Steph Curry in Smolensk

Fives on Friday 4/19/2024

Happy Friday!

As I’ve done the last three years, I spent this week commuting back and forth from Brooklyn to The Bronx for a musical theater gig. In addition to the paycheck and the hours the commute affords me to chill out and read War & Peace, this perennial job has given a comforting regularity and structure to my year. I know that once the blossoms start blooming I’ll soon be transferring from the F to the A to the 1 and walking up a giant hill twice a day. I know that if the sun is out by the time I leave rehearsal that it will hang at the perfect height in the sky to blast my retinas to kingdom come if I sit facing west on the south bound 1. I also know that if I don’t get some allergy meds in my system that I’ll spend that whole commute burning through every disposable napkin and tissue that I could stuff my pockets with before leaving the house, grossing out all my fellow passengers as I do so. And finally, I know that if I hustle at 168th and don’t get stuck waiting for the A too long that I can make it to the bar in Brooklyn where my friends are watching the early days of NBA playoffs.

Musical season. Allergy season. The NBA post-season. All useful framing devices, markers of progress across a calendar, prompts to dredge up memories big and small from previous cycles around the sun. I’ve mentioned in years past that I love how much time I have to think in weeks like these. The routine keeps my eyes off my phone and my ears headphone free. As strongly as I believe in the old “no input, no output” adage, I can’t deny the benefits of an enforced period of digestion. It may not have the immediate satisfaction of taking another bite, on the contrary I often spend these weeks in a state of nagging mental discomfort, but I know this process is for the best in the long run. Having time to think means having time for disparate thoughts to grow tendons and attach to each other. No such growth happens without discomfort.

Let me be a little more specific. The other night as Coby White led my beloved Chicago Bulls past the clay pigeon Atlanta Hawks to the second round of the NBA Play-In tournament I joked to ~*my girlfriend*~ that Georgia hadn’t been lit up like this since Sherman’s March. ~*My girlfriend*~ having apparently not spent hours in elementary school obsessing over the details of American Civil War battles asked me what the heck I was talking about. It was only as I explained the context that I realized why a general leaving a trail of scorched earth in his wake came to mind so quickly. Within a nanosecond my mind left the bright lights of the United Center for darker environs.

Like I said, I’ve been reading War & Peace. I’ve been reading War & Peace for all of 2024. Right now I’m in the third of four books within the novel. I’ve noticed with a lot of truly long-ass books I’ve read that there’s usually a section buried deep in the page count that feels like “the real novel”. It may not be my favorite part of the book, but this section always feels like the heart pumping blood to the body of the novel. The surrounding material, even if it is terrific, reveals itself to be architecture designed to contain this core story. A few examples off the dome: the title chapter in Moby Dick, the Franz Pökler novella stuffed into Gravity’s Rainbow, the moment in Infinite Jest where Gately emerges as the novel’s real protagonist. Book III of War & Peace serves a similar function. I can imagine Tolstoy starting with the aim of describing Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 before realizing that in order to do that he’d need to describe Russia’s first encounter with Napoleon a near decade earlier, and that in turn would mean he’d have to describe the time in between… and so on until all 580,000 words of War & Peace had tumbled out of him. The event of Napoleon’s invasion is treated with such enormous magnitude that anything less than a 900 page build up to it would be selling its significance short.

Riding back from rehearsal earlier in the week I read a chapter about the destruction of the Smolensk, one of the major cities on Napoleon’s warpath to Moscow. In the novel’s previous battle scenes we’ve seen the action through the eyes of Prince Andrei and Nikolai Rostov, both charismatic megafauna in the vast human zoo of War & Peace’s cast. Not so at Smolensk. This time we follow Yakov Alpatych, a bit player with only a handful of lines before this turn in the spotlight. Instead of viewing the event from the frontlines, Tolstoy places us deep in the city itself. Alpatych goes about his routine duties, convinced that the French won’t ever breach the city even as evidence mounts to the contrary. Dread pervades, but life continues as usual. It takes a cannonball crashing into the middle of the street instead of sailing overhead for Alpatych and the other townsfolk to realize the gravity of the situation.

