#also im not religious. i just find the idea of god in the narrative interesting

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Someone should rewarch The Terror and pull out every quote making reference to God.

[toastess-with-the-mostess]

Let's Rewind! Toast watches Voltron: Defender of The Universe (1984)

Season 1, Episode 5: The Princess Joins Up

Just from the episode title alone, I know my boy Sven is about to be tossed out like TRASH

I wonder what Zarkon wants with Allura, Lotor hasn't been introduced yet so maybe just a political prisoner or something

All the guards and prisoners are like ??? because haggar swears she'll upgrade the winner of this next gladiator fight so they can go against voltron if they didn't push the "all the soldiers were robots not people" narrative so much I'd agree but one of them asked how she could improve robots,, many ways sir and it's worse because she uses magic

Again some of these robeast and alien designs are so cool, very creative and reminds me biology is a suggestion when it comes to making a new species

A look into haggar lab, interesting actually it's just being used as a torture chamber where she infuses magic into them while they're still awake to feel the pain, horrifying

On Arus again, now it's the team calling out to the remaining Arusians into the tunnel to give them safety in the castle AND LANCE ALMOST FALLS OFF A CLIFF, GREAT START It's ok Keith grabs him before he dies

Pidge and Hunk are also trying to convince some people to come by, too bad their main selling point is wanting their cooking because it doesn't work with them either

I couldn't find a gif of the team sitting on this brick wall which I thought was super cute, and I don't want to screenshot that rn, so now it's up to imagination but fr trust me the team are all cuties

"I hate to give [Allura] the bad news :(" to "Sorry! No one wants to help!" PIDGE A LITTLE MORE TACT PLEASE LMAO

Something interesting, Hunk points out that they can't use Voltron to outright attack Zarkon and Allura agrees because he's a defender Knowing that they defeat everyone at the end after outright attacking castle doom, it seems kind of ironic BUT ALSO in Voltron Force (2011) we get an episode that revisits this legit subject and answers why or why not that would change That'll be a fun episode to review when I get to it

Again why would he want Princess Allura so bad, political prisoner is my best idea here This is probably where the Keith/Allura shipping started because after Coran mentions that Keith is super quick to threaten violence against the guy if he tries to touch her I mean ignoring the fact that it's one of the more obvious pairings lol

An attack! And they destroyed that satellite dish thing that Sven and Allura just finished building, rip

They routinely call the lions "space lions" which I guess makes sense but if Earth or at least the GG have been in contact with aliens for god knows how long it feels like it's kind of redundant to specifically say they're from space

Again with the GoLion references, I don't remember it being this abundant it's just them saying the name GoLion btw, nothing subtle LMAO

This week's robeast is called the Dieklops! They named this one pretty well, so there's some hope for the future, This one is heavier than the last one at only 4100 short tons!

I like to think that the team fights in the lions first before forming Voltron because they're trying to see what it can do, and it's a lot easier to annoy a robeast into showing its cards when there's more of you

Activate interlocks, dynotherms connected, infracells up, mega thrusters are go! They finally did the chant this time! Maybe it's because I religiously rewatch Voltron Force (2011) but I expected them to say "Let's go voltron force!" but instead they just shouted Voltron that's ok too I guess

I didn't comment on the transformation sequence last time, but it's pretty cool because it reminds me of some frankenstein's monster type stuff especially because there are a lot of electricity crackles and zaps seen and heard when voltron forms

AND IM FREEEE FREEE FALLIN

Ok but actually though that's a really interesting landscape near the castle, pretty secure in case of ground attacks but what about when natural disasters hit? It probably isn't that safe

I know the show just pulls phrases out of its ass to sound futuristic but "nucleonic circut" is wild

Alfor CREATED voltron?? Again I'm twisting it to my own version because I can't trust them telling a linear story here, but my thinking is that after Voltron was officially split into five, Alfor later discovered them and had them slowly rebuilt as mechs which is why they form like this now

Man these guys suck at dodging

oh shit now the castle is getting taken apart I know what happens next but it's still wild

HELLO?? CORAN WHY WOULD YOU TELL HER TO SURRENDER WHEN YOU SAID THAT ZARKON NEVER BACKS DOWN

I think it's a nice touch that Voltron has expressions whenever he fights, kind of hints at his magical nature even though in this show they're just treated as machines and nothing more

Alfor ex machina returns and confirmation that Zarkon is the one who killed Alfor

Goodbye decrepit old castle of Arus, hellooo new futuristic version!

