Even thirty-four years after its release, few records feel as cutting-edge as Spiderland. Sure, there are hundreds of sludgy, spoken-word-heavy post-rock bands in the world now, but it feels as if all of them owe something to Slint.

The album is so unique, so singular, that even the band’s preceding album Tweez does little to nothing to predict it, and records featuring members of the band after its release (Tortoise, The For Carnation, Papa M, et al) never quite touch on the exacting stylistic control of Spiderland.

According to Scott Tennent’s brilliantly researched 33 1/3 volume on the album, that control was intense — the band spent months discussing everything down to whether strings should be up- or down-picked; most of the songs had been practiced to perfection. Strangely, the album wasn’t produced with the same sort of obsession; it was recorded quickly, without much studio magic. The band wanted to capture the sound of the music as it was being played, as was the case in the field-recorded blues records they were getting into at the time. There were few takes: Spiderland is almost raw.

That rawness — and that exacting, technical knowledge of the material — oozes throughout the album’s six tracks.

My experience with the record could be called cyclical, not quite baked, even though to hear their name or to think about the record, I can hear “Breadcrumb Trail” in my head note for note. I’ve fallen into the album, again and again, at odd moments in my life, and every time it is a surprise to me: I do not expect to live in its gloomy, airy spaces. And I do live in those spaces, for a time — an entire day, listening on repeat, or a week, coming back to the album once or twice a day. Nothing precedes this spell, nothing predicts it: I won’t be listening to anything stylistically similar, or perhaps I won’t be listening to anything actively — perhaps, I’ve only listened to my workout playlist for weeks. And then I am under Slint’s spell.

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I don’t remember when I discovered Spiderland, only that it has been in my head for decades, caught up in one of the many manic exploratory periods of my teens and twenties.

I associate nearly every beloved band of my youth with someone: a friend that I obsessed over The Appleseed Cast with, or a friend with whom I saw Rainer Maria. I associate albums with spaces: dorm rooms, garages, specific backyards of rented houses. I associate songs with relationships: a breakup song, a song burned on a CD for a crush, and the way that, for whatever reason, M and I love “Footloose” together in a way that I never loved it on my own.

I don’t have these associations with Slint, with Spiderland, or with any of the six tracks on the album. My love for this music is somehow solely my own. I do not remember playing the album for any of my friends (even the ones who would love it); to do so never occurred to me. Spiderland is a headspace, a solo mission, a cherished fever dream.

From my understanding of the larger Slint fanbase, Spiderland is similarly insulating, similarly singular. One doesn’t drop the needle on the angular guitar of “Nosferatu Man” in the middle of a party; this is headphone music.

The album is monolithic in its effect: if nothing sounds like this, and if this is so intimately singular to its fan, then it only makes sense that an entire genre of music spawned from these 39 1/2 minutes of music. No one could anticipate it — even the people who saw the band live during their brief time together — and people have spent decades trying to replicate this feeling in their own bands.

Me, I can’t imagine trying to replicate it; the number of post-rock bands I actively listen to I can count on both hands. Spiderland remains interior, for me, and no matter how much I long for more than these six songs, I feel like they have to be enough for me for as long as the obsession lasts. Eventually, the storm passes, but I know that a month will come when all I hear are these precise notes, these spoken words; this is a melancholic but joyous certainty.

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The first sign of blessed infection — the point of no return — might very well be the intrusive thought that is the earworm: the lone, incomplete lyrical refrain rebounding over and over within your mind as you go about the minor morning preparations before work.

Standing in the pre-dawn gloom of the kitchen, filling my coffee cup before trudging up the stairs to chain myself to the office desk, it clamours inside me. The near-titular line — from the middle of the titular track — in all its mauve-tinted haze: oh here comes the hardcore life.

Despite a long acquaintance with Pulp’s Different Class — an acquaintance shared, I’m certain, with the hundreds of thousands of people who picked up the album during its mid-90s hot streak (I’m certain my copy came from one of those buy one get 12 Columbia House scams) — I’ve only ever had the vaguest of contextual knowledge of the band, its exploits, and its then-twelve year history. It’s a history that has continued — Pulp only recently released a new single, “Spike Island”, forty-two years after their first release.

Mind you, I wasn’t actively engaged with music when Different Class came out — 1995 put me at the tail end of grade school. That Columbia House shipment would have come years later, say seventh or eighth grade. Right around the time of the release, in fact, of This Is Hardcore, in 1998.

That it was Different Class and not This is Hardcore that found its way into my nascent record collection is no wonder: Different Class was a breakout album. This Is Hardcore is a breakdown album.

Recorded at the height of Pulp’s popularity, the album struggles with concerns of sickening fame, of selling oneself. The ‘Hardcore’ in the title refers, of course, to pornography; lead singer Jarvis Cocker’s narrators wink at the listener, all but assuring them that porn and pop are not all that far apart.

I began my inaugural journey into This Is Hardcore with Jane Savidge’s insightful 33 1/3 volume on the album firmly in hand, a sort of guidebook for what I was hearing. This might not be the best way to get into a record — I often feel that falling in love should come before tearing something apart — but my Pulp knowledge is disappointingly underwhelming. My own time with Different Class aside, I was nowhere near the age for (and, clearly, nowhere geographically near) the entire Britpop phenomenon. I knew an album; I didn’t know the band.

For all its deconstruction of the album’s tracks, though, Savidge’s book slowly (and, I think, correctly) took the backseat to my journey into Hardcore. There are points in her prose where it feels as if she is writing to us begrudgingly — this isn’t my favorite Pulp album, she seems to be saying, and it most certainly shouldn’t be yours.

That’s not the best frame of mind to be in when starting an album, particularly an album as lush and sneering as This is Hardcore. It’s an album that almost dares you to like it — or, rather, that dared the presumably staid, blushing listening public of 1999 UK. All its narrative difficulties are, by now, rather tame; sex is barely blush-worthy in 2025, and drawing the connecting line between questionable sexual behavior and selling records barely registers.

