#this has to be some kind of style guide groupthink

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I notice journalists seem to be really fond of the verb “slammed” and I would like for someone to point them to thesaurus.com

[skateamini]

I had my Hannibal obsessed phase (especially because of Mads Mikkelsen). I love this kind of art, dark, strange and morally dubious with lots of blood. I watched Bones and All (again, because of Taylor Russell) and really liked it.

About All of Them Dreams, I really think the movie A Ghost Story will make you think, it's like its description of the story. There is also a book called The Ghost Bride that addresses the world of spirits in Malaysia, it is a fantasy with a lot of Asian culture.

This year I read Carmilla, a classic vampire book that came long before and which inspired Dracula, about Carmilla and her obsession with beautiful women, especially the book's protagonist, Laura. It has everything that the term "vampirism" carries.

There's a film about cannibalism called Raw, it's very explicit, but it has some interesting discussions.

A list of films that are unique, in my opinion:

Antichrist is about a couple who lose their son and deal with their grief, but things go south in Act 3.

Climax is a crazy movie too, it makes me think of Hoseok because it has an opening about dancers explaining why they dance and then a long presentation with various dance styles, but again, things get dark.

Martyrs from 2008, in French (the remake is not worth it) about a religious sect that tortures people so that they are between life and death and can glimpse the other side and tell what they see.

I watched All of Us Strangers yesterday and, my god, the ending left me with my mouth open. It's Queer and talks a lot about loneliness. A writer visits his childhood home and meets his parents, but his parents died when he was a teenager. Meanwhile he starts to get closer to his neighbor.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer was one of my first in the "bizarre" genre.

I have more recommendations, but I don't know if you want them? I think I've already written too much.

No, thank you! Go ahead and recommend everything. My favourite kinds of media are those that are "bizarre" and strange!

To balance it out, here's some films and books that I enjoyed for being dark and strange:

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - a lot more gruesome and dark than the title insinuates! About a vampire. Weird stuff going on. A great allegory for community groupthink and underprivileged voices not being listened to.

Piranesi - the narrator lives in a great hall, flooded by the sea and full of columns and ancient greek statues. A really strange and magical world with a darker undertone!

House of Leaves - a really dense and convoluted novel with an "editor" writing and editing text around the story of a family who discovers a door in their house that leads into a dark and endless labyrinth

Handling the Undead - one day the undead wake up, and chaos ensues! Dark, haunting but also tragic.

Where I end - a dark and twisted story about a young woman who looks after her bedridden mother (read TW for this book regarding infanticide and abusive behaviours, etc.).

Here are some films that inspired All of Them Dreams:

The Devil's Backbone - takes place during the spanish civial war, boy abandoned in orphanage in the middle of nowhere, a ghost of a little boy tries to warn him.

Incantation - Taiwanese Horror Film about a mother who has cursed herself and her daughter, found footage style

The Wailing - Korean horror film, folk horror and shamanism.

The Others - woman whose husband is off at war lives in house with her two young children, strange servants show up one day to work, strange things happening in house.

[theeverlastingshade]

Favorite Albums of the 2000s

10. In Rainbows- Radiohead

After Radiohead released Hail to the Thief it seemed pretty set in stone that while they may still go on to continue releasing great records, it’s unlikely that they’d ever put out another record that shatters expectations and makes a bid for being among their best work. And then we received In Rainbows, a shocking late-career game changer so assured, dynamic, and brilliant that there are music fans that came of age around its release that still claim it’s the best Radiohead album. It’s not, but it’s exceptional nonetheless; a perfect fusion of the art-rock, electronic rock, and avant-guard impulses that they’d seem to have perfected by the time Kid A dropped, but had never quite navigated so fluidly. It’s a best of both worlds record that’s lean, perfectly paced, and contains some of the strongest songwriting of Thom Yorke’s entire career. It was the first Radiohead record since Kid A to sound like a revelatory statement able to stand on its own, and not simply exist in the shadow of prior records. The pay what you want model that they used to sell the record was a game-changer at the time of its release, but it’s the warm orchestration, frigid beats, and dynamic range that gave this record the staying power that it has. It’s the kind of record that displays an assured effortlessness that belies what exceptional musicians they all are, and reminds you why you fell in love with the band in the first place.

The one-two punch of “15 Step” and “Bodysnatchers” sets the pace for what’s to come; the former a glitchy electronic song that seems to hint at a less claustrophobic approach to Amensiac before the latter, propelled by a motorik rhythm and Yorke’s fractured wail, erupts and shatters that notion. The two of these songs taken together give a fairly apt depiction of the poles that Radiohead where bouncing back and forth from, and the tension arising from that balancing act propels the record forward. Caught between the somber guitar ballad “Nude” and the lumbering, electronic midpoint crescendo “All I Need” is the fidgety, nimble guitar work of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” which does a wonderful job of offsetting the dreaminess of the previous track and preparing you for the creeping dread of what immediately follows. “Faust Arp” is a welcome, jangly transition from the heaviness of “All I Need” into the album’s most accessible song, “Reckoner”, and through that song’s warm melody and infectious percussion the downtempo march of “House of Cards” sounds like a perfect transition, with its string drones setting the stage for the record’s best song to arrive. There isn’t a moment wasted throughout the entire record, and it’s a marvel to hear the band cover such vast ground and still end up with something so concise.

Being a Radiohead record it should come as no surprise that In Rainbows tackles themes of existential dread, apocalyptic visions, corruption, and alienation throughout. “Nude” grapples with groupthink, the tendency for societies to not operate in the best interests of its people, and the inherent emptiness that defines the human experience “You paint yourself white/And fill up with noise/But there’ll be something missing”. “Bodysnatchers” explores someone faking their way through life and being unable to live the way they truly are “I have no idea what I’m talking about/I’m trapped in this body and can't get out” while “Faust Arp” finds someone crushed under the weight of monotony, recognizing the issue but seemingly lacking the courage or conviction to change his surroundings “Dead from the neck up, I guess I’m stuck, stuck, stuck/We thought you had it in you/But no, no, no”. “Videotape” ends the record on a perfect thematic note with the narrator making a videotape for the love of his life before he kills himself “No matter what happens now/You shouldn’t be afraid/Because I know today has been/The most perfect day I’ve ever seen”, drawing an unsettling through line from the closer on Kid A. The themes of despair throughout the digital age have become increasingly more realized with each subsequent Radiohead album from OK Computer onward, but they hit a notable new peak on In Rainbows. In Rainbows isn’t their most ambitious, or accomplished album, but it perhaps best distills what their essence best, succinctly showcasing just how peerless they were and remain.

Essentials: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”, “All I Need”, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”

9. The Glow, Pt. 2- The Microphones

Before Phil Elverum recorded two devastating records about the loss of his wife, Genevieve, and the process of having to raise his daughter without her by his side under his current Mount Eerie moniker, he spent several years recording lo-fi psychedelic folk songs as The Microphones. He switched gears in 2003 and continued recording music as a solo act, having swapped the name of The Microphones for Mount Eerie (the name of the final record recorded as The Microphones) feeling that he had taken the former project to its natural conclusion. Before making the switch, Elverum recorded four albums as The Microphones that each rank as among the most accomplished and thoroughly engaging albums that he’s recorded to date. While all are exceptional and worth anyone’s time, The Glow Pt. 2 is the best of the bunch, and still stands as Elverum’s magnum opus. An idiosyncratic LP bursting with personality and color while folding in psychedelic folk, noise, lo-fi, ambient, and indie rock The Glow Pt. 2 is a colossal tour de force through Elverum’s tastes, and it hangs together remarkably well. He would continue to explore various facets of styles explored here on subsequent releases, but no single record of his before or after captures the vivid imagination and breadth of his musicianship quite like The Glow Pt. 2.

Opener “I Want Wind to Blow” sets the stage for what’s to come through gentle acoustic strums, repetition, and a generous use of space while growing increasingly grand in scope until it explodes during its last minute with pummeling percussion and thick slabs of distorted noise. “I Want Wind to Blow” is one of the longest songs here, with most ranging from 1 to 2 minutes, just long enough to begin exploring an idea and then smoothly transitioning to something else before wearing its welcome. There are songs like “(Something)” that drift by quickly with little more than droning strings floating eerily throughout the mix, and others like “Map” that are a treasure trove of eclectic instrumentation that seem to be constantly rising and falling in intensity for several minutes without locking into a steady groove for too long. “Headless Horseman” gets a ton of mileage out of a softly strummed ukulele and Elverum’s tender vocals while the menacing “I Want to be Cold” pits a searing cymbal rhythm against smoldering, distorted guitars with Elverum’s voice barely audible above the noise. The individual songs may run the gamut through a myriad of different genres, but the analog warmth, droning motifs, tape hiss, and punctual silence tie everything together as one vast landscape of thematic and sonic coherence. No matter how far ranging some of the songs here develop with respect to everything else around them, the production renders each song with the same unmistakable warmth and richness.

The Glow Pt. 2 is centered around a breakup that Elverum experienced, and he details his thoughts and feelings throughout the ordeal, consistently blurring the lines between fact and fiction while gradually finding solace in nature. “I Want Wind to Blow” opens the record right after the storm has died down as he begs for a change to sweep away the sense of loss that he’s beginning to endure “My clothes off me, sweep me off my feet/Take me up, don’t bring me back/Oh, where I can see days pass by me/I have no head to hold in grief”. This leads directly into the record’s centerpiece and title track where Elverum comes to terms with the fact that his girlfriend and best friend became romantically involved with one another. Elverum recognizes that life will go on whether or not he wants it to in that moment “I could not get through September without a battle/I faced death, I went in with my arms swinging/But I heard my own breath/And I had to face that I’m still living”, and slowly works his way back towards the resolve to go on. Throughout the rest of the record he tries to erase memories of the relationship (“The Moon”), succumbs to pure apathy (“I Want to be Cold”), comes to terms with how insignificant he is within the scope of the universe (“I Felt My Size”), and eventually comes to terms with what remains of his life as he slowly bleeds out in the forest (“My Warm Blood”). The experience that Elverum draws from throughout The Glow Pt. 2 is universal, but it’s rarely been translated into such a rich, transcendent experience.

Essentials: “I Want Wind to Blow”, “The Glow, Pt. 2″, “Map”

8. Since I Left You- The Avalanches

While the last decade saw the release of many brilliant records, there were very few that were as legitimately inventive as Since I Left You. The debut album by The Avalanches is a plunderphonics record that seamlessly blends disco, r&b, jazz, bossa nova, comedy skits, and pop music into a glorious, kaleidoscopic whole that truly sounds like nothing else. SILY wasn’t the first plunderphonics record, but nothing working entirely within those parameters before or since has achieved something so fresh and singular, creating a colorful, fully-lived in new context for the 900 plus samples that make up its whole. The perfectly natural flow that guides the record is part of its inherent charm, and belies just how intricate and complex the creation of the record actual was. SILY was so painstakingly meticulous to construct that it took The Avalanches 16 years to return with a proper follow-up, and while that follow-up, Wildflower, was a great return to form, it doesn’t quite capture the singular beauty of their inimitable debut.

