(#1) Death, Punk and Childhood
The inaugural life and times of stereobub.
Welcome to the inaugural bubstack entry where you get an update on everything bub.
Be warned: Substack tells me this post is “too long for email”. Read it on the blog. I suppose there can be no more fitting way to kick off this blog than something like that happening… typical of me at this point, surely. Yap yap yap blah blah blah, y’all. Like and subscribe.
Life has been chaotic and I did not manage to write properly, so this is a compendium of everything that I find worth writing about since I opened this blog. I’ll give a small life update and “music bub likes” update, a mission statement for this blog, some random things i felt like sharing, and a little comp of all my writing in the last while!
And pretty please, if you’re actually reading all this, also let me know what you think about the format - should I break these up into smaller posts? Should I incorporate the full-length writing into the text itself or make like, separate posts and link when required? This is all a big experiment for me! Feedback super welcome and actually necessary if this blog is to fulfill its purpose, which is reaching you guys with all my work :D
Life
As of typing these letters onto the screen, I am going to move to Belgium in two days to start working on my PhD there the same week. I’m going to do some basic first semester teaching, continue my graph theory research from my Masters thesis, and get to join a project on verification of symbolic neural networks. The education system over there honestly looks far better for the students than what I’m used to at the RWTH Aachen, partly because the scale is so much smaller so you can really be there and get hands-on. I’m very excited to do that and also low-key still pretty hopeful that my masters thesis research isn’t dead in the water yet. We have a small team of 5 people including me working on it now, because honestly I’ve really reached my limits as a researcher and getting someone with more knowledge will really revitalize this thing (cross your fingers for me). As far as the brand new research project at Hasselt, I’m not exactly sure what I’m getting into yet but I do know there are very good people working on it and I’m excited to join the team. This has been a dream of mine since I was little, and I’m especially looking forward to hopefully becoming part of a community of researchers - science is a team sport really. I’m not into the idea of the lone genius mathematician writing beautiful proofs at the dead of night, even though my work is all mathematics, and I do know many people like that. Admin stuff has been horribly exhausting and I am not particularly good at physically moving things around, but it’ll all be worth it soon!
Unfortunately, these last few months have otherwise been a bit difficult for me due to health issues - physical and mental. The good news is that I am now finally back out in the nick of time thanks to my local support network that I’m really grateful to have. I haven’t had any panic attacks or suicidal thoughts for over two weeks now, and this morning I was able to pretty spontaneously run a half marathon and finally get back into the shape I was in earlier this year. The plan on that front now is to prepare for the Vienna City Marathon 2025, with a rough goal of like… 5 hours maybe. My current Half time from this morning is 2h20min, so this might or might not be doable if I really give it a go. In any event it sounds like a nice thing to do in your life once or twice.
As far as art projects go, there’s a lot in the oven - a video project, a writing project, physicals for Decay, a new album… all of these are at various stages of ready and I’m sure they will all see the light of day in due time, but as mentioned I wasn’t able to focus much energy on them recently, and sure as hell won’t for the next few weeks either. Trust the process though, you guys! You will see a great many stereobub works potentially next year.
I like music
Did you know this! =)
I generally think lists and charts are quite useless as far as actually saying anything about art, but I do find them useful as a tool of communication, and also as a way to question yourself, as in “hey, what am I really about?” in music terms. So I did a bunch of that again recently.
Updated klaracore list, now v2.2, with many legacy entries removed and thus a slightly more compact form. Here. New albums in there are Hang by Foxygen, Cime LP2, Opus by Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Joanna Wang’s Bob Music.
New top 50 songs ever list here. It still sounds a bit weird and sad overall but that’s just what I like.
Now attempting to sync my discography compendium again, where I listen to every song an artist from my favourites list has put out and talk about my overall thoughts. Many new artists in the chamber and maybe by the end of the year the favourites list and compendium will be back in unity.
All this stuff is kind of mindless library work but hey, I enjoy that for some reason. Makes you reflect. Also a very peaceful task.
There’s been a lot of stuff recently that has me VERY excited for the future of music:
Prolegomenon by Skin Tension is the prelude to their newest work Xomn, out possibly next year and the proper sequel to Omni, which I have many many thoughts about that you can look at here. This thing is promising. REALLY promising. If you like harsh alien sounding music - have a go.
Incredibly excited about the upcoming Geordie Greep record, previously de-facto “frontman” of cutting edge rock group Black Midi, whose most recent work I reviewed here (RYM frontpage!). The new single “Holy Holy” is this absurd progressive take on Steely Dan with Greep’s most emotive vocals to date, on which he effortlessly slips into character as this weird incel dude and tells a creepy but also somewhat heartbreaking story about a very very lonely man paying a prostitute to make him look like a macho. Cannot wait for this album.
Big shoutout to “Wha Me Eat” by Macka B, an absolutely iconic vegan anthem that has somehow slipped past me for the whole time I’ve been vegan myself. It’s this really catchy Dancehall tune about Macka B’s vegan lifestyle and he goes kind of insane on the rhymes. The amount of delicious vegetables he fit into these verses is insane. Fire track. I love bumping this one in the kitchen. Music video. I’ve heard of this dude before because of his Medical Monday series, on which he kicks a little rap about some vegan medicine and the cucumber episode that made it on my Youtube feed is super catchy.
I will talk about Nothing by Louis Cole, Opus by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cime LP2 and Bob Music by Joanna Wang later in this entry, all of these have hit me like lightning though.
Mission Statement
So, I really don’t like RateYourMusic. I link to it all the time and I currently just do not have a much better place to host my music related writing and thoughts… but the more time goes on, the more I’m convinced I need to do something. One of the major incidents lately is a mod unpublishing the entirety of one of my friends writing, GardenOfDelete, because their review for the latest Kanye record is… too political maybe? Not sure, because the mods never gave a proper reason, but I don’t see it being anything else truthfully. There’s that, as well as the new songs update revealing some really disturbing racial biases in what the people of RYM consider good and proper elite music, and more little stories that I don’t really want to broadcast here that made me convinced that, above all else, RYM does not even want to function as a good archive for art. The main function of the website is to establish a musical “meta” that you can subscribe to so you can be in the know about “the best” music. And whenever you start enabling that kind of stuff, you get an absolutely rotten userbase with horrible perspectives on art. And honestly fuck that.
