#No rules sandy

[biglisbonnews]

Sylvan Esso Isn't Making Their Mirror Face Anymore Sylvan Esso, the North Carolina-based electro-pop duo, kicked down industry doors in 2014 with their eponymous debut studio album, Sylvan Esso. It's one of those special captures-a-moment-in-time records, where escaping into the rousing, body-moving tracklist, a folksy mixture of skillful (yet unpretentious) electronic production, felt like discovering an untapped reserve of talent. The album has since accumulated over 250 million streams on Spotify and propelled the band into mainstream success.Ten years into their career as Sylvan Esso, singer Amelia Meath and engineer/producer Nick Sanborn have gotten married, toured the country and sold out shows around the globe. Yet somehow they feel like they're just getting started.I meet Meath and Sanborn — "Sandy," as she calls him — for lunch at preppy Upper East Side institution J.G. Melon. Squeezing puffer coats and backpacks through the tightly arranged floor plan, we wedge ourselves into a corner table with views of East 74th Street. The band is in town for a whirlwind visit of record signing, an Electric Lady Studios Spotify session, a CBS Saturday Morning live show and, most importantly, to see the physical release of their most recent record, No Rules Sandy. Even in the mustard-tinged lighting, the two glow with the frenetic flush of maneuvering a tightly scheduled press trip. No Rules Sandy, Sylvan Esso's fourth studio album, which dropped this summer, was immortalized on January 20th in its physical form. Now, the band is gearing up for their summer tour (with major venues like Red Rocks and London's Electric Brixton already selling out) and has newfound confidence in the longevity and durability of the band."Can I have a dirty Beefeater martini?" Meath asks the aproned waiter. She turns back to us and says, "I know it’s only three, but we did TV already." They’ve just come uptown from a CBS live taping in Times Square. "Fucking genius," Sanborn says, smiling from across the table. They decide to split a cheeseburger with a "fuck yeah" and a satisfying menu pile. "Your hair is just crazy," Sanborn says jokingly to Meath, who tousles her wispy, blonde hair into a more chaotic position."There's something exciting about being a band, coming up on 10 years old, and feeling like there’s still so much for us to discover together," Sanborn tells me. There was a period of time before they started working on No Rules Sandy where he began to worry about playing decade-old songs and fighting to reclaim and relate to a distant version of himself. "This feels like a completely new way of working together, like cracking the knuckles of our band," he says. In January 2022, Meath and Sanborn road-tripped from North Carolina to Los Angeles to attend the Grammys, as they'd been nominated for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album. With a spike in the Omicron COVID-19 variant, the Grammys were postponed, plans and hangouts dashed and the pair was left in their California rental with nothing to do. Three short weeks later, they had recorded the first version of No Rules Sandy. "It was a complete accident," Sanborn says. "It began as just something to do that day," Sanborn says, sipping his Budweiser with raised eyebrows. "We were just playing around to make the other laugh or to be impressed.""They're the most personal songs I've ever written," Meath says. "The first taste of every idea we had, we would just follow." Sanborn recalls that he’s never seen her write lyrics so fast, explaining that nearly all of the vocals on the album were from the first take, even sometimes the first time she ever sang them aloud. "Whatever microphone we had, wherever she was sitting in the house, we would record there. There's like leaf blowers and shit on the album," Sanborn says, laughing. "And birds!" Meath adds. "I would write something and we would both be shocked by it," Meath says. "And then I'd be like, 'Well, we need to change this because it's too close." After multiple rewrites in hopes to distance herself from some of the more vulnerable lyrics, Meath says the songs would always end up worse. "I had to stop doing my mirror face at them," she says. "And even if it wasn’t as ‘cool,’ it’s what I was feeling.""If we re-recorded anything, it just wouldn’t be the moment," Sanborn says. "It was true improvisation. And with improv, if you're doing it right, I think you’re being your most honest, raw self." Witnessing how the polishing and refining of their improvisational work was always to the detriment of the track, both Meath and Sanborn relaxed into the process and let go. "The craziest thing... is that it worked," Sanborn says. The two sneak a glance across the table, a check-in or a shared moment of gratitude. The waiter comes over and Meath orders the cheeseburger. "Just from the tone of your voice, I’m detecting you want your own," Sanborn says with a chuckle. The symbiosis of the pair can be felt in the adventurous nature of the record, intensely intimate and uniquely experimental, created by a partnership that thrives on trust and playfulness. The name of the album, partially an homage to Sanborn's nickname, is a representation of the band's new mentality that accepts and even welcomes the uncertainty of sonic risk-taking and improvisation. If their first record embodied joyfulness and exultation, this album invites unabashed exploration. The epitome of Sylvan Esso's new ethos can be found in the track "Your Reality," an enigmatic synth-pop song with a swelling string quartet that holds the prophetic and titular hook, "Surreal but free?/ It's your reality (no rules lately, no rules Sandy)."When Sanborn first produced the track, the two discovered that each had heard the downbeat differently. Meath had already written lyrics exploring the individual experience of one’s perceived reality and so, in an audacious gamble, decided to protect the disputed downbeat, constructing the baseline and vocal track in a way that validated both interpretations. The song quickly became the symbolic apex of the album — evidence of the duo's playful philosophy and keen experimentation. "Ninety-nine percent of people who listen to the track won't ever think about this. But it made the song both really simple and massively complex. And I think that's the hallmark of our band at this point," Sanborn says. "There's a way to hear our band and kind of dismiss it. For better or worse, we write the type of songs that allow you to enjoy them on a surface level if you want. But if you want to dig into it, every step you go, there’s something for you to find," Sanborn says of the album. "I'm too Midwestern to be this cocky, but it’s a song I don't think any other band could have written."It’s a stark contrast to their last album Free Love, an earnest and tidy project that relied dutifully on the structured tradition of indie-pop. "In a lot of ways, it feels like this record is deeply a return to our first record, in that our first project was really asking, Well, what sounds good? What does this mean to me?" Sanborn says. "I really don't feel like we're confined anymore," Sanborn says. "It feels like we can keep changing because no matter what we do, if the two of us make it, it's gonna sound like a Sylvan Esso record. And knowing that makes all of the other questions go away," Sanborn says. The album still remains acutely close to the two, as it’s yet to be performed in front of their fans. "Songs creep up on me. And I’m still so deeply in the record because we haven't gotten to tour it yet," Meath says. "There's so much more to be discovered."Photos by Alessandra Schade https://www.papermag.com/sylvan-esso-no-rules-sandy-2659297999.html

