joshuahayward

[joshuahayward]

Young M.A -- Herstory in the Making

So...it's been a long time since I've posted here. I didn't think I would ever update this blog again, but I'm so bored and reminiscing on my history as a music fan and what made me enjoy projects like this years ago. I used to be obsessed with music as a whole, always trying to learn more about the indie scene I was into and going deep into every lyric and the personal history of each artist I listened to. That's how I prefer to connect with music: intensely. But of course, you have less bandwidth for that as you grow older. Over time, I found myself primarily listening to my classic favorites, when I listened to music at all, with few exceptions.

Young M.A is one of those exceptions. If you follow this blog (and I actually hope you don't, as that would mean you know me from way back which makes this post feel extra #cringe lol), you know this is outside of the genre I used to post on here as well. But this spring someone played the music video for "Ooouuu" at a party, a song I'd heard many times in the past and never actually listened to, and for some reason it stuck in my head. On a whim, I decided to check out her other stuff (which, again, is so rare for me to do), and was immediately obsessed.

The first thing that struck me was the incredible production, but the second thing that struck me, almost immediately, was how gay nearly every song is. "Fuckin' with the same sex, they say it's a sin / But I'm a dyke and she a femme, it's a synonym" is right there on the first track of this album. I originally wanted to pull more lyrics but I stopped because it's pointless; it's so ingrained throughout. But songs like "Stubborn Ass," "She Like I'm Like," and "My Hitta" are favorites of mine because they're explicitly about Young M.A's relationships with women. I'd never in my life heard someone be so self-assured, unapologetic, and relaxed about their sexual orientation and gender presentation in the way she is in her music. So often queer people lean into either 1) saying that their identity makes no difference as to who they are as a person or 2) treating their identity like it's their sole personality trait (and no shade, I'm definitely the latter lol). Young M.A effortlessly walks that tightrope between acting (and getting everyone around her to act) like her identity is no biggie, nothing out of the ordinary, while simultaneously making it clear that it's a central part of who she is. It's mind blowing and so, so affirming to see a lesbian (a LESBIAN!!!!) be so revered and respected by the male-dominated music industry.

Anyway, after scouring YouTube and SoundCloud to download all her unreleased tracks and watching countless hours of interviews and music videos (did you know she has 50-something?), here I still am months later, being a fan in the only way I know how (intensely).

[joshuahayward]

Tame Impala -- Tame Impala

This is a limited Record Store Day re-release of Tame Impala’s first EP from 2008. Sometimes early demos and recordings are shit, but this isn’t one of those times. It’s actually pretty cool to hear early versions of later songs, because Tame do both gritty and polished super well. The reissue also includes “Forty One Mosquitoes Flying in Formation” and “Wander,” which weren’t on the original release. In case you didn’t know, the artwork is a painting Kevin Parker did of a diagram he saw once that illustrated the distance between the sun and the stars Antares and Mira.

[joshuahayward]

The Horrors -- Death at the Chapel/Crawdaddy Simone

I would literally give a limb to see this performed live, which of course will never happen lol. This is one of my favorite Strange House era songs, and it’s got an interesting story behind it, too. Most people think the song is reminiscent of a horror movie, where a murderer goes after a bunch of unsuspecting teenagers. Faris actually explained the real background of the song in an interview, saying that the teenagers in the song (Jimmy, John, Betty, and Eddie) are named after 60′s girl group protagonists. Faris only mentioned “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las by name, but songs like “Johnny Angel” by Shelley Fabares were other inspirations too. The man on the motorcycle who kills them is a man who got fed up with idealized love. There’s also a pretty cool cover of “Crawdaddy Sumone” by the Syndicats on the b-side, which was produced by Joe Meek, one of the Horrors’ favorite musical icons.

[joshuahayward]

Kate Bush -- Hounds of Love

“if the drums in running up that hill by kate bush didn’t change your life I’m not sure you’re human” -- a post I made on my personal blog four days ago. I stand by it. Full offense but this is the best album ever made. If Tori Amos is my older sister, Kate Bush is my mother. This is almost one of those albums I can’t talk about properly because I love it so much. 