Simply put, I just don’t want to engage anymore. So the plan is this: 1. Start using this thing as an archive for my writing, as I am doing now. 2. Code and establish an actual self-hosted blog for myself where I can post the primary versions of new writing. 3. Crosspost on RYM. I’ve decided to keep that third point because, despite everything, through my profile I’ve fostered a nice atmosphere and people that read and respond to my writing there actually reach out sometimes, and the resulting conversations I’ve had + the few friends I made this way have been a huge positive in my life. But yes, such is the plan. Start here, make a blog, back to the stone ages. That’s where I was, anyways! In 2020 or so, a gaggle of friends and I hosted a blog website on which we would all post our reviews, and then I’d crosspost on RYM as a form of archiving. That’s how it should be! For me, at least. I hope I can get back to this way of life rather soon. Over the last few months, I’ve picked up some minimal webdev skills and might get cracking on a personal blog starting there once I have the elbow room. And then perhaps these posts can live in a nicer world =)
Anyways, time for all the major thoughts I found worth writing down.
Death
I’m gonna try to keep this one short. Death has been, somewhat unfortunately, a major major theme in all of my favourite songs, as well as in my writing - read anything stereobub from this year and you can perceive its looming shadow. This is partly simply just due to the fact that Death is on my mind a lot anyways and a major motivator to get shit done and live and make connections while I am on Earth, but also because I consider it a “great unifier” in art. One of those things that is just understood by the listener no matter who when or where they are. It’s gonna happen to you, so you probably thought about it before and might have feelings on it. Music that picks up on that can speak to you. For a long time, I for some stupid reason thought Death is the only great unifier, but of course not, and as I was writing about Loss of Life by MGMT this year, I had to append Love to that list, at the very least.
Well, Death has come back to haunt me these last few months due to two things (and I hope this wont be part of every entry). One, I think we finally got the final puzzle piece to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s body of work, a musician who I’ve been very obsessed with and who passed away last year while I was in the process of combing through his entire work to write a comprehensive guide on it - now finished, unfortunately forever. “Opus”, his last recorded live performance ever, is now available as a music album (previously only as a concert film). This album is one of those rare moments where an artist is crucially aware of their death, possibly has been for a long time, and has carefully considered the exact art that they want to leave behind. Like a message to the world, maybe. Sakamoto had great control over this, and though I think he would’ve had more to say had he stayed alive, he is maybe one of the very rare cases where a musical artist I know was able to go in peace, doing what they love most. This gives me hope. I often think about what I’ll leave behind if I go tomorrow, and all the projects I will never be able to finish. Of course I’m only young, but life is unpredictable and scary. And I’m sure Sakamoto had so much left in his imagination too - all of that now closed off for all of us forever. But still, with Opus (as a key to the rest of his discography), I think he somehow did it - at least by all appearances, he left us with no regrets, having said all he needed to say. This is something to strive for and I imagine it will take nearly forever - but maybe only nearly.
My “extended” thoughts on Opus are here and at the bottom of this page (not nearly as extended as usual, but it did get me a RYM frontpage highlight). I hope me, and you reading this, will be able to grow old enough to achieve something like this. Thank God I got my health back in order, huh! If you’re anxious reading all this, as I often am when it’s time to think about this stuff, consider that we do have it a lot better than people decades back, because, well look at this! A post on the internet! At least we leave those behind, for better or for worse, but surely for the rest of time (or as long as the internet works). If you don’t mind a dark example, here is a website that is the epitome of exactly what I mean. This person has not managed to finish what they were working on - but they live forever in the code. A more modern approach than what Sakamoto was doing, surely…
And for a third approach, I have to bring up Nothing by Louis Cole (and the Metropole Orkest led by James Buckley). His latest work and nothing short of INSANE, something that has to be seen to be belived (like actually seen, there’s this video of the album that I find essential). Ideally, seen live, in concert, in your face (I had tickets, sob) - which was the plan for this thing, but unfortunately Louis is sick now and has cancelled or postponed everything he had planned for this year. He just can’t play the drums now. Tragic but somehow absurdly fitting for this record - the most surreal work in his catalogue so far, full of mesmerizing nihilist quotes like "the Sun is just another flame", "nothing making sense makes sense", "just some person in the mirror won't matter to disappear", et cetera et cetera. I don’t think he even cares about format anymore either. It’s just this pure expression unlike anything I’ve heard before. The reason I think this album is an approach to understanding Death is because, after spending time with it and also due to the unfortunate timing of its release on Earth, my main way of understanding this album’s themes has been to view them from the perspective of a dying artist. Like, what are the thoughts going through a mans head as he’s staring at the void about to embrace him? What has he made of the totality of his time here? And the answer, at least on this album, is - nothing. A whole LOT of nothing, but still nothing. It’s all completely contradictory, actively and repulsively nihilistic, and not really in the optimist way, just a full plunge into the dark abyss beyond. There’s beauty there too if you’re patient, though. And it does rock, still. He’s still got it on that front. I hope Louis Cole gets well soon and is able to work on his earthly legacy with renewed vigor - but for now, this is a fascinating window into a mans innermost thoughts about the dark expanse beyond our living days, released during a time where he was struck with an illness that no longer allows him to actually partake in art, that is, properly live to the fullest.
Punk
I have happy thoughts too! People don’t generally associate this with me that much, but God I love punk music. I suppose my taste in the genre can be a bit confusing as I suffer from writing brain and so zero on in lyricism always - but every now and then I find a record so compelling that it wins me over in a way that feels revelatory. Punk music does this a lot, actually. And it just so happens that last month, I found a record exactly like that - via a random recommendation online - wrote about it (read here and at the bottom of this page) and miraculously got into contact with the artist, which only immediately deepens my fascination with this thing. That artist is Monty Cime and I’m talking about The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble. In my review of this record, I try among other things to break down its perceived musical lineage from where I stand, which leads me to write a little paragraph about Egor Letov - iconic Russian anarcho punk artist that has certainly influenced many, and i mean MANY, but I always thought you kinda have to have been there or speak the language to “get it”. So I bring this guy up, and I say that he would have loved Cime LP2 if he was still alive, but hastily I add that, well, this is a personal brainworm of mine because I love Letov so dearly, and there is no real chance that a woman from the Honduras actually has this connection. Turns out. She fuckin does. Monty messages me within like 15 minutes of my review going out (she has a problem) and lets me know that the centerpiece of the record was actually directly inspired by a Letov song and she is a huge fan of his work - and my mind is blown. We went on to talk about the Soviet rock scene, which she is far too knowledgeable about, and later many other things, but I keep on coming back to this initial moment - how on earth did this happen? Letov-inspired Honduran-American punk? It’s a bit like a dream sequence.
This whole thing has kicked off a maelstrom in my mind. First of all, language barriers appear to be not nearly as much of an issue as I thought, and neither do age gaps - here’s this zoomer lady who’s several years younger than me from an entirely different part of the world, speaking entirely different languages, who somehow seems to get Letov in the same way that I do, background be damned. There must be something about music, and especially punk, that’s just able to break free like that somehow. This actually ties into my specific thoughts on the album: In my review (read below or here), I go into how Cime takes historical contexts and uses them as a canvas to talk about current, real and personal issues. Hearing this actual example of how it works in practice has validated my analysis in a really nice way, and I found this story important to tell here as an example for how powerful punk music can be. And second of all, this whole situation has made me appreciate the value of music writing, including my own - because look, now we know this cool thing about this exciting punk band. Sometimes just saying whatever works. Also listen to that record, by the way.
