I had only the most honest of intentions when I stumbled upon Ms. Yeh. I was sampling the new album by Taiwanese black metallers 閃靈 (Chthonic), and I casually plugged them into Google image search. Grim frostbitten glamor shots immediately bombarded me with all the force of Satan’s Almighty Penis thrust into my lusting goatholes of blasphemy. Doris Yeh has been playing bass for the band since 1999. On top of being a great musician, she has effectively employed her phenomenal body to both market the band and garner attention towards their political activism. Chthonic are actively involved in promoting human rights in Taiwan and throughout Asia, speaking out against Chinese imperialism in Tibet and their home country and advocating a greater awareness of women’s rights. Visually, Doris Yeh stuns me most in more traditional black metal attire and on stage (the last two pictures in this compilation), but she’s just as gorgeous in her modeling and goth photo shoots.
Musically, Chthonic are better than most at what they play. I give them props for incorporating that delightful and underrepresented world of Asian folk into metal, but their glossy, high production, symphonic brand of black, melodic death, and folk metal isn’t really my style. Here is a sample track from their new album, 武徳 (Bú-Tik), if you’re curious:
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
38. Split Lip Rayfield (789 plays)
Top track (46 plays): Thief, from Never Make It Home (2001)
Featured track: Barnburner, from Split Lip Rayfield (1998)
I chose the soundtrack to my four years in Texas appropriately: 92.5 The Outlaw. Poor San Antone lost its favored child–the only country station in the area that focused specifically on bands from Texas and the surrounding region–about a year after I left. (The owners thought they could make more money by instead offering another ultra-right Rick Perry-worshipping neo nazi talk show station.) Well, I didn’t actually ever hear Wichita, Kansas-based Split Lip Rayfield on The Outlaw anyway, oddly enough, but I did stumble upon them while listening to last.fm radio playlists of Texas country bands. It’s not like I’d never heard boisterous, edgy folk music before; the stuff The Outlaw was spinning had more balls than half the heavy metal out there. But to hear it in bluegrass was still a bit of a novelty to me at the time, and to hear it with this degree of technical proficiency blew me away.
They/their label unfortunately seems to have fallen pray to that fallacy that non-mainstream file sharing diminishes revenue–as if people just randomly buy albums from groups they’ve never heard without sampling a track or two first–so I can’t offer any studio selections, but the live video I’m showcasing here was one of the first recordings of the band I ever heard. In retrospect, it was a huge influence on my own personal guitar style. A bit of guitarist and singer Kirk Rundstrom’s total disregard for any supposedly necessary point of transition from acoustic to electric guitar has resonated in everything I’ve written or performed since. Sad to say, he tragically passed away of esophageal cancer right around the time I started listening to them. Rest in peace.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
39. Camera Obscura (786 plays)
Top track (228 plays): Country Mile, from Let’s Get Out of This Country (2006)
Featured track: Razzle Dazzle Rose, from Let’s Get Out Of This Country (2006)
The presence of Camera Obscura on my decade-spanning last.fm charts might be the only fluke in this series. They basically got here because I listened to “Country Mile” on repeat for about 12 hours one day. Let’s Get Out of This Country is the only album I’ve really listened to extensively in their discography (they just released their fifth last month), and while I did get the pleasure of seeing them live once, I can’t say I know much about the band. But I do think this album is absolutely delightful–a little hidden ray of light in my mostly heavier music collection that warmed my heart the first time I heard it and still does today. Its retro vibe feels oddly more authentic than any of the actual classic pop sounds it replicates, made fresh by a heavy dose of 2000s indie aesthetics and Tracyanne Campbell’s angelic vocals. Let’s Get Out of This Country takes me back in time so vividly that I swear I remember growing up surrounded by the wallpaper on the album’s cover. It’s flooded with innocent ennui, played out in front of a kitchen window on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Its depression is refreshing and nostalgic, replaying some childhood memory in which boredom seemed to be the worst thing life had to offer.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
40. Ensiferum (782 plays)
Top track (38 plays): One More Magic Potion, from Victory Songs (2007)
Ensiferum descended on metal in 2001 with a force sufficient to crush any lingering doubts that folk metal was a genre in its own right. Their self-titled debut coincided with the first instance in which I was aware enough of metal music to fully recognize the birth of something new, and for that I’ll always view them with a sense of nostalgia. When I was first encountering the likes of Finntroll and Thyrfing, metal in general was still something of a novelty for me. The fledgling trend towards incorporating folk-centric fantasy and pagan themes graced my ears uncontextualized and thus timeless. When I first heard Ensiferum, I finally realized that this was an emergent process. The clerics of musical trendiness had been persuaded to change allegiance, and Odin and Thor would have their day in place of Satan for a time.