At the time of the album’s release, however, there were claims that the album was to be the final nail in the Britpop coffin, a sort of seedy but ultimately thoughtful record that, while not conventionally catchy, might be more cerebral than the Britannia that had taken over the charts.

I can’t speak to whether or not that was the case; This is Hardcore might not sound like Different Class or What’s the Story, Morning Glory or my beloved Parklife, but what I hear when I listen isn’t so radically different from those records that it divorces itself from that sensibility. Sure, it’s a weightier record, due to the intellectual investment it demands — I can see some critics (myself not included) considering it a bit pompous — but it is, at its heart, a deeply pop record. It’s just sluttier than its peers, and I can stand behind a slut.

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The titular song has stuck in my head the most, but there are (of course) other highlights. The album’s most sincere song, “A Little Soul”, avoids the larger sexual themes of the album, turning its focus instead on an estranged father’s woeful communication with his child. It isn’t a saccharine song; it’s a song filled with self-loathing and desperation. Jarvis Cocker’s own father was estranged — he fucked right off to Australia — and so if there’s a sliver of vindictiveness to the song it can be forgiven. “You look like me/please don’t turn into me,” goes the song. “Wish I could show a little soul,” the father intones, and the reading is that his soul itself is little — he is bankrupt, spiritually, is lesser than.

The catchiest song — the one most like the previous album’s hit, “Common People”, is “I Am a Man”, but it’s a condemnation of the idea of “A Man”. It provides the ridiculous and toxic aspects of masculinity (before the term ‘toxic masculinity’ was in ready usage), and it mocks those sensibilities. Despite feeling anthemic, as if the song is meant to draw disparate listeners together, it is a song that breaks some listeners down. Perhaps we can gather together to tear down these shallow false fronts, the song seems to beg.

Strangely, what This is Hardcore reminds me of the most isn’t Different Class but of the solo recordings of Tim Kasher, which do a wonderful job at distilling the chamber-pop of albums like This is Hardcore and (by Kasher’s admission in a The Good Life song) Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No. 2 into a bedroom pop intimacy. Kasher may very well be aping ‘TV Movie’ when his awkward spoken confessionals trip upward toward singing, just before his acoustic guitar is suddenly accompanied by an orchestra. Indeed, Kasher’s commitment to self-deprecating, sex-hungry lyrical protagonists also mirrors the subject matter of This Is Hardcore.

I’ve spent a little over a week with This Is Hardcore, and each listen delights just a little bit more; each listen reveals another small sonic detail. It’s made me eager to hear MORE, an album slated for release next month, but it also makes me desperate to dive deeper into the back catalog — to determine the trajectory from 1983, through 1995 and 1998, and finally to 2025.

Further music reading:

• On the lyrical perfection of Jason Molina’s Pyramid Electric Company

• On how Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans reminds me of my father

• The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree provided endless catharsis

My Work This Week at AIPT:

• Grim reapers, giant monsters, and haunted houses for this week’s Judging by the Cover.

  

• Earth X is one of my favorite Marvel Comics stories of all time, and I got a chance to look at the new printing.

  

• I also got to look at some stellar reprints of “forgotten” Marvel horror comics from the late 60s thanks to Fantagraphics new Lost Marvels book.

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I was young and I didn’t understand what love was.

I was in a relationship I wished was over – that I wished hadn’t begun – but felt overwhelmed by an inability to do much about it. This was a relationship with a good woman who I felt badly about; I felt bad about a lot of things.

I was barely into my 20s, and the whole endeavor of loving had a sick sheen of guilt all over it, a lingering and tragic haze of religious shaming from a god I did not believe in. I had been conditioned, throughout my youth, to understand that my desires were wrong and bad, and so I had coupled off with a girl who I wanted less than she deserved.

Scars were forming; I was doing damage to both of us by not admitting to myself that I didn’t want to be where I was, with who I was with, doing the sorts of things I was doing. I was an emotional criminal, and I would not pay for the crimes I was committing for years to come.

I was infidelitous, even if only internally, emotionally. Every other attractive girl I came into contact with – in classrooms, at parties, over MSN Messenger – became a potential escape hatch, someone to attach a lot of water-damaged longing to in hopes that their buoyant charms might lift me from my trappings. As if transferring my baggage from person to person could help me understand what was wrong with me.

I had a lot of crushes; not a one of them knew how desperate I was in my situation.

It was thus feeling – smothered by my own religious trauma and locked into a toxic relationship with someone who wouldn’t have been toxic without me around – that I first discovered Reclinerland’s second self-titled album.

Released in 2001 by Hush Records, Reclinerland is a collection of songs custom-built for kids with crushes; more, I think, for kids who wish they had a crush and, what’s more, wished that crush could save them. It’s forty-nine minutes of somewhat saccharine pining, written by a stellar songwriter with flawless pop sensibilities. While it never solved any of my problems it certainly didn’t hurt my post-adolescent yearning.

Nearly every song on the album presents a vague, Manic Pixie Dream Girl — and this is a good thing for the right sort of person; after all, those manic pixies of the early 2000s were designed to fix all those stupid, bad, broken boys who created them. They were liferafts for the self-absorbed and emotionally stunted.

For boys like me.

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From the very first lines of opener “Miss Haze”, songwriter Michael Johnson illustrates his abstract yearning: “Maybe I’m jealous of windows and bridges/because they get to be walked all over and looked through/by you”.

This is an album about the put-upon and hindered kids, the type that always got in their own way or found themselves somehow constricted by situations that seemed out of their control (but were, without a doubt, completely of their own making). Johnson — or Johnson’s avatars — are lost in a way that only the privileged and depressed boys of the world can be. In “Eight (Edit)” he yelps about a sort of ennui brought on by the banality of working life, as if getting up and going to work has somehow destroyed his ability to feel correctly. “I think I’ve broken the record for just standing in one place/I think I lost all the feeling in the right side of my brain/it’s hard to explain this lonely feeling,” he relates, and then a wicket guitar comes in and blows the rest of the song to its conclusion.