The eclecticism of SILY is one of the most immediate, and impressive draws. There are recurring samples and motifs that occur multiple times throughout the record, but no two songs sound anything alike. The pacing is sublime, with songs bleeding into one another in a manner that approximates a DJ mix with supreme versatility. Samples are constantly shifting, being pitched in different directions, being sped up, slowed down, or swapped out entirely. There’s never a moment where something isn’t in flux, and the fact that they manage to accomplish this while still constantly giving each song such a defined shape and tone is a marvel. Sampled voices appear periodically, but rather than leading the arrangements, in true plunderphonics fashion they're tucked into the fold alongside everything else, treated as percussion or texture depending on the song. No single moment overstays its welcome, and because of how much texture is being employed at all times it’s easy to constantly discover something new each time that you listen to it. The last song on SILY transitions seamlessly into the first song, which only heightens the potency of its DJ mix structure.

With a record as coherent and consistent as SILY it’s difficult and almost beside the point to zero in on highlights since it’s meant to be consumed all at once as an experience. But there are a few astonishing songs that stand above the already strong pack, and rank as among the strongest plunderphonics songs that I’ve ever heard. “Two Hearts in ¾ Time” unloads a swirling concoction of xylophone, flute, and keys atop breezy scat singing, and the carefree exuberance that radiates from the composition is infectious. “Radio” pits a massive bassline against repetitious chants and distorted bursts of guitars and keys while “Summer Crane” pairs down the sonic density (slightly) as a slurring thermin, strings, and sleigh bells dance in tandem while the recurring string motif flickers throughout. “Frontier Psychiatrist” is as ridiculous and absurd as things get here, and is legitimately one of the funniest moments on any electronic album through its use of vocal samples lifted from the Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster comedy sketch of the same name “The man with the golden eyeball/And tighten your buttocks, pour juice down your chin/I promised my girlfriend I’d play the violin. And the closer “Extra Kings” unravels in a bouncy psychedelic sprawl with the voice from the first song and title track singing “I’ve tried but I just can’t get you/Every since the day I left you” as noise makers and woodwinds swirl around the vocals in rapturous joy.

The one thing that cannot be overstated is just how much fun it is to listen to this record. Through its many songs and moods, joy, pain, sorrow, regret, and unease are conjured at various moments, but throughout it all there’s a palpable sense that the band are thoroughly enjoying themselves. It remains playful and whimsical even at its most crestfallen, and thrills even at its deepest lulls. A sense of discovery and communal spirit animates this record, and The Avalanches achieve a sense of weightlessness that pervades even the record’s densest moments. It’s the rare record that matches its remarkably accessible, party-friendly nature with an equally groundbreaking execution that completely rewrote the cultural relationship to sample-based music. The Avalanches wisely opted to downplay the inherent brilliance of the music, and they made it as easy as possible to simply get lost in the endless spirals of grooves, texture, and pockets upon pockets of melody. There’s no air of pretension in The Avalanches’ universe, just the pure, unmitigated joy of stumbling upon new sounds in unusual contexts again and again and again.

Essentials: “Extra Kings”, “Frontier Psychiatrist”, “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time”

7. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- Wilco

Wilco was already a great band before they released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it’s this record that cemented them as one of the most compelling of their era. When their label, Reprise Records, an imprint of AOL Time Warner, heard the record they assumed that it would essentially amount to career suicide and opted to release them from the label with the rights to the album. In order to not significantly delay the release of their record before touring it as well as controlling the quality of the songs that were already being leaked from it Wilco put the entire record on their site and embarked on their most successful tour up to that point. Both Being There and Summerteeth were massive leaps forward for the band, defined equally by Jeff Tweedy’s increasingly accomplished songwriting and the studio wizardry of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennet, but on YHF these forces hit a peak. The songs on YHF are intensely felt, and earnestly conveyed by a band that was completely in-tune with one another, and were perpetually firing on all cylinders. The tasteful sonic experimentation, warm rock and baroque arrangements, and Tweedy’s wistful, romantic sentiments coalesce into a superbly realized whole. Mature, earnest, empathetic, and adventurous, YHF is a landmark for indie rock, and one of the most beautiful and compulsively listenable albums of the century so far.

The biggest development that took place on YHF was Tweedy’s songwriting fully blossoming into a sincere, singular voice that propelled to the band to unprecedented heights. On opening song “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” Tweedy’s depiction of someone wandering around Chicago post-breakup “I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I’m hiding out in the big city blinking/What was a I thinking when I let go of you?” sets the tone of the album with wistful, poignant urgency. “Jesus, Etc” depicts the desolation and the simple pleasures clung to within urban, contemporary American life “Voices whine/Skycrapers are scraping together/Your voice is smoking/Last cigarettes, are all you can get/Turning your orbit around” while positing love as a balm for the ills of modern existence “Our love is all we have/Our love/Our love is all of God’s money/Everyone is a burning sun”. On the album’s stunning closer “Reservations” Tweedy’s trying to reassure his love that he’s invested in their future “Oh, I’ve got reservations/About so many things/But not about you” while on the album’s centerpiece, “Radio Cure”, Tweedy laments the difficulty of sustaining a long distance relationship despite advancements in technology making it easier to do than ever before “Oh, distance has no way/Of making love understandable”. Tweedy’s writing is concise and direct, cut with an emotional through line that elevates the sentiments beyond what may scan as initially simplistic.

YHF doesn’t provide any overhauls to their approach to the extent that Wilco’s previous two records did. Rather, it’s a case of tightening up what they already did well and improving considerably on all fronts. Jay Bennett continues to showcase how he was the band’s not-so-secret weapon at this phase of their career with a sly touch that embellishes each song here with surprising amount of dimension. Bennett really began to experiment considerably with Wilco’s sound on Summerteeth, but his most compelling contributions are those throughout YHF. Whether its the ambient swirl of chimes that open “Ashes of American Flags”, the spring-loaded percussion on “Pot Kettle Black”, the melancholic string drones that dominate “Poor Places” or the whirring samples that swirl in perfect harmony alongside the infectious concoction of cymbals, xylophone, and acoustic guitars throughout the build of “Radio Cure”, Bennett’s use of texture was subtle, but supremely effective in fleshing each composition into wonderfully distinct shapes. The songs are certainly strong enough to stand on their own in much simpler, stripped down forms, but Bennett’s tinkering perfectly complemented Tweedy’s songwriting, imbuing his romanticism with a welcome surrealist bent.

The suspected allusions to 9/11 in a few of the songs despite the record having been finished months before 9/11 dominated the narrative of the album upon its release, but that supposed prescience overlooks Tweedy’s astute observation of American despair and generally just glosses over the fact that, regardless of possible foresight, YHF is simply a magnificent record. There’s a universality to the sentiments that are beautifully rendered by Tweedy’s aching tone, and the band finally seemed completely comfortable dropping all pretenses of “alt-country” and leaned unabashedly into their intrinsic weirdness without much concern for what the record might initially scan as. What continues to really impress about YHF is that Wilco simultaneously became more experimental and tuneful, with some of the melodies dominating songs like “Radio Cure”, “Jesus, Etc”, “Pot Kettle Black”, and “I’m the Man Who Loves You” ranking as among their strongest to date. There are few albums that I’ve heard that strike such a fine balance between strong melodies and forward-thinking composition, but YHF manages just that, while offering a compelling insight into initial 21st century American malaise.

Essentials: “Radio Cure”, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, “Jesus, Etc”

6. Madvillainy- Madvillain

MF DOOM and Madlib were already renowned figures in underground hip hop with a couple of great records under each of their belts before they linked up to write and record Madvillainy. But in each other they found the perfect collaborator whose sensibilities ran parallel to their own. In the universe that they built together dense internal rhymes float effortlessly over dusty soul loops and thick clouds of pot smoke. There were obvious precedents for what they accomplished on DOOM’s Operation Doomsday and Madlib’s The Unseen, recorded under his Quasimoto alias, but on Madvillainy they helped one another reach a creative breakthrough with them both redefining the form of their respective crafts. Madlib’s beats are relentlessly eclectic, gorgeously textured, and masterfully mixed, while DOOM’s verses are some of the most varied, superbly rapped, and thought-provoking of his entire career. The ease with which their styles complement one another belies the effort that they put into it, and the end result doesn’t sound fussy or labored over, but it did herald a new era of faded west-coast hip hop built on a throne of comic books, jazz records, and a dizzying array of internal rhyme schemes.

The production on Madvillainy was handled entirely by Madlib, with DOOM co-producing the opening track “The Illest Villains”, and it’s the most cohesive collection of beats that Madlib has ever assembled while still packing a considerable amount of variety within its grooves. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is the longest song, clocking in at 4 minutes exactly, but most of the songs are under 2 minutes and concisely introduce their ideas while DOOM unloads brief, but substantial bars over them. The samples span the likes of The Mothers of Invention, Sun Ra, George Clinton, Bill Evans, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Street Fighter II, and so much more sometimes within the same songs without once showing the seams. The atmosphere is soulful and jazzy with a hazy tinge that the samples lend the compositions on the whole juxtaposed superbly against the visceral nature of DOOM’s rapping. The music is rendered within a quantized grid so there’s no mistaking it as anything other than hip hop beats, but these beats are arranged more tastefully than the vast majority of instrumental hip-hop that’s come before or since. Whether it's the guitar/sleigh bell stomp of “Shadows of Tomorrow”, or the sluggish bass crawl and metronome sigh of “Meat Grinder”, or the anthemic brass leads that frame “All Caps”, the beats are simply bursting with texture and personality.

Since reemerging as MF DOOM towards the end of the last century Daniel Dumile has completely owned this specific lane of verbose, off-kilter hip-hop defined by his knotty phrasing, complex internal rhyme schemes, and magnetic personality that draws from all ephemeral of pop culture. Madlib brings out the best in DOOM, and his rapping is by turns loose and tight, dense and reference heavy while delivered with a level of precision that transcends pop culture acumen. “Living off borrowed time, the lock ticks faster/That’d be the hour they knock on the slick blaster” are the first lines on “Accordion” that open the record, and things only get more surreal from there. The rhymes are eloquent and guttural, often open to various interpretation, and packed with colorful imagery while never being anything less than thought-provoking. “Meat Grinder” depicts DOOM’s pimping of a stripper named China “Heat niner, pimping, stripping, soft sweet minor/China was a neat signer, trouble with the script” while “America’s Most Blunted” is an absurdist ode to marijuana “Quas, when he really hit star mode/Never will he boost loose Philies with the bar-code”. “Curls” reveals a glimpse of DOOM’s lost innocence after smoking his first spiff at 7 “Spliff made him swore he saw heaven, he was seven/Yup, you know it, growin’ up too fast/Showin’ up to class with Moet in a flask” while on “All Caps” he’s reveling in pure braggadocio “So nasty that it’s probably somewhat of a travesty/Having me, then he told the people “You can call me your majesty””. The complexity and eclecticism that DOOM imbued his lyrics with hit a new peak for hip hop as a whole on Madvillainy.