Ensiferum’s discography is not the sort of thing that ought to necessarily make them the hallmark of that glorious and now fading trend we call folk metal. Their history is a bit more rocky, oscillating between excellence and something less. Iron (2004) frankly bored me, and I could never quite get beyond the feeling that From Afar (2009) was a collection of Victory Songs (2007) b-sides–outstanding to be sure, but extremely similar and never quite as perfect. Unsung Heroes (2012) stands taller, I think, and its negative reviews are likely a consequence of a forgivably weak ending and single-minded fans looking for Victory Songs 3.0. But no, it’s not consistency of quality that makes “Ensiferum” one of the first names to pop into my head when I think of folk metal. It’s more a matter of timeliness–of peaking when it mattered most. Ensiferum (2001) sounds a little washed out now, but it was a triumph in its day, and it appeared at the cusp of the genre’s transition from an underground pulsation to a self-declared musical movement. Victory Songs (2007), their best album (I think most fans can agree to this), emerged at the pinnacle of the genre, when the original artists were coming into their mid-career highs and the best of the bandwagoners were leaving their marks. It was supported by a grand-slam of folk metal tour bar none here in North America the following year: Ensiferum playing in the USA for the first time, closing for a mind-blowing opening line-up of Eluveitie, Týr, and Turisas at Paganfest 2008.
Unsung Heroes (2012) appeared in time to claim ownership of folk metal’s end. I’ve been getting the sad feeling lately that 2011 marked the style’s grand last hurrah. It was a loaded year for metal, with a huge number of releases. The new trend away from earthy folk towards ethereal post-black was ever present, 2000s legends duking it out for album of the year with metal newcomers like Krallice, Liturgy, Altar of Plagues, and Deafheaven–those bands I’ll wax nostalgic about ten further years from now. Ensiferum got their two cents in a year late, in a sense, but perhaps this amounts to the honor of writing the final post-script. Sure, folk metal bands aren’t going away, but the spark of collective musical inspiration has moved elsewhere. Ensiferum happened to leave their greatest marks in the opening chapter, climax, and epilogue.
I’ll leave you with a really beautiful song from Unsung Heroes: Burning Leaves.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
41. Our Lady Peace (765 plays)
Top track (30 plays): Angels Losing Sleep, from Healthy in Paranoid Times (2005)
We are all entitled to a guilty pleasure or two. I would humor calling Our Lady Peace mine, but only if we agree to restrict their cause for lameness to the lyrics. Their popularity, especially as those “Canadian softies” emerging amidst much heavier U.S. trends, overshadows the fact that they are absolutely amazing. Raine Maida’s voice is capable of making anything sound great, and capable of making me not give a shit about singing a falsetto at the top of my lungs at traffic lights with my windows down. Even as I was signing the final divorce papers with my radio in the late 90s and letting my affair with Napster and heavy metal be known, I was probably listening to 1999’s Happiness…is Not a Fish That You Can Catch more than any other album on the market. I’ve definitely listened to it more than most other 1990s albums–even the grunge greats–in my more informed years to follow.