OH SHIT WATCH OUT ALLURA STAYS STRAPPED ok maybe I was wrong about this episode being the one where Sven gets nerfed

Robeast is defeated but as Allura monologues they show a slide show of all the lions with their pilots on top, except the first one we see is blue and Allura on top lol that must've been weird for kids who saw it air

Episode end! Another short one it feels like, or is it because it was such a simple premise This is the last one for tonight, and hopefully I'll be able to do one tomorrow, but it's my busiest day of the week :/

[your-dar-ling]

G:L Season 2 Episode 2 Re(Cap/View)

Better than the premiere. Not gonna waste time:

Dri and Roberta

I loved their plot but the slap was a bit much. Dri is great in this episode, and she's pointing out the obvious flaws in her mother's philosophy. Lines like "He's fighting them" just hold so much weight to me. I'm not exactly sure why.

Roberta has a very believable quality to her faith, they all do. She embodies a very common (and annoying) parenting sentiment: The "I'm the parent so my beliefs are ultimately most important" Clause, and its corollary "Fine. You don't have to believe me but here's a ridiculous ultimatum that will either force you under my heel or irreparably alienate us to one another." I think alot of religions play into such a binary system, and I think the Union is most fun when it is finding the commonalities between how religions present higher powers.

Brother Tate

OMG thank God he actually believes in what he's saying. I don't think I could take it if "The Flow" had no merit to it at all. I'm sick of stories that present the "religious option" as just crazy people. Now is it a death cult? Yea, kinda. But there's no self-serving motives. Unlike the Polity, who is legit just making things up, the Union actually thinks they are humanity's salvation. The truth in that is....well it's unclear. And I appreciate that the show doesn't jump directly to the villainization of the Omnifaith.

Chase

Thematically Chase being the cornerstone of the Union is SO good. Julius Caesar, Jesus, I mean Brother Tate's speech at the end perfectly summed it up. Chase's idea of heroism is filtered through his suffering, and the horrifying revelation is that without death, there is always more of himself to lose. The truest of horrors of war stories.

However Chase lacked the emotional depth he needed in this episode. MBJ does a phenomenal job voice acting him for the most part, he shows a remarkable amount of emotion. But the way the show implements it feels uncanny somehow. I can't exactly describe it but the editing is off.

Yaz

I find it very gripping how the Union converts her through breaking her. It's honestly kinda sucky that the nature of the Union -- and many (especially Abrahamic) religions, too -- presents itself as the one and only option. It's such a morbid and cynical servitude. No one is actually concerned about convincing her, they just keep guilting her until submission. And when she finally gives up? The flow keeps her alive? I don't quite know. But yea this recontextualizes alot of her behavior in Season 1 in a positive way (narratively speaking of course. I don't feel good about it).

I don't think the show is in a place to explore this, but I appreciate the irony in the "you have no proof of the afterlife" line from a person of (presumably) Muslim faith. It may have been an oversight, but it's one I feel is thematically appropriate.

(I think it would have been more interesting if she did believe in the Omnifaith itself, but not as literally as the suicide pact demanded by it's organized religion. But I digress.)

Polity

Nice save on Marin, there guys lol. It's too late, I already think she's a bad guy.

I think one thing that makes this show so viscerally unsettling sometimes is its sheer willingness to connect itself to modern day Earth. When I heard that the Polity was a rebranded (and equally useless) UN I legitimately buffered for a moment. How horrifying. How likely. It's almost as if G:L the show itself is prophetic of what is to come. Speculative fiction at this point is just a reality that hasn't happened yet. And from that standpoint, I'm with Chase. I'm scared.

TLDR: The Union is some AMAZING world building. This G:L crew is truly making the best of this mess of a production that they can, and I appreciate that.

Final Score: 7/10

P.S.: IM PUTTING WARNER IN THE DEATH NOTE for messing with reaction videos. RT (the company) is also pretty damn close to filling the blank space. Like are you serious???