Tolstoy returns to this idea a few chapters later when the nobleman Pierre Bezukhov decides to ride along with the Russian army to the battle of Borodino. Here as with Smolensk, it takes Pierre a long time to accept that the violence surrounding him is truly real. When the bullets and cannonballs start firing, Pierre barely seems to register that the battle is actually happening. The mind doesn’t recoil at violence, it flatly refuses to reckon with it. Until that tipping point war is an intrusion that can’t be integrated into reality. It’s a blotch, a broken jpeg where the sun should be. By the time that Pierre realizes that he should get the heck out of dodge he’s already completely surrounded by carnage.

It feels purposeful on Tolstoy’s part that Alpatych and Pierre have the same oblivious reaction to war despite belonging to different rungs of the social ladder. Tolstoy isn’t making a point about the ignorance of the serfs or the cluelessness of the gentry. The point is that war is an affront to human nature across the board, inconceivable until it is unavoidable. This is, despite its heaviness, an optimistic sentiment. It suggests to me that no amount of mental preparation, either in the case of training or media saturation, can replace the raw shock of experiencing war first hand. The notion of being desensitized to images of destruction human suffering comes up a lot these days, but I suspect that we’re only desensitized to the images, not what they depict. The facts of the matter are much older than our modern technology. The real deal will still shock us faster than our ability to process it.

Then, just as abruptly, my thoughts recoil back to the petty war games of the NBA. What remains is the notion that things end before you realize they are over. The night before the Chicago Bulls sent the Hawks packing, a parallel drubbing took place on the west coast. The Sacramento Kings, long the hapless little brothers to the rest of California’s star-studded superteams, made quick work of Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. Curry and the Warriors spent the last decade remaking the NBA in their image, forcing the rest of the league to copy their long range jump shooting strategy just to compete. I started watching basketball seriously in 2015. Every year since the Warriors havee either been in the Finals or conspicuously absent in a way that preserved the team’s mystique. This year it hardly feels like it matters that the Warriors aren’t involved in the post-season. As popular as Curry remains, the “story” of the NBA has turned its eye elsewhere. “Lightyear’s ahead” is now yesterdays news.

What strange phantom limb is growing from this confluence of thoughts? Everywhere I look I see signs that something outside of my line of sight has ended and the shock waves of something new are headed my way. But from which direction?

Well, one thing that isn’t over is this newsletter, so let’s get to the tunes.

# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #

• Actually wait, before we get to music I should admit that there are other reasons I’ve had the NBA on my mind. In between chapters of War & Peace I read an advance copy Kings of the Garden, a new book by Adam Criblez about the New York Knicks and New York City itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I submitted a few draft questions as an unofficial basketball sicko consultant to the Center for New York Affairs who then spruced them up for a full interview with Criblez, which you can read here.

• Bellows are opening for Steve Mason of The Beta Band at LPR in Manhattan on April 23rd. You can get tickets in advance via Dice, and I suggest you do because this is sure to be a big one!

• After a few false starts, Laughing Stock are finally making their Manhattan debut at Berlin Avenue A on April 29th. We’re playing with Sugar Milk, Jesse & The Spirit, and Just Milk. To my understanding the two milk bands are not related, but the show is sure to be good for your calcium intake either way.

• Lamniformes Radio returns! I spoke to Kabir Kumar about the new Sun Kin album Sunset World, out now where records are found. We talked about writing songs as drummers, how playing in other people’s bands can improve your instincts, millennial Steely Dan fans, and what Animal Collective have in common with Hindustani classical music. It was a great conversation, as I hope you’ll agree:

• Speaking of records, I have a new one out myself! It’s called The Lonely Atom and I think it kicks a ton of ass. But don’t take my word for you, you can check it out right now on bandcamp:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a Spotify playlist with all of this year’s tracks here.

“Dim The Lights” by Handsome (Handsome, 1997)

This track comes by way of Becky Leverty who wrote about Handsome on her newsletter Slowpoke a while back. This track fits right in with the Rival Schools joint I shared three weeks back. Post-hardcore just a little too scruffy to be full on radio rock. Killer drumming and some pleasantly no-nonsense production from Terry Date.