“19th Century Boy” doubles down on exploring that ennui by introducing more layers to our irresolute avatar: he’s a mumbling boy who doesn’t “have words to blow you away with,” who needs his crush to guess “why I’m not sleeping”. He’s unique, this sufferer, and this plea to some woman who can save him might feel trite under a lesser songwriter, in a less catchy tune.

This unique and sensitive boy only gets more so: “As Paranoid as I Am” illustrates a boy who identifies with the arts over the practical. Further, our fourth crush-object of the album develops her own identifying passions. “She’s the front row at a silent movie/I’m the boy with nosebleed seats to the symphony.”

It might seem like I’m tearing into the narrative frivolity of Johnson’s songs here, but know that I am not: these songs barbed me with an earnest longing, helped me imagine someone I could love who did not make me feel bad for being there; I imagined that there were people in the world who could understand that the place where my love and sexuality were coming from was unhealthy and misunderstood. Someone who got art, got movies that I did not, could help me see that I wasn’t a terrible person because of my hormones. I wanted to put my heart — and my healing — in the hands of someone somehow cultured and enlightened; my rural and isolationist upbringing had never presented such a person.

For all the exasperation for these sorts of stories — sad boy gets saved, young man crushed by the realities of life, etc, etc — there is a sort of truth behind them. Just because they seem vapid and cliche doesn’t mean those cliches aren’t coming from genuine experience. A person who doesn’t go through some small crushing epiphany moving between childhood and adulthood surely doesn’t exist.

What these songs didn’t teach me right away — something that I came to understand only after coming back to the album two decades later — is that all of this is deeply (perhaps dangerously) self-aware, self-mocking. Johnson’s got a smirk on his face, throughout the album, cracking that the world doesn’t need “another pair of star-crossed pen pals” in “Vegas Remains”; these feelings, the songs want the listener to understand, are perhaps too self-absorbed.

It’s not the Manic Pixies who save the day; it’s the depressed party finding their own way out of a bad situation.

For all the smarmy self-awareness, the album holds a lot of sincere emotion and genuine calls for understanding. Please, these songs plead, understand me. At the end of “Yours”, Johnson croons: “You are my plan; what’s yours?” What a bold, honest sentiment.

My life shifted not long after falling in love with this album — there were big, screaming fights, sexual miscalibration, and a long trip to a hospital only minutely connected to these troubles. The relationship ended, and though she wouldn’t agree to it at the time, it was an incredibly positive thing for both of us. I found myself freer than I had for years; I was still desperate for some sort of new, pop-song-worthy relationship, but now these were crushes I could engage with. And I did so poorly, with desperation; it would be years before I fully understood myself enough to attempt to understand someone else.

It took me years not to think of women as potential liferafts.

Michael Johnson moved on to a different sort of songwriting after this album. Reclinerland’s The Ideal Home Music Library, Vol 1 came out in 2003, and took the shape of fictionally lost show-tunes, rediscovered and reinterpreted by Johnson and company. They played like peepholes into lost musicals, and they were not what I hoped for at all. They were songs for people in different personal crises; they didn’t clamor for recognition. They didn’t demand to be seen; Johnson had grown past all that, and now he was making something closer to timelessness than all this pointless pining.

For the first guest column of the new Never News era we’ve got Sound Tucson author Nick Prevenas. I can barely think of a more perfect introduction to guest columns: Nick was around during the first Never News era.

I hate it when the computer knows what I like.

Every aspect of modern life is dictated by The Algorithm, or The Algo, if you want to get adorably dystopian about it. The Algo knows what you want to see, hear, and feel often before you do. Every social media app and online audio/visual platform has been keeping tabs on you for the past couple decades and has turned your taste into a ruthlessly efficient commerce tool. It was always heading this way. Most people prefer it, if we're being completely honest. Why work to discover something new when your app of choice already has a "discover" option? Why take a risk on something bad/weird/challenging when you've already told The Algo everything?

Me? I still like taking chances. I like feeling like I made the discovery on my own, even if that feeling is harder and harder to come by organically.

Occasionally, though, something will get caught up in my radar that feels as though it was recorded and released specifically for me. The guitar sound and the slack mf'er lyrics will transport me back in time to the early 2000s, during that Napster-fueled broadband-internet deluge of new music discovery, when entire Pavement/Guided By Voices/Superchunk/etc catalogs were a click away. I turned my iPod into a library on the history of indie rock from my dorm room in Laramie, Wyoming (not a traditional Merge/Matador hotbed).

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MJ Lenderman: Are you The Algo?

I listened to Bandsplain's end-of-2024 wrap-up episode, where host Yasi Salek and guests Rob Harvilla and Justin Sayles discussed their favorite records of last year. The hosts and I share similar tastes. I bet if you're reading music blogs on the internet, your taste overlaps with ours, as well. Harvilla – my favorite music critic and host of another music podcast we all like called "60 Songs That Explain the 90s" and its sequel show "60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s" – spoke about MJ Lenderman with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion. It's a good impulse. Interrogating one's taste is the surest way to defeat The Algo and to maintain the all-important element of surprise when listening to music, watching film, reading literature, or, well, living life.

Even after interrogation, however, I have come to the conclusion that "Manning Fireworks" is extremely my shit.

I can't help it.

You're only 25, MJ Lenderman. You turn 26 in a month – I looked it up [editor’s note: at time of writing]. I'm 42. You play the kind of music I always dreamed of playing. Your songs sound like how my songs sound in

my head, only crisper, funnier. You play guitar the way I play it, except sharper, more melodic. Your music is my music, except better.

I've admired Lenderman's guitar playing through those fantastic Wednesday albums, particularly his hard-charging riffage on "Chosen To Deserve." But that is only half of the Lenderman equation. His command of simple song structure, along with his mastery of Malkmus-ian turns of phrase, made "Manning Fireworks" my favorite record of 2024, despite how obvious it is for me to like this.

Lenderman strikes this perfect balance between jokey and sincerity in his lyrics. One degree further toward jokiness and the record falls apart – it would be this too-cute-by-half collection of extremely self-satisfied material. Yet one degree further toward sincerity and it would be this mawkish, self-pitying navel-gazey mess. This is an impossible needle to thread, but Lenderman threads it. It's the steady hand possible only after two ice-cold Miller High Lifes.