How people have experienced OLP over the years probably varies drastically depending on where you’re from. The late 1990s and early 2000s marked the final days of musical segregation, with Americans barely having a clue who Radiohead, Blur, and Muse were. (Didn’t one of them do that “woo-hoo” song?) The U.S. and Canada were a bit more in sync, but Our Lady Peace was definitely not the overhyped megaband down here that my Canadian friends recall. They were just “that band that did Clumsy and Superman’s Dead”. The singles on Happiness received minimal air time, and the only song since that I’ve really heard extensively here was “Somewhere Out There” (Gravity, 2002). (I can’t honestly speak for their last three albums of course. Maybe “Angels Losing Sleep” was huge–it deserves to be–but I hadn’t listened to mainstream radio in years by then.) My main point here is that, while OLP might have been played to the point of annoyance in Canada, down here they were presented modestly enough to not face serious media pollution. I had a better opportunity to engage them by choice–and choose which songs I liked best.
Our Lady Peace are a band that has definitely catered to the radio single. Even on their first album, Naveed (1994), a few tracks stood out as decisively more catchy than the status quo. Their albums by and large are never perfect; there are plenty of second-rate tracks in their discography. What they have really accomplished throughout their career is a consistency of top-notch quality among the handful of main focus tracks they produce for a given album. They are a band better set to a playlist, and even as recently as Burn Burn in 2009 they’ve pumped out new material worthy of that mix. (“Signs of Life”, “Paper Moon”–featured above) Happiness…is Not a Fish That You Can Catch remains, I think, their best album by far, because it is the only one for which I can safely say there are no downer tracks. Every song on that album could be a single. But I really do enjoy the full discography, and I have a tendency to queue it up from start to finish when I’ve got a long project to work on at home. Something about the more ho-hum tracks projects a sort of humility on the big picture–the sense that these guys are down to earth, not supernaturally brilliant in the sense of contemporaries like Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. Their lyrics are frequently incredibly lame, but that’s the only major fault I hear in a band that was perhaps a bit too successful to be appreciated for their real worth.
Our Lady Peace: a guilty pleasure? Maybe, but I’ll keep singing along.
I have two major hobbies: music and sports. I only tend to write about the former because frankly, I have no idea what it’s like to be an athlete. Aside from some peewee baseball and my Army training, I can’t say I’ve ever physically exerted myself for reasons other than a paycheck. I love watching sports for the suspense and the statistics; I don’t pretend to know the game better than any of the players and coaches actually involved. It is with that in mind that I’d rather not pass judgement on Bubba Watson’s controversial comments to his caddie over the weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with the headlining golf gossip of the week, Watson headed to the 16th on Sunday with a two stroke lead and then managed to triple-bogey and blow the tournament. With all cameras pointed his direction, he appeared to criticize his caddie for one bad shot after another rather than accepting blame for his mistakes. Were his complaints legitimate? Probably not. He’d already played the par 3 16th three times that week, scoring two pars and a birdie. I would hope a professional at his level knew what to expect without relying on his assistant to make the calls for him. But I don’t play golf; I just watch it obsessively. Maybe his caddie really did cost him the tournament; or more realistically, maybe the media, riding off Sergio Garcia’s fried chicken comment, was desperate to create ratings-boosting controversies out of nothing. He is probably only guilty of forgetting that the cameras were rolling while venting his general frustration over a series of shots that cost him more than $800,000.
But let the pundits sling their mud, because I hate Bubba Watson’s guts. When he beat out Louis Oosthuizen at the 2012 Masters, I practically fell into a depression. There is always a bittersweet feeling when unrepentant athletes with substantial skeletons in their closets achieve the ultimate goal in sports, but at least no one thinks Kobe Bryant or Ray Lewis are good guys. Watson is different. Not only is he the biggest asshole in sports to have never killed somebody or beat his wife, but he has convinced a sizable fan base that he is the ideal Christian role model.
Bubba wants you to know that he “loves Jesus and loves sharing his faith”. It’s the very first line on his official website’s “Who is Bubba Watson” section. Moreover, “Bubba and his wife, Angie [sic] are committed Christians who share a passion for philanthropy and dedicate as much time as possible to giving back.” At every turn in Bubba’s career, he is careful to remind the media of his faith and philanthropy. He tells us through social media. He tells us in press conferences. He tells us in private interviews. Most athletes talk about “giving back” at some point; it’s PR 101. But Bubba wants you to know that he’s not just your average athlete philanthropist. No, his entire life is a service to Jesus Christ and his good word. Let us count the ways.