Childhood
Another recent obsession of mine has been Bob Music. This is not, as one might rightly assume, a genre of music dedicated to the ears of Bob. It is instead a rebellious album made by a Taiwanese lady with an insane history in the music industry - read here - and one of the most powerful and relatable things I’ve heard in recent memory. Now, on the surface level, you might ask me what the hell I’m talking about. This music sounds like emo dubstep for kindergarten kids! Surely whatever thematic value it has must be buried beneath this garish aesthetic. But I tell you that this music is powerful not despite, but BECAUSE of this childish aesthetic. You see, Ms. Wang has not been able to actually live a normal childhood, like many of us. I for one can relate, having transitioned socially and physically in my early 20s and thus not having had access to a normal puberty, living through a second go at puberty quite recently. And here’s this singer, theatrically embracing the kind of thoughts a teenage boy might have, at an age way beyond what one would consider a proper “adult”. But it is precisely by reclaiming this childish aesthetic that this art becomes so powerful! For one, we don’t actually have much control of our childhood, so taking matters into your own hands and re-living or maybe even fixing and re-imagining your kiddy years through art can be an incredible form of therapy and self expression (and I think Bob Music is the peak of this artform). But secondly, and I think this is important, childish aesthetics rock because they force you to be pure and naive, and thus isolate your main points very very clearly and make them very colourful and evident, like a kids book would do.
I have specific examples of where this works really well, partly brought to the fore by re-living part of my own childhood by actually committing to a video game (rare occasion, happens a few days a year) and plunging into World of Goo 2, a game that manages to evoke nostalgia in a peculiar way - this sequel doesn’t actually give you more of what you loved as a kid, it gives you more of what you now remember you loved as a kid. And your memories are always lying to you, always one step ahead of the actual thing, more beautiful and tangible and important. Quite a feat of game design. But anyways, while doing this, I came up with a few striking examples of what I consider good kids-book storytelling in the way that Bob Music excels at.
The Giving Tree. For some reason, I only happened upon this story now, and I should not write about it too much here given that everything has already been said. But this is what I mean: A simple story told in a very stark and effective way, one that reaches you very intuitively, but plants a seed in you that makes you ask many, many questions. It makes you investigate your relationship with your parents and maybe your partner, what dependence and thankfulness even means to you, alternative ways for this story to unfold, et cetera et cetera… definitely look at this if you somehow haven’t yet? It will stay with you.
Easier To Love You by Porter Robinson. I wrote about his new album very extensively here (and at the bottom of the page) and it finds a lot of depth and beauty in simplicity, and even turns to a bit of meta commentary with its musings on nostalgia, something we all connect with “child-like” stories. But anyways, I mean, just look at this thing. Very child-friendly, and yet manages to poke into a thought that can stick with you for a lifetime. This is my favourite song on the record for many reasons, and it’s excellence at “childhood-core” is among them.
Nothing To Declare by MGMT. Similar idea - simple, slow moving poetry that is quite clear and easy on the surface but carries so much mystery underneath. The video is also a very in-your-face depiction of a person getting the most out of their life despite the cards they were dealt - goes along perfectly and speaks in a universal language. Like, an 8 year old might not think much of the poetry here, but they will get this video. They will remember that.
Wallsocket by Underscores, my favourite album last year that I wrote about here. Yes, seriously! April Harper said this herself - these stories have very clear morals and ideas and are communicated in a very direct and naive way, much like a kid’s book, and though you do need some basic literacy to pull it all together, that’s really not the main work you do as a listener here. That comes after - imagining the rest of the town, the local’s lives, the murky details and implications. It’s a narrative that invites you and welcomes you in with an instant hook and easily digestible text, and then drops you in the depths of the world it just created. That’s exactly what good kid-friendly stories do!
I think my conclusion to all this is that actually, this is exactly what I’ve been chasing after in my own art, and specifically the Decay booklet (though I’m far from nailing it with how confusing I can be). A child-friendly story with a deep-reaching truth underneath can be some of the most powerful art in the world, because it forces you to abstract away from the thing in its entirety and go up a level or two in description, and find and nail down what it’s all actually about. Something all of the above mentioned art achieves, and something I strive to be able to do myself.
Texts in full!
Here are the full versions of all the writing I refer to above.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Opus
I think you really have to hear this album if you want to try and understand Ryuichi Sakamotos life's work. Having heard his entire studio output now, there is really no way around it. This is a career spanning performance during a time where Sakamoto was actively dying, and his last chance to enter his personal heaven on earth - playing the piano in peace. These songs were recorded with a film crew led by his son, just a couple per day so he could really concentrate and pull out the best possible arrangements for these songs. There are new arrangements and entirely new songs he's never played on piano, too - slower, more stark, more deliberate. This is far from Sakamoto's romantic emotional whirlwind era of the mid 90's that you can hear on his classic piano record 1996, and instead you hear a man on his deathbed choosing his last words very carefully. And as a last message to the world, this album is truly as concise and powerful as it could be. The iconic piano compositions are all here, in a new somber, bleak form unlike any previous performance, and the deep cuts and new entries all fit perfectly into the story that this album tells us. This, to me, is Mr. Sakamoto at peak mental clarity. It sounds peaceful to me - throughout his life, Ryuichi Sakamoto never wanted to be anyone, or anything, and yet he has lived so much and felt so intensely, leaving behind a trail of snapshot compositions as he makes his way through. Having now faced death and battled through it just a few years before this album, it feels like this artist is finally able to put all of the puzzle pieces together into a whole, unified painting of who he is, if he is anything at all. It's a deep reaching, emotionally ravaging self portrait of a man that has gone through so much, too much, and yet you can feel his gratitude and peace of mind in every note. Performing this album over the course of many studio days took everything for Sakamoto - after this, he had to recover for a month just to be able to live the rest of his days on earth attentively and openly. It really feels like he put an actual piece of his self on record - perhaps not even the full picture, as human souls are notoriously confusing and incomprehensible, but enough to reach through to any listener that is willing to lend an ear, and communicate something about who this guy really was. I think if Sakamoto can live on through music, it will really be this record that lays the final stepping stone for that.
