Out Behind The Paywall: Mitski's "Once More To See You"

Plus Fives on Friday 8/9/2024

Happy Friday!

Today is the last day of Bellows’ mini-tour opening for the esteemed homie Terror Pigeon. Since our show is at Purgatory in Brooklyn tonight (come through, NYers!) and our show last night was just across the river in Highland Park, NJ we drove home after the show. I’ve spent the morning catching up on chores. In case you forgot, this newsletter is pro-”doing chores instead of writing”. Even though I’ve had more time at home than usual on this tour, I still need a few more hours of work to finish my tour diary. Fret not, next week I’ll have a both this year’s tour diary and a tour diary from the very first time I toured with Bellows.

In the meantime, I want to reshare an old piece of mine that some of my newer subscribers might not have read yet. This week my cover of Mitski’s “Once More To See You” hit 1,000 plays on YouTube. That makes it the most viewed cover from my Drumming Upstream project so far. To celebrate the occasion, I’ve pulled DU#39 out from behind the paywall. Thanks to everyone that’s enjoyed the drum cover, I hope you enjoy its accompanying essay.

Now, on to your regularly scheduled tunes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 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.

“Perfect Life” by Belong (Common Era, 2011)

Shouts out to Langdon of Death//Sentence for introducing me to this project. Home-made shoegaze from 2011. Generational bias here, but home-recording has never sounded better than it did in the early 2010s. It sounded better than because the tech was worse, leaving space for a sense of mystery in the final product. I wish I had this record on hand back when it came out. It would have fit right in with my Grouper and Tim Hecker favs at the time.

“Chimin Spirit” by Zepiss (Natibel, 1983)

Fascinating grooves from Guadalupe. The French Caribbean is big blindspot for me both musically and historically. Maybe I should finally get around to reading The Black Jacobins. Is that relevant to this song? I don’t know!

“…and Heavens Cried Blood” by Swallow The Sun (New Moon, 2009)

I’ve had the main riff of this song stuck in my head since I first heard it at age 19. No joke, if you see me staring off into space and slowly patting my hands on my thighs, there’s a solid chance this song is looping silently in my head. How this deep cut from a solid but unremarkable record by a not-all-that-popular metal band embedded itself this firmly into my subconscious I cannot say. Revisiting it, I’m struck by how well this singer encapsulates what I valued in a harsh vocalist at that age. These days I’m far less picky, but damn does he sound good on this.

“Free” by Ben Seretan (Allora, 2024)

My apologies Ben Seretan, I was not familiar with your game re: shredding.

“Tear Me Like the Bonds of Burning Propane” by Detatch The Islands (A Highly Magnified History, 2024)

I am very familiar with Emmett Ceglia’s game. When he’s not drumming for half of the heavy bands in New York (including, occasionally, Lamniformes!), Emmett writes his own devilishly complicated music as Detach The Islands. It’s been years since DtI dropped a new record, but they haven’t lost even an inch of their edge. We’re operating so far out of conventional harmony that the waves of clashing notes almost loop back around to being pretty again, only for the blistering speed of the drums to throw us right back into mosh-pit hell.

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

Here are five micro reviews from my high school & college collection of burnt CDs. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in 2021, 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.

Medúlla by Björk (2004) - Art Pop

Björk’s famously “a cappella” record, where with one noticeable exception all of the sounds originate from a human voice. This was treated as a curio at the time and felt like a heat check for Björk’s streak of classic solo records. It’s the kind of outrageous risk that only someone like Björk could pull off. With nearly punishing intimacy, Björk highlights the parts of singing usually edited out of records. Get past the initial confusion and great tunes reveal themselves. Much better than I remembered.

Ghost Opera by Kamelot (2007) - Power Metal

Some real cornball power metal from Florida. I’ve always had a soft spot for this style of power metal because it’s one of the last places you can hear a metal band really swing for the melodic fences. This record however is where this band lost their slugging power. I wonder how this would hit if it was like, 20% less polished. The production is too clean for its own good as it is. Not the sharpest collection of tunes either.

City of Evil by Avenged Sevenfold (2005) - Heavy Metal

Back in high school this was my first chance to hate on a band for “selling out”, a rite of passage for any young metal fan. Of course this isn’t really all that different from their older material, but music culture is rarely rational. Aesthetics aside, City of Evil launched Avenged Sevenfold into a whole other category of fame, which was all the reason a teenage hater needed to dismiss it out of hand. It’s some really over the top and knowingly theatrical stuff, which would be more fun if it weren’t so damn long. The playing is nuts, but these songs take so many twists and turns that the excitement flattens out. Still pretty entertaining though! The vocals don’t always work, but the guy was fresh off an injury and had to rebuild his technique from scratch so I’ll cut him some slack on the rough patches.

Iron by Ensiferum (2004) - Folk Metal

Metal from Finland about vikings. This stuff had a big swell of popularity in the metal in the late 00s in America but doesn’t seem to be as popular these days. This album came out before their singer splintered off into Wintersun and became the poster boy for crowdfunding gone wrong in metal. The best tunes on this are the ones that get straight to the riffs and lean the least on folk instrumentation or keys. Underneath the local flavor this is a standard issue European speed metal album. Not my thing, but the cover of “Battery” is pretty sick.

Mare by Mare (2004) - Post-Metal

This band dropped one EP on Hydra Head and then vanished. Half very intense sludge metal, half art rock. Some weird doom-y lounge bits, choir harmonies, French horns, all in 24 minutes. Nothing else like it. A total 00s oddity, if you like weird heavy music you must check this out.