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A few months ago I discovered and dove deep into Say Hi, fka Say Hi to Your Mom. My top 5 songs, unranked:

Hooplas Involving Circus Tricks

The Death of Girl Number Two

Back Before We Were Brittle

The Twenty Second Century

Your Brains vs My Tractorbeam

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I’ve been getting into Brand New lately (yes, I know, I have thoughts about Jesse Lacey that I might publish at some point), so here’s my top 5 songs from them as of now, unranked:

Okay, I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t

Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades

Archers

Millstone

Fork and Knife

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“January 1979” by meWithoutYou

The opening track to the group’s second album establishes what they did quite well in their early days: singer Aaron Weiss screaming about his place in life through heavily literary clippings from the Gospel, the biblical prophets, and Richard Brautigan, the only thing missing is Weiss’s other perennial favorite, Rumi. meWithoutYou have been branded as Christian rock, but if I hadn’t mentioned the biblical allusions I doubt you could pick a specific religious connection: the group stand out for how they take influence from scripture and convey ostensibly spiritual themes without proselytizing or espousing any particular beliefs. You can pick out what you want, or just come to hear about being crowned the king of grasshoppers.

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“Sea Ghost” by the Unicorns

The Unicorns are strange beats. Their image, their themes and motifs, the music itself—they always presented themselves a deliberately weird. “Sea Ghost”, for me, is their best individual song, and while it’s not their weirdest, it’s weird in all the right ways. The guitar sort of infects your mind as Nick “Neil” Diamonds tells of his trip into and out of the deep ocean. The actual motive is unclear: he has a parasite attached to him, but is the song a metaphor for suicide? I don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter. The universe of the Unicorns is a magic one, one haunted by ghosts and full of odd happenings. Their sole album (Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?) is worth listening to in full, but “Sea Ghost” remains their brightest gem for me.

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“Spitting Games” by Snow Patrol

Although Run was their breakthrough single (in the UK) and “Chocolate most representative of where the band were heading, “Spitting Games” encapsulates both the past and future of Snow Patrol in 2003. The song maintains some of the quirks of their earlier work released on indie label Jeepster Records while incorporating a pop-rock flair through catchy guitars. In fact, an earlier version of the song was released as a b-side to "Run" that betrays their love of Sebadoh, taking the form of an oddly subdued acoustic number, in contrast to the final version’s Jacknife Lee-enabled, stadium-friendly juciness.

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“Sweet Talk” by Deer and the Headlights

Dear and the Headlights fall into a very loose indie-emo genre from the mid-2000s, perhaps best exemplified by Machester Orchestra’s early work, and if they’re remembered at all by the average person, the song that would come to mind would be “Sweet Talk”. Featuring vocals that convey and anxious mindset and lyrics about someone ditching you for their boyfriend—apparently singer Ian Metzger wrote it about his mother finding a new partner when he was a kid—running rapid-fire through the verses followed by a slower chorus, accompanied by guitars alternating between emo twinkle and simple chords. It’s a really cathartic listen, and it makes some sense that it was chose to be DLC for Rock Band as a representative of its genre.

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On Successfully Identifying Lostwave Songs

This is a bit different from most of the content that has been and will be here, but I think now is a good time and here is a good place to put my two cents on this out there.

I'm not going to explain in depth what lostwave is right now, because the audience for this is people who already know, but to put it very basically, it's songs that people have part or all of the audio of but don't have identifying information for—the easiest example is a song someone recorded to tape from the radio but didn't catch the name of.

In the past year there have been a number of successfully solved cases—again, I won't list them because of my purpose here, but you can find lists pretty easily. What I want to look at is how these songs are generally found. I've identified a few common methods (the acronyms refer to songs solved this way):

contacting people who might know something — WMT, TWWSE

Brute-force searching (e.g. Discogs, YouTube, SoundCloud, MySpace Dragon Hoard, copyright databases) — a bunch, including Uptown People, Kenya Dance, HLWIT

Combing through possible places of origin (e.g. listening to all songs on a station's playlist, watching a ton of a single type of videos like commercials or pr0n) — EKT, BTB, TRITA

Some, such as Fond My Mind, have been a bit more complicated, but I'd say these are the most common vectors.

Sometimes the searches will go without drama, but the first method in particular can lead to problems. A hype cycle emerges around someone who should be contacted, whether because they know it or because they may be the artist themselves, and people start piling on and harassing the person, intentionally or unintentionally. Often this becomes a problem and can make the process far more difficult than it needs to be. This is something people really need to be aware of: a potential lead is only a potential lead. There's nothing definitive, and you shouldn't get your hopes too high. At the same time, you should evaluate the credibility, because it might be promising or it might be a load of BS. Being too eager or too much of a downer can both be problems.