The B-side of this album is most important in my opinion, but that doesn’t mean the first half isn’t great too. You already know how I feel about the first track, but the other stand-out is “Mother Stands for Comfort”, which is unsettlingly ominous and explores the theme of a murderer being confident of his mother’s continued love and protection. It also uses a shattering broken glass sound effect. One of my favorite things Kate does on nearly every song is her use of strange vocal distortions, sound effects, and disorienting, chaotic instrumentation.

While all these songs are well and good, what I really want to talk about is The Ninth Wave, the suite on the second half of the album. It was inspired both by this painting, also titled The Ninth Wave, and the Tennyson poem with the lines “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, / Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep / And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged / Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:…”

Kate said the concept is very much similar to this painting, in which someone has fallen off a boat and their lifejacket has a little light that will hopefully guide someone to their rescue. For some reason I’ve always imagined this person as a teenage girl. Either way, the first song of The Ninth Wave, “And Dream of Sheep,” is so beautiful and calm it could be a lullaby if you didn’t know it was about someone struggling, and eventually failing, to stay awake while drowning in freezing water.

As she falls unconscious, a sort of dream sequence follows. Each song in the suite is a full length, but they’re all so different and chaotic that it feels like when you have a couple of really strange nightmares back to back. You know that realistically they weren’t real and all happened in seconds, but in your head it feels like the realest experience that lasted hours. The second song, “Under Ice,” is much more ominous in tone than the first, so you know there’s something wrong, and the drowning girl has realized it too, as she dreams/hallucinates that she’s skating across a pond and sees her own terrified face trapped below. 

“Waking the Witch” is hands down my favorite track on the album. It begins with a compilation of people -- teachers, lovers, parents, friends -- telling her to wake up. To me it sounds like a journey through her memories, in which her mind has summoned every instance in her past in which a person told her to wake up in an attempt to revive her. They’re just sound bites but somehow they still have the capability to make me incredibly sad, especially the young man’s voice asking her to “wake up, love,” because this girl may not wake up this time. The hallucinations continue as the girl struggles between with the idea of whether she will reach heaven or hell, first attempting to confess and then being pronounced guilty at a witch trial. Of course, one of the methods used to prove whether someone was a witch or not was weighting them down and throwing them into water. If they drowned, they weren’t a witch; if they survived, they were. This is an obvious conflict for the drowning girl, who wants to both reach heaven eventually and live. At the end of the song, sounds from the real world -- a helicopter and a man shouting “Get out of the wave! Get out of the water!” -- break through to the girl’s awareness.

There’s a shift from the past to the present in “Watching You Without Me,” in which the girl has an out of body experience and imagines herself in her house, where someone has been waiting for her to return for hours. She tries to communicate with this person but as she begs to be heard at the end of the song, her words are choppy and distorted. “Jig of Life” is another temporal shift and a shout-out to her Irish roots. This time, it is the girl’s future self speaking to her, convincing her not to give up. My favorite lines are “Where on your palm is my little line / When you're written in mine / As an old memory?” I think this is an allusion to the life line on her hand, which according to traditional palmistry, is supposed to reveal information about your experiences, relationships, and health. This older woman is pointing out where the younger girl is located on her own palm, and demanding that the girl see that the older woman is located on hers, too.

The next songs are a huge shift in tone yet again, as the girl gets rescued and starts to wake up in “Hello Earth”. The repetition of “Get out of the waves, get out of the water” makes it sound like she’s repeating it to herself as a motivational mantra, as she seems to gain memory of what has happened and metaphorically return to Earth. Finally, the girl recovers and reflects on how her love for her family and friends, the earth itself, and her own life has increased since being revived (”You know what? / I love you better now”). 

As you can see, I tried and failed to keep this short. LISTEN TO IT!

[joshuahayward]

Grinderman -- Palaces of Montezuma

Let me be clear that this is not about to be a post about Grinderman (spoiler alert, it’s gonna be about the damn Horrors & co., AGAIN!). Honestly I’ve only even listened to two Grinderman songs and they’re both on this single lol. The reason I bought it is because Cat’s Eyes did an incredible cover of “When My Baby Comes” and it’s the b-side to this single. Like, it’s so much better than the original. Almost unrecognizable in a really, really good way.