[blookmallow]

i dont have the energy to go through all my outlast 2 screenshots right now, i have one liveblog post drafted that i was working on before, and now i have a huge pile of screenshots to go through again so there’ll be. at LEAST two more... play by play type posts lmao

so anyway the order’s gonna be kinda weird but my brain is screaming and ive been going through wiki pages for like 2 hours so heres. some thoughts and a lot of questions and some observations i think im. sort of starting to get it,

---

ok so... knoth believed the antichrist was going to be born, apparently he DID think it was going to be from one of his own people, but then. blake and lynn obviously aren’t from his people so i have no idea why he suddenly decided it was on them 

marta was his “angel of death” hitman going around murdering people in the name of god

people who got sick (definitely STDs, believed to be the Curse of Sin or whatever but it might have just been anyone who was diseased at all) got banished to the scalled village where they all got HORRIFICALLY sick and infected and have completely lost their minds now abandoned by the church

val broke off from knoth’s church and started the heretics cult, they seem to be. satanists now and are trying to allow the birth of the anti christ but are also constantly trying to kill me to death too 

according to the wiki val is almost definitely a trans woman, which. the Only trans character in outlast is a woman who is a violent sexual predator who might be a devil worshipper and has wet dreams about child murder. granted everyone in outlast is fucked up but THAT’S A PARTICULAR KIND OF FUCKED UP

lynn was not visibly pregnant when they crashed, blake claims they hadn’t been sexually active in months so if she was pregnant, it’s not his child. when he finds her again she’s not only very visibly pregnant, but actively going into labor. she calls it “our baby.” blake doesn’t have the chance to ask her how this happened. this is never fucking explained : )

like it doesn’t look like lynn was just like.... reverse c-sectioned and even if someone raped her to force pregnancy she wouldn’t have gone through an entire 9 month pregnancy in ONE NIGHT, so what the FUCK was that about

the wiki mentions its possible the baby isn’t actually real, it apparently doesn’t cast a shadow and lynn has the “there’s nothing there” line, but even if blake hallucinated the pregnancy and the baby (which. at least would explain how the process of “giving birth” took like 3 seconds and she became suddenly 9 months pregnant in one day) why would lynn be reacting as if she was pregnant too. or if they both hallucinated it why did she say “there’s nothing there,” wouldn’t she be able to see it too 

anyway jessica, lynn, and blake were all friends in. high school middle school whatever age.  it seems like there was some kind of love triangle going on, jessica seems into blake in the flashbacks, blake seems unsure

he starts getting lynn and jessica confused near the end so he might’ve had some kind of feelings for her though, the wiki mentions his complete obsession with saving lynn might have been partly fueled by “i couldn’t save jessica but im going to save lynn im not going to lose them both i HAVE to succeed this time” to the point that they just kind of became the same person in his head by the end 

there’s some weird parallels with jessica playfully jumping on him and val pinning him down so its very possible jessica was acting... sexually aggressive toward him, on a much smaller scale of course, but enough that val’s assault triggered the memory

jessica was almost definitely being molested by one of their teachers/church leaders/whatever and blake seems to blame himself for not doing anything about it

i thought jessica killed herself and blake felt responsible for it, maybe figuring the abuse she was enduring from the teacher (and possibly her father, she reacts very afraid when he threatens to call her father) might have been one of the causes, and he didn’t help her 

but the wiki says the teacher actually may have killed jessica and forced blake to help cover it up as a suicide, hence... finding her on the stairs. which i guess makes sense too 

but the whole flashback thing is never explained?? i guess maybe it really was just trauma manifesting in really fucked up ways and like, that’s still narratively interesting but the fact that it kept crossing over into the real world (the recordings from the flashbacks showed up as corrupted files, so Something happened and it wasn’t just in blake’s head, frequently you get stuck somewhere you can’t escape from, get pulled into the other world, wake up somewhere else entirely) means it’s not just internal so why the FUCK is he crossing dimensions. they don’t tell you!!! i had to go digging on the wiki to figure this shit out

from the wiki:

“The "apocalypse" Blake had witnessed, as well as the nightmarish flashbacks to his childhood, were all just hallucinations induced by the Murkoff Corporation's local Radio Towers.“

WHAT???? IT WAS MURKOFF THE WHOLE TIME 

but like. are you telling me it was all a hallucination that was just kind of vaguely mentioned Once. the big reveal/the truth behind it all was literally just hinted about in One Note/One weird encounter with a distant radio tower in ONE SCENE randomly in the middle of the game and never expanded on. what the FUCK kind of writing/game design is THAT

it looks like the “voice of God” knoth was hearing was actually the murkoff frequencies too, but like. fucking why. why were they telling this guy to kill babies and create a murder cult. was it just a “how far can we take this” experiment like the “how badly can we fuck someone’s mind up if we take away their meds and exacerbate their mental illness” thing at mount massive. i mean i guess a corporation that would do That would also probably fuck with a bunch of hyper religious hillbillies too but it just seems way too convoluted for “idk just wanted to see what would happen” 

and “maybe if we hide subliminal messages in the radio frequencies we can convince some random guy we’re the voice of God” is. way too specific to actually Work, i guess maybe if they could induce hallucinations they could maybe manipulate peoples’ minds that much more efficiently but like. still. it doesnt fucking make sense!!!!!! why would it manifest as “flashbacks of childhood trauma” in blake and “suddenly im pregnant” in lynn and “God Said I Gotta Kill Everyone” in knoth and “satan said i gotta fuck everyone” in val NONE OF THAT MAKES ANY FUCKING SENSE!!!