My favorite pre-"Manning Fireworks" Lenderman track is called "Hangover Game" – a humorous ode to Michael Jordan's alleged "flu game" when he almost single-handedly defeated the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals despite suffering through flu-like symptoms. Lenderman (almost definitely correctly) calls bullshit on this myth, asserting that Jordan was not sick but instead completely hung over. It's a funny song until Lenderman hits the line "I like drinking too." It then pivots on a dime into being a song about recognition – we've all suffered through a few hangover games of our own, but rarely delivered incredible performances on the biggest possible stages.

Lenderman explains his formula on "Joker Lips" – please don't laugh, only half of what I said was a joke.

Side A of "Manning Fireworks" is wall-to-wall bangers. Each side of this record starts with a ramshackle Uncle Tupelo style country song that sounds like split wood on a worn-out porch. Side A's "Manning Fireworks" sets the syllabus, but it's the cumulative effect of "Joker Lips" into "Rudolph" into "Wristwatch" into "She's Leaving You" that show Lenderman and his band at full strength. They don't miss.

Side B's "Rip Torn" has a fiddle that sounds like it's falling apart and has the meme-able milkshakes/smoothies moments. It segues into the record's only weak spot – the wobbly clarinet that drives "You Don't Know the Shape I'm In." It's a fine song with a sticky melody, but it's at this point in the record that I'm worried that Lenderman only had an EP's worth of material (that Side A onslaught) and is now into the filler portion.

"On My Knees" is the most important song on this album. Just when we think we've heard all of Lenderman's moves and we think he might be running out of steam, he hits us with "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" guitar stomp and this goosebump-inducing falsetto on the chorus. Whatever doubts I might've had about this guy, this record, The Algo – it's gone the second he sings "Is it the TV static of a distant crowd or maybe just the breeze?" It's on the word "breeze" when his voice cracks into that falsetto.

Every ounce of skepticism I might try to muster floats away on this breeze.

Lenderman ends the record with a song about playing "Bark at the Moon" on Guitar Hero and letting the guitars feed back for six or so minutes, almost like an indie movie that's 78 minutes long but needs six minutes of credits to earn theatrical distribution.

"Manning Fireworks" is not a reinvention or an interrogation or a recontextualization of anything. It's just a damn good guitar rock album that speaks exactly to the pleasure centers of my brain. I promise to spend most of 2025 challenging and interrogating, but I'm asking for only another half hour to spin this record again.

A quick bonus newsletter for the beginning of the month, hoping to catch you in the right mood for new music!

January was a lot of things for me, musically; I spent a lot of time discovering new tunes through various blogs and Substacks, and I spent some time diving into the discography of a classic indie rock band (spending most of my time with their first album, represented here). One of the songs got stuck in my head because of Nick’s book.

This playlist represents my general listening habits over the month (if the songs in question were on Spotify); most of this listening was done in my office, some in my car, and a little on my weird new little iPod knock-off.

I’ve included music videos where applicable. The Spotify playlist sits at just under a

n hour and a half; it can be found here and is also embedded at the bottom of the newsletter.

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A Never News Sampler, February 2025

1. Archers of Loaf - Web in Front - I picked up a copy of Archers of Loaf’s third album, All the Nation’s Airports a few months back; it was my first Archers album — they’re a band that influenced some of my favorite bands, but I had never spent any real time with them. I loved Airports, and I thought I’d start expanding that horizon. Web in Front is from 1993’s Icky Mettle, the band’s first full-length.

2. Mourn - Alegre y Jovial - I had not heard of Mourn up until a couple of weeks ago, when their new single dropped; it’s their first set of songs in their (presumably) native Spanish (the band is from El Maresme, Catalonia, Spain). I was immediately hooked, and am very excited to do the same sort of deep dive with their catalog (which is, amazingly, about as large as Archers of Loaf’s, going back a decade. What an embarrassment that I’ve been missing out!).

3. Thursday - White Bikes - The return of some truly Thursday-sounding Thursday tracks has been a welcome thing.

4. Japanese Breakfast - Orlando in Love - It isn’t often that a catchy pop song demands the listener’s knowledge of poetic forms. At least I think vocalist Michelle Zauner is singing “Orlando in love/write 69 cantos” at the opening of the song. Regardless, I’m very excited about the new album (out in March), and it makes me want to go back to the previous albums and stew.

5. Throwing Muses - Drugstore Drastic - Also out in March is the new Throwing Muses record, Midnight Concessions. An old buddy of mine (who was very influential on me, both as a writer and as a listener to music) was very, very big into the 1990s 4AD lineup of bands. In the hours and hours we spent talking about music and sharing pirated MP3s and CDrs, I became just familiar enough with Kristin Hersh and her bands 50 Foot Wave and Throwing Muses for her to be consistently on my radar — if I see new music, I spend some time with that new music. Drugstore Drastic is the b-side of the lead single, Summer of Love; for whatever reason, Drastic is the one that got mixed in my shuffle foremost.

6. Palimino Blond - Plain View

7. Squid - Building 650 - Yet another band I know next to nothing about, the new tracks by London’s Squid remind me, by turns, of Q and Not U and Beep Beep. It’s the former that Building 650 reminds me of; it’s something to do with those opening vocals over funky base and sharp guitar. Both this track and the Beep Beep-adjacent Crispy Skin are from the forthcoming Cowards.

8. Gabardine - Romance is Better in Theory - Speaking of Beep Beep, a mostly forgotten record by that band’s predecessors, Gabardine, found its way into rotation for me this last month. I haven’t listed to the band’s self-titled record in years, but I’ve spent a bit of time recently digging through boxes of CDs that have been stuffed in varying closets since my departure from Wyoming years ago. The archeological dig has done wonders for my rediscovery of old gems.