Idk what Faris and Rachel get up to when they’re making music but it’s wild. They took out half the lyrics and re-arranged the remaining ones in the most threatening-sounding way possible (”She got hands as white as milk / And weaves a web of spider's silk that glistens,” “There is an ancient question behind her eyes / That I can't even begin to describe,” “They had pistols and they had guns / They threw me on the ground as they entered into me”) which Rachel sings in a terrifyingly soft, echoey voice and Faris practically growls over unrelentingly powerful guitars. LISTEN TO IT!!!!!

It’s probably one of my top three favorite Cat’s Eyes songs, and it’s not even theirs technically. This is also definitely the coolest-looking record I own.

[joshuahayward]

The Knack -- My Sharona/Let Me Out

I can’t remember buying this or listening to it but I’m almost certain that it was like $2 and at the time I was still laughing about that time Bradford Cox freaked out at a gig and told a man to take his clothes off, asked everyone to lift their chairs above their heads, covered My Sharona for an hour, dedicated the show “the death of folk music and birth of punk,” etc etc. tbh I’m still laughing about it and will continue to do so probably forever

[joshuahayward]

The White Stripes -- Elephant

I’m going to expose myself here...I have honestly listened to this album a bunch but the only song I could tell you about or even hum off this album is Seven Nation Army lmaooo tbh I only really got it because it was an RSD exclusive and I am such a sucker for collectables/colored vinyl

[joshuahayward]

Cat's Eyes -- Drag 

You'd think I would eventually get tired of buying every piece of Horrors-related merch but that day has apparently not come yet as I paid £15 for a single-track promo CD lol. I am so hyped for this album tbh, I love both songs they've released already and I love the minimalist artwork of Rachel and Faris's faces (didn't like the video for this one nearly as much though lmao. I don't want to see anyone getting beat up let alone my parents beating up on each other).

[joshuahayward]

The Horrors -- She Is the New Thing/Sister Leonella, Draw Japan (Dandi Wind Remix), Excellent Choice (Alternative Ending); She Is the New Thing Promo 

why do I own four physical copies of exactly the same song? BECAUSE IT’S A FUCKING GOOD SONG!!!!!!!!! and also, all the b-sides are different. I usually hate remixes, but the “Draw Japan” one is very danceable. “Excellent Choice” is one of three versions of that song, which are all incredible; for some reason I just like hearing the others do the vocals in songs (this is the one with Tom and Rhys doing the verses).

but like!!! why is the guitar part in “She Is the New Thing” so aggressive and sexy (and I hate that word)??? why are Faris’s manic, slightly slurred vocals, which are essentially about discarding women, so attractive to me??? I’m going to angrily watch live videos from 2007 and stew, yet again, about how I will never see Strange House era Horrors live. 

[joshuahayward]

The Sound of Music Soundtrack

I feel like I’ve been watching/talking about The Sound of Music much more than is normal for me recently (after all, I only saw it for the first time in late high school or early college). BUT I had to write an essay on a piece of media that portrayed some aspect of WWII recently (the Anschluss, aka the annexation of Austria into Germany... which was a STRETCH to say the least, because it’s hardly mentioned until the last 25 minutes of the movie, I got a B+, whatever), and then The Untold Story of The Sound of Music happened to air this month and HOW could I pass up clips of Christopher Plummer playing The Hottest Dad, or interviews with my sweet lovely grandma Julie Andrews. I’m honestly still shocked about the fact that she can’t sing anymore, like what a travesty. I love “Edelweiss,” but I love it even more after watching that documentary and hearing the host reveal very casually that Christopher Plummer was “lit” when he performed the reprise near the end of the movie????