Bubba Watson adopted a child. He gave some poor Chinese girl about to be drowned in a river, or maybe some AIDs-ridden Nigerian teen, a shot at a good life, right? Oh, never mind. He adopted a one month old white male when his wife couldn’t get pregnant. You know, the sort of kid you have to go on a years-long waiting list to acquire, because every rich white asshole who can’t produce an heir wants one.
Bubba Watson places his family first, even at the expense of his tour schedule. That’s what he told us when he canceled his May tour dates, including the prestigious Players Championship, after winning the Masters last year. He wanted to be there for his little Caleb, and teach him how a responsible, caring a dad ought to act. He’s got his priorities straight, unlike those other pros. Now Caleb will have lots of great memories of his dad being there for him when he was… two or three months old? Yeah, it’s regarded as highly unprofessional in golf to take a month off just because you “feel like it”, but so what? Bubba had just banked $1,440,000 and accomplished the greatest goal in professional sports: he won a championship. Instead of just ignoring the petty media buzz over his vacation, he twisted it in his mouth and in his mind into some sort of charitable expression of Christian values. Give me a goddamn break. Phil Mickelson showed up to the U.S. Open jetlagged this year because he flew over night from his daughter’s graduation in San Diego, and the only reason the media made a big deal about it was because it’s Phil and he almost won anyway. He–like the majority of PGA tour members–knew how to responsibly balance his personal and professional priorities, and he never bragged about it. All Phil proved is that he’s a good father. He never suggested he was better than all the other good fathers out there. Bubba took a month off to party and celebrate his own accomplishments–that much is arguably tasteless but fine–and then he intentionally projected it as though this made him the PGA’s ultimate family man.
Bubba Watson raised over one million dollars for charity this year, through a combination of donations and his own earnings. Charitable giving ought to be expected, since, according to Bubba Watson, “Bubba’s character exemplifies the strength and humility it takes to succeed in life.” But what athlete doesn’t donate a little to charity? What has Bubba done towards this end that somehow gives him more bragging rights than the rest of them? Is it the fact that he does it with God on his side, whereas the others are just decent human beings? Bubba just loves to talk about what a humble guy he is–as long as the topic is distanced from his boasts about wearing a $500,000 watch (did I just say a $500,000 watch?…) and driving the original Dukes of Hazzard General Lee stunt car. Hey, I’d live large if I was a celebrity or sports star too, but I don’t think I’d brag about following the teachings of Jesus while doing so. I mean, I don’t read or believe in the Bible, but I’ve never seen anyone quote that passage where Jesus talks about the virtue of investing the vast majority of your earnings into frivolous social status symbols.
Bubba Watson donates for breast cancer research. That’s cool. He also donates to a military veterans service for wounded Green Berets. I’ve got no personal issue with that, though I think Jesus was a pacifist. But here’s what I really love: he donates to The City Church. I don’t know how familiar the average, non-psychopathic American is with non-denominational Christian mission organizations, but I grew up surrounded by them. They’re absolutely traumatizing brain-washing centers where you are taught at a young and volatile age that all of your friends and family will suffer terribly if you aren’t prepared to die as a martyr for their salvation. You learn all about how America ruthlessly persecutes Christians (i.e. non-denominational Christians, because anyone who acknowledges multiple interpretations of Christianity is clearly misguided and requires your guidance for salvation), how homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists, socialists, non-Christians, and really most Christians too–basically anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News–are corrupting God’s kingdom and distorting his values, and how only you have been entrusted by God with “the truth” and the power to fight back. Stellar fucking stuff; the real “Onward Christian Soldier” mentality. I have enough personal experience to recognize by browsing that website exactly what Bubba’s “charitable donations” are going towards. But it comes as no shock to me. It’s entirely in keeping with everything else the man does.