[kraftwerk113]

Life´s too short for weird music - Tagesempfehlung 21.01.2023

Album of the week (KW 3/23): Sylvan Esso – No rules Sandy

Tatsächlich hatte ich das in 2022 veröffentlichte vierte Sylvan Esso Album No rules Sandy völlig zu Unrecht mit Missachtung gestraft. Vielleicht hatte ich mich zu sehr vom Übertitel Didn´t care (Platz 23 der Life´s too short Jahrescharts 2022) leiten lassen. No rules Sandy ist ein Album, welches Sie sich erarbeiten müssen. Die 10 Songs und 6 Soundfragmente pendeln zwischen gebrochenen Electro-Beats (Moving), knackenden House Grooves (Echo Party, Alarm) klassischem Indie-ElectroPop (Didn´t care) und fast akustischem Folk (Coming back to you). Das mitunter diffuse Album wird wie bei einem roten Faden durch den Gesang von Amelia Meath zusammengehalten.

Zentrales Stück auf No rules Sandy ist No reality, welches die Band zur zentralen Frage des Album führte: wie verrückt können wir das Album gestalten, wie weit können wir gehen, wie fremd kann ein Sylvan Esso Album ausfallen? Nach mehrfachem Hören muss ich gestehen: Experiment geglückt, der Sound von Sylvan Esso hat sich dramatisch erweitert, der Mut zur diffusen Improvisation hat sich gelohnt. Wenn Sie sich die Mühe machen, No rules Sandy mit Ruhe, in einem Kontext zu hören werden Sie vielfach belohnt. So etwa mit meinem Highlight Echo Party. Mehr elektronisches Pop-Gefrickel geht derzeit nicht....