“Medicine Man” by WaqWaq Kingdom (Essaka Hoisa, 2019)

As far as I can recall I saw this album cover in a Bandcamp Daily piece and decided to check it out no matter what it sounded like. It turned out to be a dance album so eclectic that I hesitate to summarize it. Even on an album as surprising as Essaka Hoisa the closing track “Medicine Man” sticks out. A cyber-cinematic jazz suite, like the score to a film halfway between Ghost In The Shell and Taxi Driver.

“Montate” by Puya (Fundamental, 1999)

My roommate Noah Ortega pointed me in the direction of this Puerto Rican nü-metal band during a conversation about Latin American metal a few months back. For the first minute this tune is what you’d expect from a late 90s album with a guy stuck in the ground on the cover. Drill sergeant barking over downtuned and braindead riffs, albeit with an exceptionally tight rhythm section. In fact, the bass and drums are so deep in the pocket that they hardly seem to blink when the song abruptly shifts to salsa for the chorus. Stick around for the absolutely nasty guitar solo.

“Sanctuary 2023” by Infinity Shred (Sanctuary 2023, 2024)

The homies in Infinity Shred re-recorded their 2013 album Sanctuary last year. While I enjoy the old version of the album the remake is the product of a tighter, more experienced group of musicians. If you didn’t catch this band’s synth-forward take on post-rock the first time, this update for the PS5 era is a great place to start.

“(Return of the) Astral Vampire” by Kontact (Full Contact, 2024)

Here’s another one that I checked out on the strength of the cover, plus the added weight of Wolf Rambitz’s recommendation. As an on-the-record fan of metal singers sounding like weird little guys I can’t help but love this, even if the vocals are weird in the exact same way as Voivod. Luckily this group picks up a few other tricks from Voivod, including a meter change halfway through the song that takes the band in a completely new direction. Great b-movie sci-fi thrash metal.

\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /

Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

In The Eyes of Fire by Unearth (2006) - Metalcore

This felt like it was Unearth’s shot at “going for it” since they recorded it with Terry Date (Deftones, Pantera, etc), but I don’t remember their profile or popularity changing much as a result of it. Goldilocks metalcore. Not too metallic, not too hardcore, not too melodic, not too breakdown-centric, etc. A total net zero. It’s a decent listen but I can’t remember a note of it after its finished.

Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park (2000) - Nü-Metal

Basically the greatest thing my 11 y/o, Vanilla Coke guzzling, Grand Theft Auto 3 playing, pizza gobbling self had ever heard. Once I was old enough to be anxious about being cool I started scoffing at this band, but come on, we’re all adults now, we can agree this record kicks ass. Incredible that this feels both like a greatest hits record a singular statement. Great pacing and track transitions. The balance between MPC beat-making and the rock instruments is so precise. You can chuckle at the lyrics or clown on Mike Shinoda’s watered-down backpack rhymes but this is a record aimed at as wide a teen audience as possible and it NAILS what it’s going for.

White Pony by Deftones (2000) - Nü-Metal

I bought this on the strength on “Change”, which was a staple on rock radio and the music video circuit. This was still vaguely a nü metal record, but also appealed to my growing interest in 80s new wave, trip hop, etc. This isn’t my favorite Deftones record, but it is the album that codified their “nü metal but make it sexy” approach to songwriting. The singles, including the opening track, are all great. I could lose some of the stuff in the middle. Good record!

3750 by The Acacia Strain (2004) - Metalcore

I was legit terrified by this band as a teen. Their shows were violent even by hardcore standards. Every time I saw them on the east coast they’d have to stop playing to break up fights at least twice a set. This record is super ahead of its time. The Acacia Strain were doing 808 bass drops, death core riffs, and djent patterns in 2004! The lyrics are very bad, a lot of gross “killing my cheating ex” stuff. I feel like Emmure kinda stole this band’s shtick and ran with it to the bank.

O God, The Aftermath by Norma Jean (2005) - Metalcore

From what I remember this band’s lineup had almost total turnover between their first record and this one. They definitely got a lot bigger after this album but fans of the first album were unenthusiastic. It seemed like they had sanded off the edges and settled into being a Botch rehash. This DOES sound a lot like Botch, but since that band kicked ass and only put out three records I’m happy to have more Botch-esque stuff to listen to. The second half, starting with the 10 minute track in the middle, is really where things come together.