an album review of “Let’s Not (And Say We Did)” by Zeahorse

The blurry streetlights and bitterly ferocious noise rock of Sidney.

Zeahorse’s latest album tyrannosauruses through a world experiencing a mass-extinction event. The first song, “Designer Smile,” careens forward with its weight-throwing groove and tyrannical vocals. The sweaty, raving lyrics—“I wish you could see me know / I'm exercising my designer smile!”—sound both insecure and commanding.

Let’s Not (And Say We Did) is the Sydney-based band’s third album and first in over four years. Zeahorse’s sound calls to mind bands like Unwound and Fugazi. Think noise rock and post-punk.

After a couple of galloping tracks, Zeahorse canter through a chunkier groove on “Guilty.” The lyrics describe treading water in a hyper-self-conscious culture of self-improvement. The rising and falling vocal sneers, “When our heads get turned into mush, blame it on the hoo-haa, the Friday night fuss ‘cause I’m dated and bloated and boring and sinking / The party will never end with someone like you / Whatever you do will only make it worse; whatever you do now will only make it hurt.”

On “The Ladder,” Zeahorse bare teeth at the ladder-climbing company man: “Ah, I climb the ladder—there is nothing better! If I could be the spanner, will you be my hammer? Ah, I climb the ladder—there is nothing better! I could be a friend to everyone!” This disaffected lament boils over to the sound of hard-charging post-punk.

Find a slight change in sound, from post-punk to a sludge-gummed crush, on “20 Nothing.” The song opens with a big beat, then rolls out a savage bass tone that sounds great with splashy cymbals. Zeahorse flash big, broad noise-rock stripes and more satire in the lyrics: “I'm so happy, I'm so ready to turn my moments into nothing / Suffocating under the money tree / This ain’t no place for you, and it ain’t no place for me.”

The four-piece band keeps it loud in the pocket. Songs on Let’s Not (And Say We Did) seethe massive grooves and layered, blaring vocals. The singing has that quality of sounding taunting, scolding, and pleading all at once—Johnny Rotten-style, already done. The lyrics deliver indelicate attacks on the materialistic, shallow, and image-obsessed—familiar targets and features of culture that, the louder you rail against them, the more they envelope you.

 

Note: Not really my taste in music, but I think it sounds good and can imagine others enjoying it.

 

something about "The Good Fight" by Harry Reid

Harry Reid was the Republican Party's biggest Democratic villain before he retired and Nancy Pelosi took the honor. In The Good Fight, Reid shares his life's story, including his battles with the George W. Bush Administration over Social Security and war in Iraq.

Reid was born and raised in a Nevada mining ghost town called Searchlight, a place where the leading industry was prostitution. "I don't exaggerate. There was a local law that said you could not have a house of prostitution or a place that served alcohol within so many feet of a school. Once, when it was determined that one of the clubs was in violation of this law, they moved the school." His parents were a tough, booze-bleeding pair, and his boyhood home had no indoor toilet, hot water, or telephone. Reid emerged a scrapper from true poverty in Searchlight.

His assessments of his influences produces my favorite passage; Reid remembers Willie Martello, a "whoremonger," lecturing him about honesty, and pairs that with his parents' ways:

... They never taught me things about basic honesty—maybe that's why I had to learn about it from the whoremonger.

But this lesson my mother did teach me, and it's the most important thing I've ever learned: She taught me to have confidence when sometimes I had no business having confidence. She taught me that no one was better than me, even if it wasn't true. She taught me that I could handle anything that the world could throw at me, whatever it might be.

Reid worked as a policeman to pay his way through law school. He faced down crime lords as the head of the Nevada Gaming Commission and eventually was elected Senator and served as Majority Leader in Washington, DC. The Good Fight shifts coherently back and forth in time between Reid's tough-it-out rise and those hard-fought, highly consequential battles of the 2000s. Quite an enjoyable read about a one-of-a-kind in modern political history.


Notes:

• “Who I am now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with those people, in those mines.”

• The book's full title is The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington. Reid had writing assistance from Mark Warren, whose resume highlight is his tenure as Executive Editor of Esquire magazine. Warren, a Texan, also worked on or directed several state- and national-level political campaigns in the 1980s.