Bubba Watson is not afraid to speak out against corruption and evil when he sees it! Why, at the Alstom Open de France in 2011, when his classy 5-star hotel had the nerve to pollute his room with bottles of vintage wine, he dumped them out his window and let the world know about it. When the crowd heckled him the next day, he did not back down from righteousness! He bravely announced his total disgust with European culture and refused to return to any future European Tour event. (Except the Open Championship of course; he can make a lot of money there and maybe buy a second watch.)
Athletes and celebrities can do whatever they want with their earnings. While I think some of the charities he supports are better branded as dangerous hate groups, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the majority of his actions. But Bubba adamantly insists–and adamantly believes–that he is the most humble and charitable man in golf. He’s the 21st century version of a white supremacist piece of shit, and quite possibly the most egotistical, self-righteous bigot on the PGA Tour. And did I mention he has openly criticized Tiger Woods for not setting a good example?
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
42. Burzum (756 plays)
Top track (42 plays): Key to the Gate, from Det Som Engang Var (1993)
I remember watching some comedy in the early 90s where a cave man frozen in ice gets thawed out and has to adapt to life in modern Los Angeles. I don’t really remember any details about it, except that it was bad. This has pretty much been Varg Vikernes’s fate since being released from prison in 2009, and no one ought to feel the least bit sorry for him. Varg ultimately made his name known through his crimes, not his music, but he used to deliver a sound to match. There is a tinge of the deranged in classic Burzum. Albums like Det Som Engang Var carry such a lasting appeal because they simultaneously capture the pagan spirit of early 1990s black metal and the air of madness that overtook the scene, landing many of its participants in coffins or jail. Varg’s first new recording after his release, Belus, was sufficiently better than anyone expected to open the door for a potential second chance at a successful musical career. But after more than a decade with no means to record, Varg let his longing for creative expression take him, pumping out five new albums in the four years that followed with little quality control, coupled with an endless sea of writings. The overwhelming majority of this material was ho-hum, and for any other aging artist this would be fine. Plenty of other later-career heavy metallers have earned sufficient respect in their younger years to maintain a fan base as their capacity for greatness dwindled. Plenty of revolutionary thinkers have maintained a right to social commentary extending beyond their original mode of expression. But no one respects Varg Vikernes nor views him as a revolutionary, and no one really should. In spite of the quality of his early albums, he remained rightly subject to criticism, leaving prison to run head first into a sea of high expectations and further demands for proof of talent. He failed to rise to the occasion, and now no one cares. He is busy writing treatises and filming documentaries that no one will ever grant the time of day. He is chugging out album after album that most of us will never bother listening to. Sorry Count Grishnackh. It is too late for your opinions to ever matter.
We can certainly continue to derive enjoyment from select Burzum material while rolling our eyes at any mention of its creator, but for me Varg is a bit of a disappointment. Black metal is something of the thinking man’s sledgehammer–a genre which oddly entangles disgust for intellectualism with ideas which require a great deal of formal dialogue to express in other-than-artistic ways. But if the fault lines of egotism render my favorite forms of music necessarily esoteric, I have always preserved the hope that some musician might have something intelligent to say about it. Varg runs his mouth ceaselessly, and I think it a shame that nothing substantive has ever come out of it. No one has ever been in a greater position to serve as the spokesman for the genre than Varg Vikernes, granted for all of the wrong reasons. The murder of Euronymous and Varg’s outrageous, self-incriminating comments which followed propelled him to a level of stardom that his music alone could have never achieved. Sure, he was entirely at odds with the genre; he could never, unlike artists such as Ihsahn, point to unlawful actions in the early 90s scene as an immature expression of an entirely justifiable state of mind. But he had the one thing no other black metal artist could hope to achieve: extensive public attention beyond his niche genre.