In my Async review, I tried to express that nobody ever really dies because human souls interpenetrate, and that before we are taken from this earth physically, we leave behind pieces of ourselves that loved ones, students and listeners can borrow to shape their own lens on life, and thus carry on a bygone human life just by perspective. I still very much believe in that - simply put, the piano will still play even once Sakamoto is gone. This album is the best argument for that he was ever able to record during his days on earth. I think this recording is a very strong and convincing testament to the human spirit, and some of the music on here is genuinely immortal. I am very glad we got to hear it, and if this really is the final thing we hear from Mr. Sakamoto, then he has said everything he wanted to say. If you want to listen to this but thing you don't have "enough context" - do it anyways. Just feel it intuitively. Take your time and have patient, open ears. That is all you need.
Rest in peace, Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Cime LP2
I think music should hurt more often. And I don’t mean that in a masochist way, where you might want to be stepped on or whipped, or eat the spiciest noodle you can find in the world, or spend your youth painstakingly cataloguing every piece of released music by hundreds of artists online. I mean the kind of hurt that teaches you something about yourself and the world around you - and music can really do that, I’ve seen it before. I for one do not identify with the “100 Gecs changed my life” generation which I am meant to be part of, but one of my friends did genuinely feel something new and real the first time she listened to “How to Dress as Human” by Laura Les, back then going by Osno1. It’s the kind of song that stings to hear if you’re the right person - but it’s not a punishing sting, it’s the kind that feels revealing. It’s painful at first, but if it works right, you will feel understood in an entirely new way that might even plant the seed of a whole new person deep inside you. If more music allowed itself to hurt like that, maybe the world would paradoxically be a kinder place to live in. I do not know what this type of hurt would be for other people, perhaps it's lonely country music, or the right kind of brash power pop, or even Radiohead’s No Surprises. I would never imagine. I can, however, stick to what I know, which is trans music made by trans people, like that Laura Les song. “Trans music” being songs written explicitly about the inner emotional turmoil and outward catastrophe of existing in a trans body. There are of course classics like Transgender Dysphoria Blues by Against Me!, and more modern takes by the likes of Dorian Electra and Backxwash, not to mention my personal queens Vylet Pony and Underscores. “I Wish That I Could Wear Hats” by Brian David Gilbert would have also counted if he wasn't by all appearances a proper cis man and just happened to write one of the most effective songs about dysphoria there has ever been. But I digress - the important part here is that there is very, very little of this music. I named almost all that comes to mind. And that is because it hurts, to make and to listen to. It’s scary. Music that hurts in this way will always be rare and precious. So imagine how absolutely overjoyed I was at finding this album and its opening track “A Tranny's Appeal to Heaven”. Let me tell you how that went.
The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble begins with a prayer. It’s backed by soft, rhythmic jazz music the likes of which you might imagine playing in the waiting line in front of the gates of paradise. Maybe it’s diegetic. Monty Cime pleads: “God save my soul, God give me strength / Come close to feel within arm's length / Forgive my father for which I’m unable / Forgive everyone for which I'm unable”. There’s a genuine spark of hope here, a sort of pure and naive joy flowing out of the band, a surreal sense of idyllic beauty. Monty recites a short poem, concluding her prayer: “Betwixt joy and tragedy / The act of creation, nurtured / What a joy, what a blessing / Like wheat to bread / I, too, can join this process / A privilege and an honor / That is what this is / Amidst it all / Amen”. When I first heard this, I wasn’t entirely receptive, caught in a depressive whirlwind and stubbornly sticking to my morning forest run with some kind of new music in my ears, anything that will give me a new sensation and carry me through. But this made me perk up. In the midst of the already dwindlingly tiny pool of trans depictions by trans people in modern music, even much less of it sees beauty in a transgender life. It’s easy to perceive your benign condition as a sickness, something to go through, something life-destroying but almost never life-affirming. And here’s this crazy punk singer launching into a prayer, telling me about how being trans is a blessing. Sure then, go on. And the band marches on. There’s a deranged optimism to this section as Monty goes into more poetic descriptions of transness, the band fills up space around it more and more, a palpable tension despite the overt merriness of the whole ordeal, an absence of peace amidst the happiest place on earth, a freaky back-twisting dance in a state of bliss. And as the “one two three four, one two three four”s reach a fever pitch, the balloon pops and this is where the song becomes absolutely furious and unstoppable for 5+ minutes of absolutely indescribable music - which I will have a go at describing anyways because who am I if not to try. The whole band is firing on all cylinders here, Monty screaming “I DON’T WANNA DIE!”, horns and drums and guitars all twisting and cycling in a blinding daze. The entire rest of this track is essentially a gigantic solo, ever-increasing in pace, as Monty Cime continues: “BUT IF I DO, I HOPE I LOOK ALRIGHT / SHOULD I PUT MY MAKEUP ON TONIGHT? / JUST IN CASE I DIE - JUST IN CASE I DIE”. As the pace tightens up, the elements of the track begin to slide apart and more noises enter, some kind of glitchy synth instrument wizardry starts to creep in and take over and the band partakes in what appears to be a communal hallucination - a happy kind of delirium, a mass panic serotonin frenzy, dance your legs off and get swallowed by the sun, let’s go! I have often toyed with measuring songs by how much “music per music” they contain, and this bit must set some kind of record for that. An absolute historic milestone in music per music. It’s overwhelming joy and abject horror at once. In short, this track is the most deeply touching and heartwarming depiction of transness I’ve heard in years… maybe ever. Maybe this is my “How To Dress As Human”. I’ve been unable to listen to much else other than this album since I first tried it, and this opening moment might be solely responsible for that. I don’t even know if I have properly processed my feelings for it still - that’s just how much music per music there is. What I do know is that it hurts in just the right, special way. It’s kind, it’s gorgeous, it’s destructive and it makes me feel new things I thought I would never have access to. I don’t want to die either, and maybe being trans really is blessed and beautiful in a really horrible way. In the pain this song brings me, I feel the seed for something yet unknown. I will just have to see where it leads me.
