scatteredpenstrokes

[scatteredpenstrokes]

electric boogaloo

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Time for more music gush:  The National

Talk about music to fuck shit up to. For real. Ball your hand into a fist and punch yourself in the stomach until you cry, then convert that to .mp3, because that’s what we’ve got here. Thought you were over that one who broke your heart a couple years back? Well you aren’t. Matt Behringer is gonna make sure of that with a sad baritone voice and some upbeat rhythms.

Now The NTL’s first couple of albums are a little strange, and not that good. Got an Alt-Country sort of vibe. Nobody’s self-titled album is good alright, leave them alone. But then they released Boxer and Alligator and things changed. We went from Alt-Country to Art-Rock, which is one of my personal favorite genres.

I was in a kind of transitory period when i found out about The National. Specifically that transition in a high school relationship where it goes from a burning trashcan fire to a burning dumpster fire. The brake lines are cut and you’re steering from the back seat, so i had some emotions that this band definitely helped me through. Even at their most upbeat and hopeful, everythings still desolate and drained. 

In 2013 after that burning dumpster fire turned into a smouldering bag of roadside McDonald’s, They released an album entitled Trouble Will Find Me, which is honestly one of my favorite albums ever released because it tells a story between a Jennifer and a Jo/Joe (They only ever use gender neutral pronouns and use ‘child’ instead of man/woman). If you’re looking for music to incite an emotion that’s the album, from beginning to end it’s a ride. Not a fun ride, but a ride nonetheless.

I don’t really have any great associations with this band because outside of some of their songs i can’t really listen to an album without being overtaken by grief, sadness, and all the other melancholy feelings that make up the rainbow of negativity. I do keep Mr. November, Karen, and Abel in my playlist though because those are some proper bangers. I do absolutely love the band and the work they do though.

I must be me, I must be me Black feathers are falling on my feet

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Cage The Elephant Retrospective Thing. Unpeeled

This ones a little odd, but i love it.

I don’t post a lot of stuff about myself on any sort of social media so most people don’t actually know about my entering of the military, and discharge. Turns out depression and anxiety to the power of stress are not what makes a good sailor, but i digress. I was so excited about this album. The teaser tracks came out a few months before i left, and i was so ecstatic for it. It came out while i was in and was the first thing I listened to after i got home. Depressed over your career ending and now incredibly worried about what’s to come? How about a new album from your favorite band? Yeah. I actually made myself sick of this album a week after I got home but it was still good. 

It’s got a full compliment of acoustic versions of..... pretty much every good song they’ve released? There’s a few stains on thier pants that didn’t get covered, and some of them just weren’t done despite being really good. (Maybe we’ll get a deluxe version?). Alongside that we’ve got  covers of the songs Whole Wide World, Golden Brown (One of my personal favorite songs), and Instant Crush. They fucking covered daft punk???? How happy could I be?

They managed to breathe life into songs that basically got killed with radio play like Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked and Cigarette Daydreams, which is pretty phenomenal in my opinion. A version of Right Before My Eyes that’s got proper instrumentation for an anti-love song is more than i could’ve imagined to be receiving. They didn’t brings Ms. Mosshart back for Take It or Leave It, but I could Take It or Leave It.

Like I would’ve sooner expected a Ska album or a Grunge album than anything like Unpeeled, I didn’t talk about their musical progression but in Tell Me I’m Pretty there’s a lot more of a 60′s garage band Beatles-ey kind of sound to it. In four albums CTE managed to go from Generic altrock/punk, to Bowie-esque, to garage rock sound, to a dynamic soft acoustic sound in Unpeeled and that’s really impressive to me. Bands shift over time but thats a big change imo.

Not enough time has passed for me to have a kind of memoir-esque perspective on Unpeeled, but i’m sure in a few years i’ll have something better to write about the friends i’ve made, and the friendships i already had ever-deepening.

10/10 easier to peel than an orange.

Never a frown with golden brown....