[joshuahayward]

The Horrors — Sea Within a Sea

I can’t believe I spent £25 on a one-track cd with a picture for an insert that I could have printed out myself. then again, it’s me, so I can believe it. 

this also happens to be the LAST ITEM in my up-to-date collection of Horrors releases (besides that limited run of 25 glow-in-the-dark versions of Luminous that everyone seems to have bought just so they could put them on ebay for £100). incredibly, this one I found a couple weeks ago was the first one I ever saw on sale online in the past two-ish years. so while it might not be much, it’s a cool find for me especially since the artwork is Josh. I hope that going forward the Horrors start releasing 7″s again… while I get that a lot of their singles are really long now, I prefer having the vinyl over these promo cd singles. 

also: if you don’t think Sea Within a Sea is the best song the Horrors have ever written (or if it’s not in your top three at least), we can no longer be friends. I still find it funny to imagine old school Horrors fans, obsessed with the Strange House aesthetic and sound, hearing this for the first time, as the first single off the new album. to me the song sounds like dying, but in like, an uplifting way? at the beginning the instrumentation is relatively harsh and sparse, as Faris talks of “walk[ing] alone, barefoot on wicked stone,” while looking to the “scraping sky,” his “destination.” the music crescendos into this really chaotic and expansive and scary point, before becoming quieter and calming, with the repetition of the warm synth and guitar and Faris’s comforting parting words, “until the end.” Faris’s vocals fading slowly into the background while the music itself fades into a haze feels like the sonic equivalent of someone’s eyes fluttering closed as they lose consciousness. that feeling is captured brilliantly in the music video as well, as the picture slides in and out of focus. the whole song is a journey from terror and uncertainty into a calmer place of resolve and lightness; it’s 8 minutes long but you never get bored because the sonic landscape continually shifts. is it morbid to say that if I had to pick a song to die to it would be this one?

only complaints: if you listen to it with headphones there are parts where the two synth parts coming through the headphones fall out of sync in an annoying and distracting way, and I haaaaaate the way they play it live. like I would be crying and cheering for the Horrors if they stood on the stage doing literally nothing for an hour, but still.

[joshuahayward]

The Wytches - Wire Frame Mattress/The Holy Tightrope

this band needs to come back to NYC now!!!! the Wytches are honestly one of those rare bands I could see every week for the rest of my life and never get bored (I’ve seen them 7 times already....). I would say these are two of my favorite songs of theirs but...they’re kind of all my favorite songs.

I kind of just want to talk about the artwork tho like?? Samuel Gull’s sleeve and merch designs are so important to the Wytches’ identity as a band I think, and they’re really good at reproducing visually the way the music sounds. I’ve never been the kind of person to want to get a tattoo just because it looks cool, but I’ve been thinking about it recently. their friend Mark Christopher Breed does similar artwork and on his website there are lots of examples of people who have gotten it tattooed and it looks sick. but yeah the sleeve designs are just totally mad, every time I look at them I see something new.

[joshuahayward]

George Harrison & Friends -- Concert for Bangla Desh

I kind of forgot I owned this ($10 in a used record shop) and I was in a bad mood today so I put it on. my favorite part besides George’s songs is Ravi Shankar’s section in the beginning ahhh I love sitars sm...tbh I only listen to this for those two and Ringo bc I don’t care for Bob Dylan’s music (I’m content just looking at him, in the 60s at least) and idk who Leon Russell is but he sounds boring. Eric Clapton too whatever I’m a hater. follow my blog for more in-depth reviews of classic albums

[joshuahayward]

The Beatles - Please Please Me

I feel like you can’t really say that Please Please Me is your favorite Beatles album?? because it’s like, what about Abbey Road, what about Revolver, what about the half of the songs on the white album that are actually good and shouldn’t have been sandwiched between shit like “Piggies” and “Savoy Truffle”?????? (it should not have been a double album, and I will not budge on that.)

but, I don’t know. when I was a little kid and the Beatles were my favorite band, I didn’t listen to much past Rubber Soul. this cd was my jam. my best friend and I were the only kids in my class who listened to the Beatles; I remember getting into an argument with Mitchell Johnson in 4th grade because he said 50 Cent was better and, even worse, he didn’t know or care who Paul McCartney was. FOR SHAME!

it may not be the Beatles’ most important contribution to music (hell, six of the fourteen songs on the original album were covers), but at the same time it’s a classic as well as the first of the Beatles’ many incredible contributions to pop culture, rock music, and my own formative years; when I heard Paul perform “I Saw Her Standing There” live two summers back I cried real tears, and I have been known to listen to “Twist and Shout” thirty times in a row.