…but, I can’t exactly write about that. I can only try and write about where it comes from - and I solemnly vow my best to do so here. So let’s spend just a moment hovering over this opening moment and how the music and themes come together. The record starts with a prayer, a religious and ancient thing, but uses it to tackle a struggle that is very current and vital at this very moment. This becomes a blueprint for how the album tackles tradition. After all, it is a latin rock album fronted by a woman from Honduras, but I’d bet a pretty penny that it doesn’t fully sound like any of its roots, nor do I imagine there is a lot of latin rock about being transgender. Prove me wrong there in the comments if you so wish - I would enjoy that. This highlights where this album sits in terms of its cultural moment - informed and very much following a lineage of very personally important music and culture, but sprouting something fantastically brand new and unrecognisable. Point me to a single track in the world like A Tranny's Appeal to Heaven! Please, I beg you. But until then, this is worth trying to pull apart, and so I shall try at least the best I can do from over here. I clearly cannot really write much about the actual, real traditions that Cime pulls from because I am at a completely disjoint intersection here - Russian parents, German birthplace, Jewish heritage. The one viewpoint I share is also being a trans woman in my mid 20s, but even then my experience over here will inarguably be so different that I do not dare make some kind of analysis on where this comes from, and I better sit and listen. What I can do very well, however, is put aside a paragraph or two on what I perceive to be historical precedent for this album, from where I stand. Whether these are an actual influence on Cime, or if they have even ever heard of these pieces of music I am reminded of, I will never know and will never claim. However, I do see some kind of real musical lineage here even if it's just in perception, in the way that this parallels great punk and progressive works from decades ago. So here I go doing that.
a) Egor Letov would love this if he was still alive. The guy responsible for Сто лет одиночества, an absolute masterpiece of weird ass overwhelming progressive punk. When people write in memory of Letov, they often come back to the quote “Я летаю снаружи всех измерений”, which roughly translates to “I fly outside of all dimensions”, but sounds terribly awkward in English compared to the beautiful Russian phrase. And this album does nothing if not that. There are no boundaries to this music at all - this is a very “hey, why the fuck not” type of album. Production choices, songwriting, performances, everything here has this deeply uncaged and unhinged attitude to the point where re-capturing it in word form feels inappropriate and clumsy. Many times I considered that I should not even write about this album at all - but I cannot help myself. But to my point, Letov operated on these principles too. He was a punk, a poet and a philosopher, often defined entirely by contradictions and always juxtaposed with the current regime. Even his approach to tradition was, in turn, often similar: Take classic human folk songs, rip out their core and bring them into a new and alien kind of light that matters most right here, right now. It’s a timeless approach and I’m sure Cime will only get better at it with time. On a more superficial note, Cime’s approach to vocals is very much in the Letov spirit and it works wonders for this record, and they have a similar death-defying, electrifying stubbornness in their lyricism which I’m extremely happy to hear has persisted since Letov has passed.
[NOTE: Monty has since contacted me to say she is indeed massively inspired by Letov and specifically, the gargantuan Невыносимая лёгкость бытия was the conceptual basis for penultimate track The North.]
b) While I’m at it: Comus. When I think about music that hurts in the right and special way, they absolutely HAVE to be in the conversation. First Utterance was an album so gruesome in its themes that it made me reconsider how I value and process music at all, and this album has sent me down a similar pathway of “this is so miserable, how do I love it?” given what happens after the intro track. Plus, I coined the term “psych ward folk” to describe Comus because it was maybe the first instance where I found this term usable and even necessary, and some moments on this album, especially the intro, very much deserve the same description. Until the very moment I picked up this record, I believed that the psychological might of “All The Colours of Darkness” on me would never meet its match. Enter Cime. I do believe that this is maybe finally a band that can pick up where Comus tragically left off so early despite being so ahead of their time.
c) Also, inescapably: The BCNR thing. Though I don’t care nearly as much about this group as I do Letov and Comus, it does have to be mentioned here that yes, this is somewhat FTFT-coded, and there might be a genuine, direct influence here (as opposed to a and b, which are just a personal brainworm) [CORRECTION: Not a personal brainworm, Monty has not heard a whole BCNR album but is huge on Letov. Still, I get why the aesthetic similarities are often brought up, even if it was a shot in the dark in this case]. Major difference being that the angst depicted in the Windmill scene is all acted out by well off cis white dudes as leaders of the movement - the few exceptions like Morgan Simpson and the women of BCNR being there but not a leading voice. The leading voice of Cime is a homeless Honduran trans girl. This is no British theatre. The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble comes from a place of genuine rage and desperation. This is part of why it rocks so much.
And… ah, well there’s the rest of the album of course. I expanded on how the intro track hurts in just the right way, and I spoke many words about joy and beauty… well, as the album runs on, this upbeat and happy tone slowly runs out and gets ripped apart by the reality of the world around it. In the next three tracks, Cime zooms out from the very personal and inner-world tumult of the opener and looks at the broken, uncaring world around it. And aptly so, the atmosphere shifts. It’s getting colder, and we’re headed northwards.
First stop: The Ballad of Tim Ballard. It’s about Tim Ballard, a very rich man of the Latter Day Saints who founded an anti sex trafficking organisation and then was removed from it due to allegations by several of his own employees of, you guessed it, sex crime. Monty uses this story to illustrate “The American Motto” - “Cause the problem, claim you solved it”. Rightfully, this track gets absolutely venomous, but it’s still funky as hell, quite upbeat and, if you knew no English, even somewhat jovial. Cime simply can’t stop themselves from having a good time despite the scathing misery leaking through Monty’s words. There’s even enough time for an absolutely insane bass riff supporting two duelling jazz solos. The hopeful nature of the intro track is left behind here, but by all accounts, it’s a bop still.
DIYUSA is not a bop. It’s very angry and very Spanish. I can’t tell you much about this, but maybe my partner can if she eventually listens to this. What I can tell you is that it has maybe the best bassline of the whole album. And that’s saying something.
Back to my realm of comprehension is Lempira (Or, The Lencan Crusade), a sung story about Lempira the Lenca ruler, who fell for a dirty trick by the Spanish and got lured into a promised peace negotiation, but was captured and dismembered and silenced forever in return. In the imaginary timeline of this song, he comes back 500 years later, and it turns out he does not want peace at all. He wants to go to Russia by birthright, as his haplogroup dictates, and the USA gives him an army of immigrant soldiers. Cime makes a rough connection to the current Russian-Ukrainian war here, but ultimately this is not about the current war at all, and more so points at a current event as a springboard for so much more political venom. This is maybe the messiest song on the album, but at the core of it, it reeks of disgust at national mythology, anger at military leaders for upending the lives of their folk, and the general horror of military conscription. And that’s all that really matters here. Because yes, many of the Russian soldiers sent off into the war to die deserve just as much of a eulogy as the side we deem “correct” here - I shall quote one of my favourite lines from my favourite movie ever, spoken by prisoner of war John Lawrence: “You are the victim of men who think they are right... Just as one day you and captain Yonoi believed absolutely that you were right. And the truth is of course that nobody is right”. This song is, to my mind anyways, a very unruly and horrified expression of this same eternal truth, using characters and events close to Monty Cime as symbols in a theatre of cruelty.
