Truth in Genres: Shoegaze/Dream Pop

Much has been said and written about the evils of classifying music by genre, and many writers have started out said articles with "much has been said about...", but despite the recursive criticism and the inherent social quagmire, genres persist in how we define music. If nothing else, genres are a shitty shortcut to move the conversation along. Sure, it's a shortcut filled with the dangers of broken glass, toxic fumes from a near by chemical plant and the occasional meth-addled drifter that will slice your throat for the Coke Zero nestled in your backpack's outer mesh pocket, but it is a shortcut nonetheless.

As I take a bite out of some of the select genres, their subsets, their derivatives, their god-genres, etc that I'm intrigued by, my feelings on the whole system of music identification will be made clear. Hopefully, these feelings will be refined into an accurate statement that articulates my simultaneous disdain and embrace of genres as avenues in discussing music.

The History:
I'd like to start this series of posts off with my most beloved and, perhaps, hated genres under the banner of ambient music: shoegaze and dream pop. The two are typically entwined because they both represent the sweeter side of ambient aesthetics in the pop and rock format. The opposite are noise and drone music (and all their stupid subsets), which represent a darker, harsher side. Naturally, the two sides tend to bed each other in a variety of ways and levels on intensity, but what I'd like to focus on here, are the artists and the culture that surrounds the predominantly consonant, warm and gorgeousness of shoegaze and dream pop.

Technically speaking, dream pop started to occur years before shoegaze was even an idea. With the wisdom and atmospheres of electronic ambient of the mid-to-late '70s planted in the young minds of a handful of aspiring artists, dream pop came into being in the early '80s alongside the explosion of the noise movement and post-punk. The Cocteau Twins and The Jesus and Mary Chain are called-upon champions of the style, providing the most adapted blueprint for what would be fully embraced as dream pop - equal parts moody, saccharine and chiming textures in sound, all shot through with soft vocal melodies that blended with the music but stayed slightly above as a prominent attraction.

 

 The moniker "shoegaze" was given by the British press to late '80s bands that allegedly stared at their shoes during their entire performance. A lot of members of different bands during this time refuted the name on many levels, but the most basic was that they were concentrating on the correct pedals to use and listening for the changes in the songs. The genre, at this point in time, was exemplified by My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, with significant pull by other bands like Ride, Lush, and Chapterhouse.

Shoegaze carries a lot of the same qualities as dream pop in terms of the importance of bright, shimmering textures and woozy vocals, but the are some key differences between them. For one thing, the drums typically blend in with the swirling textures of the song, meant to keep the rhythm and adhere to the pop song format, but only barely. More importantly, however, is the complete synthesis of the vocals in the mix and the bending, hypnotic usage of distortion and feedback. Another thing that differentiates shoegaze from dream pop is that shoegaze tends to ramble on and embrace the amorphous quality of ambient, while dream pop is succinct - the haze is controlled, almost like the power to lasso clouds had finally been harnessed.



The '90s saw a steep decline of interest in both genres. However, shoegaze carved a path for post-rock which became a force in it's own right. Shoegaze's presence was felt, but the image and the culture had significantly dwindled. It wasn't until around 2011 that a massive resurgence in both shoegaze and dream pop occurred. This wasn't necessarily a revitalization of the genres, but of ambient as a whole.

The Sound:
I set out this brief, omission-laden history to give a bit of context on my views on the sound and culture of the music. Since I'm so in love with the idea of shoegaze and dream pop music - the ethereal mixed with traces of familiarity, the abstraction and textures funneled into consonant joy - seeing them fail or become mediocre is particularly depressing. Since each genre is so reliant on mood and atmosphere, it has a dangerously high potential to be boring, tepid, total fluff. In fact, I've seen this occur in 90% of the shoegaze and dream pop artists that I've heard.