I guess I hoped that more than 15 years in prison would have given him the opportunity to grow up a little. I thought maybe he would fess up to having been a dumb-shit teenager who ruined the Norwegian scene by letting his emo jealousy of Euronymous get in the way of his commitment to its values. I thought he might very carefully and very professionally take his time crafting an outstanding album as proof that he was moving on to bigger and better things. Belus succeeded in buying time, but Fallen and the works that followed proved beyond a doubt that the dumb-shit teenager was nothing more than an educated, bearded, dumb-shit adult. He never acknowledged his debt to metal–and his potential for adding a substantial new flame to a musical movement that has since rapidly left him in the dust. In short, it irks me that a man of so many words, once returned to the spotlight in 2009, had so little to say and show for it. Nevertheless, classic Burzum has stood the test of time and remains a quintessential example of the sound that swept Scandinavia in the early 1990s and continues to influence countless bands today.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
43. Neutral Milk Hotel (727 plays)
Top track (81 plays): Holland, 1945, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
Featured track: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (full album)
When you listen to a really diverse and enormous catalog of music, terms like “favorite” can seem more cheap than they really are. We are bombarded, after all, with trite Rolling Stones style top 100 whatever lists for which half the entries are predetermined without any serious consideration whatsoever and the remainder are entirely arbitrary. I like to think that this Top 50 series contains sufficient factual restraints to avoid these shortcomings–that the inclusions are genuine in a manner that avoids momentary whims and degeneration to name recognition. (You won’t find any Led Zeppelin, Beatles, or Pink Floyd in this house.) But I also like to think that that the dozens–maybe hundreds–of musical entities I have described as a “favorite” here on Shattered Lens have been sufficiently qualified to bear weight. I don’t typically speak of unequivocal favorites. I point out what I like best under a well-defined set of conditions.
So read this as it stands: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is my favorite album. At some point in the late 1990s, Jeff Mangum became possessed by some superhuman muse long enough to compose 40 minutes of poetic euphoria.
I don’t know that any prose description could fully capture the depth of this album. It is a mesh of beautiful poetic metaphors that only slowly begin to reveal themselves over dozens of listens. It does follow a loose chronology that is sufficiently cryptic to allow for multiple but similar interpretations. The album begins with a reflection on an innocent childhood and the narrator’s first sexual experience (presumably with her–or possibly his–step-brother, the “King of Carrot Flowers”) in an environment of domestic tension that they were at the time oblivious to. The scene then fades into the past like a movie, the The King Of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two And Three presenting a bizarre first-hand account of the experience of being born–some sacred moment followed by an explosion of chaos as the narrator first boldly proclaims her existence in total disregard to the good and bad around it. (Garbage bins? Dead dogs?) The title track which follows seems to hark back to the scene of the opening song from the perspective of the innocent in awe of the mysteries of life, embracing her young lover and dreamily “laughing out loud” at “how strange it is to be anything at all.”Two-Headed Boy is the first track in which the lovers start to grow up. The childish “King of Carrot Flowers” has become a metaphorical misfit, one head clinging to youth and the other being forced into the hardships of adulthood. Their physical love is expressed in passionate desperation, aware that their innocence is fleeting: “In the dark we will take off our clothes, and they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine and when all is breaking everything that you can keep inside.” The narrator ultimately assures him that their innocence is eternal, lying in wait for the moment that he can overcome his recognition of the hardships of life, and then she gets up and leaves: “Two-Headed Boy, there’s no reason to grieve. The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves left beneath Christmas trees in the snow. I will take you and leave you alone, watching spirals of white softly flow over your eyelids, and all you did will wait until the point when you let go.”