And so the narrative thread arrives north. The North is beyond description. That’s it. It takes up about half the album, and I will not waste my lowly words here. Someone might tackle this appropriately, but it is not little old me. There comes a part where the phenomena in front of me are so huge and terrible that I simply cannot communicate them. I will however tell you that over the course of this track, the narrative thread of the album loops right back around to the intensely personal. I will also tell you that Monty Cime really hates white people, and for good reason. There’s a lot here about violently breaking apart the illusion of a capitalist utopia just out of reach. If you work enough, myth dictates that The North shall love you back - but it doesn’t. The record ends with Monty returning to La Ceiba and wishing goodnight to the listener, with what I assume is a field recording of a folk song sung on the streets of the city. I could not figure out what the words mean, but a friend of mine told me it translates to “I’m not sure what to do with my life” [CORRECTION: I was contacted by a member of the band and as it turns out, this is a field recording of a traditional Punta performed by the Garifuna of Honduras, from before anyone in the band was born. And my friend was completely wrong about the lyrics, they are actually: "'sit down and enjoy myself. it won't kill me' / misery reaches the sky, the flowers, and the trees / your brothers will fall and the crows will come / prepare your mourning, berona (name of a woman)"]. Anyways… if nothing else this album has hammered one very simple truth into me that is now snaking around in my skull louder than ever, in the form of a little quotable political slogan. And I shall leave you with it:
If you’re queer, you have to live. Make queer art and be uncomfortable! Let your voice be heard as it is right now!
Porter Robinson - SMILE! :D
Have you ever voiced something so traumatic that you immediately have to follow it with an involuntary anxious giggle, because your only response to your pain is to laugh? Nobody wants to look like they’re falling apart, even if you really feel like it. Conversely, have you ever laughed so hard you cried? Like when you hear a joke that drills itself into your brain so much that it starts to become physically painful and you become addicted to this feeling of laughter, contorting your face and losing breath control. In the same way, I do think you can get addicted to crying when you’re really down, once the rush takes over and you lose control and the catharsis and validation of that experience can make you feel like only in that very moment, you’re actually alive. That’s kind of what this album is like - it exists at this geometrically impossible cross section of feeling where extreme ends of emotion blur together and become this indistinguishable human writhing mess. I think Porter knows what he’s doing when he asks “Is there really no happiness without this feeling?” later on the album. Still, I think not calling this album SOB! :’( was a good call, especially because the way this music works is it lures you in with fun sounds and flashy colours and good times, and then punches you in the gut repeatedly until you don’t really know what you’re feeling anymore. It makes you experience the full extent of your emotional horseshoe - not to get on my Underscores shit here, excusez-moi. I think it’s a good and necessary feeling though, as stressful as it sounds. In fact, I think letting yourself go through it is the only way to heal. So that brings me to my main thesis: If Nurture is awakening, SMILE! :D is therapy.
Given this Nature of Nurture’s follow-up, I think it only makes sense I also expand on what I said in that review three years ago, especially given that it’s one of the few times people on here read and resonated with my silly little letters I put on the screen. I said that Nurture sounds like Porter reinvents himself from scratch after Worlds, while SMILE! :D sounds more like he just picked up a guitar. In many ways, it’s Nurture put through an amp. Most of the themes explored in that album are still present, but there is little to no subtlety left and Porter’s quiet emotional clarity has become a scream. He did also drop the vocal effects almost entirely to focus even more on himself as a real person. This allows him to explore real-world situations even more truthfully, turning some of the more abstract and poetic emotional moments of Nurture to more concrete conversations about food, clothing, flesh and feelings. This album’s a bit like Porter accidentally switched to the selfie cam on his phone and now we get to see him at this funny unflattering angle and there’s pores in his skin. In fact, this album is very much mainly about this odd para-social relationship we as listeners have with the man behind the magic. So maybe, let’s start there: When I wrote about Nurture, I already had to bring up larger-than-life superhumanity, idolization, and all of the terrors that come with it, because you can’t really talk about that album without exploring the dynamics between Robinson, his work, and his fanbase. This battle is made much more explicit on this album: Much like Nurture was in part a reaction to how the world has reacted to Worlds, this album is also in part a musing on the way his fans ate up Nurture (and what they spat out). I kind of hope this isn’t a cycle Robinson gets stuck in, because quite honestly it sounds terrifying. But that’s what we have here. This album deals with a pretty nauseating truth post the unmasking of Nurture, which I would sum up like this:
I care about Porter Robinson. Using my experiences and “I” as a stand-in for his core fanbase, I have no idea who this person actually is, nor do I delude myself into thinking these albums give me an accurate window into his identity and disposition, and yet, I care. Partly, this is because this guys music has been regularly in my ears ever since Spitfire, which I heard at about 12 years old, so being 25 now, Porter’s art has surrounded me for the majority of my time on this earth, especially considering I don’t even have many conscious memories of like half of my life before Spitfire. In my Nurture review, I wrote at length about how much Worlds meant to me and many other internet babies at the time, and what went unmentioned is that the symbolism and aesthetics of that whole era of his work hit many of us at a really formative time. It just becomes a part of growing up. I imagine this is how people one generation upwards feel about My Chemical Romance or something like that. Or Radiohead, though I shudder to imagine this. That’s the role that album plays for people. I also mentioned in that review how I used to attach this little guy from the Worlds cover to my display name everywhere I go ->【=◈︿◈=】. Since then I got a friend to tattoo him on my shoulder. He’s with me forever now, in my skin. Nurture and the following years have only deepened that relationship I spoke of in 2021: That album has guided me through college days, my physical and social transition into who I am now, and it has been the soundtrack to my life during various walks to therapy and back, through nature around where I live, and eventually to this point where I’m typing now. And this isn’t where this tie between me and this guy’s art will loosen. In a bit over a month, I will move to a new country and start what is essentially a new life, and SMILE! :D will be there with me. I’m going to see him live for the first time with my beloved friends at two different shows. It only goes on from there, I assume. That being said, no matter how much I care about this guy, there’s another simultaneous truth here:
I don’t want to be friends with Porter Robinson. Obviously, like I don’t even know who this guy is. Porter Robinson, as a character played by Porter Robinson, has become this fixture in my mind, someone who always has something to say and who has always been there. But Porter isn’t Porter in this scenario. The inseparability of Porter’s character and his rabid fans has only heightened since Nurture, become more weird and fleshy and obsessive, and I’m playing an active role in that. But the celebrity that exists in my mind is still that, no matter how naked and honest his art has become over the years, and whoever I think of when I read the name “Porter Robinson” is something like an old plushie I carry around with me and ascribe feelings to, an inanimate object that is more the result of what I see in it and less an actual autonomous being. Notice this: A lot of my friends who don’t have their own little Porter mascot in their head associate 【=◈︿◈=】not with Worlds or its deep reaching influence on young artists and creatives at the time, not the community around it, not Porter as a person or artist, but with me. Because I’m the weird guy with a 【=◈︿◈=】on their shoulder. I sort of made the symbol mine without thinking about it. People get obsessed with their doll playthings to the point where that doll becomes a symbol of you, not the other way round. That’s very much what this album is about: This absurd caricaturized blow-up doll Porter that lives in our minds, and our possession of it. How does the doll feel about that? On the cover you can see him squished into a square cover art format, as if trying to escape his cage of art. He still looks kind of happy though. Look at him go. :D