Although the partnership between MF DOOM and Madlib only resulted in Madvillainy, the influence of that lone masterwork continues to ripple throughout the underground and mainstream alike. Odd Future, Brainfeeder, Black Hippy, Pro Era, Bruiser Brigade and countless other crews, collectives, and labels were informed tremendously by the nerve this record struck. DOOM clones are still rampant, and Madlib’s anything goes crate-digging approach to sample-based composition can be heard in everyone from Kaytranada to JPEGMAFIA. There were very few records that came out this decade that drastically altered the direction for what hip hop can sound like quite like Madvillainy. DOOM and Madlib were such a perfect match for one another that neither of them have made music with anyone else before or since (or solo) that comes close to the brilliance of Madvillainy. Whether or not the two of them ever reunite to create that tantalizing follow-up seems like a coin toss, but truth be told we’re better served with things as they are. The original is still paying enormous dividends 15 years later and it’s only going to continue getting better from here.

Essentials: “All Caps”, “Figaro”, “Curls”

5. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.- Deerhunter

No other double LP from the last decade delivered so much, or asked so little from the listener, as Deerhunter’s extraordinary Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. Originally just intended as a single LP, Bradford Cox generously recorded all of Weird Era Cont. to reward fans that purchased Microcastle after it leaked months in advance (unfortunately, Weird Era Cont. would be leaked as well). Microcastle finds the band honing their populist impulses with impeccable clarity without completely abandoning their murkier roots, while Weird Era Cont. completely dives into their stranger, more abstract realm of their sound. Each record is exceptional in its own right, but when taken together they form the perfect realization of all the sides of the band, spanning the likes of garage rock, post-punk, shoegaze, ambient, musique concrete, krautrock, and psychedelic pop while managing to make such amalgamations sound like second nature. There’s more range covered on each of these LPs than most bands manage within entire careers. While Cryptograms first showcased the seemingly limitless potential that Deerhunter was capable of, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. proved that they were one of the defining bands of the century so far.

Microcastle is sequenced in a way that is comparable to Cryptograms, but there are just a few more bright pop moments right out of the gates before the record descends into its shorter ambient middle section. After the obligatory ambient opening interlude, this time in the form of “Cover Me (Slowly)”, Lockett Pundt begins the record proper by taking lead vocals on Cox’s “Agorophobia”. Having Lockett sing the first actual song on the record is a testament to how far their lead guitarist had come as another vocalist (and songwriter, with “Neither of Us, Uncertainly”) in such a short order. With “Agorophobia” Lockett leads one of the gentlest sounding songs that the band had released up to that point, with a disarmingly gorgeous vocal melody superbly juxtaposed against lyrics that describe the sensation of being buried alive for sexual pleasure. The sharp immediacy of “Never Stops” follows suit, and here Cox completely comes into his own a pop frontman, no longer content to wallow innocuously behind the squall of guitar distortion, and he propels the arrangements with a legitimately anthemic melody. Both “Little Kids” and the title track provide two of Cox’s most tender vocal performances up to that point while still making room for Lockett’s spellbinding guitar tones.

“Calvary Scars”, “Activa”, and “Green Jacket” aren’t quite as engaging as any of the ambient songs throughout the stretch from “White Ink” to “Red Ink” on Cryptograms, but they nonetheless draw an effective bridge to the record’s high-point, the colossal “Nothing Ever Happened”. “Nothing Ever Happened” has the band firing on all cylinders and delivering a show stopping performance that blends krautrock, garage rock, and shoegaze for a song far more satisfying and life-affirming than the sum of its parts. After that rollercoaster we’re treated to the bouncy jangle pop of “Saved by Old Times”, and the soothing dream pop of comedowns “Neither of Us, Certainly” and “Twilight at Carbon Lake” before the later erupts into a cacophony of jerky guitar spasms. It’s a welcome ending for a record with such a clear emphasis on melody, and it reinforces the notion that you shouldn’t get too comfortable with any fixed idea of what Deerhunter sound like at any given point in time.

Weird Era Cont. is where things really get interesting. It’s the only album of theirs that includes songs that were recorded and performed by individual members of the band intended for their various solo projects (these being Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound and Lockett Pundt’s Lotus Plaza). The album as a whole hews closest to the first Atlas Sound LP, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel, in that both are absolute treasure troves of sonic riches that prioritize pure sound and overall immersion above proper song structure. The fact that Weird Era Cont. is so disparate and yet hangs together so cohesively is as much a testament to Deerhunter’s discipline as it is their sheer intuition with respect to flow and pacing even amongst such inherent disorder. And so here you get the raucous garage rock anthem “Operation” colliding into the noise-pop gem “Dot Gain”, the ambient interlude “Cicada” seeping right into the twisted ethereal waltz “Vox Humana”, and the whirring instrumental collage pop “Moon Witch Cartridge” segueing nicely into the droning noise of “Weird Era”. While Weird Era Cont. is only strengthened when viewed through the lens of it existing as the flip side to Microcastle’s warped pop, it still provides a welcome microcosm of Deerhunter’s incredible range all on its own, and it’s the most adventurous record that Deerhunter ever recorded.

Due to the fact that Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. are both Deerhunter records, the lyrics deal almost entirely with dreams and death. Most of the characters that occupy these songs are trying to escape from their nightmares or literally sacrificing themselves for the sweet ecstasy of oblivion. A version of “Cavalry Scars” appears on both records, the former a brief guitar lullaby and the latter a blistering shoegaze freakout, but the constant thread that ties them together aside from the title is that the narrator is crucifying himself in front of all of his friends. “Saved By Old Times” is more literal, and it depicts the alienation that Cox experienced growing up in his parents house by himself after his parents divorced while trying to cope with his Marfan Syndrome “You are trapped in your basement for a war of 16 years/In a combat for victory/In a combat with ourselves/In combat with these cultural vampires”. Cox’s fixation on death seems to serve as the ultimate salve for his lifelong struggle with simply having to exist, and regardless of whether or not music functions as a temporary solution for his anguish it’s clearly a natural medium for him to exercise his demons. Deerhunter have spent the rest of their career honing in on that release, but Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. is where those fixations first crystallized into something truly singular.

Essentials: “Nothing Ever Happened”, “Never Stops”, “Microcastle”, “Vox Celeste”, “Dot Gain”, “Slow Swords”

4. Strawberry Jam- Animal Collective

Strawberry Jam was the first Animal Collective record to have been released after band member Panda Bear’s exceptional solo breakthrough, Person Pitch, so for the first time in their career there was an obvious precedent in place for where the tight knight crew of David Portner (Avey Tare), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Josh Dibb (Deakin) might take their sound, but like all their prior records it sounds nothing like anything that came before it. Having completely moved on from the full-band analog approach, SJ is the sound of a band moving fearlessly outside of their comfort zone and harnessing the immense potential of samplers. On the whole, the compositions are more richly textured, melodic, and better paced than the bulk of their past work. The band continued to incorporate field recordings into their music, but given the prevalence of the samples happening at all times it can be difficult to parse who’s doing anything other than percussion and vocals at any given point in time. Avey’s presence dominates SJ to a large degree, with his idiosyncratic approach to melody defining the bulk of the standouts here. But despite Tare’s voice being the focal point on most of the songs on SJ, Panda Bear still holds his own as a songwriter throughout, and his softer melodic tone helped superbly counterbalance Tare’s outbursts. On SJ you can hear the band bending the fabric of pop music to their will in real time, and it remains both a masterclass in warped pop, and a joy to revisit time and time again.

During the tour in support of their incredible 2005 psych-rock LP, Feels, Lennox was mesmerized by the look of a tray of inflight jam, and decided that the production on their next record should sound the way that the jam looked. On SJ the band capture that superbly as they deliver some of their strongest, and sweetest melodies coupled with Avey’s most abrasive, and expressive singing to date. This tug of war between the band’s heightened melodic instincts driving candy-coated, psychedelic arrangements against Tare’s octave leaping shrieks provides an entrancing juxtaposition that loses none of its potency from the frantic opening song “Peacebone”, to the longing closer “Derek”. Songs like “Chores” and the aforementioned “Derek”, both of which are Panda songs, execute sublime, unpredictable transitions midway through that demonstrate both his knack for sample-based composition and the West-African influence on his songwriting that really congealed in earnest on PP. Meanwhile Tare songs, like “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Cuckoo Cuckoo”, still favored conventional chord changes and verse-chorus-verse structures, but they managed to pack the hallmarks of the band’s sound into much more succinct packages that don’t nullify any of the impact. Neo-psychedelic synth textures, tribal drumming, choirboy vocal harmonies, feral shrieks, and a pervasive use of space still reigned supreme throughout SJ, but the band were crafting legitimate pop songs while still in service of their wonderful idiosyncrasies. Nothing on SJ could be mistaken for the work of any other band, but it’s remarkable to hear just how significantly they tightened up their arrangements while still still remaining an island unto themselves.

As soon as opener “Peacebone” kicks into gear with its stomping percussion and dazzling array of arpeggio synth leads setting the foundation for Avey’s full-throttled yelps, it’s clear that this is his record. At the time of its release, “Peacebone” was the most immediate that AC ever sounded, but Tare’s shrieks kept listeners giddily at arm’s length even as they adopt more approachable structures. The midsection breakdown is still thrilling, and a good barometer of whether or not SJ is really your cup of tea or not. “Unsolved Mysteries” follows suit and doubles down on the pervading sense of whimsy from a compositional standpoint, and Tare’s vocals continue to provide a satisfying juxtaposition. The backbone of the album consists of “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks”, the strongest back to back songs on any of their albums. On “For Reverend Green” Tare provides one of his most thrilling vocal performances to date, gleefully leaping between octaves mid-verse and switching between cathartic wordless croons and feral shrieks on a dime. It’s a stunning display of virtuosity and passion that couldn’t have come from any other musician. “Fireworks” is one of Tare’s most tender vocal performances to date, and it finds him contemplating the cycle of life as well as his place in the world over stuttering percussion, wordless croons, mesmerizing field recordings, and minor key piano. It’s a touching, albeit heavy listen, but the band play with such joy and warmth that it never suffocates under the weight of its ambition, and it’s one of the greatest songs that Tare has ever written.