APPARENTLY there’s a whole mess of comics that go along with this and hopefully explain shit a little bit more but “explaining what the fuck happened in your game by means of a side comic that isn’t mentioned in said game” is : ) 

I DONT KNOW. iM SO TIRED ITS 1 AM SOMEHOW

ill go through all my screenshots and shit later maybe that’ll help. something :’) god. I MEAN TO BE FAIR, outlast’s strengths have never been its story telling, it’s a great game for being absolutely scared out of your fucking mind and boy did they ever deliver on that front so like... i guess ultimately i got what i wanted out of it but im still CONFUSED,

i should really have expected this though lmao this is the same thing that happened at the end of outlast 1 i didnt understand anything until 900 wiki pages later and still hated the ending even when i finally did sort of almost understand it 

[afro-elf]

How to Listen to Hozier: A Guide in Escapism with The Troubadour Hero

@farrahda5hy wrote this days ago and it’s every thought i’ve ever had about this fucking album and i really feel understood

The narrative I am proposing is personal to me, and I do not claim that it is proper or correct way to listen to this album. However, I will be providing commentary on how I compose this specific narrative. These steps are really boiling down how I perceive things so see them as the end all be all. The instructions are comprised on two main factors: one’s beloved and the constructed world that exists in one’s mind.

1. First, identify your beloved. I don’t have a significant other which is why I probably am going to choose Sweet Andy Hozier himself. Also, he’s a neat guy and quite a charmer and activist…etc. This step should be easier for those are in relationships. As reductive as this may sound, it is important that one chose a few words that summarize the relationship with one’s significant other. 2. The self-construction is really only important to listen experience. It’s really where your mind goes to when you’re listening to the album. For those who are taking the beloved to the narrator (Andy as Narrator maybe) approach, I assume this step would be harder or potentially easier as one’s mind is free to run wild as you are not tied down to reality. As a creative writer, I live and thrive in this space.

I am choosing the words: Fluid, Bold, Chaotic, Sarcastic, Overwhelming, and Passionate.

As for this world construction, I usually go back to my hometown within the Appalachian mountains, specifically the Smokey mountains. For me, this place represents a mysticism that I have created for myself. Honestly, it is quite the opposite of the Bog People villas described in the album, but there’s a large number Irish descendants in this area. But like I said, it’s more personal and obviously idealistic. I don’t care for my hometown, but I’m in love with how it made me feel and the bastardized version of it that exists in my head now that somehow blurred into my new city.

Taking these basic elements, I’m forming this new track list organization. Hold on to your hats, it’s going to get fucking wild and possibly a bit fanfic, so as Griffin McElroy says “just fucking play in this space with me.”

Track one: Take Me to Church.

Yes, don’t at me. This song is in fact the first song on the album, but I think it sets the tone for the narrative. Two lines that stick out are “She’s the giggle at a funeral” and “My church offers no absolutes.” Honestly, these lines really stick out to me. Immediately, it identifies the woman in the relationship as other to what is excepted in society. Quite frankly as black woman, I’m kind always in that category, you know. Not to mention the hella gospel tones and such. The second line mentioned out of context is very much a declaration of acceptance which is bomb, but also naive in a way in a new love sense. Because of course within relationships, there are aspects that are fine in the beginning or on some levels but cause problems in the long-run. For me, I identify as the woman who the subject of the song. Honestly, I’m that gal who’s going to say wise shit to you, but will also doubt herself. But I’m a “fuck what the world thinks” person and overcompensate by existing in this “let’s take down the world” ideology.