There seems to be a proliferation of the idea that either genre can rest on the laurels of chorus, delay and reverb. To many these guitar effects are automatic assembly lines of "cool", "alternative" or "interesting" songs, which leads to lazy songwriting and even lazier song structuring.With dream pop, there are legions of bands that think applying chorus and sheeny-bear reverb to typically hammy, generic pop songs constitutes as dream pop in it's truest sense. You won't have to search long to find one of these pretenders, all the sweetie-pie melodies and spritely, major chord guitar progressions splash right across your face but are forgotten by the time they slide off your cheeks. It's a pop band that has slightly reverse-engineered their sound in hopes of swindling a demographic that likes moody, atmospheric music.

The truth is, good dream pop (in my opinion) is born out of a genuine fusion between the familiar energy culled from pop's structure and the indescribable romance of ambient layers, injected like pie-filling into the center and then having it overflow from the inside out. It's not created when the ambient aspect is just a transparency plopped on top of the whole affair. It's amazing to me how many artists have tried and failed that formula in the past, and how many to this day still try and still fail. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart  and The Dum Dum Girls are prime examples of cookie-cutter pop outfits, massaged by indie labels to just barely evoke the nostalgia of early jangle-bright stylings of My Bloody Valentine and The Smiths, and the doo-wop coating of The Jesus and Mary Chain. All of it in hopes that the tragically hip will nod in unison and say "That sounds killer. It's like '80s alternative, even though I don't exactly know what that means. I'll go buy a jacket from Urban Outfitters to suit my mood."



On the other hand, shoegaze has been adopted by droves of psychedelic, post-rock and post-metal (basically angry dudes that decided to totes mellow out) bands. It makes sense because shoegaze is less concerned with structure and more concerned with textural confluence - a journey to the center of yourself with faint sign-posts to guide you there or a boring, heat-bleached struggle through the desert, depending on the kind of ears you have. Shoegaze, as a result, is constantly butchered and alienates droves of people because they only hear the most dull, lifeless versions of it. It seems like every time I go to Facebook, I'm greeted with an ad on the side pane, telling me about some outfit in Texas, called Molasses or Space House or Sad Sloth, who are a "special" or "new" brand of shoegaze "that harnesses the power of the genre's mainstays, while forging a sound of their own". I'm already a hard-as-nails skeptic when it comes to music, so these particular words only conjure up resentment and mistrust.

Unfortunately, most of these knee-jerk reactions are founded. In fact, I would argue that most shoegaze bands turn out a kind of swill that is so inconsequential in it's effect, that they might as well have not made the music at all. The main issue is similar to that of dream pop, in that most shoegaze artists rest on the laurels of style and nostalgia that has been built up over the years. Who needs dynamic shifts in texture and engaging interweaves of soft vocals, when you simply have a loop pedal that repeats the same three guitar drones until the end of time? After all, it's all about the slow-burn, "tripped out" feeling that you get, right? It's this mentality that seals the fate of most shoegaze bands. It's as if they think 5 minutes between chord strikes uplift them to a new realm of "legitimate" indie musician, where they aren't hugely successful, but the 15 friends who like them and the friends of friends who only sort of care are enough to legitimize them as the second, super-secret coming of Kevin Shields.  



The People: 

Since shoegaze and dream pop (and ambient in general) have a tendency towards hypnotics, the genres unfortunately have attracted boatloads of drug enthusiasts. It's not to say that the presence of drugs in any kind of music is a surprise, but the pitfalls are quite plentiful with shoegaze/dream pop. The subculture has self-perpetuated this idea that the DIY drug experience is inextricably bound to the spine of the music. If you recall the stoners you went to high school with, who were into old tapestry bands like Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and so on, you'll understand what a drug stigma can do to an art movement. Those stoners couldn't separate the emotions brought by the music and those brought by the drugs, because they didn't care to. The music was there to enhance their high, which rendered it secondary in their priorities. To me, that's not genuine love for a genre, or even music overall.

Drugs are never about progression, only temporary displacement, while art is meant to move you forward in some way or another, permanently. Unfortunately, both experiences start out the same and many don't bother to follow the hare all the way down the rabbit hole. Shoegaze and dream pop are about transporting you to new ethereal planes of  intimacy and reconciliation, while keeping you pinned by the familiar thrum of the bass and crash of the drums. Shoegaze and dream pop on drugs is about looking at those emotions in a distorted kaleidoscope, laughing and saying to yourself, "yeah, I've experienced those before", but never going on to touch them in a meaningful way.

