about an EP from some former members of aughts metalcore bands

New music from former members of Every Time I Die and The Dillinger Escape Plan

 

Whoa! Here is an EP by Better Lovers, a group combining former Every Time I Die members Jordan Buckley, Steve Micciche, and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak with former The Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato, plus producer and member of Fit for an Autopsy and END, Will Putney.

 

The four-song EP, "God Made Me an Animal," opens with “Sacrificial Participant,” and immediately Puciato’s manic, veiny-neck vocal fills the room. At 1:10, the song spins melodic with a fretboard-tapping, cymbal-riding passage under Puciato’s rubbery and subtly R&B-influenced vocal, "You got manipulated, told lies behind my back / I’m not the one you hated, you’re just looking to unpack.”

 

At 2:13, the song downshifts, freeing reverb-heavy notes and splashy cymbals to run with the falsetto—“You’re losing time to move, outcomes keep you second guessing / entombed still inside the womb, and I’m not sure you’ll get the message.”

 

Every Time I Die and Dillinger toured together years ago, but in 2022 Buckley saw Puciato performing in Las Vegas, and one thing led to another. Puciato says, “We’ve all hung out, gotten to know each other, and it’s all fire now. Everyone has already been through shit. You know yourself better. Your ego isn’t as big as it used to be. You can share your opinions. It’s a cool dynamic.”

 

Buckley says likewise: “This is my life’s work. I learned all of my lessons, passed all of the tests, and took all of the right turns and the wrong turns. It turns out what I thought were wrong turns got me here, and that’s all that matters. I have no regrets. I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

 

In April, Better Lovers put out a single, “30 Under 13”—right away, you hear an aughts-era breakdown move into a glazed-thicc riff. At 2:08, the song drops into speed metal topped off with a virtuosic little guitar solo. Puciato often dominates songs, but the rhythm section gets time in the spotlight on this one. The finalé crushes with breakdown-style riffing and the attention-seeking vocal, "How far are you willing to reach? You can’t become like this fucking machine! Oh, you shouldn’t hold onto me, hold onto me, let go of me, let go of me, try to hold on to me, hold on to me, try to let go of me, let go of me, of what you’ll never be!"

 

It shows lots of Puciato’s nose in your face, but the video looks good. The dark background and red and warm-white lights burn and reflect off instruments and faces, all stars in a dying galaxy.

“For some reason, this song got me,” says Puciato. “Once that happens, you have the toe of the dinosaur skeleton in the dirt. You start brushing it away, and soon you have a fucking T-Rex.”

 

Drums hop ahead as the guitar and bass move with wild agility on the EP’s title track, “God Made Me an Animal.” At 1:25, the song hits fault-line-grooving riffs. At 2 minutes, a melodic muted-metal sequence jets, the vocal crooning, "Deny your skin and bone, pretend the flesh hides stone / I’m sitting here, we’re talking, but we know we have to go / and I’m afraid there’s nothing that can make this clearer / I wish that we could be nearer / anything to get you here or closer—anything to get you closer, anything to get us closer, anything to get us closer!"

 

Puciato describes the project: “Better Lovers definitely feels like its own thing. I’m in so many lanes right now, so it was important that one lane didn’t step on another. However, nothing I’m doing is this vicious. This is full-on scathing. It’s been really fun. I forgot how much I liked that.” Buckley also comments on what the project means to him: “Greg and Will rejuvenated me and made me even more confident.”

 

Putney mixed and mastered the EP; it sounds crisp and clean. "God Made Me an Animal" was released July 7, 2023. Better Lovers are about to tour, sometimes headlining, sometimes backing.

 

something about the David Sedaris book “Calypso”

Calypso is one of many David Sedaris books I read last year. The first books I read were assembled essays and maintained a kind of consistency. But Calypso might have been the most thematic collection. The 21 essays trend toward Sedaris’s family and aging. The book was published in May 2018, and Sedaris has now reached his 60s.

The prose, as always, is fresh and funny. Sedaris tells stories (all semi-autobiographical), and he masterfully balances his thorny wit and criticisms with bits of cottony poignancy.

One of my favorite parts is in “The Silent Treatment.” Sedaris is telling a story about how, at some point in his pre-teen years, he supposedly started flushing empty toilet paper rolls just to be a lil' bastard. His dad, not knowing David was the cause, would then have to plunge or, failing that, pull the toilet and unclog the drainpipe by hand. But dad eventually realizes David is the culprit.

“You are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this toilet again.”

As I backed away, he pounced. Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family’s asshole.

And there it was been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.

“Why Aren’t You Laughing” also hits as Sedaris writes about his mother, who died of cancer in her 60s, and her drinking.

Maybe ours wasn’t the house I’d have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn’t as clean as I’d have liked. From the outside, it wasn’t remarkable. We had no view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought, Home. It had been a living organism, but by the time I hit my late twenties, it was rotting, a dead tooth in a row of seemingly healthy ones. When I was eleven, my father planted a line of olive bushes in front of the house. They were waist-high and formed a kind of fence. By the mid-eighties they were so overgrown that pedestrians had to quit the sidewalk and take to the street instead. People with trash to drop waited until they reached our yard to drop it, figuring the high grass would cover whatever beer can or plastic bag of dog shit they needed to discard. It was like the Adams Family house, which would have been fine had it still been merry, but it wasn’t anymore. Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.

