended version online, with Michelle Williams doing spoken word in an interlude section, there is a definite sort of Allen Ginsberg/Beat generation vibe to the lines, moving to a sort of transcendent rapture: ‘The past was folded up and in the twinkle of an eye / and everything had been changed / And made beautiful and good’.

The song overall feels like a spiritual and spatial journey; it fades and builds and comes to fade again. It never indulges in elaborate solos but instead maintains its vibrant rhythm that moves between liveliness and a kind of soporific haze of drums and sparkling guitar and synths. Listening to it at work, for those five-and-a-half-minutes I felt weightless, bodiless, up in the air; free from the cutlery and crockery and bells tolling endlessly from the kitchen…

6) Bright Eyes – ‘Lua’, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005)

A song that you carry with you somehow, that’s so engrained in your brain as to never leave you, each chord and lyric sedimented with years of memory. It’s a fragile song, sparse as a deciduous tree in winter. It’s a song about wandering, the dislocated sense of not exactly inhabiting the world, but somehow just drifting through. It’s a paean to solitude: ‘when everything is lonely I can be my own best friend / I get a coffee and a paper have my own conversations / with the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflection’. It explores the thinness of reality, the sheen of ‘polish’ that in the morning ‘looks like shit’, the false love sold in the evening, which by the morning ‘won’t exist’. It’s a candid admission of human frailty, the mercurial nature of our emotions. It’s a specifically metropolitan song: you have a sense of Conor Oberst’s warbling voice as he wanders the streets, lost protagonist in his solipsistic sadness. Yet the song spreads outwards, as a commentary on the human (or at least a generational) condition, a not-quite nihilistic exhaustion with the world – ‘we might die from medication but we sure killed all the pain’. We flit from one thing to another, our desires will oscillate as sure as the moon’s phases. Everything seems ‘so simple as the moonlight’ but no amount of incantation will render solid this refrain.

Thematically, the song is about addiction, depression, the everyday vacillations of sensation contained in a morning and evening. The random party at ‘some actor’s west side loft’ and the flask shared on the train, the person addressed who looks ‘skinny like a model’ and keeps escaping to the bathroom, ‘always say you’ll be right back’. In body, the people in the song waste away as easily as the time that contains them, surviving off coffee and moonlight and imaginary conversations.

Oberst, lyrically, is a genius at paradoxes and parallels and expresses them in a way that offers them as explanations or gestures of understanding which never quite satisfy but at least leave us pondering: ‘But what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane’. The opening line, ‘I know that it is freezing but I think we have to walk’ so clearly establishes the tone of the song, the jar of realisation – we’re both forced upon this journey, nobody’s going to give us a ride – that it could be a line from a Wallace Stevens poem. It’s a cold song, whose play of end rhymes only half hit home – ‘walk/loft’ ‘off/gone’ – leaving us always  longing for something more. No closure can be reached: the song can only end with the circular repetition of ‘so simple in the moonlight’, a childlike rehearsal of the beauty which cannot kill the complications of adult life, the self-destructive habits which inhabit the song’s lyrics.

In third year of high school, I used to listen to this every lunchtime, lying in the playground by the P.E block, feeling so light and empty, the world dissolving around me in a dull cacophony of kicked footballs, shrieking games and called-out names. It was a mysterious adult world, the one contained in that song, but I almost felt I was already there, dissolving what was left of matter.

[There’s a lovely version Oberst recorded with Gillian Welch for the album Dark Was the Night (2009) which gives it a flavour of melancholy Americana, a greater sense of dislocation, fusing the urban setting and Oberst’s minimalist delivery with Welch’s distinctly lilting, country voice and all its resonance of the prairie].

7) Muse – ‘Citizen Erased’, Origin of Symmetry (2001)

It seems insane to think that this album was released fifteen years ago, but maybe the timing was appropriate. There’s something uncanny about it: the paranoid, political and often surreal lyrics, howling soprano, bloated distortion of electric guitars, as if the music were forcing us to release the visceral eeriness and indeed grotesque weirdness of a reality that tried to cloak itself in the fairytales of gameshow tv and the financial greed offered by a fresh new century…

‘Citizen Erased’ is visceral, beautiful; at once tender and full of fury. It renders the experience of someone living in a fucked-up political state, the striving for freedom and confusion over what it means to be human, to be a person, at all. The thrashing drums give way to a thickly buzzing bass and the yearning swirls of screeching electric guitar solos. The song builds slowly and softly but the choruses are huge and operatic, with Bellamy’s distinctive wail crying out: ‘For one moment / I wish you would hold your stage / with no feelings at all / open minded / I’m sure I used to be, so free’.

The experience of this song is one of purification. You are exposed to music that is violent, lashing, angry, but like any good narrative, there is a turning point, a calming of the waves. The music becomes almost ambient. The key changes and Bellamy’s voice returns to its melodic, delicate expression, accompanied by ripples of piano and the fuzzy, spacey twanging of distorted guitars: ‘Wash me away / clean your body of me / erase all the memories / that will only bring us pain’. I’ve always felt purged somehow after listening to ‘Citizen Erased’. I think it chews you up a bit then leaves you, disembodied, drifting along the final tributaries of its current, back to a place of imaginary origin, more peaceful and pure than the harsh world it renders…