Despite SJ being an album dominated by Tare’s presence it was still a major showcase for Panda Bear as a songwriter in his own right. “Chores” nails the sort of transitional finesse perfected on PP as it starts from a frantic intro dominated by bass drums and noisemakers before seamlessly shifting into a brief droning mid-section and then ending on a psychedelic, West-African influenced march. The disparate movements sound nothing alike one another, but they’re stitched together in a way that not only flows incredibly well, but sounds completely natural. “#1” is the closest that the band get to one of their signature drone compositions, and although it’s far sparser, and not nearly as developed as most of their prior ones it works on the strength on Panda’s gorgeous vocals alone. The arpeggio synth melody, sleigh bells, and vocal samples provide a refreshing minimal framework on an album otherwise defined by maximalism, and gives Panda’s voice the kind of room necessitated for it to achieve its maximum impact. The finale, “Derek”, also clearly sprang from a PP compositional influence, with an intro full of chirping synths and tranquil organ chords that slowly give way to an explosive, double kick drum wall of sound beneath one of Panda’s most triumphant vocal melodies to date. It’s a massive sound, but his sentiments couldn’t be any more tender “You can count/When you count/Count on me/What do you/See when you/See inside of me”.

On SJ AC grapple with their adulthood, their lives as touring band, and the daily routines they now find themselves entwined in. Panda’s “Chores” is about him getting his chores out of the way so that he can get high in the rain while his closing contribution, “Derek”, finds him pondering the weight of having a living being depend on him for survival. None of Avey’s songs have the the playful energy of “Chores”, and he spends the album delivering a stream of consciousness on the nature of death (“Cucko Cucko), exploring the delusions that we buy into to feel okay about life (“Winter Wonder Land”), and the futility of living in the past (“Peacebone”). In addition to to being compositional standouts, “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks” also form the emotional backbone of the album. The former explores the jovial existence of childhood against the crippling realities of adulthood “A running child’s bloody with burning knees/A careless child’s money flew in the trees/A camping child’s happy with winter’s freeze/A lucky child don’t know how lucky she is”. It almost plays like a spiritual successor to Tare’s masterful early song “Alvin Row”, and it perfectly exemplifies their ethos as a band. On “Fireworks” Tare contemplates the passage of time, acknowledging how quickly everything moves, and fantasizes about what bliss might look like to him “It’s family beaches that I desire/Sacred night where we watch the fireworks/They frighten the babies and you know/They’ve got two/Flashing eyes and if they’re color blind/They make me feel/That I’m all I see sometimes”. It’s a universal sentiment delivered with their singular charm, and one of their strongest statements to date.

On SJ AC retained their idiosyncratic whims and experimental proclivities, they just learned how to harness these elements into more immediate forms. As with each of their records released throughout the last decade SJ sounds nothing like what preceded it, but it’s too eclectic to be the work of any other band, and despite the shift in sonics it still operates by the dreamy logic that the band imbued it with. Each release following Danse Manatee has found the band creeping closer to full on pop, and although they embraced it unabashedly on SJ it’s still on their own terms entirely. SJ was the latest in a progression of records since Ark that found AC being ahead of the curve of several indie trends, and many of the sample-heavy indie acts throughout the end of the last decade owe their careers to this record. SJ isn’t AC’s most immediate record, nor is it their most challenging, but it is one of the most inspired developments within their progression, and it jump started their sample-based mature phase. MPP remains their most celebrated work, but the crystallization of their sound that took place on that record wouldn’t have been possible without the groundwork laid by SJ. Although SJ was overshadowed by PP the year that they both came out, SJ still stands as the best showcase of the band’s work with samplers, and it remains a landmark of experimental pop music.

Essentials: “For Reverend Green”, “Fireworks”, “Derek”

3. Kid A- Radiohead

Few artists have managed to make such a drastic leap in sound on any of their records the way that Radiohead did with Kid A. Throughout the 90s they developed organically from a run of the mill Brit pop band into one of the most idiosyncratic and forward thinking bands of all time. With their landmark 1998 record Ok Computer they created a blueprint for a form electronic rock equally informed by classical music and the various strains of experimental electronic music that emerged in the 90s courtesy of the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Autechre. By the time that they were gearing up to record the follow-up to what was then unanimously recognized as their masterpiece they disavowed the form of rock music entirely. On Kid A the guitars are stripped away in favor of icy keyboards and the austere glare of syntheizers, with the stark precision of drum machines deployed to provide the heartbeat for their desolate soundscapes. The risk paid off immensely, resulting in a work that sounds like nothing that’s come before or since. It’s the sound of a band grappling with existentialism, early information overload, and the sweeping saturation of advanced technology and responding with doomsday prophecies that sound more prescient with each passing year. No other record released this century has better set the tone for everything to come quite the way that Kid A has.

As soon as Kid A’s opening song “Everything In It’s Right Place” begins it’s undeniable that a great deal has changed with Radiohead this time around. Despite the chilly exterior that Ok Computer exudes, there are still moments of melodic warmth such as on its opening cut “Airbag”. “Everything In It’s Right Place” presents an uneasy atmosphere at the offset, and things gradually become more foreboding from there. Thom Yorke’s heavily manipulated wail sounds like it’s glitching as it soars over the horizon of digital keys and kick drums. The mix slowly becomes an overwhelming wall of vocals and keys that form a repetitive bludgeoning motif, incorporating their heightened love of krautrock. Along with the classical music and IDM touchstones that informed Ok Computer, krautrock, jazz, and ambient were large influences they drew from as well. The title track follows “Everything In It’s Right Place”, and it’s an ambient lullaby that finds the band prioritizing atmosphere and texture over any semblance of conventional composition. On the following song, “The National Anthem” the band spiral into a propulsive epic that fuses jazz and krautrock into something else entirely. The first three songs sound nothing like one another, and in addition to the late album IDM stomp of “Idioteque”, they set the parameters for the record as a whole.

Despite the variety on display throughout Kid A it still achieves a remarkable cohesiveness through tone and atmosphere. Every song is masterfully paced, and exquisitely produced, and most blow open their sonic parameters further then they’ve ever dared before or since. “Optimistic” is one of the few songs here that hints at the sort of driving guitar compositions they prioritized early on, but when coupled with the forlorn melody and the eerie synth loops it almost sounds like an unsettling throwback that achieves a sense of perpetual weightlessness. “Treefingers” dives headfirst into ambient, and is one of the most gorgeous instrumental compositions that Radiohead have ever written. It also provides a superb bridge from the existential acoustic reverie “How to Disappear Completely” into the moody lurch of “Optimistic”. “Idioteque” is the pounding heart of Kid A’s detached overlook, but despite being the closest the album comes to a single it’s still claustrophobic and uninhabitable. After several songs that aim to instill dread and discomfort at every turn, the album’s last proper song “Motion Picture Soundtrack” ends things with a gorgeous harp arpeggio set against an organ wail as Yorke sings softly about a suicide fantasy. All these years later and Kid A continues to hold together as an astonishing collection of experiments from a band at the height of their powers.

Emerging at the dawn of the current century, Kid A didn’t commit to any pretenses of subtlety whatsoever, particularly with respect to its thematic concerns. On “Everything In It’s Right Place” Yorke lays out his perception of the state of a world laced with depression, anxiety, fear, and disconnection “There are two colours in my head/What was that you tried to say” informed by a breakdown that he experienced while touring Ok Computer. “How to Disappear Completely” takes the form of an out-of-body experience with a narrator thoroughly disillusioned with his life and ready to precede to the next plane of existence “In a little while/I’ll be gone/The moment’s already passed/Yeah, it’s gone”. “In Limbo” traffics in pure abstraction as the narrator wanders aimlessly throughout life unable to escape from his fantasies “I’m lost at sea/Don’t bother me/I’ve lost my way” while “Morning Bell” depicts a lingering spirit that supposedly resided in a house that Yorke used to own “The lights are on but nobody’s home/Nobody wants to be a slave”. The aforementioned “Motion Picture Soundtrack” provides a superb ending to the album rendered in bleak, cutting detail “Red wine and sleeping pills/Help me get back to your arms/Cheap sex and sad films/Help me get where I belong”, and it culmines with the narrator easing into suicide. The songs portray a grim culture of isolation and pacification that we’re much closer to living than we were when the album came out.

A year after Kid A Radiohead returned with their fifth LP, Amnesiac, but it mostly plays like a well-sequenced collection of thoughtfully repurposed leftovers from the Kid A sessions. Several great records followed suit, the latest being their sublime 2016 LP A Moon Shaped Pool, while various members of the band have spun off to focus on solo careers and film scores. Radiohead have never released anything less than a good record, but nothing since Kid A has come close to capturing the consistent brilliance of that record. The paranoia, uncertainty, and disillusionment that was pervasive at the turn of the century is rendered remarkably through their stark arrangements, liberal use of space, and distant temperament. The shift in Radiohead’s trajectory following Kid A was so pronounced that a band releasing their Kid A has become shorthand for the sort of dramatic, swinging for the fences left turn that's all too rare in music these days. While it’s almost certain that Radiohead will never release anything of this magnitude again, Kid A has held up incredibly well, and it continues to loom large as a relic of an already bygone era defined by a sense of wonder slowly being crippled beneath the weight of an encroaching dystopia.

Essentials: “Everything In It’s Right Place”, “The National Anthem”, “Optimistic”

2. Feels- Animal Collective

While Sung Tongs was the true breakout record for Animal Collective, Feels was where the band locked in as a full group to showcase that the remarkable melodic warmth peeking out through their intrinsic weirdness was far from a fluke. Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin had all come together once before for Ark two years prior, but the pop craftsmanship, confidence, consistency, and sheer range displayed on Feels are worlds apart from the unsettling, freak-folk noise collages that define Ark. Psychedelia and drone music are still large facets of their sound, but they hadn’t previously been utilized to reinforce such strong song craft. Having moved beyond their freak-folk and noise roots, Feels was a departure towards presenting themselves as more of a conventional rock band, and it’s still the closest they’ve ever come to releasing any semblance of a traditional “rock” LP, but true to form Feels defies any easy classification. Guitars, drums, piano, and vocals dominate the proceedings to be sure, but so do dense field recordings, and otherworldly drones, particularly on the record’s spellbinding second half. While perhaps not their most adventurous, nor their most unpredictable record, Feels is certainly their most consistent, offering a glimpse of a band still changing dramatically from record to record while offering far more than any of their peers.

