200!! (For Real This Time)
Fives on Friday 6/28/2024
I neglected to mention this last week cause I was already too deep into the draft to switch lanes, but this newsletter now has 200 subscribers!! Wow!
Since 200 is a nice big-ish round number, I’d like to take the occasion to reflect briefly on the experience of writing this newsletter and then consider where I’d like to take it going forward.
Lamniformes Cuneiform started as a Tiny Letter back in 2018 as a way of staying in touch with my friends and internet acquaintances outside of social media. Like a lot of people I got pretty freaked out by the Cambridge Analytica news breaking at the time and figured that was as good an excuse as any to break off from Facebook. I spent two weeks posting the link to my newsletter every day with a count down until I deleted my Facebook account. My friends still roast me to this day for this promo campaign. To be sure it was annoying. But being annoying is what it took to get people’s attention, and I reliably got a handful of people to sign up every time I posted.
At first I used the newsletter to cover topics that didn’t fit into my work as an editor at Invisible Oranges. In practice this meant that I wrote a lot about movies, social media trends, and non-metal music. I kept a semi-regular schedule, posting as consistently as my day job, night job (IO), social life, and drumming gigs would allow. When I split from Invisible Oranges I devoted more time to the newsletter, putting together longer pieces that included more explicitly political content and meta-music-criticism.
By 2020 I’d picked up a few other media hobbies that kept me away from my keyboard. I started two podcasts. I was working on two albums. Still, the newsletter puttered along, arriving every now and then in the inboxes of roughly 80 people. Then Tiny Letter inexplicably became a giant hassle, regularly holding my emails back for reasons they either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain to me. After one too many error messages, I switched over to Substack. By this point the newsletter was still a “when I feel like it” deal, so growth was pretty slow. I got a nice boost when my goofy “Brewer Metal” piece got shared by Patrick Lyons and Ian Cohen, but I didn’t do much to take advantage of that opportunity. What can I say? It was 2020 and I had other things on my mind.
The real turning point, for my life and for this newsletter, came in 2021. Burnt out from working straight through pandemic only to end up back in the fiery pits of a call center, I left my comfortable day job and decided to go all in on playing and writing about music. I spent the fall planning a massive project that would provide me with with juicy subject matter for years to come. Just as I was about to launch that series, which you now know as Drumming Upstream, life intervened. A friend of mine passed away. I wrote about it, and what I wrote got shared on social media by a lot of people. That put me over 100 subscribers, which I try not to dwell on.
By the end of 2022 Drumming Upstream was a clear win. It gave structure to the newsletter and it made me a better drummer. Being a better drummer meant that I got more gigs, which cut into my writing time. To compensate I added new formats that I could put together quickly and schedule in advance so that I’d never miss a week if I didn’t want to. This too was a clear win. With steady output the Substack network effect started to kick in and my subscriber count has incrementally grown to where it is now. I’m hesitant to give too much credit to Substack itself here. I think the truism that consistent publishing leads to Good Numbers™ holds true regardless of the platform hosting that published work. Still, in the last year most of my new subscribers came through the Substack app or by recommendation from other writers. I generally don’t see too many new subscribers following a particular post, with the exception of the Mitski fans that signed up after I covered “Once More To See You” last winter. That’s fine by me. I don’t write with the intention of going viral, so it’s more important to me that the people who sign up stick around then accumulating a bunch of subscribers that vanish a week later.
Now halfway through 2024 I’ve reached another turning point. I’m back in the working world, which is good for me personally but gives me less time to write. I don’t have much trouble putting together the weekly version of the newsletter, but I’m majorly backed up on Drumming Upstream. I currently have 19 drum covers filmed and ready to go, enough to last me an entire year at the rate of previous seasons, but the writing process has slowed considerably. This has forced me to reconsider whether it makes sense to keep Drumming Upstream behind a paywall. If I can’t deliver it consistently it doesn’t feel right to ask people to pay for it. Moving DU behind the paywall hasn’t had any effect on my subscriber numbers in either direction. All things being equal, I’d prefer that more people read Drumming Upstream than just the people that pay me, especially since I’ve got a reliable income outside of this newsletter again. So yes, Drumming Upstream is coming back soon and when it does it’ll be for everyone. To make up for it, I’m going to use the paywall to post weirder, looser, material. I’m talking Lamniformes demos, old playlists, ancient tour diaries, that kind of stuff.
As for the free content, I’ll continue to show up in your inbox every Friday with rad tunes, micro album reviews, updates about my gigs, and medium length writing about whatever subject strikes me as interesting. I’m grateful to each and everyone that reads this newsletter. Here’s to the next 200.
# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #
I’m about to have a very busy Saturday. At 4pm I’ll be playing drums with the homies in Told Slant as part of a massive 12 hour party organized by Temporary State, featuring live music, vendors, and workshops for putting on DIY shows. You can find more info about this event and RSVP here.
