In the end, I decided to re-post something I wrote early in college for a writing class. It's fairly over the top and wrought with hyperbole, but it encapsulates perfectly what I felt about music at the time, and what I still do some days. As you read, listen to the music I'm writing about. That's what it's there for.
A Suite in Four Seasons
For me, the seasons will always start with spring and end with winter. I suppose it can be likened to a cycle of rebirth – the birth of warmth leads to the decay of it – but that’s not all that there is to it. I have been alive for almost 23 years, and for about half of that time, I have identified myself more or less by my musical choices. The seasons have defined me almost as much determining my day’s activities as much as my mood. It’s an endless cycle, and a fascinating one. Each year we go through the same motions, and without much exception, the same emotions. This is probably not a coincidence.
These albums are selected not just because they remind me of an aspect of the seasons, but because for all intents and purposes, this music is the season for me. I wanted to write and reflect on these albums, less as a way to convince you the reader to listen to them, and more to inspire you to consider your own. We start at the beginning of the seasonal cycle…
Spring
Streetlight Manifesto - Everything Goes Numb
“We are the few that won’t say nothing right/We are the footsteps fading into the night/Nobody cares and nobody stares with such conviction and I say/I never wanted this, no one ever wanted this/But they gave it to you so you might as well be proud of it”
- “We Are the Few”
At the risk of attaching a grand idea to a relatively standard climate change, spring is the season of hope. The mottled shades of winter’s gray are slowly replaced by browns, tans, and eventually greens. It starts slow, as the snow melts and suffocated grass is revealed. Green starts even slower, daringly jumping forward before being chastised by a late frost. Eventually, green takes its course and the gray frost is gone for another season. Both temperatures and temperaments climb, and spring begins its rise.
Coming out of the dark winters, spring has only truly sprung when I get to drive with my car windows down. This is a vastly underrated experience: It means that internal heating is no longer issue; it means that it is not yet hot enough to waste gas on AC, and it means that you are confident and hopeful enough that the weather will not betray you. When you roll down the glass between you and the world, the world will once again say hello.
When I lived in Moorhead, this often happened with snow on the ground. It made for an interesting contrast some days, but never changed the experience. In other, more normal places, this is not necessarily the case. Driving with music loud/driver proud is my preferred method of springtime travel, but it’s for more reason that simple elbow tanning. Ultimately, window-down driving is the culmination of spring’s hope: It releases you from winter’s restrictions; it gives you a glimpse at the yet untold wonders of summer.
Seasonally, spring is driving with my window down. Musically, driving with my window down is Streetlight Manifesto’s Everything Goes Numb. Nothing but bar singalongs and dirty horns, the album is twelve tracks deep. And the horn lines are dirty. With two sax players doubling duties (alto/tenor/bari) and trombone and trumpet in the mix, one of Streetlight’s shining qualities is the way that their horns can take over a song and never feel forced. Too many bands try to shoehorn in a trombone or two for a certain effect, and it only ends up sounding pathetic. Whether by experience, luck or divine intervention, Manifesto’s sound stops just short of shrill egotism at brash brass. Spring always seems a little breathless and determined to me, and that’s pretty much the most accurate description of SM available.
This brings us to the real reason you’re reading alliterations about trumpets: Streetlight in the springtime. It’s rare to happen upon an album that doesn’t have a weak song, but even rarer to find an album that swaps favorites. My favorite track from the first summer (“If and When We Rise”) was not the same from the next (“We Are the Few”) is not the same as now (“The Big Sleep”). The range is of the band is somewhat limited to “na na na’s” and big key change bridges, but the lack of stretching space actually belies their true strength: epic choruses and crashing horns don’t really need variety, they need a niche. Streetlight may not have created it, but they’re certainly nurturing it.
So when I’m driving through snow melt on poorly maintained streets, the excitement of warmth and promise of summer makes everything go Numb. My window is rolled down and my throat is slowly hoarsening while I simultaneously try to whistle the trumpet part and invite pedestrians to sing along. Streetlight Manifesto captures the essence of springtime hope thoroughly in raspy phrases and repetition. I can think of nothing I would rather be doing than singing “Na na na na” at the top of my longs and the beauty is that in the freshness of spring, it never gets old. Hope springs eternal.
Summer
Saves the Day- Stay What You Are
“Despair can ravage you/If you turn your head around to look down the path that’s led you here/’Cause what can you change?/You’re a vessel now floating down the waterways/You can take your rudder and aim your ship/Just don’t bother with the things left in your wake.”