Since Feels was only the second album of theirs to feature all four members by that point it’s a far more fleshed out sounding record than the bulk of those that preceded it. Both Avey and Deakin play guitar throughout, and Avey typically played lead while Deakin provided a warm melodic underpinning. Feels was the last record to feature Panda Bear behind the kit until Centipede Hz, and his drumming is some of the best that he’s ever recorded, alternating from frantic tribal percussion on “The Purple Bottle” to serene minimalist rolls on “Loch Raven” and everything in-between. Geologist’s superb use of texture hit a new peak here, particularly throughout the dreamier compositions that made up side B. Tare’s singing is anything but conventional, swinging wildly between octaves mid-measure, and flipping from tender croons to blood-curdling shrieks on a dime. Panda’s vocals continued to play a larger role in their music, and throughout Feels his voice acts most frequently as additional texture that lends their music an ethereal glow. In addition to larger contributions from all of the members besides Tare no other record of theirs features as much from outside collaborators. The piano playing courtesy of Doctress (who was married to Tare at the time) and the violin playing courtesy of Eyvind Kang add quite a bit of unexpected dimension that evens out the record’s more warped leanings. Despite everything that’s going on the instruments all have quite a bit of breathing room thanks to the record’s superb mixing and pacing. No single element ever dominates, and the amount of variation on display is a marvel.

Feels tells you everything that you need to know about its sentiments in the title alone. From the opening track “Did You See the Words” all the way through to the closer “Turn Into Something”, the band chronicle the euphoria of falling in love on the first side, and detail the poignancy of enduring heartbreak on the second side. With the exception of the superb, droning breather “Flesh Canoe”, that bridges the adrenaline burst of “Grass” to the grand, propulsive shuffle of “The Purple Bottle” the first side translates the euphoria of falling in love with infectious giddiness. It’s here where Avey’s delivery is at his most delirious and unpredictable, and he provides two of his greatest vocal performances with “Did You See the Words” and “The Purple Bottle”. “Did You See the Words” establishes the scope of the record as Tare recites the sparks that led to the relationship with keen details “Have you seen them?/The words cut open/Your poor intestines can’t deny/When the inky periods drip from your mailbox and/Blood flies dip and glide reach down inside/There’s something living in these lines” as his voice enthusiastically zig-zags around Panda’s minimalist tribal percussion. “The Purple Bottle” articulates the pure bliss of a relationship in its honeymoon phase, and features what’s quite possibly the most expressive vocal performance of Tare’s to date as he fantasizes about a future with his girlfriend “Well I’d like to spread your perfume around the old apartment/Could we live together and agree on the same wares/A trapeze is a bird cage and even if its empty it definitely fits the room/And we would too”. Naturally, things take a turn for the worse.

Side B is what really elevates Feels to a classic, and it’s the strongest stretch of songs that AC have ever recorded. Even though “Bees” is technically the conclusion of side A, tonally, and especially sonically, it fits far better with the rest of side B. Over chiming autoharp drones and sprinkles of piano, Avey depicts the calm before the storm “They came wide/So wild, the bees/They came crying/They said, “I’d take my time/You take your time/Please take your time”” as Panda’s angelic croon glides across the mix like a mirage. It’s a breathtaking moment of mesmerizing tranquility that emerges just before the clouds begin to take shape. We then transition into “Banshee Beat”, the centerpiece of Feels, and arguably one of the best songs that the band ever recorded. On “Banshee Beat” Avey depicts how his relationship fell apart after he learned that his girlfriend cheated on him, and every second of the sublime, nearly 8-and-a-half-minute song is necessary. “Banshee Beat” opens to wispy trails of droning guitar and brief spurts of piano as Avey solemnly sets the tone “Oh there’ll be time, to get by, to get dry, after the swimming pool/Oh there’ll be time, to just cry, I wonder why, it didn’t work out”. The song then slowly builds up steam as melodic guitar chords cut through the drone set against Panda’s nimble, chugging rhythm. Avey looks back on the memories that he and his ex had together, and despite his sorrow, he comes to the conclusion that he’s far better off without her in his life, and the song reaches a cathartic coda that features wordless harmonies between him and Panda as the song spirals into silence.

After “Banshee Beat” we’re led into “Daffy Duck”, the record’s most surreal, structure-less drone song. The guitar textures that Deakin provides here are some of the most immersive in their discography, and Avey’s at his most abstract “And if I had volcano boots/For swimming in volcanoes/Do you know the origins of laughing ducks?/Oh what’s a matter with those words”. It plays like a dream sequence that emerges right at the tail-end of the glowing resolution from “Banshee Beat” right into “Loch Raven”, one of the record’s other high-points. “Loch Raven” is perhaps the closest that AC have come to writing a straight-up lullaby, and it’s equally haunting and life-affirming thanks to the understated melodic sweep and soft, high-pitched textures that wafts through every corner of the mix. Panda’s honeyed tenor is unbearably tender as he repeatedly sings “I will not give up on you” juxtaposed against Avey referencing lines from Little Red Riding Hood that contextualize his cheating partner as the wolf plotting her deception. It’s truly something that couldn’t have been written by any other band, and it’s the last completely ambient song on the second side before the explosive finale, “Turn Into Something”. “Turn Into Something” is a classic sounding AC song, defined by explosive yelps from Avey alongside droning guitar, sprightly piano, and a bouncy floor-tom beat courtesy of Panda. At the 4-minute mark everything breaks apart and the song transitions into a ambient conclusion with Tare and Bear’s vocals floating through the ether as the droning guitars chime around them. It’s just as effective as a conclusion to Feels as it is an entry point into their work as a whole.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is easily the most successful record that AC have ever released, and most critics will tell you that it’s their best work, but it doesn’t come close to Feels across most conceivable metrics. Feels is the sound of the band firing on all cylinders, having developed exponentially as musicians and songwriters within the span of just five years. It didn’t push their sound forward quite as much as Strawberry Jam, nor did it signal quite as dramatic a leap in song craft as ST, but no other record of theirs succeeds in tackling so much ground with such remarkable consistency across the board. Feels was the last record that AC released before Panda Bear’s landmark solo LP Person Pitch irreversibly changed the entire trajectory of indie music, and influenced them to begin using samplers as the focal point of their compositions over guitars. Like all of their great records from Ark onwards, there are traces of everything that they had done prior on Feels, but listening to this record still leaves the impression that they could truly go anywhere. With almost any other band that’s ever existed, that claim is mostly disingenuous, but up until Centipede Hz the possibilities for AC truly seemed limitless, and that unprecedented unpredictability remains a key component of their appeal to this day. No 2 of their 10 records sound alike, and while they’ll almost certainly never again release anything that comes close to touching the pure bliss of Feels, the magic of this record is still an absolute marvel to revisit every time.

Essentials: “Banshee Beat”, “Loch Raven”, “The Purple Bottle”

1. Person Pitch- Panda Bear

By the time that Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) released Person Pitch he had moved from Brooklyn, New York to Lisbon, Portugal, gotten married, and his band Animal Collective were rapidly growing into one of the defining bands of the 21st century, but even knowing all the ground that they covered in such a short span could hardly have prepared anyone for anything as singular as PP. The last solo record that Panda released prior to PP was his gorgeous, yet devastatingly poignant 2004 folk record Young Prayer, a tribute to his late father who passed that same year from brain cancer. On PP the analog instrumentation that defined YP and Panda’s past work with AC was opted out entirely in favor of compositional approach informed by plunderphonics that was spurred by his increasing fondness of producers like Madlib, and his formative musical influences like GAS, The Orb, and Daft Punk. The end result is a remarkably rendered patchwork of disparate sounds that span the scope of recorded music history tied together with Panda’s signature tenor, and his sharp ear for sequencing. While PP isn’t technically a plunderphonics record due to the incorporation of Panda’s vocals recorded fresh for these compositions, it’s still more wide-ranging, and superbly realized than any plunderphonics record released before or since. PP went on to completely shift the trajectory of indie music in the years since its release, and very few artists have managed to release an album that matches the scope of this dazzling breakthrough since.

PP is superbly sequenced into seven songs, two of which broach the 12-minute mark, with well-placed comedowns emerging right after the epics. The songs consist of loops cherry-picked from old records that Panda was exposed to during his time working at the Other Music record store in Brooklyn throughout the early aughts. The music shifts and contorts on a whim, segueing through different motifs with acute finesse while drawing through lines between various eras of music that may have been previously unthinkable, but nonetheless seem to sound like natural evolutions in Panda’s hands. Nothing sounds out of placed or forced because of the careful sequencing, and the precise tweaking of the samples that are being deployed. The opening song “Comfy in Nautica” perfectly sets the tone as a choir of vocals descend upon what sounds like an ascending roller coaster, and samples of racing cars. The construction is simple, but striking, and the tone he achieves is one of pure humility established with his homespun mantras of self-preservation “Coolness is having courage/Courage to do what’s right/Try to remember always/ Just to have a good time”. Whether it’s the dreamlike glide of “I’m Not”, or the cozy, glowing conclusion “Ponytail” the samples that Panda utilizes perfectly achieve the aesthetics of what the songs themselves are striving for. Everything is meticulously placed, and a single shift would disrupt the lean symmetry of the whole.

Nothing on PP underwhelms, but the high points are among the most remarkable achievements throughout the history of sample-based composition. “Take Pills” starts with what sounds like a lumbering stroll along a cobblestone road with percussion cribbed from Scott Walker’s “Always Coming Back to You” as Panda’s sighs guide the caravan forward unassumingly, but after several minutes the song transitions smoothly into jaunty surf rock propelled by a sample courtesy of “The Popeye Twist” by The Tornadoes. The shift is immense, but nothing about it scans as gimmicky or unnatural, and the ease with which the song transitions belies the ingenuity on display. “Bros”, almost certainly the most celebrated song of Panda Bear’s solo career, is a masterful 12 and a half minute tour de force that cycles through various eras of pop music’s history with the sharp precision of DJ set. Beginning with another sample from The Tornadoes (this time in the form of “Red Roses and a Sky of Blue”), “Bros” establishes a merry-go-round framework that never manages to sound stale within the course of its 12 and a half minutes. The acoustic guitar thrust sampled off of Cat Steven’s “I’ve Found a Love” alongside Panda’s harmonies that forever recall those of Brian Wilson propel the second act of “Bros” up until its life-affirming third act that gets a great deal of mileage out of a sampled vocal loop from The Equal’s “Rub a dub dub”. PP’s other epic, “Good Girl / Carrots”, spends its first 3 minutes spiraling through a dub freakout that eventually folds neatly into a rousing, spring-loaded midsection featuring some of the finest melodies that Panda has ever sung. As the song transitions into its carnival-esque, music box final act with a sample from Kraftwerk’s “Ananas Symphonie” Panda caps things off with a rejection of the sort of music nerd hive fandom that helped propel him to such heights in the first place as noisemakers soar along the periphery of the mix. The peaks of “Bros” and “Good Girl / Carrots” are astonishing, and those two songs alone cemented Panda Bear’s status at the vanguard of sample-based composition.