As soon as I’m done with Told Slant I’ll be running back to Brooklyn to play drums with Laughing Stock at a secret backyard BBQ show. I can’t tell you exactly where in public, but if you’re chill about it you can ask me and I’ll give you the deets!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 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, updated with a new tune every Monday-Friday.
“Wounds Heal” by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (Waves, 2019)
Hey, yeah, sorry for dropping a 20 minute long song right at the start of this section, but it is simply too good to pass up. Since I wrote about Reznor a few months ago I’ve been revisiting the whole NIN + Reznor & Ross catalog, including their scores for movies I haven’t seen. I’ve heard not great things about Waves, but it’s one of the best R&R scores for sure. There’s nothing from the NIN discography from before this that I could compare it to, and Reznor’s longform experiments on Locusts honestly don’t hold a candle to this track.
“One For The Vine” by Genesis (Wind & Wuthering, 1976)
The songs are long this week. Don’t ask! I feel like the common line about Genesis is that they went pop immediately after Phil Collins took over for Peter Gabriel, but that over looks the brief period where they kept writing prog tunes with Collins singing. Turns out they had some real jams! Gorgeous piano playing on this one.
“Daybreak” by Pallbearer (Mind Burns Alive, 2024)
The closer Pallbearer get to being a straight up slowcore band the more they make sense to me. They’ve gotten better and better at making the softer parts of their music sound more convincing on their, hard to imagine their singer sounding this confidant at this volume early in their career, which in turn makes their returns to HUGE VOLUME all the more impactful.
“Natsu No Tobira” by Seiko Matsuda (1981)
Major shouts to Ryo of This Side of Japan for putting me on to this summer jam. Honestly just go read what he said about the tune. I’ll only add that I love the piano counter melody in the pre-chorus and those righteous triplet hits in the chorus.
“Samurai Sword” by the Microphones (the Glow pt. 2, 2001)
Research for an upcoming entry of Drumming Upstream. I’d assumed that Phil Elverum’s interest in black metal aesthetics picked up once he started releasing music under the name Mount Eerie, but this track suggests he was incorporating those ideas much earlier. Interesting how most of Elverum’s musical children excised the harsher side of his sound in favor of “ooo i’m so small and the world is so big” folk songs. I think that loses something of the big picture, contrast is important!
\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /
Here are five micro reviews from my high school and college CD collection. 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.
Cosmogenesis by Obscura (2009) - Death Metal
Tech death by former members of Necrophagist and other super shredy German bands. Mixed a lot of influences from the early 90s death metal scene that were very hip at the time (Death, Cynic, Atheist, Pestilence) [Editor’s Note: The popularity of the last Tomb Mold record suggests that this stuff is cycling back into favor]. Probably my favorite record of this kind of super-clean & outrageously busy death metal. There are a handful of stand out tracks, but I have to place special emphasis on the closing three minutes of “Centric Flow”.
Of Malice and Magnum Heart by Misery Signals (2004) - Metalcore
Very technical and emotionally bracing metalcore produced by Devin Townsend. This band had a lot of hype because of their connections to the much less popular but beloved 7 Angels 7 Plagues. Until the final track, which is a fucking mess, this record is terrific stuff. I prefer their follow up, but this stacks up against any metalcore record from this era.
The Bedlam in Goliath by The Mars Volta (2008) - Progressive Rock
The first Volta record with Thomas Pridgen on drums, which was very exciting to nerds like me who spent too much time watching G*spel Ch*ps drum videos on YouTube. Allegedly the recording sessions were haunted by a cursed ouija board? I remember listening to this record driving around New Mexico while visiting College of Santa Fe in my senior year of high school, extremely magical moment. The first five tracks are top tier Volta. After that things get really freaky in a way that takes corrects the failures of Amputechture. Could be shorter, but that’s stating the obvious.
Death Magnetic by Metallica (2008) - Thrash Metal
I have two copies of this album, one that I bought in stores and another that came with a concert ticket to see them in early 2009. After hitting rock bottom on St. Anger this album was supposed to bring Metallica back to thrash and thus their 80s glory. They would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for the most brick-walled production of the loudness war era. I had to listen to this at the lowest volume my laptop could produce because anything louder gave me a headache. There’s probably an EP’s worth of good material here, but the filler and awful production make digging for gems a tough prospect.
Still Life by Opeth (1999) - Progressive Metal
A concept record about why you shouldn’t move back to your hometown for a relationship (Medieval Edition). As much as I like their previous record (My Arms Your Hearse) this is the first album where you can tell Opeth have settled into their style and sound. The kinks have been worked out. For a band that writes such long songs, this thing really flies by. Some of the coolest guitar parts in their catalog, and the first album where their soft parts feel fully integrated and developed. Not my favorite Opeth, but very good.