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Cage The Elephant Personal Retrospective Thing Episode III

Tell Me I’m Pretty didn’t actually come out at any sort of big point in my life, but is my favorite album of theirs. Cozy little morning. Writing something i don’t need to bother editing. Eating peppermint bark, and drinking tea. Guess i can write about that one too.

So when Tell Me I’m Pretty came out it was a few months after my  Eighteenth birthday. I was so goddamn excited for this album, I preordered it! I got the Vinyl, a Coloring book, and a kickass blue shirt with a bird skellington on it! I had just started waiting tables at a certain sportsbar with shitty management that’ll go unnamed. and i couldn’t be more excited for this album. The Single “Mess Around” had dropped about a month in advance and i put that song on the touchtunes at work once a day everyday. Inbetween ferrying drinks and lifting heavy stuff i would always talk to a couple of coworkers about varying things but i couldnt strike a chord with any of them to really stay friends/ they were too old and destined for nowhere to really keep in my life. One standout is a tiny ginger girl who had a crush on me who left to go become a manager at Walmart.

This album seriously has some of the most powerful simple verses i’ve ever heard, and I’m a total sucker for that sort of thing. 

What kind of man are you? Instead of kisses you gave bruises.

Like seriously, how fucking dope is that? That’s probably the description for more instagram selfies than my brain can actually comprehend.

Counselor, Give me some advice. Tell me how hard will I fall if I live a double life.

Soft speak, with a mean streak, you were only seventeen....

Like holy fucking shit my dude!

I guess if i had to associate this album with anything; It’s nothing. It’s just straight up a kickass album I associate with no memories. It’s honestly my personal favorite of the standard albums they’ve released. Except of course one specific forty thousand track acoustic album.

Ten replays of Punchin’ Bag out of ten.

You know what they say, yeah? The wicked get no rest.

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Confessing love to the girl you like in ninth grade like

I don’t know why. I got these feelings... YEAH. I just can’t seem to.... get away from... can you dig it?

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Cage The Elephant Thing Part 2

Melophobia

The Fear of Music

This album came out, if memory serves, a couple months into a relationship with a girl we’ll call A. At this point i had grown to about 5″4 and A was maybe 5″ in shoes with thick soles. Sandy hair, glasses, freckles, the whole shebang. little nerd girl.

I’d listen to music on the walk to A’s house because well, fav band. Around this time i was listening to grungier things like Steel Pole Bathtub(Indulging also in NiN, who i still itch to listen to a few times a ear), while also starting the slow and emotional descent into the realm of dream pop through Elbow. She listened to different set of eclectic music than what i’d listen to. Where my tastes ranged from Katy Perry to TV on the Radio hers ranged from Michael Buble to Bon Iver.

I guess i associate this album more with lessons learned about the utter brutality that is High School dating than anything else. I don’t need to delve much into the details because just from that sentence; I’m sure you can tell how that ended.

Still though, this isn’t a bad Album and I associate this album more with youthful ignorance than anything else. It’s still home to some of the most emotional and raw tracks i’ve ever heard, as Cage The Elephants been increasingly better and better at. Telescope for me sits alongside tracks by the national like “Fireproof” and “I Need my Girl” (that album specifically came out after the breakup lol).

Now I don’t actually have any negative memories associated with the album, but i’m a little less into it than most, because honestly the sound doesn’t resonate with me as well as the other albums but it’s still got some straight bangin’ tracks likes Spiderhead and Teeth.

As for how the sound of the band progressed; It’s a little closer to David Bowie, with EDM influences thrown in there, which you can specifically hear in Hypocrite and Teeth. It’s got a nice feel, and it’s got themes of both Love and Abandonment, which i’ve really only spotted as i’ve gotten older and more analytical. Spiders come up a lot, I suppose you could derive a theme of feeling Entrapped or something to that degree but i don’t get that so much from it, that theme would be dissonant with the instrumentation and style, but YMMV.

Five Spiders in my head out of Six Spiders in my mind.

You may take my eyes, But baby, I’m not blind.