And then Sedaris writes about his dad, a widower, looking back on his wife’s condition.

“Do you think it was my fault that she drank?” my father asked not long ago. It’s the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It’s almost laughable, this insistence on reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

I think I was a little stunned by the parts related to his sister Tiffany’s suicide in 2013.

Note: Most of these essays were previously published in magazines.

 

a review of a band that likes The Strokes

The Projectors set out to reintroduce aught rock

The Strokes balanced great melodies and tight, energetic performances with the cleverly aloof and slightly unpredictable vocal of frontman Julian Casablancas. The band’s raw, swaggering debut, Is This It, followed the example of The Stooges and Velvet Underground.

The Projectors may be more reminiscent of Herman’s Hermits than The Stooges, but the band does have some pretty good songs on this newly released self-titled album. The singer, Dylan Rysstad, acknowledged the influence of The Strokes when he described writing these songs: “With the first couple songs, ’When the Lights Came Up’ and ‘Golden Age’, I really embraced certain influences and didn’t try to obscure or hide the fact that it was starting to sound like someone else. The songs I’ve been writing for this project are what I want to be playing and listening to, and somewhat ironically, I feel like it’s the most me, if that makes sense.”

It does make sense—influences are not hard to understand. The “someone else” is The Strokes, and though Rysstad seems to be defending himself here, everyone knows musicians connect with other music just like the rest of us.

More importantly, The Projectors are not straight ripping off The Strokes the way, say, Ed Sheeran ripped off Marvin Gaye. The Projectors are just not able to rip off The Strokes.

The band lacks qualities that made The Strokes debut so good—the energy, the rawness, the swagger. But the music has other well-done elements common to songs by The Strokes—songs like “You Can Only Wait,” “Golden Age,” and “Lost in Spaces” feature a choppy, jangly rhythm guitar, a lead guitar playing simple melody throughlines, and a solid, pulsing bass. This is a warm and sunny sound led by an easygoing, agreeable vocalist.

The Projectors are based in Victoria, British Columbia. The songs on this album were originally released in April 2022, but they have been remastered and now re-released as the band works toward bigger things.

something about “Other Voices, Other Rooms”

I had a decent review of “Other Voices, Other Rooms” by Truman Capote, but stupid Blogger lost it when I pressed Ctrl+z.

I think I talked about how The New York Times review was somewhat negative, and then I probably agreed with it. In any case, I remember reading this book and thinking that the richness of detail was overwhelming, and that it must be almost unbearable to be someone like Capote—someone so sensitive to one's surroundings, for so much of life to fall into your attention.

(posts) a poem, "Bedecked"

Bedecked

  —Victoria Redel

 

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy store rings
               he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star choker,
               the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says sticker earrings
               look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a boy’s only
               a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping off tracks
               into the tub.

Then tell me it’s fine—really—maybe even a good thing—a boy who’s
               got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who
               still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means—
this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up
               everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining
               true color.

Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.

 

 

 

Note: Using smaller font to preserve more of the poet's own line breaks.

 

a review of a new album I disliked

Doomy shoegaze band Lanayah set to release new album

Reverb and echo flood "I’m Picking Lights in a Field...," an album of obfuscated doomy shoegaze. Lanayah’s cooling lava flow of sounds try to muster some shape, some force, some proximate of artistry.

“Insects in Their Immersion” loudly blasts melodic doom, a vocal barking into the wind, sucked up into a warming atmosphere of futility before being suddenly cut off for the next track. The best song is “Nameless Fluttering”—breathy vocals echo down halls of smooth bass guitar. The good part ends and, after a pause, a coda tries to recover a moment nobody remembers anymore. The album goes like this. A thick bass stands out amid a wash of noise. Songs stray and dissolve into decadence. You wake to find an arm dead asleep.

Lanayah is based in Santa Barbara, California, and Seattle, Washington. The experimental group released its first album, North Pinion, in 2016. Forever in May followed in 2019. The new album, I’m Picking Lights in a Field..., will be released June 16, 2023.

 

about seeing herself

She stood in front of the mirror, turned the wineglass upside down, and watched the throat muscles work. Her posture and body spoke quiet—her face said trust, her eyes told of a search. But when she sees this reflection, she heard only the thirst.

 

 

(posts) a John Prine song

"One Red Rose" almost gives you intimacy even when you listen to it while driving mom's car alone to the grocery store over the holidays.

something about “Better Living Through Criticism” by A.O. Scott

After Roger Ebert died in 2013, A.O. Scott at The New York Times became probably the most respected and read movie critic in America. In 2017, he published a thoughtful book on criticism, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. A central idea in Scott's book is that all art is criticism.

I enjoyed Scott's exercises of criticism using selected works of art and writing. I did not enjoy the dialectic chapters; these were supposed to be funny, but Scott's humor is stale.

Notes:

• Scott shoehorns a quote from Greek poet Hesiod into this thing—it is completely unnecessary, but I read it a couple times to savor its prose: “Never by daytime will there be an end to work and pain, nor in the night to weariness, when the gods will send anxieties to trouble us.”
• Scott stopped reviewing movies in March 2023 and started writing for The New York Times Book Review.
• He attracted haters (and defenders) online after publishing an indifferent review of Marvel's “The Avengers” in May 2012. Indiscriminate actor Samuel L. Jackson led the attack.
• Scott's review of "Joker" was much more negative than “The Avengers.” But I enjoyed "Joker."