And where there are drugs there are inevitably going to be assortment of the hippy, crust and raver cultures. It's unfortunate, because it gives shoegaze and dream pop a sort of greasy, ramshackle quality that should be left to the likes of hardcore, bluegrass, new folk, etc. The music is too smooth and ghostly to connotate grimy commune children.

On the flip side of that, most shoegaze and dream pop fans are generally easy-going, low maintenance individuals. Some due to the aforementioned downers that they are consuming, but also the general permutation of mellow reflection that each genre tends to roll off. There aren't many condescending intellectuals or testy hotheads in this group of fans. In fact, shoegaze/dream pop is just one place where refugees of harder music tend to end up - tired of the impotent rage, tired of the highly defined, tired of the obnoxious quirk - looking for some solidarity. I like the idea that the music gives people a common arena to just relax, to just be. When you're swaying to the the waves of delay, there isn't a lot of opportunity for aggression or pretension, at least from the fan perspective.

Fair-weather hipsters are a different story. They still manage to think highly of themselves (whether part of a band or just a fan), even in genres that tout warm, cathartic vibes. Since late '80s and early '90s college rock is all the rage these days, you'll find the asshole quotient to reflect the popularization. And you know when hipsters start their own shoegaze/dream pop bands, just look at Cults:




I may be mistaken, but this band (amongst many others) sound like they didn't give a fuck about dream pop  until it conveniently became popular again in the past two years, and they won't give a fuck about it when it's popularity has subsided. The band literally sound like slightly higher functioning thrift store employees started a band to be cool, to drink beer and to cash in on a trend. But I'm not going to repeat myself about the dummy bands in these genres. I pointed it out because it's symptomatic of the hipster culture that congeals over all subcultures, like an old, gross, parasitic cheese. It's a ravenous glob that seeks to devour all the cool from a particular thing and then move on when they feel the winds changing. Shoegaze and dream pop are no different.  
 

Sleep Over - Forever

Sample the Album

It's quite rare for an artist to come along, straight out of the blue and sweep me off my feet. My parameters for truly rapturous musical experiences are so elusively specific, at times contradictory, and so lofty that any special occurrences are almost a laughable conspiracy theory. Like a theorist's elaborate shill - proposing that the government's complicity with an alien hierarchy in producing growth hormones to make everyone fat and useless, so the country will be easier to take over, setting in motion their plans to dominate the world, then using said fat people in a sort of "Fat Gladiator Games", watching participants die of heart attacks and go into diabetic shock before they can even reach their opponents in battle - the idea of amazing music to bottle-rocket straight into my heart is just as ridiculous.

But when it does happen - oh man - it's like that rocket hit a snow-packed mountain and the ensuing avalanche is my adoration - tumbling down, destroying all the cabins and snowboarders of doubt in it's path. Such an avalanche occurred when I listened to the cacophonous ghost that is Sleep Over's debut, Forever. The brainchild behind such a plume of mystifying ecstasy is Stephanie Franciotti, based out of good old Austin, Texas. Franciotti floods her music unapologetically in reverb, then throws on a shawl of decayed recording quality to push it all down into the mists of the subconscience.

The entire affair is traversing the anatomy of a ghost - a once vibrant network of memories, blood, veins and organs - now a teal, rear-projected transparency in the mind's eye. The opening to the album, "Behind Closed Doors", has a similar cadence to the beginning of the Cocteau Twin's Victorialand, though instead of guitars and saxophone rising out of the ether, it is synthesizers and electronic ambience. It's an amorphous wash that pours you through the finger tips, promising greater things within. And you only have to wait about three seconds for that greater-ness. "Romantic Streams" is a gorgeous and sultry piece of music, automatically dissipating anxieties and beckoning you to come hither, lay down your head and bask in the warmth of intimacy. The recurring shower of regurgitated '80s synthesizer, trickling over distant explosions of the drum machine strikes that perfect balance between sweet and heavy.