-“This is Not an Exit”
Summer has always been the penultimate season for me. All other seasons seem to lead to it, and nothing can shoulder three seasons worth of anticipation. As a result, it always feels like a disappointment. It’s simultaneously a time of supposed accomplishment and a season for reflection.
For students, summer becomes the embodiment of achievement. It’s the longer days at the end of tunnel, and the epitome of anti-school: warm, open, and long. For former students (the rest of us), summer just seems to hold shadows of the hope we used to treasure. Where it was once a bastion for carefree recklessness in our youth, it now becomes a reminder that we can never go back.
Stay What You Are speaks to the idea perfectly. The album title refers to the same feelings that I get when I watch a sunset at 9:30 pm: nostalgia and regret. I’ve had this album since its release in 2001, and it has been one of the only musical constants in my life. It was there for my first taste of tobacco, my first sip of alcohol, and my first camping trip that combined the two.
What makes this different from an album like Everything Goes Numb is the amount of anticipation present. Streetlight Manifesto’s entire approach is a sort of anticipatory chest-thumping, while Saves the Day is already rocking their chairs reflecting on it all. It’s cynical, reflective rock about being cynical and reflective. Not a new concept, but one that works all too well. Within the canon of STD’s work, this album takes a on a greater meaning. On either side of the album chronologically, STD albums were frenetic punk affairs; the time for reflection wasn’t really at hand. Why they took a break with whiskey and cigarettes is beyond me, but nevertheless appreciated.
As I’ve written before, my favorite kind of summer night involves tobacco and sunsets. This album is playing in the background, and although the fall (and then winter) is coming, right now is just okay. I can smile wryly about yesterday and tomorrow, but as the crickets chirp and my pipe wafts, I can handle bittersweet today.
Fall
godspeed you! black emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to the Heavens
“We used to sleep on the beach. Sleep overnight. They don’t do it anymore. They don’t sleep anymore on the beach.”
- GY!BE, Interview: “Sleep: Murray Ostril”
I discovered GY!BE in the spring of my sophomore year of high school, during the first band tour I ever took. We were in Tennessee, and I bought the album off of a Tower Records “employee favorites” shelf. My life was never the same. I had only read about them in a vintage issue of SPIN, and then only briefly. Their music was described as “orchestral rock.” To be honest, it didn’t even register with me. But when I spotted the double CD, it didn’t matter.
Outside of the usual classical suspects, I had never heard any music solely without lyrics. The concept of long-form music without vocal support blew my mind (I didn’t even know who Pink Floyd was, much less Yes and the bunch). The entirety of Lift Your Skinny Fists is 4 pieces over 2 compact discs. The longest suite is twenty-three minutes long, and the shortest clocks in at eighteen.
The album opens with quiet, almost imperceptible guitar tones flowing over one another. Cello and violin join in just as quietly, and they build and burn until the 3:11 mark. At that point, marching snare and bass kick triumphantly look ahead. It continues to build until, inexplicably, it all crashes down around itself. Right at the point of the supposed climax, it ends early and wallows in its failure with half-tuned strings and broken musical thoughts.
This equates all too perfectly to fall. Fall is summer’s endgame; what happens when all of the planning and excitement gets too far ahead of itself and is crushed by the first blizzard. Yet in spite of the impending winter, fall is my favorite season. It speaks the most to change, and yet is the most reliable. During fall, temperatures will drop. The leaves will change color and drift lazily, and plans will start to have “If…” in front of them.
That uncertainty is what drives the fall season, and what makes Skinny Fists a fall album. After the climax fails at its peak, it tries again to regain itself. For seven more minutes music builds and sways. Right at its most frantic and faithful, the music changes once again. The drums go from rollicking to rambling, the guitars start to wander around the spectrum and the strings are suddenly dissonant. The song is the musical equivalent of the fall from hope to despair. It ends with half-hearted drums being hit, and as the sounds fade, one can almost see the last leaf drifting to the ground.
As the album progresses, the uncertainty intensifies. Shaken after the hopeful opening salvo, the next part starts to sample wartime interviews over reluctant piano. Fall is the season of change, and so the album progresses. Over the next two pieces, despair is treated first like an annoyance and then like a disease. In the third movement titled “Sleep,” an interview with a Coney Island resident reflects the changing of the times. “We used to sleep on the beach…they don’t sleep on the beach anymore.” The change is here. By the end of the suite the band is raging against the it. Rapid drum fills and feedback fill the air, and even though it’s futile to try and stop the yellowing of the leaves, they try anyway.