To cut to the punch here and quote the final track, Porter has fully embraced and made peace with this weird dynamic, as much as it might haunt him day by day. On “Everything To Me”, he lays down with his guitar and lays it all out, as Porter sings: “You don't know me / But you know me”, directly addressing his fans, and accepting his fate as a mascot; “If this is goodbye, if I won't see you again / Waiting on a corner with your phone in hand / If irony is a virtue, maybe I should be king / Crush me like a plushie, I'll be one of your things”. Resigned to his doll-being, Porter outlines a pretty stark and important realisation on this album: All the weird parasocial nonsense Porter’s fans have done to him, he has long since returned in equal measure; “And maybe I'm addicted to the look in your eyes / It's hard to say you've had enough when you get this high / I shouldn't say I love you, I don't know your name / But I just say it anyway 'cause it feels the same”. In fact, throughout this whole album, Porter not only goes into what his fans have done to him, but explores the ways in which he’s built of the same stuff and prone to the same errors in thinking - if they even are errors. He even goes the whole way and has a back and forth with interview clips of another dollified superstar, Lil Wayne, on Year Of The Cup, relating Wayne’s drug abuse to his own, the drugs being both a literal thing, as he was intoxicated when he first called his now wife confessing his love, and metaphorical drugs, the obsession he has with performance and his fans: “I guess that screaming at my audience works and everyone likes it / I dreamed of cutting my Achilles' heel: wanting people to like me”. This dynamic is something that empowers him to make the amazing art he does, but also haunts him as a form of constant emotional torture: “I can't go to sleep 'cause my mind keeps ringing with times that I / Laid out everything wrong with me up on stage, it's embarrassing”. He actually sounds a bit drunk on the song. I hope he’s okay. But those are essentially the two sides of the coin on this record: We turned Porter Robinson into a weird doll mascot, and he turned us into a drug. The consequences are disastrous but equally life-affirming. This is where I could drop this review as far as themes go and return to listen to the album again, but I do actually want to talk about the music as well and maybe go into some of the specific ways this theme shows up. Especially because I have a big problem with how people immediately dismiss this record on here.
So let’s talk about cringe. I’ve read quite often on here that the sound of this album has been largely informed by a movement to “abandon cringe”, as in embrace corny childish aesthetics of the past in an effort to reclaim them now that we’ve all grown up and might be ready to admit there was something there - maybe as a form of true self expression that previously had to be hidden from the public. But that sounds like a bunch of revisionist horse hockey to me. I’m sorry guys, but that narrative only works if you ever considered these sounds “cringe” in the first place. They never were! Cringe, as I type it in this moment, is a word that was largely brought up and codified into what it is now by people wishing to exclude certain genres and aesthetics, and certain people, from the conversation about good music and good culture. I know that many of you folks have grown up on /mu/, or patrician-posting groups, or even worse, decade old forms of this website, where this actively took place. But that’s not the only way. I, for one, grew up on EDM music forums that still had mid 90’s webdev architecture a decade too late and most of the people posting on there just like to have fun and go to shows and festivals and post the newest banger. That’s where I found Spitfire. There is no elitism in these spaces, and most ideas are treated equally. There is no real rush to sort music into categories based on musical complexity and experimentation or pick a “core” for the forum, which is really just a shorthand for “listen to this to be one of us”. Some of us are even Monstercat girlies. Horrible to consider, I know. That’s where I believe these sounds stem from. These songs were not written by someone who intuitively got scared by 100 Gecs at first and had to come around to “embrace cringe” in an online post-post-irony way. This was written by someone who just thinks those sounds rock. Which they do.
A much more significant reason for the sound choices on this album beyond appealing to “furry teenagers” is the fact that embracing overblown sounds of the past allow Porter to play a character and position himself as this boyish Y2K superstar adored by hordes of hungry Tumblr women in their teens, which is intuitively something we’d consider a “thing of the past”, though it’s really not - ironically enough, this very album has shown that to be the case (I don’t really keep up with the current Porter Robinson community online because I am way too old, but I have been distantly informed of the horrors). Platforms have changed and sounds have shifted, but people are the same. Still, writing an album with a current 2020s sound about his current 2020s fanbase would probably be insanely uncomfortable and weird and age immediately, whereas an album with a 2010s ish sound about his general feelings on fame and fortune has the right amount of distance to discuss this stuff properly and rings true now the same way it will in decades to come. In this way, Robinson uses nostalgia as a shield. As a way to detach this album from time, but also to pretend “this isn’t happening now”, though clearly it is, and in reality this is his current 2020s sound, and it is about his current fanbase. By using this sound palette, he can build up some emotional distance and be much more honest and bare about his feelings on the matter and write a song like Cheerleader, on which he puts on his best MCR-sona and blasts away on his crusty synth, parading around hallucinating being hacked to pieces and eaten by a thousand hungry girls which he characterises with “She’s got hearts in her eyes / And draws me kissing other guys”, and “Cheerleader / Says she hates me ‘cause I’m not hers”. Of course, on the same song, Porter admits “Her love, the type / That makes you dedicate your life / Oh, my cheerleader / Thought she needed me, but I need her”. Porter nails this characterization of a violently obsessive star-groupie relationship on many of the songs here, my favourite probably being Pinterest Garden, which sounds just pop punk and anthemic enough to make the whole thing a little bit horrifying, but catchy and sharp enough to get stuck in your mind like candy in your teeth.
Of course, the thing about this type of nostalgia is that it can kill you. Porter knows this and jokes about it on penultimate track Is There Really No Happiness?, on which he recalls simple childish joys of the past by pining “I remember the family PC / There was snow in the hallways, there was blood on my teeth” and realising “I know I'm not alone in wondering / The vertigo of tryna get close / To who I was before remembering”. This track is very much a meditation on how nostalgia as a shield, like it is used on this album, can become an addictive behaviour - “Making love to the memory / You'd think I'd been chasing the dragon” - which is made even more poignant by the blissful vocal chop melodies and classic breaks that Porter brings out for this one. As the song fades out, a voice pops up noting “You know, Porter / Some people die of nostalgia / So you better look out” - something which sounds like a voice note some woman left Porter upon hearing this record, but really is just the man himself with a bunch of vocal effects, as this song and by extension the whole record is a conversation between Porter and himself, in this case about nostalgia. Nostalgia as an escape from current pain is one of the key components that make this album work emotionally, but also is yet another thing that Porter has turned into a drug that he is dependent on - much like he outlines his addiction to fame and performance and adoring fans on Year Of The Cup. SMILE! :D is, among other things, a close look at the coping mechanisms of an artist, much like you may put on a smile to cope with the hurt right behind your face. But of course, none of these things will really matter to you if you view the nostalgia on this record not as an artistic choice, but a performative type of pandering to a fanbase that refuses to grow up. To which I say, wah wah wah.