The success of the lostwave community in the past year is largely due to the number of people invested in it, leading to both more songs being searched for and more people searching for them, and while the cynical answer is that the wild success, the "golden age of lostwave", is just an illusion, I think there's validity to it. Some of the songs have been missing for a while and merely needed more attention paid to them; others were, while not publicly part of a search for as long, seemed unfindable until they weren't (looking at you, Everyone Knows That).

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that I've come to see that deeming a lostwave case "unsolvable" is very extreme. If people take a step back and look at how searches have succeeded in the past, we could maybe learn how to better proceed in the future. Perhaps the biggest takeaway goes back to Everyone Knows That being found: someone searched in private (hehe) through a potential pool of sources and found it. While having more people searching is helpful, sometimes the correct path is the one with little hype done away from the spotlight or in secret.

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"Who Knew" by P!nk

P!nk is probably most well-remembered for her rebel image, but the songs that reveal her sensitive side are her greatest, with "Who Knew" standing unrivaled. A meditation on loss, whether to death or to time, it depicts the disbelief of grief with P!nk's trademark personality, threatening to "punch…out" those who say the song's subject will be gone before long, while later admitting she was "all wrong" and accepting this loss is real, yet still shocking. This is all set to "Since U Been Gone"-style rock instrumentation, with strings to accentuate the climactic moments. Whether you're dealing with a literal death, or the death of a friendship, or simply losing things to the passage of time, "Who Knew" is there to tell you that you're not alone.

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“Family Tree” by Highway Demon

I’m not sure of it was a hoax or not, but this ended up on the site WatZatSong, with the poster claiming theory found it on Soulseek without an attribution—except this was weeks before an official release. Regardless of whether this was a stunt or not, it’s an interesting song one that wouldn’t be out of place in the early 2000s, but at the same time doesn’t sound like a period piece. There’s vague bits of shoegaze and grunge, perhaps most in line with Superheaven. I don’t really know much about the band—information is pretty scarce—but this track’s worth checking out.

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“Set You Free” by Frightened Rabbit

As talented of a lyricist Scott Hutchison was, he and the rest of Frightened Rabbit were just as adept at covering others’ songs with their own spin. In the case of “Set You Free”, they turned the 90s dance track into a melancholy exhortation for the wallflowers and the ones calming themselves down in the bathroom while their friends party to the original.

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"Robbers" by the 1975

In contrast to other early singles like "Girls" and "Chocolate", "Robbers" is a mid-tempo ballad that showcases Matt Healey's vocal vulnerability. Those songs had proven the band pop-rock masters, but here they demonstrated that their more dramatic side isn't limited to atmospheric meditations like "Me", but can form its own "this should be a single" songs, and setting the way for later his like "Somebody Else", while also standing its own.

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“Wicked Gil” by Band of Horses

An album cut from the groups’s great first release, Everything All of the Time, “Wicked Gil” melds the glorious guitar sound of the slower, melancholic “First Song” with a more rocking sound that creates an atmosphere most comparable to second-wave emo, yet at the same time sonically very different. There’s not many bands who sound like this. (Check out the whole album, really—it’s one of the best of the 2000s in my opinion.)

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“Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets” by the Appleseed Cast

I'm not sure there's a better example or what the Appleseed Cast do best. Mare Vitalis as a whole is a masterwork, but this song in particular showcases the group's blend of emo and post-rock that sounds like no one else. That genre mixture may sound on paper like American Football, but they're really quite different; the Appleseed Cast are louder and more driving, for lack of a better word; they recall Sunny Day Real Estate's dramatic guitars and quiet-loud dynamics with the atmospheric yet muscular sounds of, say, Mogwai. They make mood music, and I know few songs as well-suited to looking out a window at an overcast sky to.

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"Captive of the Sun" by Parquet Courts

To inaugurate this blog, I'm choosing the song I've taken the name from. It's admittedly an odd choice to start with because it's not the most accessible, but if you like post-punk influenced vaguely by rapping, it's a great track. The version with Bun B is great too. But the focus for me is that the lyrics resonate for who I was, and who I still am, as a young adult:

I'm a passtime streamer, hanging From the rafters, I don't get out I don't have fun Livin' like a captive of the sun

The term "captive of the sun" became a bit of a shorthand for myself.