The lyrics throughout PP are heartfelt admissions from someone whose life had undergone massive shifts within the few years leading up to it. The release of AC’s landmark LP Sung Tongs in 2004 allowed him and the rest of AC to begin sustaining a career in music, and that very same year his father died, he decided to move from New York to Portugal after falling in love with a woman while on vacation from tour, and he soon after married her. The warmth seeping out of the music on PP reflects the atmosphere that Panda suddenly found himself immersed in much in the same way that AC’s superb 2003 record Ark was informed by the chaos of their lives in Brooklyn. “Take Pills” grapples with the history of Panda’s family’s reliance on anti-depressants “Take one day at a time/Everything else you can leave behind/Only one thing at a time/Anything more really hurts your mind”. “Bros” is a plea to his brother Matt for space to live his own life in the wake of their father’s passing “I’m not trying to forget you/I just like to be alone/Come and give me the space I need/And you may you may you may you may/You may find that we’re alright” while on “Good Girl / Carrots” Panda’s taking taste makers to task for trying to instill a false sense of superiority over those who aren’t as informed on underground music “Get your head out from those mags and websites who try to shape your style/Take a risk yourself and wade into the deep end of the ocean”. On the album’s closer, “Ponytail”, Panda offers up little more than “When my soul starts knowing/I am as I’d want to be/And I know I never will stop caring”, but it’s a perfectly fitting conclusion to the record, and as sincere a sentiment as anything I’ve heard on any album. The overwhelming sincerity of the music is tempered by a beyond-his-years wisdom that’s well-earned and deeply empathetic.

Panda Bear released three solo LPs following PP, and the approach on this record has gone on to inform all of the AC records that have followed in its wake. The influence of this record simply cannot be overstated. As easy as it is to roll your eyes at chillwave and the “vibe” generation, everyone from Tame Impala to Travis Scott owes an enormous debt to Panda Bear. As the bulk of their peers began to stick to their respective lanes Panda and the rest of AC continued to swing wildly between trends and genres throughout the last decade, leaving their stamp on various forms before pivoting wildly to where their muses led them next. Thankfully, Panda has continued to push his sound forward throughout his solo career as well, and even when returning to sample-based composition for his stellar 2015 fifth solo record, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, it marked a clear shift towards the influence of hip-hop and house, and away from the minimal techno meets psychedelic guitar pop that PP favored in abundance. No musical artist throughout the 21st century has covered as much ground as consistently or as impressively as Panda Bear, and PP still stands as one of the few truly idiosyncratic statements from any artist throughout the last decade. It’s aged tremendously well in the years since its release, and it still presents a disarmingly well-realized euphoria that couldn’t sound more radical in the moody, deconstructed landscape of music that has defined this current decade.

Essentials: “Bros”, “Good Girl / Carrots”, “Take Pills”

[bountyofbeads]

Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take Conspiracies Seriously https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide.html

When you have the #POTUS pushing conspiracy theories about the former president we are in DANGEROUS territory. The #ClintonBodyCount is being pushed by Russia and bots. We can't jump to conclusions until we have the facts. BEWARE

Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take Conspiracies Seriously

Sometimes conspiracy theories point toward something worth investigating. A few point toward the truth.

By Ross Douthat | Published August 13, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 13, 2019 |

The challenge in thinking about a case like the suspicious suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the supposed “billionaire” who spent his life acquiring sex slaves and serving as a procurer to the ruling class, can be summed up in two sentences. Most conspiracy theories are false. But often some of the things they’re trying to explain are real.

Conspiracy theories are usually false because the people who come up with them are outsiders to power, trying to impose narrative order on a world they don’t fully understand — which leads them to imagine implausible scenarios and impossible plots, to settle on ideologically convenient villains and assume the absolute worst about their motives, and to imagine an omnicompetence among the corrupt and conniving that doesn’t actually exist.

Or they are false because the people who come up with them are insiders trying to deflect blame for their own failings, by blaming a malign enemy within or an evil-genius rival for problems that their own blunders helped create.

Or they are false because the people pushing them are cynical manipulators and attention-seekers trying to build a following who don’t care a whit about the truth.

For all these reasons serious truth-seekers are predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories on principle, and journalists especially are predisposed to quote Richard Hofstadter on the “paranoid style” whenever they encounter one — an instinct only sharpened by the rise of Donald Trump, the cynical conspiracist par excellence.

But this dismissiveness can itself become an intellectual mistake, a way to sneer at speculation while ignoring an underlying reality that deserves attention or investigation. Sometimes that reality is a conspiracy in full, a secret effort to pursue a shared objective or conceal something important from the public. Sometimes it’s a kind of unconscious connivance, in which institutions and actors behave in seemingly concerted ways because of shared assumptions and self-interest. But in either case, an admirable desire to reject bad or wicked theories can lead to a blindness about something important that these theories are trying to explain.

Here are some diverse examples. Start with U.F.O. theories, a reliable hotbed of the first kind of conspiracizing — implausible popular stories about hidden elite machinations.

It is simple wisdom to assume that any conspiratorial Fox Mulder-level master narrative about little gray men or lizard people is rubbish. Yet at the same time it is a simple fact that the U.F.O. era began, in Roswell, N.M., with a government lie intended to conceal secret military experiments; it is also a simple fact, lately reported in this very newspaper, that the military has been conducting secret studies of unidentified-flying-object incidents that continue to defy obvious explanations.

So the correct attitude toward U.F.O.s cannot be a simple Hofstadterian dismissiveness about the paranoia of the cranks. Instead, you have to be able to reject outlandish theories and  acknowledge a pattern of government lies and secrecy around a weird, persistent, unexplained feature  of human experience — which we know about in part because the U.F.O. conspiracy theorists keep banging on about their subject. The wild theories are false; even so, the secrets and mysteries are real.

Another example: The current elite anxiety about Russia’s hand in the West’s populist disturbances, which reached a particularly hysterical pitch with the pre-Mueller report collusion coverage, is a classic example of how conspiracy theories find a purchase in the supposedly sensible center — in this case, because their narrative conveniently explains a cascade of elite failures by blaming populism on Russian hackers, moneymen and bots.

And yet: Every conservative who rolls her or his eyes at the “Russia hoax” is in danger of dismissing the reality that there is a Russian plot against the West — an organized effort to use hacks, bots and rubles to sow discord in the United States and Western Europe. This effort is far weaker and less consequential than the paranoid center believes, it doesn’t involve fanciful “Trump has been a Russian asset since the ’80s” machinations … but it also isn’t something that Rachel Maddow just made up. The hysteria is overdrawn and paranoid; even so, the Russian conspiracy is real.

A third example: Marianne Williamson’s long-shot candidacy for the Democratic nomination has elevated the holistic-crunchy critique of modern medicine, which often shades into a conspiratorial view that a dark corporate alliance is actively conspiring against American health, that the medical establishment is consciously lying to patients about what might make them well or sick. Because this narrative has given anti-vaccine fervor a huge boost, there’s understandable desire among anti-conspiracists to hold the line against anything that seems like a crankish or quackish criticism of the medical consensus.

But if you aren’t somewhat paranoid about how often corporations cover up the dangers of their products, and somewhat paranoid about how drug companies in particular influence the medical consensus and encourage overprescription — well, then I have an opioid crisis you might be interested in reading about. You don’t need the centralized conspiracy to get a big medical wrong turn; all it takes is the right convergence of financial incentives with institutional groupthink. Which makes it important to keep an open mind about medical issues that are genuinely unsettled, even if the people raising questions seem prone to conspiracy-think. The medical consensus is generally a better guide than crankishness; even so, the tendency of cranks to predict medical scandals before they’re recognized is real.

Finally, a fourth example, circling back to Epstein: the conspiracy theories about networks of powerful pedophiles, which have proliferated with the internet and peaked, for now, with the QAnon fantasy among Trump supporters.

I say fantasy because the details of the QAnon narrative are plainly false: Donald Trump is not personally supervising an operation against “deep state” child sex traffickers any more than my 3-year-old is captaining a pirate ship.

But the premise of the QAnon fantasia, that certain elite networks of influence, complicity and blackmail have enabled sexual predators to exploit victims on an extraordinary scale — well, that isn’t a conspiracy theory, is it? That seems to just be true.

And not only true of Epstein and his pals. As I’ve written before, when I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people peddling a story about a network of predators in the Catholic hierarchy — not just pedophile priests, but a self-protecting cabal above them — that seemed like a classic case of the paranoid style, a wild overstatement of the scandal’s scope. I dismissed them then as conspiracy theorists, and indeed they had many of conspiracism’s vices — above all, a desire to believe that the scandal they were describing could be laid entirely at the door of their theological enemies, liberal or traditional.

But on many important points and important names, they were simply right.

Likewise with the secular world’s predators. Imagine being told the scope of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged operation before it all came crashing down — not just the ex-Mossad black ops element but the possibility that his entire production company also acted as a procurement-and-protection operation for one of its founders. A conspiracy theory, surely! Imagine being told all we know about the late, unlamented Epstein — that he wasn’t just a louche billionaire (wasn’t, indeed, a proper billionaire at all) but a man mysteriously made and mysteriously protected who ran a pedophile island with a temple to an unknown god and plotted his own “Boys From Brazil” endgame in plain sight of his Harvard-D.C.-House of Windsor pals. Too wild to be believed!

And yet.

Where networks of predation and blackmail are concerned, then, the distinction I’m drawing between conspiracy theories and underlying realities weakens just a bit. No, you still don’t want to listen to QAnon, or to our disgraceful president when he retweets rants about the #ClintonBodyCount. But just as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s network of clerical allies and enablers hasn’t been rolled up, and the fall of Bryan Singer probably didn’t get us near the rancid depths of Hollywood’s youth-exploitation racket, we clearly haven’t gotten to the bottom of what was going on with Epstein.

So to worry too much about online paranoia outracing reality is to miss the most important journalistic task, which is the further unraveling of scandals that would have seemed, until now, too implausible to be believed.

Yes, by all means, resist the tendency toward unfounded speculation and cynical partisan manipulation. But also recognize that in the case of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, the conspiracy was real.

Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned

With each news cycle, the false-information system grows more efficient.

By Charlie Warzel | Published August 11, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 13, 2019 "|

Even on an internet bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories and hyperpartisanship, Saturday marked a new chapter in our post-truth, choose-your-own-reality crisis story.

It began Saturday morning, when news broke that the disgraced financier  Jeffrey Epstein had apparently hanged himself in a Manhattan jail. Mr. Epstein’s death, coming just one day after court documents from one of his accusers were unsealed, prompted immediate suspicion from journalists, politicians and the usual online fringes.