Track two: Jackie and Wilson

This song is so damn playful, and it’s this feeling of hopefulness and disappointment in a way. Really the entire breakdown of the song throws your head into a loop. There’s this one-sided commitment, and I guess when I get to that part of the song I’m always thinking “yeah, bud, I like you, but shit, this thing can’t last forever right? Don’t tie yourself down to me because woof…buddy, I’m a roadtrip you do not want to go on.” The song is trying to come to terms with a partner who isn’t giving their 150%. Also, for my mental music video, Hozier has his hair down the entire car ride and sunglasses on, and I’m sticking my whole body out the car with an lit cigarette in my left hand while we do donuts in Kroger parking lot.

Track Three: Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene

This song is another one where the breakdown of the song is the most powerful. Really the song speaks for its self. The relationship just is toxic and overwhelming and in need of escape. Every time I listen to this song, I imagine myself in a basement at a drum set. It didn’t really occur to me that it’s the chaotic feeling and the need to escape that I have latch on to.

Track four: Someone New

Forget everything you know about this song, okay. Because this song is literally the “Take Me or Leave Me” moment. Literally until the breakdown of the song, I imagine the beloved singing the verses rather than Sweet Andy. It’s very much a “we’re not working. We’re trying other people.”

Two things I want to highlight: the lyrics of the breakdown. This first part will not make as much sense until I talk about the next song. But Jealous!Hozier is a fucking thing. I find this interesting, but until then, there’s this “I’m level headed and open about my emotions” air about him. But this delightful pang of jealousy adds dimension to what I call the Hozier Troubadour Hero. The female character (or the one I have constructed in my own head) as main vocalist is just as level-headed and falsely self-aware. Then there’s this arrow of “oh yeah we’re doing this thing and seeing other people, but I’m not happy about seeing you with other people.”

The line “Love with every stranger. The stranger the better.” I love this wordplay. But against the line “how pure how sweet in love Aretha that you would pray for him,” it’s fucking taunting and bitter as hell. Really, starting the album of with Take Me to Church reflects this disregard for organized religion, which is no stranger to Hozier, but the beloved seems to still exists in that sphere. But I also want to read in another way that it’s bittersweet to the Hozier!character that this beloved still prays for him although she’s involved with another person. I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Quickly, I want to highlight the other vocal overlay that actually comes between the two lines mentioned. I get this air of confrontation and then the “NO ITS COOL IM HAPPY THAT YOUR HAPPY WITH SOMEONE NEW”. Once again, I imagine this argument taking place in an apartment living room.

Here, I would like to introduce a distinction between the characters. The Hozier character is very much fluid that is very self contained chaos whereas the female character is very much open chaos. As a fire signs, I totally get that. Hozier being a water sign is very fluid in what we stereotypically thing as fluid, but we also don’t always see water as destructive in comparison to fire.

Track Five: From Eden

To this day, I still wonder if this is a love song. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be. But I find this song to be one of my favorites.

I want to flip the imagery of Jackie and Wilson and delve more into the Chaotic!Hozier characterization. Obviously, this song is very upfront with the Garden of Eden serpent allusion. This song exists in the uncertainty of relationship. The “are we or aren’t we” spheres. To sum it up, this is a conversation happening in a car. Oddly, person in the passenger seat (Hozier) is leading the conversation and the beloved as the driver really doesn’t want to have this conversation.

The ending of first verse give us little snippets, and it appears that the beloved flaws are being pointed out or Hozier is anticipating the responses from the driver. But also let’s return back to this serpent imagery. Hozier aligns himself with the serpent in Eden, so the idea of corruption is very highly in this imagined car ride.

When I first heard this song, I got the “bad boy who doesn’t let everyone know he’s a bad boy” vibe.” I really gripped on to this concept; along with other religious allusions, I really don’t know how to objectively look at them. For me, it’s a little “Walk to Remember-ish” where the preachers daughter is in love with the bad boy. I don’t know, but really at the heart of it, the narrative boils down to “I’m going to corrupt this persons core, and I don’t have remorse at all.” Understanding what this concept means on personal level will determine whether it’s a love song or whether it’s an act of selfishness disguised as love.

Track Six: Foreigners God

I’ll admit. I didn’t really get this song after my initial listen to the album. I think for me it’s just too personal. I grew up in a Christian household, going to a very charismatic church. So the line that really sticks out it’s very simple “It’s Foreign to me”. I’ll just leave that there.

It’s really an outsider looking in and not understanding and forming their own opinions. While “Take Me to Church” is very much a “sex in an abandoned church (or whatever) type of jam that highlights the oppressive aspects of organized religion, “Foreigners God” really displays the frustration of separating the comforting parts from all the oppressive aspects.