[heshemejoshi]

going west

[fleshunger]

Joel - Ellie + Mis - Alex G

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage - Depths of Darkness

[legendaryrat]

I filled this 'sheet' (?).. with my own rules. And by any i mean like ANY Generation or version of the character.

[emo-56]

The one thing im really enjoying about this site is the lack of sandy cheeks cock vore

[skeletonsonparade]

my name is sandy, i’m 14 years old

and sometimes i hate you

but right now i just want to go home

[lookslikethatsallthetimewehave]

oliver getting two moms and mya getting two dads

Oh ok, so that's what you meant.

And yet... I don't know if you mean Kevin hooking up with Oliver's dad and Sandy hooking up with Mya's mom, or a genderbend thing...

I'm confused and stupid XD

Sandy as a man

Kevin as a woman

[reallylikestoscream]

i need Ariana and Katie to fuck off of VPR and get their own spin off because they're clearly being iced out of VPR and it's making it so unbearable to watch

I don't care about anyone else, I just want to watch these two navigate divorce and moving and dating and opening a business

[niadrawsstuff]

just realized how terrible Pigsy probably feels in the At Your Service AU.

Like, imagine being separated from someone you basically consider as your son. Not even a moment later, you find out that he’s been captured and taken to the enemy you’ve been trying to stop.

And when you go to rescue him, you find out that he’s become a brainwashed lackey who’s now loyal to the big bad, and starts attacking you.

You could only continue your journey on finding the weapon, and hoping- hoping that you can get him back.

[grootflyart]

Sketch

[poisindonottouch]

Queer reads: KD Casey

For day 28: To round out the romance section, and the month of queer reads, I bring you the subcategory of Gay Sports Romances. I think I picked up KD Casey because Cat Sebastian recommended Diamond Ring on instagram, and that was it for my and this rabbit hole. 

So, first off, I must state that I do not care for sports. Like, I don’t hate them, because that’d be way more feelings toward a thing I do not care about. But for any given sport event happening on the TV, I’d rather be in the other room reading a book. Ironically, it might be a sports romance.

KD Casey does not hate sports. In fact, they care about them greatly. All the baseball fanning, all the baseball knowledge. When I explained my new-found interest in sport romance novels to my coworkers (all of us high school English teachers), one of them said, “Oh, so you read sport romances like it’s sci fi.” To which, yes, except I know way more about space ships in the far flung future (or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) than I do about baseball. 

But these were fun. The series actually is called Unwritten Rules, and it starts with Unwritten Rules, but I think I read them Fire Season, Unwritten Rules, Diamond Ring, which is 2, 1, 3? Anyway, there’s some flashback stuff going on, so it wasn’t too far off. There’s lots of sporting happening in these books, but also very gorgeous men with lots of feelings and internalized homophobia. Actually half of the characters have no internalized homophobia, but that’s part of the angst. Sports, as we can imagine, whether we like sports or not, is not a world that’s super open for gay people of any stripe, and part of sports as the setting presents some built-in conflict for the characters. If you’d like your romances without homophobia, these probably aren’t for you, but I think I mentioned how much I like angst, and these deliver on that. 

KD Casey makes writes some great tension, steamy sex, and compelling characters who all have some serious baggage. There’s also stuff about recovery, injury, and physical disabilities (one of the MC in Unwritten Rules is hard of hearing, which is always present but isn’t actually part of the conflict of the story.) 

If you like sports, check these out. If you don’t like sports, but you think Cat Sebastian has some good recommendations (or you think I do), check these out. 

[sruhhvalo]

saw alex g tonight and now my life feels complete

[creatediana]

A half-assed whiteboard imitation of Frederick Sandys’ Perdita (1866), done in a few minutes in Expo marker on 2/14/2023

[shvroyism]

Hope Davis got submitted for best guest actress but not Zoe Winters…