"The Heavens Turn by Themselves" is all epic business. It is, without a doubt, the album's deep white heart and I imagine the fact it comes in the middle of proceedings is no coincidence. Franciotti delivers a satin rush of moans and croons, the words completely obscured by dark-hall reverb and delay constantly folding in on itself. The huge ambient chords rise tall like shafts of light, while a horn synth wavers between the same three notes throughout.

But this spectral corpse isn't all transcendental haze. Franciotti is sure to temper any over-saturation of sugar with a dose of darkness - namely the use of abstract structure and noise. For example, "Cryingame" grinds in with distortion and loose synth pulsations that create a miniature tornado in the gut. There's certainly a foreboding and a sense of doubt, but it also carries the outlines of curiosity more than dread.

Of course, wherever the darkness comes on the album, the light is never too far behind. In a way, Forever accurately describes melancholy, with all the happiness distressed into despair and back again and forth again and back, the fluctuations in mood are so well timed that you'll wonder why this woman didn't turn out to be a psychologist. This is the type of album that makes all my searching worthwhile. It's music that speaks directly to my unfettered genesis, affirming all the emotions but remembering to fill in the details of perspective. It's a phantom body that I am sure to return to many times and pay my dearest respects.

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Clinic - Walking With Thee

 Sample the Album

Before their stunted growth in the mid-2000s, Clinic was one of those bands that actually mastered their strange assortment of influences, rather than being ruled by them. They established a sound that was effortlessly irreverent, a kind of controlled schizophrenia spelled out by distorted clarinet, pulsating organ and, save for a few exceptions, trim drum patterns. Instead of assuming the presumptuous mantle of mixed media party host, the band traversed fog-addled forests of the subconscious to carve out a niche - regardless of the historical or contextual fallout.

Walking With Thee highlights the band's ability to create darkness as viewed through a lens of cryptic abstraction. The album comes off much like those 3D holographic cards that you tilt to see the image change, the only difference is that in place of the rainbow refraction is a monochromatic white to gray to black, all stabbed through by windows of pale teal translucence. Where as their debut album, Internal Wrangler, was a swatch - turning from glib folk tale, to bittersweet eulogy, to cheeky social commentary - Walking With Thee presents a distinctly bizarre winter.

Aside from the opening track, "Harmony", the album is chalked full of revolving-door lyrics that make pinning down a respectable interpretation difficult. On "Harmony", singer Ade Blackburn proclaims in his high-register croon, "I believe in Christmas eve/I believe to trust one's free/I believe in happiness/no one living with regrets/come fill yourself with dreams", which is a clear, albeit, resigned call for the goodness in all people. While the lyrics in the song are uncharacteristic of the rest of the album, "Harmony" comes off as a sort of shining gate, standing before the specter-flown landscapes of the rest of the album. It's not that the song is stylistically different - the clarinet, punctuating keyboard and simple house drum rhythm are right in line with the rest of Walking With Thee - but it's optimistic lyrics push it into a reverse-Pixies scenario, where the words are kind and the music is ominous.

The album's most successful hit, "Walking With Thee", is an organ-grinder with clashing drums and Blackburn's paranoid librarian delivery. "As you climb up the stairs and come back forever/Summer's in the house, untamed it was" warbles the singer, following it up with a repetition of "walking with thee" in the chorus. Fuck knows what Blackburn is referring to, but the imagery in the lyrics and the rough delivery of the music provides a creeping, jerky stop-motion animation for the mind, something involving inanimate objects coming to life. Which is convenient, because the music video for the song chooses exactly such a visual representation. When the singer cries out repeatedly, "no, no, no, no", any semblance of knowing what the song might actually be about goes completely out the window.