[joshuahayward]

Black Lips & Lumina -- Drugs/I’ll Be With You

I’m sure you can already guess (unsurprisingly) that I bought this for the Horrors connection, not the Black Lips track. Lumina is a one-off band consisting of Faris and Cherish Kaya (from Ipso Facto). but noticed something interesting: Rachel Santesso is also credited as “vocals & keyboards.” in case you don’t know (which you probably don’t because it’s purposely been kept secret for some reason), Santesso is the real name of Faris’s girlfriend and Cat’s Eyes band member, Rachel Zeffira. Rachel has two totally separate alter-egos; the wikipedia pages for Rachel Santesso and Rachel Zeffira are totally different, and to my knowledge no music publication has ever made the connection. but as Santesso, Rachel mentored Lily Allen in her short stint as a teacher, recorded several opera albums, and founded the Capital Children’s Choir, who have received attention from their covers by the likes of Lady Gaga and performed with the Spice Girls, Rihanna, and Vanessa Carlton.

I never knew much about Ipso Facto until recently, but if I had I would know that Cherish Kaya didn’t sing in the band, she played keyboards. I originally assumed she was the one singing in this track because that’s the way it was marketed. but now that I listen to it it’s so obvious it’s Rachel, and she probably had a lot to do with the arrangement as well. when I went to see The Duke of Burgundy, which Rachel and Faris scored, it kept reminding me of something they’d already done. I couldn’t figure out what though, because nothing they did on the Cat’s Eyes album sounded as eerie or scary. now I realized this is what I was thinking of. THE CONSPIRACY THEORY CONTINUES!

regardless, the original Black Lips song “I’ll Be with You” that Lumina covered here was written for the band’s friend, who died of lung cancer the day after it was written. it’s a sad, yet hopeful lo-fi garage song about the love between friends. the Lumina version is low-key terrifying; it sounds like it could be written by a deranged rejected lover who divides their time between stalking their ex and plotting in their parents’ basement how to commit a murder-suicide. it’s excellent.

[joshuahayward]

The Horrors - Horror Asparagus Stories: Top 6 US Psych-Punk 45s

this is the first fanzine the Horrors made back in the Strange House days and it’s cool as hell!! it’s got drawings by Faris, playlists by Rhys and Tom (the latter of which is responsible for the CD), vague instructions on how to modify a pedal from Josh, and a clipping telling you how to make drainpipes out of regular jeans. one of my favorite parts of it is Faris’s writing on the second to last page: “The funniest thing is surely when you hear of your school friends saying that you have left them behind on your route to ‘stardom’ but they only care about you not calling when they see you in the paper.”

of course the music on the cd “as chosen by Tomethy Furse” is weird as hell, and very the Horrors’ #aesthetic circa 2007. it all sounds like shit you’d hear in the Cave Club (in fact, I’m sure I’ve heard my favorite track, “Suzy Cream Cheese,” there before). it’s all good stuff, and none of the electronic shit Tom usually puts on playlists (SORRY NOT SORRY).

Track listing:

The Driving Stupid -- Horror Asparagus Stories

The Magic Mushrooms -- Never More

Galaxies IV -- Don’t Lose Your Mind

The ID -- Boil the Kettle, Mother

Teddy & His Patches -- Suzy Cream Cheese

The Hooterville Trilogy -- No Silver Bird

[joshuahayward]

The Wytches - Robe for Juda/Wide at Midnight

I never have any clue what's going on in their artwork but it's cool af anyways. tbh I don't even want to talk about the lyrics to these songs bc they're not online anywhere I'm sure the lyrics I transcribed for someone else once are all wrong lol. but I do love the line from "Wide at Midnight" that goes "feline eyes wide you are my only reason to keep breathing" it's such a creepy image