lizziecq-blog

[lizziecq-blog]

i won’t let you go

the other day saw the release of an album that has likely flown under the radar of most people i know, but to me represents the culmination of something ancient and ambiguous, whose precise contours will likely take much more time to sound*.

If We Ever Live Forever by Longwave

historically, longwave are one of the least-remembered members of the so-called “class of 2001,” which was one of those vanishingly rare moments in music history where a bunch of bands in NYC got popular at the same time and thereby, for a time, held the rudder of popular rock music. this was the same moment that introduced us to interpol, les savy fav, and even the national, alongside a swath of much less memorable swoosh-gaze fluff like the exit, i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, etc. within a couple of years this moment had expanded and germinated into the “post-punk revival,” which in true punk fashion was capitalized on most enduringly by the brits, and blessed us with bands like the futureheads and field music while cursing us with boneheaded dross like franz ferdinand.

of course we’re ignoring the biggest driver of this wave: the strokes. is this it dropped that year (on rough trade, of course), and apparently it was so good that brandon flowers felt forced to rewrite what was to become the killers’ hot fuss from scratch. nice work boys! “mr. brightside” is still pretty good!

coming to the point: while longwave technically can’t be grouped in with the class of ‘01 (their debut had dropped the year before, and their major label “breakthru,” such as it was, had to wait until 2003), they had enough sonically in common with interpol and their derivatives to earn a spot on the dais; and at any rate, they were such good bros with the strokes that the latter invited them to open their first UK tour, which is what finally convinced the majors to give longwave a shot.

this is about where i come in. having joined my first band around the time is this it had hit - i’ve got my story about the first time i heard it just like everyone else** - i absolutely devoured it, along with the rest of the family. even at age 11 i was jaded enough not to credit the whole “saviours of rock ‘n’ roll” thing the critics had been trying to pin on them (also on the hives, and the vines, and the white stripes, and... man, rock ‘n’ roll is really just a gasping beached fish we’ve been spritzing with water every now and again for the last 40 years or so, huh?), but still it was hard to resist the lure of a bunch of drug-addled sex robots chugging straight eights into fake subway tunnels painted onto brick walls - like everyone else, i wanted dry, lazy, mechanistic beats, and i wanted them now. incidentally, this being the heyday of MTV2, this was the last time i can remember purposefully turning on the tv in the hopes that i might stumble onto the strokes playing something or other.

well, almost. because it was one of those times, maybe a year later, that i saw for the only time an ad for an album called the strangest things by a different new york band called longwave. 

the ad must have only been about 15 seconds, and i remember little of what it contained other than it was probably a bare sample of some of the band’s trademark atmospherics underneath the band’s name being repeated a few times. i couldn’t tell you what made me interested in it based on that, other than i was hungry for identity and i had access to kazaa, so now that i had heard of it there was no good reason not to give it a try. 

so i got on kazaa and the first thing i found was this:

not that it’s too surprising considering i was 12, but i hadn’t even considered anything beyond power chords by that point (my family had recently driven all the way to new york to see a reformed television play; i slept thru it) - and this was an entire song that didn’t use chords at all - i suppose it sounds a bit dated now, but this was an entire song that depended on textural variation rather than harmonic motion to define its structure, and how the hell were they even making those sounds to begin with? 

i bought the album: the strangest things. i still remember feeling my bedroom rock and scatter my bones when the first track hit:

i researched them on the allmusic guide; mackenzie wilson described one song as “just as charming as ride’s ‘vapour trail’” - who were ride? pitchfork was less enthusiastic, lamenting that producer dave fridmann, with such distinguished credits to his name as the flaming lips and mercury rev, would stoop to making something so bland - but who were they? 

this last piece was key as a matter of fact. there was no one i could get to muster as much enthusiasm for this sound as i could. my older brother, my only musical collaborator at that time, was positively venomous toward them, as he was with basically everything i liked that i had found on my own. but for my part i was done with power chords - i wanted to play this new thing i had found called “shoegaze.” and if my brother wouldn’t do it with me, well, i had just borrowed a cheap 4-track and orphaned delay pedal from my dad - it was time to strike out on my own. i picked up the guitar, started writing my own songs, and named my band day sleeper, peevishly dodging REM comparisons for about the next ten years:

and so: longwave, for all their virtues and shortcomings, were officially My First Indie Rock Band. i’ve extemporized at length about what i love so much about them elsewhere, but to paraphrase a good friend of mine who may have been my only convert across all this time, it’s not easy to be this simple and still be true. 

the real story i wanted to tell, however, is this one:

i grew up in the boston area, and the first time i got the chance to see longwave play live was when they played at tt the bear’s in cambridge (now sadly defunct, but i have a whole other trove of stories about being nurtured by this sweet little club). i was 14, and couldn’t get into the club by myself; thankfully my stepmom was able to convince my dad to get off his ass and take me down there, and even more thankfully, tt’s knew us both well enough to let me in the club (with X’s on my hands, obviously) as long as i stuck by my dad and didn’t try any funny business at the bar. i didn’t, but with my age i made a pretty strong impression on a very friendly (and very drunk) couple standing up front with me - i’m not sure how, but i’m certain they spread some kind of aura of protection around me that night, even if they mostly just gave the band a hard time for not playing any of their older songs***.