At this point, an instrumental interlude marks the passage of time into the middle third of the album. A blundering plod titled The Fool, it seems to capture the cast’s development into typical adults, overcome by petty concerns and squabbles. This new stage is not immediately spelled out, however. Instead, Mangum introduces the elusive ‘voices in his head’ characters in the plot, beginning with Anne Frank and her friend or lover. Holland, 1945 rocks out in a peculiarly up-beat fashion. It seems to be narrated by a holocaust survivor reflecting on the loss of Anne. Unlike the Two-Headed Boy, the narrator here is peculiarly optimistic and remains positive even while presenting such cutting lines as “it’s so sad to see the world agree that they’d rather see their faces filled with flies, all when I wanted to keep white roses in their eyes.” Prevented by tragedy from ever experiencing a traditional passage into mundane adulthood, the narrator remains at once innocent and fully aware of one of the 20th century’s greatest atrocities. The next track is beautiful but hard to place in context. We meet the “Communist Daughter”, a woman placed in another 20th century nightmare, and the imagery is completely inverted. The ocean is filled with seaweed and the white mountain peaks are not blanketed in snow but stained with semen, while the industrial wasteland around her is beautiful–the “cars careen from the clouds”, and “the bridges burst and twist about”. Oh Comely presumably returns to the original cast, and it hits rock bottom. Narrated, I think, by the adult successor of the Two-Headed Boy, it captures an intense bitterness towards some former lover–probably not the step-sister–and towards life in general. The narrator describes Comely as having been raised by a broken family in a trailer park and blundering into one bad relationship after another in search of elusive happiness, sleeping with men who make shallow promises in order to take advantage of her: “Oh Comely, all of your friends are now letting you blow, bristling and ugly, bursting with fruits falling out from the holes of some bratty bright and bubbly friend you could need to say comforting things in your ear. But oh Comely, there isn’t such one friend that you could find here standing next to me; he’s only my enemy. I’ll crush him with everything I own. Say what you want to say and hang for your hollow ways.” The narrator goes on to reflect on his own relationship with Comely and those moments when their love felt sincere, and then the song gives way from bitterness to lament. Voices of the past speak out in the narrator’s head: Anne’s lover describes her miserable death and regrets being unable to save her, while another voice calls to his dear Goldaline, claiming to be trapped “inside some stranger’s stomach” and promising to return her to a place where “there is sun and spring and green forever”.
The album then moves on to what I would consider its third and final movement–three tracks of inspiring beauty that describe the narrator–possibly the adult King of Carrot Flowers/Two-Headed Boy–reaching that “point where you let go” described in Two-Headed Boy and abandoning his bitterness to embrace life again. Ghost is something of an awakening. The narrator realizes that the ghost of Anne lives within him with her youthful spirit intact, and with it a sort of universal, eternal innocence shared among all of us though often forgotten with age. Suddenly the optimism of Holland, 1945 makes sense. “One day a New York city baby, a girl, fell from the sky from the top of a burning apartment building fourteen stories high. When her spirit left her body, how it split the sun. I know that she will live forever. All goes on and on and on. She goes, and now she knows she’ll never be afraid to watch the morning paper blow into a hole where no one can escape.” Her spirit will never fall into that hole of adult drudgery–and the narrator can at last climb back out of it. The next track is an instrumental celebration of this. The closing track, Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2, is by far my favorite on the album. The narrator finally grasps what is important in life. He makes amends with the people who were once close to him–his misguided father, a wayward brother, perhaps a former sister-in-law–acknowledges the breaking point where the innocence of their relationships was lost, and encourages the Two-Headed Boy to appreciate the simple things in life while they last and not be bitter at their parting:
Daddy please hear this song that I sing. In your heart there’s a spark that just screams for a lover to bring a child to your chest that could lay as you sleep and love all you have left, like your boy used to be, long ago, wrapped in sheets warm and wet.
Blister please, with those wings in your spine, love to be with a brother of mine. How he’d love to find your tongue in his teeth, in a struggle to find secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight, sounding only at night as you sleep.
In my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying, as your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet. Rings of flowers ’round your eyes, and I’ll love you for the rest of your life.
Brother see, we are one in the same. And you left with your head filled with flames, and you watched as your brains fell out through you teeth. Push the pieces in place. Make your smile sweet to see. Don’t you take this away. I’m still wanting my face on your cheek.
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle.
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies.
When we break, we’ll wait for our miracle.
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.