Fall also serves the idea of acceptance. Winter will come whether or not we want it to, and with will be a host of new ideas and feelings. The best one can do is to embrace and delve into the change. On their last piece, GY!BE takes a traditional folk song and slowly changes it, leading to a sudden and joyous outburst. As the outburst dies down, it fades into echoic synth. Although there is another brief interlude, acceptance via long tone wins over, and the music fades into winter.
Winter
MONO & World’s End Girlfriend – Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain
Winter is one long haul. Like summer, it’s the culmination of three season’s worth of emotions. Unlike summer, the sum of those emotions generally equal dread and depression. A lot of people equate winter with death, and it’s easy to see why. Most of the trees lose their leaves after they literally die and drop to the ground, the grass is smothered beneath snow, and water turns to ice; turning a source of life into a source of danger.
Still, the defining characteristic of winter for me is not what is gone, but what is coming. Living in Minnesota, winter often feels like a journey or trial. We undergo winter in order to celebrate everything else. Scenically, it’s the same day over and over again. Our character is defined by what we make of it, and where we go next.
Palmless Prayer… is a single 75-minute sonic idea divided into five parts. Simply titled “Trailer 1” through “Trailer 5,” on a quick listen it could sometimes be a struggle to identify any “Trailer” as unique from any other. This is not unlike winter. As this is the last season for me to write about, you probably know it’s no coincidence.
Like winter, the first Trailer is fairly depressing. The musical ideas are presented through a combination of MONO’s trademark soft-LOUD!-soft aesthetic and World’s End Girlfriend’s ambience. The result is a string-heavy piece that relies less on the noise it makes and more on what it doesn’t. It opens with a drawling, monotone cello that seems to be bowed forever. Slowly and surely, more string ideas are introduced, but immediately the listener is aware that time is not a factor here. Not unlike winter, the song is far less about presenting an idea, and more about building a foundation.
As winter wears on, it becomes clear that like every winter, there is no quick solution. The only true answer to the end of snow season is to wait for it. This same idea applies to Palmless Prayer. Most of the first two trailers are quiet and droning, hardly inclined to develop a melody. Instead, they set a fairly melancholic tone for the last three trailers.
The beginning of “Trailer 3” is akin to the first signs of winter’s end. For the first time in a half hour, guitars start to sound apprehensively. As they grow bolder, it’s a bit like the first warm spell. The strings and guitars swell together, coalescing into a reserved yet hopeful anthem. Punctuated by sharp strokes on piano, the rhythm crashes together in reserved triumph, simultaneously celebrating a momentary relief from the sorrow and the knowledge that it will return.
And it does. The anthem winds down, the piano plays sadly on, and the strings accept their fate once more. The first thaw brings about this feeling in everyone: “When it dries up” is a common phrase. Then of course, the snow falls again. The piano at the beginning of “Trailer 4” is resolute. This is the time. This time, it will melt. It’s joined by a steadfast cello, and the hope begins anew.
Eventually, the snow will melt. It could break my heart many times before doing so, but it will melt. And indeed, “Trailer 4” rises towards its end only to fall down again. “Trailer 5” picks up the torch one last time, slowly building a theme where it had failed in the past. As snare enters at the one hour mark for the first time, you can feel the sun rise.
The melody, spurred by snare and string, starts to whirl faster and faster. Electric bass starts to support the spins, and the drums get faster. With ten minutes left, there is a palpable sense of anticipation. The bass gets heavier, the guitars get loud, and the strings spiral.
The last ten minutes of the piece are undoubtedly the loudest, but they are also the most meaningful. The theme repeats itself over and over, and with every repetition it gets louder. This is a perfect parallel to the end of winter. We wait and wait, and eventually, spring is born again. On each repetition, the song draws to a louder close, with strings at all octaves rising in chorus. The relief at the end of winter, the end of the struggle, so thick you can taste it.
As Palmless Prayer comes to a quieter, happier close, I remember the first time that I actively wanted winter to end, and the hopelessness of it not happening. When it finally does, it brings about relief so strong that you can’t help but feel lighter by it. MONO and World’s End Girlfriend capture that perfectly, and the best thing about it is that their hope and mine are only similar in idea. Spring is here once more.
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