June 2016 Mixtape: The Long Defeat
Fri, Jul 1, 2016#36 The Long Defeat
This month celebrates finding joy in even the harshest of defeats.
The joy that followed the defeat was Glastonbury Music Festival. With all the political and financial fallout following the EU referendum, it was a great source of escapism and proved once again that music unites us all and provides happiness in even the saddest of scenarios.
Glastonbury is always a huge source of music discovery for me and although I have never attended the festival, I feel perfectly satisfied with spending the whole weekend mud-free on my sofa and spending countless hours with the extensive BBC coverage. It also means I don’t suffer from FOMO at being there and being faced with 5 great acts clashing with one another!
Glastonbury was so late in the month that many of the artists I enjoyed do not feature on this playlist. However, expect to see a lot of these featured next month as I delve deeper into the back catalogues of M83, Grimes and Tame Impala.
Five in Focus
1. “The Long Defeat” by Thrice
I was initially sceptical about championing a band two months in a row for the Five in Focus, but if any band is deserving of breaking a few rules for it is Thrice. “The Long Defeat” is an incredibly powerful cut from the bands latest album, “To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere” and felt like a natural selection for this months playlist due to the lyrical content from vocalist Dustin Kensrue.
Kensrue describes a world where deterioration is a tyrannical force that hinders any sense of progress. However, he promotes hope and togetherness in tackling the increasingly bleak future, as he underlines his belief that “there’s a way through the fire” and that “it’s ever bright beyond this black”.
On “The Long Defeat”, Kensrue draws inspiration from the Christian and fantasy writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, repurposing many of his lines and even lifting the song title from Tolkien’s masterpiece, “The Lord of the Rings”.
The concept of the long defeat can be applied to the potential fate of humanity as a whole, or even as reference to our individual mortality. We are all destined to pass away when it is our time, but Kensrue’s belief that there’s a “joy that blooms beyond these walls” could be interpreted as a declaration of hope that there is an afterlife that will provide warmth, brightness and relief from the suffering of the world we currently inhabit.
However you choose to interpret “The Long Defeat”, it is the message of hope that stands tallest as Kensrue exits wearily, yet unwavered in his repetition that “together we’ll fight the long defeat”. In these times of political uncertainty, we need songs like this more than ever.
2. “Solstice” by If These Trees Could Talk
“The Bones of a Dying World” is the new album by If These Trees Could Talk and serves as my introduction to a band that seemingly should need no introduction to anyone familiar with the post-rock genre. Nevertheless this seems a great place to start as the album is outstanding and sits shoulder to shoulder with releases from Russian Circles and Pelican as the finest in the post-metal scene.
“Solstice” is the first track off the album and juggles both beauty and brawn in equal measure. The shimmering reverb-laden guitar work provides the gorgeous backbone of the song which repeatedly gets one of its vertebrae smashed out from underneath itself each time the drums and distorted guitars thunder in for a metallic passage.
When the song reaches its conclusion you are yearning for the journey to continue, which speaks volumes of the strength of the album as a cohesive whole. I can see the album etching an even more visceral connection with myself in the darker, colder months to come.
3. “Tilted” by Christine and the Queens
The highlight of Glastonbury festival for me this time around was French singer-songwriter Héloïse Letissier, or Christine and the Queens as she prefers to go by as her stage name. I was initially drawn in by her minimalistic private performance of “Tilted” for the BBC highlights show, with Letissier showing off her bizarre Michael Jackson-esque dance moves while flexing her impressive mixed language vocals.
I was hungry to see more and then watched her full set on The Other Stage, which was a mesmerising blend of theatricality and tour-de-force vocals. There were numerous standout songs in the set, but “Tilted” proved to be the most infectious and the perfect introduction to an artist that has a blindingly bright future ahead of her.
4. “Palm Dreams” by Touché Amoré
This is a very promising taster from the forthcoming Touché Amoré album, “Stage Four”. Touché Amoré began to lean towards a more melodic sound on “Is Survived By”, but “Palm Dreams” deviates even further from their past work with the introduction of clean backing vocals and crystal-clear production. Everything sounds less abrasive than it once was for the band, and I can’t help but think this song neatly fills the void left behind by Alexisonfire, especially when that lead guitar lick comes in at the 0:45 second mark.
Jeremy Bolm is often revered as one of the best lyricists in rock music and is never afraid to open himself up wholly in his songs. On “Palm Dreams”, Bolm is at his most vulnerable as he details the pain of clearing out his mother’s old family home in the wake of her passing. The song forms a tornado of grief and regret, as he raises questions surrounding the possessions of his late mother that will forever remain unanswered.
There is something about the subject of a death in the family that allows a song or album to connect with me in a way that other subjects cannot. Although I have not suffered much loss within my own family, it is perhaps the inevitability of those losses that allows me to place myself in those songs and be stirred so convincingly by them. In recent years, albums from Pianos Become the Teeth, The Hotelier and Sufjan Stevens explored loss in their own ways and are now some of my most treasured albums. I don’t know if I can expect the same kind of connection with “Stage Four”, but if “Palm Dreams” is a sign of things to come then this may be one of the most important releases of the year for me.
5. “The Coast” by PUP
PUP possess a special strain of self-deprecation, with their band name being an acronym for Pointless Use of Potential and their sophomore album being titled “The Dream is Over”, directly paraphrasing a doctor who told vocalist, Stefan Babcock, that he would never sing again after shredding his vocal cords. However, “The Dream is Over” has been met with such resounding critical acclaim that suggest the dream is far from over. In fact, PUP seem to just be getting started.
“The Coast” is one of the more melodic songs on the album, something that might be difficult to believe when Babcock rips into a throat-tearing series of screams on the chorus:
“Now you know what’s eating me!
Taking hold!
It was dragging me down!”
The aggression is pointed firmly at a frozen lake in Canada that has claimed the lives of a number of its townsfolk during the spring and summer melt. Babcock treats the lake as a living entity, explaining how it “needs to eat like all living things and it’s hungriest in the spring”. It is detailed with such menace and character that it almost feels as though the lake is an antagonist in a horror movie.
They close out the chaos with a morose passage that is so unsettling that it had to be included below as my lyric of the month.
Lyrics of the Month
“A little girl has gone missing.
Has anyone heard she’d gone out to go fishing?
The cracks in the ice make a mighty fine grave in the summer thaw.”- “The Coast” by PUP
The Like List
Travel: Madrid
It’s always highly enjoyable to visit a foreign city for a second time. It feels as though there is less pressure to cram as much as you can in to your visit and that you can just enjoy the feeling of being back in a city that you loved so much that it warranted a second visit.
I first visited Madrid back in 2011, so the city still felt very familiar to me. We decided to spend our weekend avoiding the museums and popular sights and instead spent a long afternoon in the gorgeous Retiro park and browsing the various markets around the city. It is such a lively and well loved city and demonstrates all that is beautiful about the Spanish way of life.
Time to start planning a third visit I think…