Two-Headed Boy, she is all you could need. She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires, and retire to sheets safe and clean. But don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
44. Peste Noire (721 plays)
Top track (65 plays): Ballade cuntre les anemis de la France, from Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor (2009)
Peste Noire is probably the most French thing to ever happen to metal. Famine has frankly stated, if the interview excerpts I saw were properly translated, that he intentionally aims to make his music as terrible and possible. This is something quite successfully achieved in the nearly unlistenable L’Ordure à l’état Pur, released two years ago. That album seems to me a big “fuck you” to everyone who failed to give Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor an abysmal rating on Encyclopaedia Metallum. Its unprecedented levels of tastelessness successfully mock modern consumerism through an acute awareness of that about popular culture which inclines us to lose all faith in humanity. (Famine even traded in his traditional black metal/skinhead garb for a nu metal image in the packaging.) Maybe Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor, released in 2009, was intended to be a parody too, but in that instance Famine let his actually incredible song-writing abilities and aesthetic awareness get in the way of producing anything which can honestly be regarded as terrible. I am rather inclined to call it one of my favorite albums of all time.
One of the most interesting people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing was a highly educated skinhead obsessed with extremely racist, nationalistic bands in the punk/skinhead/RAC sphere. He didn’t share any of their ideologies in the slightest, but he was able to set aside disgust in what they stood for and tap into the sort of raw emotion that drove average working-class individuals to proclaim such extreme views. Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor might be said to mock this sort of music by maintaining the emotional appeal while deflating the fictionalized history typically necessary for its evocation. It embraces French nationalism as a parody, presumably. At least, it presents a raw, ugly image of the past that hardly meets the standard conditions for pride or beauty. Yet Famine’s vulgar vocals and lo-fi, distorted, “black and roll” instrumentation come coupled with an intense feeling of nostalgia that persists throughout the album. The parody, if it can be called a parody, stems from the presentation of nostalgia for something grotesque, but towards this end Famine committed his artistic talents without restraint. It is a nostalgic ode to a sick, sinister past, juxtaposing musical representations of unjustifiable violence and intolerance to a feeling of warmth and comfort. On the one hand it is deliciously dark, and on the other it is a legitimate embrace of nationalism in its most honest clothes. Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor is an album that has always fucked with my head, and I love it dearly.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
45. 東野美紀 (Miki Higashino) (705 plays)
Top track (31 plays): Beautiful Golden City, from Suikoden (1995)
Ms. Higashino is the first of a handful of video game music composers to have risen through my ranks over the years, thanks almost entirely to her beautiful contributions to the soundtracks of Genso Suikoden I and II. (Funny, I would rank Suikoden II in a three way tie for my favorite video game ever, and all three relevant composers made it onto the charts.) Her discography is small but compelling, showcasing an appreciation for traditional Asian and European folk music that rarely surfaces with such force among her contemporaries. Paying special attention to Japanese and Irish folk in particular, she managed to imbue the first two Suikoden titles with a lively earthiness ideal for an unprecedented model of gameplay made possible by the Playstation. The Suikoden games eschewed fantasy in the raw for an appeal to political and military strife in which the hero moves from town to town gathering an army and waging war along grey lines, the quintessential naivete of the RPG hero being frequently exploited to generate scenarios in which the moral high ground stood open to debate. If the main plots centered around those characters most aware of war’s many faces, the hero and the bulk of his officers–108 recruitable characters in all–were simple folk, fighting for personal reasons without a grasp of the big picture. Miki Higashino’s success in the Suikoden soundtracks rested in her ability to score appropriate music for the simple majority–those characters with deep ties to the land, who lacked a grand vision and swallowed whole the political propaganda which cast their homes and country in jeopardy. Songs like Beautiful Golden City capture what the majority of the Suikoden cast fought to preserve.
Higashino has a long history in the video game music industry in spite of her short list of works. She composed her first two soundtracks–Gradius and Yie Ar Kung-Fu–in 1985, at the surprisingly young age of 17. Yie Ar Kung-Fu in particular reveals that Higashino bore an appreciation for folk music from the very beginning of her career. I’ll leave you with the NES version of this remarkably early score.
Through the Shattered Lens 