Within minutes, Trump appointees, Fox Business hosts and Twitter pundits  revived a decades-old conspiracy theory, linking the Clinton family to supposedly suspicious deaths. #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrimeFamily trended on Twitter. Around the same time, an opposite hashtag — #TrumpBodyCount — emerged, focused on President Trump’s decades-old ties to Mr. Epstein. Each hashtag was accompanied by GIFs and memes picturing Mr. Epstein with the Clintons or with Mr. Trump to serve as a viral accusation of foul play.

The dueling hashtags and their attendant toxicity are a grim testament to our deeply poisoned information ecosystem — one that’s built for speed and designed to reward the most incendiary impulses of its worst actors. It has ushered in a parallel reality unrooted in fact and helped to push conspiratorial thinking into the cultural mainstream. And with each news cycle, the system grows more efficient, entrenching its opposing camps. The poison spreads.

Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide is, in many ways, the post-truth nightmare scenario. The sordid story contains almost all of the hallmarks of stereotypical conspiratorial fodder: child sex-trafficking, powerful global political leaders, shadowy private jet flights, billionaires whose wealth cannot be explained. As a tale of corruption, it is so deeply intertwined with our current cultural and political rot that it feels, at times, almost too on the nose. The Epstein saga provides ammunition for everyone, leading one researcher to refer to Saturday’s news as the “Disinformation World Cup.”

At the heart of the online fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during huge breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there’s often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumormongering and conspiracy theories.

On Saturday, Twitter’s trending algorithms hoovered up the worst of this detritus, curating, ranking and then placing it in the trending module on the right side of its website. Despite being a highly arbitrary and mostly “worthless metric,” trending topics on Twitter are often interpreted as a vague signal of the importance of a given subject.

There’s a decent chance that President Trump was using Twitter’s trending module when he retweeted a conspiratorial tweet tying the Clintons to Epstein’s death. At the time of Mr. Trump’s retweet, “Clintons” was the third trending topic in the United States. The specific tweet amplified by the president to his more than 60 million followers was prominently featured in the “Clintons” trending topic. And as Ashley Feinberg at Slate pointed out in June, the president appears to have a history of using trending to find and interact with tweets.

On Saturday afternoon, a computational propaganda researcher, Renée DiResta, noted that the media’s close relationship with Twitter creates an incentive for propagandists and partisans to artificially inflate given hashtags. Almost as soon as #ClintonBodyCount began trending on Saturday, journalists took note and began lamenting the spread of this conspiracy theory — effectively turning it into a news story, and further amplifying the trend. “Any wayward tweet … can be elevated to an opinion worth paying attention to,” Ms. DiResta wrote. “If you make it trend, you make it true.”

That our public conversation has been uploaded onto tech platforms governed by opaque algorithms adds even more fodder for the conspiratorial-minded. Anti-Trump Twitter pundits with  hundreds of thousands of followers  blamed “Russian bots” for the Clinton trending topic. On the far right, pro-Trump sites like the Gateway Pundit (with a long track record of amplifying  conspiracy theories) suggested that Twitter was suppressing and censoring the Clinton hashtags.

Where does this leave us? Nowhere good.

It’s increasingly apparent that our information delivery systems were not built for our current moment — especially with corruption and conspiracy at the heart of our biggest national news stories (Epstein, the Mueller report, mass shootings), and the platforms themselves functioning as petri dishes for outlandish, even dangerous conspiracy theories to flourish. The collision of these two forces is so troubling that an F.B.I. field office recently identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat. In this ecosystem, the media is frequently outmatched and, despite its best intentions, often acts as an amplifier for baseless claims, even when trying its best to knock them down.

Saturday’s online toxicity may have felt novel, but it’s part of a familiar cycle: What cannot be easily explained is answered by convenient untruths. The worst voices are rewarded for growing louder and gain outsize influence directing narratives. With each cycle, the outrage and contempt for the other build. Each extreme becomes certain its enemy has manipulated public perception; each side is the victim, but each is also, inexplicably, winning. The poison spreads.

[obsessivesassenach]

What the ever loving fuck is wrong with you people?

You people  You Antis, NST, Truthers, Haters, wtfer name you want to be called or are called. You people. You know I’m talking to you @noshippingallowed @contemplatingoutlander @goldenoutlander @adhara112 @aliceinoutlanerland (oops you forgot the d in outlander. get a d.) @whylimewhyanything (put the lime in the coconut) @whoreallyknowswho (it’s whom! whom! unless you just forgot to finish your sentence) @prodigiousreblogger @bestof60 (are you 60?) @vividdreamer318 (your imagination is certainly leading you astray) @breezylouisey (is that you weezy?) @momofmusa (i thought you were mom of USA lol)  @alittlebitmasss (oops your s key got stuck) Anyway, there are more of you and I’m sorry I didn’t give you a moment of thrill by acknowledging you by name but I mentioned the Tumblr accounts that I’ve seen making horrendously wild, hateful, fictional, hurtful accusations against other Outlander fans with no speck of proof - accusations meant to inspire others to emulate you and spread hate to those people as well. Let me get this straight. From what I can tell, you are super hopping mad about the content of certain Twitter and Instagram accounts. Fine. Totally fine. You are entitled to your opinions. I can see why those accounts might make some people mad. I mean, irrelevant to my life but maybe not yours.  You are mad that certain Twitter and Instagram accounts have been created for the sole purpose of throwing shade and mocking a certain celebrity you hold in high esteem. I get that. Fine. Be outraged! Express yourselves!! Speaking of fine I know you will go through this post with a fine toothed comb for anything you can argue with and attack me over because god forbid you actually read the message, digest the information, thoughtfully consider the content and then share your thoughts and opinions and maybe answer some of my questions. Nope that’s not your style. Attack attack attack half-cocked and don’t put any thought or concern for reality into it. Yes you are the borg of Antis as the foil to the Shippers. I didn’t create that world, you did. You wanted to be the anti-shippers. You are gathered on Tumblr together to be this Anti-Shipper fighting army. Go forth and fight uhh I guess? WHY????  See, shippers are motivated by love. That’s really obvious. There are all types of shippers just as there are all types of people (and even all types of antis), but what brings them together is not just their love of Outlander (and you guys love Outlander too! Whee we have something in common) but their love of the LOVE parts of Outlander and all the LOVE associated with Outlander in promos, BTS, interviews, Q&As, social media banter between the cast and crew, etc. LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE. So you generally don’t see shippers on social media attacking people with hatred and lies and accusations of criminal activity. Wait wait wait. Correction! YOU see shippers doing those things but no one else does. You mostly see shippers doing those things with accounts that aren’t even recognized shipper names. They are basically troll accounts that you have deduced are shipper accounts. You do have these long convoluted narratives of what certain shippers are alleged to have done and you bandy them about so frequently that your telephone game grows legs and walks it’s own marathon and becomes some weird beast-mode attack shipper who does horrible things. You say you SAW these things but you haven’t. Show me a tweet, a facebook post, an instagram post from an Outlander fan who identifies herself as a shipper and has a known persona in the fandom and is attacking, hating, committing these horrendous crimes you claim. What I mean is, SHOW ME THE MONEY! SHOW ME PROOF to back up your narrative. You have specifically named a number of Outlander fans and made outrageous claims as to their character, behavior, beliefs, actions, off-line actions and more. YOU HAVE NO PROOF BECAUSE THESE STORIES ARE FICTION. I’ll give you an example of how your lies have grown wings, run a marathon and turned into beast-mode: So a certain blue check account posts that a certain object of your hatred and hate-mongering did something so illegal that she would have been arrested and would still be in jail. You all headnod, mouth breath, feel righteous for having attacked her because you were soooo right, bang away at your keyboards and continue the lies and hatred and stoke the fires for uhhh fun? Yet you all know that she isn’t in jail and couldn’t have done this highly illegal thing because you watch her every move and you saw her posting pics of herself just last weekend participating in a fitness event. Hmmmm. Are you collectively dumbing each other down with your groupthink or all you all that stupid? YOU KNOW IT’S A LIE. But you’ve all convinced each other it’s ok to lie about it, malign, spread hatred and misinformation about certain fans and tarnish their reputation in the fandom because… because? because why??? Help me out here. So it’s because someone has said rude bad things to an actress you believe is Sam Heughan’s girlfriend even though he has never once said so. You BELIEVE it so it’s your reality. And the fans that you malign? You do that because they believe something else. But the weirdest thing is that you do malign them by tossing out totally unfounded and false accusations about their behavior and ascribe all kinds of unsavory activities, motives, and behaviors to these fans you have chosen to malign. You do the thing to them that you so claim to hate they are doing to the objects of your admiration.  I’m still working on this and I still need your help. So because you BELIEVE that two actors are dating and BELIEVE that it’s wrong that internet trolls make claims that they are not and some internet trolls say really rude things and tag them, you feel fully justified in making claims that the trolls are not just trolls but actual recognizable Outlander fans. Are you like shippers of trollworld or something?  I’ll just come right out and say it. Kim Hickey is not behind any of those trolls accounts you claim she is. I know this and you know this. You know which accounts are legitimately hers because she identifies herself. You are even attacking her My Peak Challenge account that she posts inspirational memes and encourages people to donate to Bloodwise. Are you for fucking real? You’re attacking a charity endeavor in your blind hatred of…. hatred of who fucking knows.  Even if you didn’t know she wasn’t behind the troll accounts, you absolutely have no basis for claiming she is. You are making shit up and publicly proclaiming it as truth just like that thing that Shippers do that you claim to hate.  Also, let’s talk about me:  I am a public person online. I don’t hide behind cutesy names. You can look me up and it won’t even be doxing me because it’s all right there, isn’t it? I have no sock accounts. I put my name on all my accounts because I own what I say and share. This tumblr account was created in the middle of last summer as a parody of Starz Obsessable campaign therefore it did not need my name on it. I never had a Tumblr account before that and I have never even sent anons on Tumblr. I never pretended I was anyone else or made any attempt to be anyone else. I posted freely about myself and my life when it was topical, including photos of myself. If you were like BINGO I’m such a supersleuth I figured out who is behind that blog!! you’re not smart or observant. It was obvious. The thing is, though, shippers didn’t know who I was. Not because they didn’t know who was behind “Obsessive Sassenach” but because they didn’t know who Nipuna was. Isn’t that funny? One of the Outlander fans on the top of your BAD SHIPPER LIST WHO MUST BE EXTERMINATED list isn’t even known by other shippers. What makes me a shipper? Just that I have heart eyes for Sam and Cait and think they have chemistry and oh wait, whoah, ZOMG, Arthur Kade thinks that too. Josh Horowitz does too! and ummmm ummmm that one lady at TCA that one year and that one book author who was on the NYT best seller list and you know I could go on. It’s not a crime to be fully happy to enjoy Sam and Caitriona’s chemistry. And if that makes me a shipper, yay. But the only reason I’m actually a known component of the shipper community now is because you guys have dragged my name around and created ridiculous lies about me. It’s like I’m some sort of Shipper Legend (to you, not shippers) who does these super crazy Shipper things in AntiLand. Remember the grave story that was created by one of you weirdos because a family friend of mine who is a caretaker for a military graveyard in the USA was friends with Sam’s father? You guys turned it into: That Crazy Shipper Nipuna stalks Sam’s father’s grave in hopes of running into him and Caitriona making a baby on his dad’s grave in Scotland. Or something like that. Anyway, tour bus guides in Scotland think there are crazy Outlander fans who stalk Sam at his father’s grave but if they stop to think they realize they don’t even know if he has a grave or if it’s even in Scotland.  You’re maligning the whole fucking fandom you freaks! You’re creating these outrageous, convoluted piece of fiction because you are all worked up about uhh something and then you tag other nasty people and get them to repeat the stories and then the stories get embellished and repeated and you sit back and watch the telephone game continue. But don’t you realize that you’re fucking the whole thing up for yourselves too? I mean, I guess not if you like chaos and mayhem. But most of you profess to care about people being nice and kind and cry out that bullying is bad and wrong. But then you do just that when you pick an Outlander fan and create detailed and convoluted lies about her behavior.  The people you lie about know they are lies, sure. And lots of other people know they are lies and ignore you, but you repeat the lies over and over and you know that saying about how if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe you. So you repeat and repeat and then sit back and with self satisfied smiles. Or maybe it’s just that your mouth is open because you’re breathing through it. Whatever. I don’t know your motives. I don’t know what attracts you to fan the way you do. I don’t know what fulfills you. I know it’s not LOVE. But do you even know? Are you just running around half-cocked and brainless and letting yourselves be lied to? What gives? Can you help me understand why you are constantly naming and targeting certain people and pointing others to attack them and if that doesn’t work creating stories that will hopefully motivate them to attack? WHY???