The nocturnal sway of songs like "Mr. Moonlight" "The Vulture" and "For the Wars" prompt you to travel to otherworldly beat cafes - far, far away from Earth. Everyone snapping their fingers and rolling their shoulders in hypnotized unison, not knowing if they are waiting for an ending or a beginning. Murals of spattered blocks, undefined triangles, cubed self-portraits, still-life lamps and fruit turned into precocious beasts and random phrases litter the sparse walls. It's a place in your mind you can't quite find, but also a place that is undeniably there.

Walking With Thee also pulls upon the sparse, acid guitar lines of spaghetti western soundtracks, mashing them into the ramshackle repetition of krautrock. "Welcome", "The Bridge" and "Sunlight Bathes Our Home" all feature jittering drum lines that have distorted, lightly reverbed guitar ribbons strewn across the top. Add in the permeating ghost of the clarinet, and the idiosyncratic haunt comes on quite strong. The songs act as a textured counterpoint to the pensive night meditation of the album's other half.

After writing all of this about the album, I've come to realize that there is a disjointedness to Walking With Thee that is definitely noticeable, but altogether unimportant in the record's enjoyment. It's because there is a roundabout cohesion, like a collage of unrelated pictures and trinkets that just -works- when you see it. Even "Pet Eunuch", which stands alone as a blast of needling punk rock, somehow fits amidst the minimal genre film soundtracks and dark jazz fusion. Walking With Thee is much like a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, basking in the unassociated associations that arise out of letting the mind loose. With Clinic, their minds found a playground in music, and though the album comes off quite serious, there is always a lingering grin behind each furrowed brow.

I Break Horses - Hearts

 Sample the Album

I'm sure many people think the dreamy side of Scandanavia has been staked unequivocally by The Ravonettes. For over a decade, the band has created guitar lines that surf their way through wide glass corridors and down avalanches of wild distortion. They have fused together demure harmonies (male/female, which is hard to tell without having seen pictures of them) that come off with a rueful sweetness - like a lover that kisses you and sticks a cigarette in your arm at the same time. But a new wind blows stronger out of the Svensk region - one that is altogether more nocturnal, saccharine and chilling. That frosty gust goes by the name of I Break Horses.

The duo's debut album, Hearts, is a textured glob of washed out melodies and chiming synthesizers, kept in line by pulsing bass drum and stilted snare breaks. Both exciting and distant, the album is reminiscent of a bittersweet relationship caught in an iceblock - the memory of which is darkened by the passing of several years. A cherished memory, but a resented one all the same. Always outlined by luminous pearl white, but always filled in with an inky, obscuring midnight-green. "Winter Beats", which confidently announces the band's existence, shimmers across an ocean of arpeggios, while singer Maria Linden floats just above the surface. Half the time it's too difficult to tell what she's singing - her low, hushed murmurs only reveal a few words in each line. It's almost as if Linden is talking in her sleep, recalling to herself more than anyone else.

Frankly, it's a gorgeous aesthetic. I Break Horses' particular lack of clarity is what makes their debut climb head and shoulders above the competition. There's a desperate intimacy here that most bands can only dream of achieving. Riding along on a crest of distorted synth lines, pushed out again and again, the band never allows you complete surrender, but they also welcome you into their arms, half-asleep, longing for an embrace. The breadth of Hearts is so sullen and anxious, exemplified on "I Kill Your Love, Baby!", where Linden softly sighs the mantra, "I kill your love/Kill your love, baby". I can only imagine this is a kind of inverted anthem for the resentment of waning desire. The relationship has run its course, the passion has gone out. Now all that's left is a slow, selfish death.

My personal favorite of all the songs on Hearts, even though they're all very good, is "Cancer", a slow-build of white-light synthesizer chords and a repeated guitar note ticking away underneath. Linden moans along, almost encouraging the synthesizer to keep going. It all culminates with heavy snare bursts, cascaded over endless cymbals. To me, "Cancer" personifies what the album is all about. It comes off like a eulogy, not only for a love lost, but an expectation never met.