9. girlpuppy - Champ

10. Horsegirl - Switch Over

11. Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham - Lola (My Love)

12. Redlands - Hidden Hands - At one point in Nick’s book, he compares his old band to one of its contemporaries, saying “If you’re familiar with indie stalwart Eric Bachmann, Bombs [for the Bored] was more Archers of Loaf, and Redlands was more Crooked Fingers.” Since I’ve been getting into those very bands and have had this Redlands song popping into my head here and there, it felt right to put this song right before a Crooked Fingers track.

13. Crooked Fingers - Dignity and Shame - My deep dive into Archers of Loaf has, naturally, led me to peek at some of member Eric Bachmann’s other work. Crooked Fingers was his project following Archers, and lies more in the songwriterly-sinister (he also released some albums under his own name, but I haven’t jumped into them even though one of them was released on my beloved Saddle Creek Records). I’ve yet to go too deep here, but the handful of songs I’ve heard call out to me.

14. Fusilier - Nightmare Muscle

15. Hamilton Leithauser - Knockin’ Heart

16. Lauren Watkins - Heartbroken Record - This is a song that is 100% something I would have hated in my 20s; it’s drenched with that pop-country glint that was so oppressive in my childhood (the radio in the Wyoming of my childhood was filled almost nothing but the most atrocious of schmaltzy country tunes best described, by an old buddy, as ‘Glitter Hick’). I think part of the reason why this song (which I discovered through Nick Hornby’s Substack) sticks out to me is because it is that music but it is also somehow not that music. I can’t figure it out and I refuse to explain myself further.

17. Planes Mistaken for Stars - Run Rabbit Run - It’s silly to put this Planes track directly after a glittery pop-country tune, but that opening riff feels like it could open up a crusty western rockabilly track. It doesn’t, of course; Planes is a bit too fuckin’ fight for all that. This comes from the band’s most recent record, the last thing to be recorded by beloved vocalist Gared O’Donnell before his death by cancer in 2021. I cannot press upon you how much I love Planes Mistaken for Stars and how profoundly I felt the loss of Gared; I’m sure I’ll write about my experiences with Planes here at some point, but until then just know that a new album by Planes — one with Gared’s growling and expressive vocals — has been such a profound and devastating experience. I’m so thankful for it.

18. Cryogeyser - Stargirl

19. SPELLLING - Portrait of My Heart

20. Blondshell - T&A

21. PUP - Paranoid - After about a trillion recommendations from friends and YouTubers, I finally got into PUP the last couple of summers; they don’t sound like it, but they’re a great band for the sorts of long walks I was taking in between running days. Their new single is the exact right type of aggressive.

22. Advance Base - True Love Death Dream

23. Cece Coakley - You’re Red

24. Archers of Loaf - Plumb Line - One last Archers track to finish us off.

And those are the tracks I’ve listened to the most in January; I hope they make it into your February; let me know which of these songs connect with you.

You can find more of my thoughts on music in the new ‘Records’ section of the Never News newsletter! I cover records that have meant a lot to me over the years.

“Twin high-maintenance machines.”

It’s hard to imagine a lyric with as much clunky-cool brute force, such nerdy high energy, such a desperate yawp of self-understanding. Despite its uncommon syntax and contextually complicated expression, this is the moment of the song you can barely wait to sing along with.

The Mountain Goats’ 'The Sunset Tree’ is an album full of such moments: freakout moments, “a-ha” moments, moments of precise understanding and emotional depth. This is a moment of perfect clarity both narratively and in the band’s singular understanding of pop music. They are moments that get stuck in your head but, unlike the catchy choruses inherent to other songs (even other Mountain Goats songs), the ones presented on ‘Sunset’ are rarely easy.

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“Twin high-maintenance machines” hits in the middle of ‘This Year’, a plaintive prayer of survival made by a man looking back on a particularly traumatic afternoon when he was seventeen. The twin high-maintenance machines in question are that seventeen-year-old kid and Cathy, ‘a girl that wants a little of [his] time’, and the sentiment betrays a knowledge, attained in retrospect, of how troubled they must have been. How dramatic and bombastic: in four abstract words, songwriter John Darnielle locks an understanding into the listener's mind: these kids aren’t just in trouble, they are trouble.

Another moment hits in the song preceding, ‘Broom People’. After a feint when the song edges up to a freakout moment at the end of a verse that doesn’t quite lead to a chorus (“down in your arms, in your arms, I am a wild creature”), the song concludes “I write down good reasons to freeze to death/in my spiral ring notebook/and in the long tresses of your hair/I am a babbling brook”.

‘Broom People’ is the second song on the album, so when Darnielle belts out ‘babbling brook’, it isn’t expressly clear that this is an album about child abuse, and that these abstractions of self-identity are expressions of that violence. Our narrator is a wild creature for good reason: he is in conflict.

‘This Year’, which is about a day spent fucking off and drinking with a girl he likes, is also ultimately about this violence: the song ends with the implied conflict he has with his stepfather upon returning home.

I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into when I picked up The Sunset Tree not long after its release in 2005, though my tendency to obsess over liner notes means that I was likely clued into what was going on before the album finished playing the first time through: Darnielle insists that the album was made possible by his own then-recently deceased stepfather (“may the peace which eluded you in life be yours now”), and goes on to dedicate the album:

“Dedicated to any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them, with the following good news:

you are going to make it out of there alive

you will live to tell your story

never lose hope.”

With that bombshell dropped, the proliferation of ‘a-ha moments’ and freakouts is all the more powerful and heartfelt. Each small, sing-along epiphany of these songs becomes a moment in which you join a legion of the abused as you sing along, and your voice joins Darnielle’s to become but a fraction of some holy prayer of survival. You’re lending your voice to a magic spell of implied and desperately needed liberation.

The narrator seeks that liberation in a romance and fast drive in ‘Dilaudid’: “so kiss me with your mouth open/turn the tires toward the street/and stay sweet” begins our escape, and “You know it breaks my heart in half, in half/When I see them trying to fly/'Cause you just can't do/Things your body wasn't meant to/Hike up your fishnets/I know you” explains both why the escape is needed and also the true path that’s being taken: this drive isn’t going to get him out of here, but maybe she will.