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Cage The Elephant Retrospective...... Thing

Cage The Elephant                  Self Titled Album/Thank You, Happy Birthday

So here’s a personal little post about some of the albums i’ve listened to in my transition from awkward, acne ridden twelve year old to an awkward, acne ridden, adult male.

I told myself i would write more on this blog but i never did, we all do things like that (Or i should think). So I’m about 20, 5″8′, 170 lbs, and built with powerful muscular legs, and noodly arms. More of a sort of thicc-style build than anything i suppose. Now.... When i started listening to Cage The Elephant i was maybe.... 11/12, 4″6′ (Ritalyn does a good bit of growth supression, i’d imagine i’d have much longer legs and much lower grades growing up if i hadn’t been on it), and Sixty-Seventy pounds at the most. Shot straight the fuck up in HS I reckon. I had about the same build as an anemic looking tree growing in a saltfield. Paired up with the instrument that i once named my main blog for; The tuba, i’d imagine that was probably a little bit of a ridiculous look.

Now it’s important for me to make this specific statement, I actually didn’t find out about Cage The Elephant from borderlands, but rather from friends who had, So i don’t associate “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” with dusty dunes and multicolored weaponry that shoot spears that explode into swords. But rather i associate it with a twelve year olds favorite past time. Filk songs. My friends and I seemed to have thought we were clever having replaced every noun in that song with “Dick.” But we were on the cutting edge. Look at tumblr’s modern memes honestly.

So I guess now it’s the point in time where i actually judge the album, huh? Now to me, Cage The Elephant and Thank You, Happy Birthday are the same album, because i basically listened to them at the same time. Granted the former is certainly more of an alt-rock sort of vibe while the latter is definitely cemented in the realm of “kinda punk music i guess?” But i digress. They still hold up as music i’m actually not embarassed to have listened to as a kid and I still gladly keep them on my MP3 playlist. A good time, two albums full of good messages. Scandalous songs, bitching songs, antiestablishment songs, and an incomprehensible song about buffalo is exactly the kind of thing i’d recommend for a very short and rebellious kid, and a still-kind-of-short politically woke man.

Can’t rate memories with numbers/10

Right before my eyes..... Saw the whole world lose control.....

[scatteredpenstrokes]

Unnamed Tale

    Collapsed. Dead? ....Dying Maybe? The battered cutter didn’t know where he stood with the mortal coil at the moment, but god be damned if it didn’t hurt. He rose to his knees to see the ever-growing, always present stygian abomination before him, quivering, pulsating, and shimmering with power in this unholy moonlight. If he had time to think, words wouldn’t be able to describe this thing. Managing to tear his eyes from the horror, he glances around to see the hollow forms of his companions. Soulless and empty now….. The names of those who fell to get him here, fallen around him and ruined, rang in his ears like a bell at the break of dawn punctuated with a solemn silence for each, quieting the chaotic hellscape around him and steadying his resolve. He rose up…….

“Could we not?” asked the hazel-eyed apprentice, her mount bobbing along with all sorts of ramshackle equipment hastily shoved in bags earlier that day jangling and dangling with every trot.

“I mean we’ve been riding nearly nonstop since february, are you really sure that riding into town and immediately starting fights is how we should go about making a living?” she complained again.

     The blue-eyed cutter sighed, something telling her in her gut that this wasn’t going to cease anytime soon. She adjusts her gunbelt and tries to unsour her expression. “I know it’s a disgrace to our uniform, but Lydia, we’ve gotta eat, y’know? Plus with Cale’s arm, we might not even have to resort to violence.” she said, trying to reconcile things between her morals and her actions, again. “Plus none of us exactly have any marketable skills that aren’t tied to hurting things. An etomologist, a website designer, and a theater major aren’t exactly gonna walk into any town able to find work. An Apprentice Mage, a Jackboot, and a Cutter however. That’s a bit of a different story.

“The uniform doesn’t mean much if the order it once held up’s nothing but a pile of rubble. Hell, the uniform itself is held together with nothing but patches and pins.” Said the nihilistic cutter, preparing to attempt to draw water from an empty bottle for the fourth or fifth time in the hour.

_____________________________

Edited for Grammar