the show was stellar - they even made fun of the aforementioned i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, whom i had missed anyway - and fucking loud. and since this was tt’s, after the set the band stepped off the stage to talk to the audience. and my drunken friends introduced me, perhaps more loudly than the bar staff would have liked, as a 14-year-old.

and i talked to steve, their singer, and the first thing he asked me was if i played music.

i got to tell him all about how i had found his band, how it had inspired me to make music on my own, and without irony, tell him i had named my band after one of his songs. he spoke to me as an equal, promised to listen to my music, and actually fucking followed up. on myspace, no less! he even remembered my name, and spelled it right in his message!

point being, a new longwave record in 2019, long after the band’s commercial fortunes rather whimperingly flared out - this is, in fact, their second reunion album - is a big deal, at least for me. its very existence has implications that reach thru my ambitions straight into my identity, all of my ideas about what makes music important outside of the shitty capitalist structures it’s forced to accommodate, and inside them for that matter. all of my ideas about how music should be appreciated that often seem so opposed to how it is. not to mention how i feel about the standard metrics for success in our world, and how ultimately cynical and meaningless they are. 

because now, nearly 20 years on, the wider world has largely forgotten longwave, and is unlikely to be dented by them anew in 2019. but i like to think they they and i have been sustaining ourselves all this time on that same little trickle of meaning their music brought into the world all that time ago, and beyond that, neither of us need a reason to keep going now. everywhere you turn there’s always something there - that’s enough for us.

*the first song on longwave’s last album secrets are sinister was called “sirens in the deep sea.” get it? heh

**it was the video for “last nite” on MTV2, obviously. but the thing i remember striking me the most about it was that it was clearly an unsimulated live performance - the drummer knocks over one of his mics near the end, and you can hear the difference. fuck good charlotte - this is punk rock.

***a few weeks before, the band’s rhythm section had abruptly quit on them with no explanation offered. they had some new guys with them who messed up a fair bit - but this actually thrilled me at the time, because i got to feel like i knew the songs better than anyone by being able to identify the mistakes.

[lizziecq-blog]

northward drift of waking

my friends, i saw them all laugh because the joke it was on me, that i would actually be able or willing to keep a running record of the two-week odyssey that has brought me to this place. ha ha. allow me to refill my coffee.

well, yes. thru disaster and peril my friends and i made the whole trip from vermont to seattle. some people were at some of the shows, which was nice, altho for the first half of the tour at least every experience we had of goodness was tinged with a great deal of personal discomfort. people live in our country i suppose and it is their wont to act like it. 

i’m hesitant to go into detail about our trials. casualties of the road include one car, and let me tell you, those winding mountain passes between montana and washington state approach religiosity in a 10-foot truck. but then, so do the sunsets; one thing i can say for certain i’ve gained from this experience is a sense of connection to landscape, in the abstract sense. we cleared the endless clouds of fields of the midwest to zoom humming into the badlands of south dakota, and i found myself for the first time wanting to climb (and apply copious chapstick). we slept out there, on the barren rock beneath the bats and askance of the rattlesnakes, skulling a full bottle of gin and trying not to piss on the milky way - the milky way! i never saw the milky way in new england, but south dakota spills it on a carpet of stars. 

half an hour on loose gravel dulled the revelatory fervor somewhat, but per aspera ad astra; next was wyoming, and circling the red cliffs of wyoming in the approach to devil’s tower leaves little room for feeling anything you can’t see. i learned how to burn sage, and the mountain said a prayer for me. of this i am convinced.

did you know the murray bar in livingston, MT was anthony bourdain’s favorite bar? probably because the people there treat passers-thru as perfunctory a) ghost hunters of the rails or b) sexual conquests, as tho dead tourists traps are dragnets for the rich forever-pillars to lie saturnine in wait for leaves on the wind. but a shaman-in-training showered us with gifts and vibrations, seeming to see into his fog as much as thru it, glowing at truth through a cloud of temporal debris, praying for us as truly as a mountain. we were moved, and set free to shut out the frogs. 

the diner, however, served us breakfast from a can.

but that night the sunset presided over our descent into the idaho panhandle, and i remember it as a long silence even tho i know better. 

and now we’ve made it, entirely certain that what we’ve arrived to is too good for us. i am writing, and searching. thank you everyone, see you.