The ‘a-ha’, the freakout, is here: “if we live to see the other side of this/I will remember your kiss/so do it with your mouth open/and take your foot off the break/for Christ’s sake”.

In ‘Dance Music’, the boy needs to cover up the noise of his parents fighting, and the phrase “so this is what the volume knob’s for”, though by no means a turning point in the song, is so poignant and effective that the real power moments of the song seem elevated: we’ve already heard the heart of the matter. Now let’s hear the struggle.

Like ‘Broom People’, ‘Lion’s Teeth’ abstracts identity. Where the former sees a boy unable to retain his selfhood, the latter makes the stepfather the much more obviously dangerous lion. Here the boy reaches into a mouth to “grab hold of one long, sharp tooth/and hold on”. Even the instrumentation of the song — choppy chords, understated but bombastic drums, frenetic slashes of strings — sounds like a confrontation, a fist fight. These ‘a-ha’ moments occur with a flowing swell of those strings; the conflict becomes beautiful.

The Sunset Tree contains multitudes of these simple but powerful moments — sometimes multiple times per song — so that even the most visceral and horrifying aspects of the song narratives read as pop music, as catchy and infectious. One can’t imagine being a child in need of escape listening to a man on the other side of his torture, celebrating.

But that celebration does not come, as one might expect, at the expense of the abuser — at that violent stepfather. Even when the lyric hits, during ‘Pale Green Things’, that “my sister called at three am/just last December/she told me how you’d died at last (at last)” it does not hit with a sense devoid of sorrow. That parenthetical repetition of ‘at last’ might be malicious, but it is maliciousness earned, and still carries the complicated feelings of family, of pain, of trauma. Darnielle manages, as the album closes, an earnestness he has refined through the twelve preceding songs.

Further Never News Album Discussions:

• Jason Molina’s ‘Pyramid Electric Co.’ and the insight of a lyrically perfect album.

• Penfold’s ‘Our First Taste of Escape’ was like a walk through the rain.

• Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans' sorrowful optimism and the lessons my father taught me.

I told everyone in Laramie that I was moving back to Star Valley to work for Dad; I told people that he needed help, presenting myself as nothing more than a helpful, attentive son.

The truth is that I had given up on myself. The experiment of higher education had collapsed beneath me with the embarrassing, heartbreaking, and troubling certainty that I was incapable of living in the real world.

I don’t recall the beginning of the collapse, but I can pinpoint the exact moment when the certainty hit: leaving an evening French class as the darkness drew down around Prexy’s Pasture. This was late autumn – snow had not yet begun to fall, but it was certainly in the air. Whatever had gone on in the forty-five minutes of that class had confirmed that I was broken, a failure: I couldn’t understand French even though months had passed. I knew I wouldn’t be back to the class, and somewhere deep in myself I knew that I wouldn’t last long in the others.

Not only did I leave school, I fled town, crossed the state, and hid my head.

At the time, my father kept an apartment in Salt Lake. My brother lived there, and my Dad spent the work week there – he came back to Star Valley on the weekends. I didn’t have a room in that apartment, but I had taken up residence in a bedroom of my parent’s basement that had once been mine but that became a catch-all for a quickly cluttering empty nest. I was part of that clutter.

To keep myself as minorly self-sufficient as possible, I drove my old Ford Taurus back and forth between Star Valley and Salt Lake. That’s around four hours one way, taken two or four times a week (depending on what nonsense reason I could think of to keep my own schedule). That Ford Taurus had the requisite portable CD Player and adapter than any kid my age had in the early 2000s; one of the albums I listened to most on those drives was Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans.

The Sufjan albums released on either side of Seven Swans are more famous, more popular, and much more dynamic recordings: 2003’s Greetings From Michigan The Great Lake State was the album that put Sufjan on the map, and Illinois pushed him even further into the zeitgeist. Why Seven Swans was the one that hit me hardest might have something to do with my mental state at the time: it was an equally ethereal and morose record. Sure, the same can be said of much of Sufjan’s discography, and for a lot of folk and folk-adjacent albums released in post-9/11 America, but there was something different about Seven Swans.

Seven Swans worked a small bit of strange alchemy for me: in its understated soaring, I began slowly to view myself as someone who could exist in the world.

After all, when the la-la-las hit in “Sister” wasn’t I already 30 miles south of Cokeville, headed to the city? Didn’t I have plans to meet Jeremy at some Cuban restaurant after work? Wasn’t there a trip to Gray Whale with Breckon on the horizon?

I wasn’t a hopeless person; I had a job, for chrissakes. Sure, it was for my dad and yeah, there would be no taxable pay stub. But it was employment, which is more than I could say if I’d have to struggle to get to class back in Laramie. Jobs were either at a premium in Laramie, or they felt that way because nobody wanted one.

If Taurus might have felt like a life raft, and the clanking banjo on “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands” was the rise and fall of the ocean. The repeated soaring chorus the titular track raised with a sorrowful, almost holy sort of optimism, and what was my life if not sorrowful and, slowly by degrees, optimistic?

As the winter closed in, some of that light got shut out; I stopped making the long drives to Salt Lake and preferred, instead, to ride in the snow-safe cab of my father’s truck. Our jobs took us outside of Wyoming and Utah, chasing us to snow-buried Idaho and even dusty, dusty Ely, Nevada. Seven Swans got left in the car the length of all that seasonal sadness and darkness.

I think back on that time, now, and I’m thankful.

For all the inescapable depression and collapsing sense of self, I spent more time with my father in those months than I ever did again.

We spent hours in his truck, driving through the pre-dawn snow toward some Sun Valley condominium or another. Though I don’t recall every small task we performed during those ten-, fourteen-hour days – the reality of carpentry never worked its way as deeply inside my bones as it did my brothers, and it certainly wasn’t inherent in me the way it was for him – but I nevertheless learned vital portions of myself from my father in that time.

In those post-college months, on those dusty job sites, in those lonely motel rooms, Dad was quietly teaching me to work my way back to life.