I Break Horses leave all these calloused memories undulating at the mercy of their ocean. Hearts is not an album of answers, and the band never makes any pretense about that. The disenchantment of love and trust is implied, but it's delivered with such a somber resignation that any potential cynicism is disarmed. Foremost, the album is about the glue, the stitching, the nooks and the crannies that exist between our memories and how we perceive them. The space between what we felt we deserved and what we actually got. It is an area where insecurity and satisfaction go hand in hand - a place which only music can adequately describe.

Julia Holter - Ekstasis

Sample the Album

Amazon is kind of like that drunk friend whose waaaaaay too into music, tossing suggestions at you with only the vaguest of guidelines and a misguided sense of altruism. They know about so much music at once, that any suggestions are destined to be too broad to make much sense. A little sense, but not much.  Oh, you like the Pretenders? You might like Aerosmith, too. Oh, you like Aphex Twin? You might like Slipknot, then. Oh, you like My Bloody Valentine? You'd probably like ABBA. If you think Siouxsie and the Banshees are good, just wait until you hear KISS!!!

Those are all real suggestions I've gotten from Amazon. I don't fucking know, either.

Most comparisons aren't logical in any immediate way, but hell if Amazon doesn't claw and scratch to connect those oh-so-distant dots. Of course, blind chance has to win out eventually (based on the law of averages) and, if only briefly, the website finds its moments of triumph.  Every now and then, Amazon haphazardly delivers up a gorgeous suggestion that falls right in line with your particular taste. One that recently befell my "Recommended for You" page was Julia Holter's Ekstasis.

If you can imagine a fancy arisocrat's hedge maze, complete with classical statues and ornate fountains, sporadically being dragged into a deep black vortex, then you sort of have an idea of how Ekstasis plays out. It's an album that finds a strange grace in the chaos of vocal samplers and stream of consciousness song structures. You can tell that Holter enjoys the austere beauty of an ambient soundscape, but she also likes to chide and tease every once and a while.

In a sense, Holter is the fanciful young woman you find yourself playfully chasing through the hedge maze. Statues float by and crumble in her wake and ghostly versions of the singer appear randomly, her gentle vocals sweeping past in every direction. The album's enigmatic opener, "Marienbad" unfolds like a chamber choral performance, swirling organ and Holter's overdubbed vocals filling in the empty spaces. The lyrical content, as glib as it is, most likely references Last Year at Marienbad, a classic French New Wave film (one I personally hate) about a couple at a chateau comparing themselves to statues: "I can hear a statue/wonder why they're so still/all day in the garden", at least, I think that's what she's saying. It's hard to tell throughout much of the Ekstasis, because, as I said, Ms. Jules likes to be a bit of cheek. The way she cuts herself off and allows her overdubs to float up to the surface is her way of grinning widely and saying, "I dare you to read into this."

"In the Same the Room" is pretty much the closest thing to a traditional "pop" song Ekstasis has to offer and even then, Holter makes sure to loosen the reigns and see where her subconscious garden may take her. It may start out with a meditative organ and straight-ahead drum machine, but the structure is slashed with flourishes of her angelic overdub and briefly careens off the cliff into a plume of whistling and vibraphone.

Of course, her sense of humor and beauty shines the brightest on "Goddess Eyes I". The song is a vocorder mantra of sorts - Holter's effects-laden vocals wavering through like a depressing future Calvin Klein ad stuck on repeat, "I can see that the eyes are not alive to cry". The singer soon adds unfiltered vocal booms to extend the melody out in a strangely exciting way, showing that she has a rueful credence for the decorum in her hedge maze. The inevitability of the black vortex entices her, but the defacement of the garden disturbs her all the same.   

It all works because the album isn't really about cohesive narratives or well-articulated ideas, as much as it's about the feelings and placement her music puts you in. Her strung-together phrases and helter skelter synthesizer arrangements evoke an amorphous sense of calm (like any good ambient) but also inscrutable mystery. Holter's lure into the hedge maze of Ekstasis may be forboding, but amidst the tall green walls, stone gazebos and Greek statues that litter the garden, there is always a presiding serenity. The singer wants you to embrace the vortex, but to never let go of your bearings.