[lizziecq-blog]

Bruce Hornsby, The Range - Every Little Kiss

what could it be about one song among so many similar that makes me just believe it, believe in spite of so much principal tension?

i can say for a fact that i've heard this song hundreds of times, if only because i heard it guaranteed at least once every shift i worked at CVS, and i worked there for over a year. anyone who has worked retail can tell you that the soundtrack is minimum 95% pure torture, but there are always a couple of songs that no amount of consumption-driven reptition could tarnish my love for, which become lifelines as the ruts in that way of life thicken into quicksand. i can remember most of mine - "name" by goo goo dolls was one (altho why they chose the relatively soulless 21st century re-recording is still lost on me); "i love you always forever;" "everybody wants to rule the world." but "every little kiss" was the one that always gave me pause, five and a half minutes of deep breaths and gently closed lids. but why?

from jump i knew aesthetically this stuff should be anathema, and while i find most of it pleasant enough i find the bulk of bruce hornsby's material i've heard otherwise to be pretty hard to really enjoy (altho it must be said that the man can play the shit out of a piano - just ask the grateful dead). i mean, it's a professional songwriter being backed by professional session musicians and there's no way not to hear it. but here i am sitting on the floor, folding CD cases and printing t-shirts and preparing to head out on tour, and i heard the song, and i wept. i mean i grimaced, my eyes pinched shut, neck drawn and shoulders raised, and i wept. nearly ruined one of these CD cases.

i guess i must believe that any person, no matter who or how they are, is sensitive to the pain of distances. and this is a song that is made of precisely nothing else. beyond the sounds of the instruments themselves, the production is hardly anything besides the soft orange drone of an endless highway. and the truth is that i relate to this song in a deeply personal way. "what i wouldn't give for only one night/a little relief in sight/some day when times weren't so tight." hundreds of miles away from any of the things that make sense to me, that i had to pour years of painful effort into making that sense of only to be drawn forcibly away in ignominy. over and over again. i can't help it: "what would i do without the nights on the phone/and the chance just to talk to you?" these things fall away: "what would i do now? just to talk to you?"

of course, hornsby is wearing a smile in that empty bar - he wrote this song after returning home to working class virginia, having lost interest in his life as a hollywood songwriter. but facts are facts - i've never had a choice but to try and make a home out of wherever i lay my head. drama aside, there is no My House; there was never even One House, and no house i ever lived in is around anymore. i didn't intend to explicate "turning to look at home" but there you go: there is no home, that turning is unending. and there is a great deal of excitement inherent in the constant making of my own past, and i've never looked forward to a departure so fervently as this one i'm about to undertake. but that dog in alice in wonderland with the broom on its tail, his eyes were sad.

there's the answer to the question of belief, i suppose. i don't believe in this song anymore than i believe that the sun rises every morning. it's like victor hugo said: "if they laugh, is it well. if they howl, it is better - to cry is to live."

[lizziecq-blog]

Listen/purchase: pretty-nice crisis by cfcq + the piss of assurance

first of all, don’t ask me to explain why i’m listening to don’t believe the truth right now, because if you do we’ll never get started. anyway, hi.

listen. this album is ten years of my life bottled up in eight days of work and distilled into 27 minutes of what i feel no hubris about calling music. diarism is cheap - i’m writing this on tumblr - but if pretty-nice crisis has any advantage in this regard, it’s that it’s just as ample fuel for antipathy toward me as sympathy, and hey, i’m not even asking you to pay to listen to it.

of course, i owe a lot to jeremy maccuish for making this album possible. i mean, it was his idea in the first place, and it’s no exaggeration to say that without him it never would have happened. if the songs are a painty soup of pain and crazy, the album itself is a coagulation of his belief in me. there can be no end to my gratitude for allowing me this opportunity, and for contributing his own special genius in order to make these songs what they are. i also want to give special thanks to our engineer peter woodford at the bottle garden, not only for indulging every stupid idea i had in the studio but for recognizing immediately and keenly the shape of my vision and applying his own personal ingenuity to bring it to bear. thanks to these two, i know what making a record is supposed to be like, and i hope i never go back.

something i continue failing to remember is that i’m the only one in the world who has been losing sleep to obsessing over this album for a full year now, and i should probably avoid saying too much more about it so unbidden. what i can tell you is that starting this wednesday, august 22nd, i’m taking this album on a cross-country tour to coincide with my move to seattle at the end of this month, unfortunately without jeremy in tow, but with the incomparable gestalt at my side. this blog will hopefully turn into an account of that tour and, if i keep my shit together, a place to stay updated on what i’m up to.

i hope you like our album. tour dates are below.

CFCQ + THE PISS OF ASSURANCE in: THE ONE-WAY TOUR

8/22 - Rochester, NY @ California Brew Haus

8/23 - Dubois, PA @ Highland St. House

8/24 - Indianapolis, IN @ State St. Pub

8/26 - St. Louis, MO @ Foam

8/28 - Chicago, IL @ Happy Gallery

8/29 - Minneapolis, MN @ Palmers Bar

9/2 - Livingston, MT @ Murray Bar

FB event for the tour: https://www.facebook.com/events/1091376571015339/