I don’t know if he knew what he was teaching me, and I can’t say if I could name the precise lessons I was learning, only that I became a better person for my time with him – all the sweet kindnesses he had spent my life giving me only solidified, even under the hardship of labor.

Run along the rough edge of exhaustion, decency somehow sharpened toward strength.

Seven Swans means something else to me, no matter how much it reminds me of those four-hour commutes alone in my car, Wyoming in the rearview, and the canyon passes of Salt Lake quickly approaching ahead. I’m weeping now, writing this. Lyrics like

My father was in the first part/He came, he came to my bedroom. . . 
But I'm still asleep/And you woke me up again/And I'm still asleep/But you woke me up to be holy.

hit harder, now. It’s been almost four years, now, since he passed away, and I still find myself lost at sea whenever I remember that he’s gone. The damnedest thing is that I don’t think I’d ever be able to explain to him how this little record somehow relates, in all its mutable emotions, to him; he wasn’t an openly poetic man.

I didn’t realize when I sat down to write about the record that I’d be writing about my father. It had been an album of self-discovery. Now, it seems, it’s a record of a challenging time I am forced now to treasure.

There was a great chain of record stores in Utah called Gray Whale; the nearest one was two hours from my house (everything was at least an hour away from my house).

My buddy Breckon introduced me to Gray Whale – we headed to the west side of the valley, through Freedom, and took 34 into Idaho, which wound you around Tincup. There’s a part of the highway that barrels around a steep rock face overlooking farmland, doing a complete about-face of 180° (coming home one late winter night, my father rounded this corner and ran his F-150 smack into a lazy, escaped cow). After that crook in the road, you head south past Bear Lake, and an hour or so later you’re in Logan, Utah.

I haven’t been to Logan, Utah in twenty years; there’s no way the Kmart is still there, but we stopped there every trip to take a picture in their 1980s photo booth. I’m almost certain the Gray Whale is also gone, though it seems the company is still up and running.

I don’t remember anything about navigating Logan (though I know I did go to that record store a couple of times by myself during my “learning to be independent after dropping out of college” period. I don’t remember where the record store was, and I don’t know what greasy, high cuisine we got for lunch (fast food barely had a foothold in Star Valley), but I do remember some of the albums I bought at Graywhale: You Can Play These Songs With Chords by Death Cab for Cutie, A Newer More Shattered You by Prevent Falls. I still regret not buying Precious Blood by a band called Ghosts and Vodka; I’ve spent twenty years not remembering how it sounded, but I was so enamored with the album art (update: it’s a bit post-rocky, mathy, and it rules; I would have spent hours over the years with it, and my regret is immeasurable).

I spent my fair time with those records, and others I made – I think I bought my first full The Appleseed Cast album there, and I can assure you it changed my life. But the album I most remember buying – and opening in the car on the way back to Star Valley – was Penfold’s Our First Taste of Escape.

Penfold’s “I’ll Take You Anywhere” had made its way, through the pirate alchemy of early-2000s CD-Rs and file sharing, into the constant shuffle of my listening sometime in the preceding year and a half. The band almost certainly crossed my path by way Deep Elm Records’ The Emo Diaries, which had been split apart into its component MP3s by a handful of friends and shared around. “Microchip”, the song that made it onto The Emo Diaries Chapter Three: The Moment of Truth (yes, that’s the real first name of the compilation), would have been in the shuffle as well.

“I’ll Take You Anywhere” made it onto some unguessable number of mix-CDs I made in the years following its discovery — at least two or three of which went to freshman year of college crushes. I loved its narrator’s frank insistence that he would cherish the song’s subject; the song might not be romantic, but it had that romantic desperation a lovelorn teenager like me felt was necessary. The singer’s frantic yelp of the song’s title, near the end of the song, felt universal to me, a feeling I had never felt but which I believed everyone does.

I suspect that many songs from The Emo Diaries made their lasting legacy on the lovelorn mixes of sad boys hoping to impress marginally less sad girls. To be fair, it worked for me – at least two of those crushes kissed me that first year at college.

Though “Everywhere” was on the band’s first album, Amateurs & Professionals, I ended up with Out First Taste of Escape for the most common reason any kid ended up with not-quite the album they went looking for: the first wasn’t in stock, and the latter was sitting right there.

The CD release of Escape is striking when you first open it — whether this is in the passenger seat of your best music buddy speeding north from Utah and into Idaho or otherwise. The ethereal cover art turned out to be an elaborate outer wrapping for the lyric booklet, and that was novelty enough for it to become a cherished object in my very nascent CD collection (I loved a good packaging novelty). But when we put that album in the CD player for the first time, I didn’t know exactly how to process what I was hearing.

If “ethereal” is the word I use for the album art, so must it be the word for album-opener “The Opportune Moment”: floating, warbled, unidentifiable notes twirl from one speaker to another. You feel as if you are underwater or — and this is the distinct feeling I had — in some sort of aural fogbank, unable to quite see until the opening guitar notes of “Fate, Coincidence and an Encounter” begin laying their arpeggiated breadcrumbs into the album proper.

I hadn’t found a record that felt so much like atmosphere — the closest thing, in my yet-inexperienced mind — was The Appleseed Cast’s Low Level Owl, though I now realize the comparison is completely off. Owl, in its two parts, is an epic journey of an album; it takes you climbing over obstacles from one place to another.

Our First Taste of Escape leads you, as well, but it isn’t an epic: it is interior. Their insistence of being “on my way home” is an apt one, as Penfold’s journey is a small one — walking from one side of a small, midwestern city to another, say, through dusk-falling sleet.

The album rarely gets as rocking as “I’ll Take You Everywhere”, and somehow I respected it for that. I didn’t get a copy of Amateurs & Professionals until Count Your Lucky Stars re-released it on vinyl a decade later, in 2011 (looking that year up just now made me feel as if I time-traveled — I was sure I only just pre-ordered that release), and though it is rockier, it doesn’t stick in my mind as such.

What’s strange about my relationship with these releases is that my favorite song — still — is “I’ll Take You Everywhere”; I have listened to Amateurs & Professionals maybe a total of ten times in my life.