Wild Flag - Wild Flag

 Sample the Album

If you're looking for the musical equivalent of four howling women on a mean, smoke-pluming bulldozer, blasting through house and storefront alike, Wild Flag is a band for you. Their self-titled debut is both a soul-shaking and oddly tender experience that leaves you constantly scanning the horizon for the band's next swing around on their audio-dozer express. It's an energy that few bands these days can seem to match - not just in the powerful growl of their guitars or the reckless tempo shifts or the schizophrenic vocal delivery, but in the way these ladies apply the intricacies of melody, invention and texture.

Featuring a line-up of '90s indie rock darlings (Sleater-Kinney, the Minders and Helium) the ladies of Wild Flag are well-practiced in their craft. After years of juggling projects, shifting members, forays into other media (Carrie Brownstein and Portlandia), Wild Flag finally emerged from the chaos back in 2011, with a record to match. The immediacy and, perhaps desperation, felt on their debut points to a sense of ultimate release, a sonic boom of creative energy that had been building up for years and years.

The opening blast of love-struction, "Romance", sets the tone quite nicely. With it's slightly detuned guitar chords jittering on and off, singer/guitarist Brownstein offers a rubbery barrage of earnest desires and admissions. Though it's never clear who she's talking about, she is singing in the personal "my" but also the collective "we", so you get the sense that the band was in full support of the song's message. She sings lines like , "Hey, you fill up the spaces, those empty places/the corners and cracks/you kill my sickness, my only witness/you're all that I have" and "We love the sound, the sound is what found us/sound is the blood between me and you". For me, "Romance" stands as a defiant optimism for love in the face of an increasingly cynical world, with music to glue us together. Or just loving music. Or both. I can definitely get behind any of those sentiments.

"Something's Come Over Me" tones things down just a little bit, shifting their dozer into second gear, with measured guitar notes and singer/guitarist Mary Timony's gentle, reassuring delivery. Timony sings of anxiety, "Something's coming over me/got a fever now/I can't breathe" and "Let me ask your advice/if I fall once/will I fall twice?", with music to cure what ails, "Oooh, oooh, oooh, I hear you comin' through my stereo". The song is quickly followed by a hard thrust forward into "Boom" and the stop-start epicness of  "Glass Tambourine".

Throughout the album, you can tell the ladies atop their bulldozer are choosing their targets carefully. Once sighted, it's only a matter of choosing whether to crush it with love, cheekiness or resentment. Sometimes all three at once. "Future Crimes", with it's distorted keyboard melody, yearns for an end to some severe hypocrisy. Brownstein wails over and over, "if you're gonna be a restless soul/then you're gonna be so, so tired/if you're gonna give up on this fight/then i'm gonna call you a liar", cementing the idea that the band, despite their rip-roaring veneer, can be achingly sincere. "Racehorse" is a great use of humor to critique the pitfalls of greed. With a smart-assed confidence, Brownstein sings, "I'm a racehorse/yeah, I'm a racehorse/put your money on me", followed by a purposefully crass chorus, "we're in the money, we're in the money".

The band see's no point in making their delivery any different, regardless of the sentiment behind it. Every emotion is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps the song that best encapsulates this is "Short Version". From the off-hand guitar flourishes to the intense drum fills, you can tell the ladies are cackling loudly as they doze around, kicking their legs off the side in joyful reverie of their destruction. Brownstein yowls off enigmatic phrases like, "Inside this stillness is a wave/a force from which we cannot be saved" and "Inside this heaven is a hell/under this fever we are well".

Eventually, one of the guitars gets stuck on a particularly juicy chord, repeating it over and over, as the other begins to fly high, arpeggiating notes until the cows come home. The band yells in unison, "Okay! Alright!", bringing this soiree of pure energy to it's boiling point. Wild Flag's audio-dozer has shifted to full speed and you can't help but gleefully hang on for dear life. And that's true of the entire album. It's a rough, gratifying ride through the passions of life, navigated by earnest and vibrant women. That's a trip I will gladly take for years to come.