[goldenoutlander]

A long rambling post to us from ObsessiveSassenach. I copied and pasted her letter to us....

What the ever loving fuck is wrong with you people You people  You Antis, NST, Truthers, Haters, wtfer name you want to be called or are called. You people. You know I’m talking to you @noshippingallowed @contemplatingoutlander @goldenoutlander @adhara112 @aliceinoutlanerland (oops you forgot the d in outlander. get a d.) @whylimewhyanything (put the lime in the coconut) @whoreallyknowswho (it’s whom! whom! unless you just forgot to finish your sentence) @prodigiousreblogger @bestof60 (are you 60?) @vividdreamer318 (your imagination is certainly leading you astray) @breezylouisey (is that you weezy?) @momofmusa (i thought you were mom of USA lol)  @alittlebitmasss (oops your s key got stuck) Anyway, there are more of you and I’m sorry I didn’t give you a moment of thrill by acknowledging you by name but I mentioned the Tumblr accounts that I’ve seen making horrendously wild, hateful, fictional, hurtful accusations against other Outlander fans with no speck of proof - accusations meant to inspire others to emulate you and spread hate to those people as well. Let me get this straight. From what I can tell, you are super hopping mad about the content of certain Twitter and Instagram accounts. Fine. Totally fine. You are entitled to your opinions. I can see why those accounts might make some people mad. I mean, irrelevant to my life but maybe not yours.  You are mad that certain Twitter and Instagram accounts have been created for the sole purpose of throwing shade and mocking a certain celebrity you hold in high esteem. I get that. Fine. Be outraged! Express yourselves!! Speaking of fine I know you will go through this post with a fine toothed comb for anything you can argue with and attack me over because god forbid you actually read the message, digest the information, thoughtfully consider the content and then share your thoughts and opinions and maybe answer some of my questions. Nope that’s not your style. Attack attack attack half-cocked and don’t put any thought or concern for reality into it. Yes you are the borg of Antis as the foil to the Shippers. I didn’t create that world, you did. You wanted to be the anti-shippers. You are gathered on Tumblr together to be this Anti-Shipper fighting army. Go forth and fight uhh I guess? WHY???? See, shippers are motivated by love. That’s really obvious. There are all types of shippers just as there are all types of people (and even all types of antis), but what brings them together is not just their love of Outlander (and you guys love Outlander too! Whee we have something in common) but their love of the LOVE parts of Outlander and all the LOVE associated with Outlander in promos, BTS, interviews, Q&As, social media banter between the cast and crew, etc. LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE is LOVE. So you generally don’t see shippers on social media attacking people with hatred and lies and accusations of criminal activity. Wait wait wait. Correction! YOU see shippers doing those things but no one else does. You mostly see shippers doing those things with accounts that aren’t even recognized shipper names. They are basically troll accounts that you have deduced are shipper accounts. You do have these long convoluted narratives of what certain shippers are alleged to have done and you bandy them about so frequently that your telephone game grows legs and walks it’s own marathon and becomes some weird beast-mode attack shipper who does horrible things. You say you SAW these things but you haven’t. Show me a tweet, a facebook post, an instagram post from an Outlander fan who identifies herself as a shipper and has a known persona in the fandom and is attacking, hating, committing these horrendous crimes you claim. What I mean is, SHOW ME THE MONEY! SHOW ME PROOF to back up your narrative. You have specifically named a number of Outlander fans and made outrageous claims as to their character, behavior, beliefs, actions, off-line actions and more. YOU HAVE NO PROOF BECAUSE THESE STORIES ARE FICTION. I’ll give you an example of how your lies have grown wings, run a marathon and turned into beast-mode: So a certain blue check account posts that a certain object of your hatred and hate-mongering did something so illegal that she would have been arrested and would still be in jail. You all headnod, mouth breath, feel righteous for having attacked her because you were soooo right, bang away at your keyboards and continue the lies and hatred and stoke the fires for uhhh fun? Yet you all know that she isn’t in jail and couldn’t have done this highly illegal thing because you watch her every move and you saw her posting pics of herself just last weekend participating in a fitness event. Hmmmm. Are you collectively dumbing each other down with your groupthink or all you all that stupid? YOU KNOW IT’S A LIE. But you’ve all convinced each other it’s ok to lie about it, malign, spread hatred and misinformation about certain fans and tarnish their reputation in the fandom because… because? because why??? Help me out here. So it’s because someone has said rude bad things to an actress you believe is Sam Heughan’s girlfriend even though he has never once said so. You BELIEVE it so it’s your reality. And the fans that you malign? You do that because they believe something else. But the weirdest thing is that you do malign them by tossing out totally unfounded and false accusations about their behavior and ascribe all kinds of unsavory activities, motives, and behaviors to these fans you have chosen to malign. You do the thing to them that you so claim to hate they are doing to the objects of your admiration. I’m still working on this and I still need your help. So because you BELIEVE that two actors are dating and BELIEVE that it’s wrong that internet trolls make claims that they are not and some internet trolls say really rude things and tag them, you feel fully justified in making claims that the trolls are not just trolls but actual recognizable Outlander fans. Are you like shippers of trollworld or something? I’ll just come right out and say it. Kim Hickey is not behind any of those trolls accounts you claim she is. I know this and you know this. You know which accounts are legitimately hers because she identifies herself. You are even attacking her My Peak Challenge account that she posts inspirational memes and encourages people to donate to Bloodwise. Are you for fucking real? You’re attacking a charity endeavor in your blind hatred of…. hatred of who fucking knows.  Even if you didn’t know she wasn’t behind the troll accounts, you absolutely have no basis for claiming she is. You are making shit up and publicly proclaiming it as truth just like that thing that Shippers do that you claim to hate.  Also, let’s talk about me:  I am a public person online. I don’t hide behind cutesy names. You can look me up and it won’t even be doxing me because it’s all right there, isn’t it? I have no sock accounts. I put my name on all my accounts because I own what I say and share. This tumblr account was created in the middle of last summer as a parody of Starz Obsessable campaign therefore it did not need my name on it. I never had a Tumblr account before that and I have never even sent anons on Tumblr. I never pretended I was anyone else or made any attempt to be anyone else. I posted freely about myself and my life when it was topical, including photos of myself. If you were like BINGO I’m such a supersleuth I figured out who is behind that blog!! you’re not smart or observant. It was obvious. The thing is, though, shippers didn’t know who I was. Not because they didn’t know who was behind “Obsessive Sassenach” but because they didn’t know who Nipuna was. Isn’t that funny? One of the Outlander fans on the top of your BAD SHIPPER LIST WHO MUST BE EXTERMINATED list isn’t even known by other shippers. What makes me a shipper? Just that I have heart eyes for Sam and Cait and think they have chemistry and oh wait, whoah, ZOMG, Arthur Kade thinks that too. Josh Horowitz does too! and ummmm ummmm that one lady at TCA that one year and that one book author who was on the NYT best seller list and you know I could go on. It’s not a crime to be fully happy to enjoy Sam and Caitriona’s chemistry. And if that makes me a shipper, yay. But the only reason I’m actually a known component of the shipper community now is because you guys have dragged my name around and created ridiculous lies about me. It’s like I’m some sort of Shipper Legend (to you, not shippers) who does these super crazy Shipper things in AntiLand. Remember the grave story that was created by one of you weirdos because a family friend of mine who is a caretaker for a military graveyard in the USA was friends with Sam’s father? You guys turned it into: That Crazy Shipper Nipuna stalks Sam’s father’s grave in hopes of running into him and Caitriona making a baby on his dad’s grave in Scotland. Or something like that. Anyway, tour bus guides in Scotland think there are crazy Outlander fans who stalk Sam at his father’s grave but if they stop to think they realize they don’t even know if he has a grave or if it’s even in Scotland. You’re maligning the whole fucking fandom you freaks! You’re creating these outrageous, convoluted piece of fiction because you are all worked up about uhh something and then you tag other nasty people and get them to repeat the stories and then the stories get embellished and repeated and you sit back and watch the telephone game continue. But don’t you realize that you’re fucking the whole thing up for yourselves too? I mean, I guess not if you like chaos and mayhem. But most of you profess to care about people being nice and kind and cry out that bullying is bad and wrong. But then you do just that when you pick an Outlander fan and create detailed and convoluted lies about her behavior.  The people you lie about know they are lies, sure. And lots of other people know they are lies and ignore you, but you repeat the lies over and over and you know that saying about how if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe you. So you repeat and repeat and then sit back and with self satisfied smiles. Or maybe it’s just that your mouth is open because you’re breathing through it. Whatever. I don’t know your motives. I don’t know what attracts you to fan the way you do. I don’t know what fulfills you. I know it’s not LOVE. But do you even know? Are you just running around half-cocked and brainless and letting yourselves be lied to? What gives? Can you help me understand why you are constantly naming and targeting certain people and pointing others to attack them and if that doesn’t work creating stories that will hopefully motivate them to attack? WHY???2 notes Mar 27th, 2017 ng post from ObsessiveSassenach to us all.

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