I have listened to Our First Taste of Escape thousands of times. Front to back, the album feels inherent in my bloodstream, those warbled early notes like my first blinks upon waking. Even now, when the song hits pockets of lyrics I don’t quite know, I know the exact pitch, the exact notes, the number of syllables my yawp must match.

This is A+ emo, is something beyond emo, is such a unique variation on the band’s initial vibe. It’s a treasure.

These are the things that made me fall in love with music when I was first learning how to fall in love: a spur-of-the-moment journey with a friend, my first proper record store, and the unexpected beauty of an unheard album. Tastes may evolve with time, but the classics stay classic, stay bloodborne, stay integral to the listener even as they become the soundtrack of one’s own escape into adulthood.

This essay was written last month; not a month later, Penfold began teasing a new version of the record on their Instagram: re-recorded, re-mixed, re-mastered. I’m not fully sure what that means, but the short audio samples they’ve posted are fresh-sounding without overwhelming my nostalgia brain. As of writing, this is all the information I have. I’m stoked regardless.

Even at the website’s peak, I was never an avid Pitchfork reader. In a time before cynicism and bitterness had truly overtaken the World Wide Web, Pitchfork made a mark by being occasionally hyperbolic, vitriolic, and hyper-critical. I don’t fault them for that: they were 1) a site built for citicism and 2) initially staffed almost entirely by idealistic, inexperienced kids with the Bold Indie Kid Ideas that plague anyone who has recently discovered music and decided that music was their whole deal.

But the site was blossoming at the same time I was falling in love with music (and, incidentally, not too long before I made the same Young Kid mistake of trying to be a critic online with the first Never News, when I had no experience doing so). Glancing through Pitchfork headlines/reviews, even if you weren’t responding to the critic’s endorsement or condemnation, was an incredible resource for someone who learned about indie rock after the advent of the internet.

In 2003, I would have been in college, and I was desperate to make music my whole deal. I needed to discover new music because I had to impress upon all these fresh new people in that fresh new town that I was worth knowing. This was before I met my friend family, you see, before I saw the Wyoming band with the worst name of all time and, in doing so, met the people who are still daily presences in my life (despite being hundreds of miles away).

At the end of that year, Pitchfork must have listed Songs: Ohia’s masterpiece Magnolia Electric Co as one of their albums of the year (reviewer Eric Carr gave the album an 8.2). I seem to remember there being MP3s on offer, or maybe I went searching. At any rate, I downloaded “Farewell Transmission” and knew instantly that this was something I needed in my life. Aside from the emo-adjacent country (Bright Eyes & Mayday, for example), alternative country hadn’t quite been on my radar.

As much as I would like to, I can’t say that Magnolia Electric Co changed my life, but it was a damn fine album. It remains a cherished thing, a bright star in all that confusing depression I was going through at the time (and that I continue to go through); Jason Molina wrote what he knew, and what I was just figuring out.

When its spiritual sister album Pyramid Electric Co came out a year later, I knew I had to be in at the ground level. I preordered the album (my first of many Secretly Canadian orders) even though it only came on vinyl and, at 19 or 20, I had no turntable (the LP included a flat-packed CD).

If ever there was an album that sounded like it should change a person’s life, that album is Pyramid Electric Co. Recorded over seven days, the album isn’t Molina at his most stripped back or primal – Songs: Ohia was a lo-fi band at the beginning – but it is him at his late-career heights of understatement: two guitars and a piano, oblique poetry, and the rising voice of an honest-to-god genius.

“You’ll have friends who won’t come home/you’ll see their bones/not separate yet from death/you’ll get used to it”.

For a kid who wanted nothing more than to be a great writer, the language on Pyramid Electric Co was a livewire, a blow to the soul. Molina sings things on this record that insist on epiphany, even when they are mundane. Every line of the album is somehow revelatory; that they are carried along with what feel like meandering, dissonant, and barely crafted guitar notes lends them an even further gravity. At its end, the opening (titular) track dissolves, and an entire second song begins to play beneath it, half-heard and acoustically brutal. A quartet of electric notes plays again and again, drowning it out.

He not only delivers mind-opening insight, he delivers a sort of heartsick love. You fall in love with the painted-up division street girl, a prostitute:

“Painted up division street girl/She's a pretty denim queen/Bird of paradise eyes/Bird of paradise dying eyes/But I could sight read those slangy lips/I could sight right those hips/And anyway out loud she says/Hey sucker

Are you lonely?”

You fall in love with another woman, Honey (or perhaps we are Honey; we are ‘Darling’.), who

“smells a little like a train/hauling lilacs through the rain”.

There are observations like this not just about women, but about the simple aspects of living. We’re told that

“nothing’s got a pulse/in the whole damn place/right down to the clocks/nothing’s got a pulse”

and when we’re told this, we know that we’ve been to the place he’s at. We’ve known a place so oppressive in its stillness that time doesn’t move. The simplicity of these things – the commonplace reality of clocks and lilacs and cigarettes – are universal, banal, and beautiful.

Finding Pyramid Electric Co when I did — 2004, finding my family, beginning the journey from who I was to who I knew I wanted to be — was one of the great gifts given to me by the clumsy circulation of indie rock. To invest what felt like a trillion dollars for a hunk of plastic that, I remind you, I could not play, and doing so without having heard a note, was an act of such profound faith that I can barely recognize it now.

“I wanted to be true like the solid earth”

I never correctly applied the lessons I learned from the album to my songwriting – Wake Megan always wanted to be early The Good Life – but Molina’s poetic sensibilities most certainly worked themselves into my prose and poetry; I struggle, in a great many pieces, to achieve the sort of earnest truth that Molina does with the seven songs on Pyramid. If I could be half the poet I would be happy; if I were an eight of the poet I’d still be improved.

“You called that the curse of a human’s life: that you couldn’t change”

Molina gives us a gift: he makes us observers of the world in a way we’ve never been before. For forty-one and a half glorious minutes, we become aware that the beauty of the minuscule is also the beauty of the infinite, and we weep with it.