And speaking of artistic choices that will inevitably alienate some but are really the perfect choice for this record - Russian Roulette, and where it is in the album. You know, the song on which Porter has a full on suicidal episode triggered by all the compounding themes of the record, feels crushed by the pressure of the music industry and alienated to a point of nothingness by social media, puts a gun to his head and and tries not to smile as he pictures oblivion, failing to go through with it after he rattles off a laundry lists of things he wishes to do before he dies - ultimately realising, he doesn’t want to die. Not just yet. The song mirrors this musically by reverting to a back-to-the-roots Hands Up section in the outro, the exact type of thing a young Porter heard on Dance Dance Revolution and that inspired him to write some of his first published music as Ekowraith, a funny relic to look back on now, but also the actual thing that drove this dude to live and make art in the first place and in a way still does now. But anyways - this is song three. Not the penultimate moment of the record. And I love that. I brought up earlier that if Nurture is awakening, SMILE! :D is therapy, and that very much rings true throughout the record with how bare and confessional it is, but this song and its placement actually highlights a much more relevant truth of the whole process - mental health progress is non linear. Putting this song right as the penultimate moment of the record, with it’s final message of “Don't kill yourself, you idiot”, and then seeing Porter make peace with the dynamics that plague him so much throughout the album, would be pretty fake and disrespectful to the actual matter at hand. As anyone that’s gone through bouts of suicidal ideation will know, even if you have a big victorious “I want to live” moment, you may well wake up the very next morning crying under your blanket, asking yourself “but why?”, unable to tell which realisations and feelings you should be holding on to, and which are your brain just making shit up. That’s why, right after Russian Roulette, Porter is right back to exploring abusive artist-fan relations and pondering his addiction. Because life goes on after you put the gun down, and the real answer to suicidal ideation is not a single victorious moment of “I want to kiss my cat one more time”, but a slow, arduous, and often non-linear path to healing.
This album mirrors non-linear progress in another, possibly less intentional way, which is the couple of ways it calls back to its predecessor - highlighting how at the end of Nurture’s emotional journey, really almost none of it has been conclusive. Take the idea of Musician, for example, on which Porter recounts the perfect high of performing to adoring fans, and where he musically mirrors that euphoria. Is Cheerleader not retreading that same ground, with a dash more delusion? That’s what I meant when I said this record is Nurture put through an amp. Feelings are heightened, synths are brighter and dirtier, songs are more upfront and unabashed and powerful, but at a core level, Porter is facing the same battle he always has - trying to feel alive and perform and play a character and satisfy fans, whatever that may bring, chasing down this idea of looking into a fan’s adoring heart shaped eyes. On this record, it seems Porter has realized how problematic and terrible this relationship can be, but ultimately, he still plays into it, and he still wants to feel the high it gives him. Another point where this album mirrors non-linear progress is, funnily enough, Mirror - that song on Nurture about externalising a critical voice that is way too harsh on you, assigning it the roles of parent and teacher and coach, but ultimately having to understand that this voice comes from within. While that song had a bit of a naive, fairy-tale approach to the subject matter, Easier To Love You on this record dives into the same topic with a lot more blunt force and honesty. Just a few powerful lines on this song say much more than I possibly could: “I found a letter, ‘Dear future me / I promise I'll take care of the person we'll both be eventually / I'll pick up painting, oh, oh, and I'll join the gym’ / I can't shake the feeling that I'll be happy by the time I'm him” . This is where those voices on Mirror actually come from. Promises you made yourself, sky high standards formulated by a naive and optimistic child. This is precisely how you later get to the point of externalising scolding inner voices to rationalise your constant need for strictness and self-punishment - appeasing that hopeful kid that wrote you that letter. It’s an unfortunate and terrible truth, but sometimes, that kid is just wrong. And so eventually, when you get to this point, the conclusion can only be this: “Please be disappointed in me / Isn't it obvious I wasn't who you think?”. Notice the “please” here - Porter, at this point, wants to be pushed and whipped to a point of pleasing this ancient inner standard, because surely those expectations were right to have and not fulfilling them must lead to disappointment. The ultimate consequence of this kind of behaviour is forbidding yourself self-love: “And it would be so much easier to love you / If you could only see yourself like me”. Porter intentionally blurs the lines here, where the type of address is like he’s singing to a partner or loved one, but ultimately he’s talking to an internalised version of himself - the exact thing Mirror was about. And if you think I’m on some red-thread pinboard rant in trying to explain how this record mirrors Mirror, especially in this song, note how he brings back the fem robot vocals from that record specifically for the background voice on this track. Because that’s who he’s having a conversation with, even if the actual kid writing that letter must have existed way farther back, long before Nurture. This song is probably my favourite moment on the album, both with how it highlights the non-linearity of mental healing even better than Russian Roulette could and how it expands on one of the best tracks on Nurture, and how beautiful and heartbreaking he managed to make this thing sound with that final synth hook outro that just rips me apart every time. Externalising your own need for perfection and self-punishment onto your partner is something I’ve recently had to deal with more than ever, and it almost got me so bad I wouldn’t even be here to write this. So having a song like this to feel less alone is something I don’t take for granted - and of course the “Don’t kill yourself you idiot” of Russian Roulette also helps.
A final, and somewhat sillier and possibly meaningless note on non-linearity (so I don’t have to end on such a depressing note) is that there’s also a singular unexpected vocal artist feature on the emotional high point of this record, exactly like TEED on Unfold. My first thought upon hearing the feature on Mona Lisa was “oh shit, did Porter work on his voice training? This is awesome”, but no, that’s this trans hyperpop duo I’ve never heard of showing up. And then they fucking KILL IT. That third verse of Mona Lisa is by far the most emo and rebellious and cathartic this album gets, and in my naive heart of hearts, this is maybe Porter sharing the stage a bit and embracing a new generation of queer artists that pick up many of the cues he’s left throughout his career so far. I felt very much the same about his embrace of Digicore on Kitsune Maison Freestyle. Considering all this my vote is for Underscores or Vylet Pony on the next album, that would make my little transgender heart very happy even if this is all a bit stupid to say out loud - write out loud? Regardless, if Nurture is Robinson’s piano album and this is his guitar album, what now? Saxophone? And if it's not too much to ask, I'd like another "I love my wife" song on the next one just like Nurture. I do hope he manages to get out of the cycle displayed on here thematically - but if not, I hope the music is at least this powerful and emotive and cathartic again.