This scene takes place in the abandoned church, and I want to react in this way of “God is here” in this desolation that some people don’t understand. Going back to that fire fluidity, I just imagine myself dancing in this church with like a song under my breath and releasing all this anger I’ve shared with no one. Then Sweet Andy Hozier is just watching in the door frame in the background. Not even sitting in the pew.

Track Seven: Cherry Wine

I think I’m just punching a window out. Car window. A church window. A bedroom window.

This pivotal point of realization that “hey maybe you’re the one that’s holding you back and lashing out at people isn’t the best.” But the tragedy is there’s still a lack of self awareness. Like you’re angry but you still put blame on other people. Yeah…

Track Eight: Sedated

This song is another one of those songs that I interpret as the point of view of the beloved based on the breakdown of the song, but I still want to look at the Hozier character POV

“Darling, don’t stand there watching won’t you come save me from this. Darling, don’t you join in you’re supposed to drag me away from this.”

That’s desperation. That’s a little toxic in a way. Expecting a person to save you, but yet, forgetting that person may need saving themselves is selfish. What makes Jackie and Wilson so tragic is this naivety. “She’s going to save me call me ‘baby’ run her hands to my hair.” Yeah, that’s sweet and cute, but what are you doing in return. Falling in love with this idealized strong woman, but then denying her the opportunity to be vulnerable is very much the corruption I spoke about in From Eden.

Honestly, the worst part about hiding vulnerability is when it rushes out like a dam breaking or when a fire is no longer contained.

Track Nine: Arsonist’s Lullaby

I call it the pagan ritual version of Foreigners God or when Chaotic!Hozier is at his most powerful and vulnerable. Why? Is it the relinquishing of this vulnerability for his beloved to use as her discretion or is it his acknowledgment of hers and offering to aid her in channeling it? Yes, but it’s also the fire within him, the passion, the chaos, and the darkness that fuels him. He is both talking to the beloved and himself.

For the sake of the conversation, this scene also takes place in the same abandoned church, and Hozier gets up to where he stage used to be; barefoot and hair pulled back. At first, he’s swaying gently, fluid like as flame is first lit with back facing the congregation. He’s like this for a few moments and then he’s twirling around the abandoned stage until he’s almost stomping his feet. Thump. Thump. Thump. Suddenly, everything changes and his hair falls out the ponytail and turns around and the stumps are more violent, yet the dance is just as fluid until he steps down from stage…the intense eye contact is fucking overwhelming. He just walks out the abandoned church leaving his shoes like some awoken wild child.

Track Ten: My Love will Never Die

Do you like blues? Welp. This song speaks for its fucking self. Do you want Sad!Hozier crooning in a room by himself? Because that’s what he’s doing, babe.

Track Eleven: In the Woods Somewhere I get a lot of fever dream vibes from this song, so I can only imagine it as something just not real. So I present you with an actual dream I had about Hozier I had once.

Pretty much, I dreamt Hozier was this shapeshifter who turned into a fox that was terrorizing the town in his fox state. It was more a vigilante like thing, but it was tragic because I had to kill the fox out of mercy.

The song also talks about a similar scene. So mercy killing when you’re in love is very much something that hard to describe, but you have to do it to the other person when you love them. I don’t know. So just imagine Hozier shooting up out of dead sleep fever dream.

Track Twelve: Run

Also a ritual dance, but also possibly a fever dream? This song introduces the field/nature imagery to relationship narrative. The metronome in the background mirrors the jerky dancing of the beloved from the Foreigners God portion but the tempo of the drums gives rhythm to the fluidity of the Hozier!Character. Both of these two sounds represent being grounded, and they work in unison. This unison is a first really. Playing that fever dream, the song seems to end abruptly and I think that’s the true awakening of the Hozier!Character physically and emotionally.

The dream itself is the couple dancing in a field together in the afternoon. I could go further with this dream, but I’m going explain it as actual event later.

Track Thirteen: It Will Come Back 

The best song on the album, not to mention a song of seduction. It’s an unintentional sexy song. I wish it were a duet or at least have more prominent female background vocals. While seduction isn’t the best term for the overall narrative, what I am trying to say is a song of pleading for so many things: to be let go, to be let in, or to be cast aside to make it easier to move on. Wild Eye, Sleep-Deprived Hozier is walking around barefoot at three am across town to reconcile his feelings, and then he’s just singing and howling outside my house? Of course, I’m going to let him in. “Don’t you hear me howling, babe?” The faded of the last line is so interesting, and it brings me back to Sedated’s line “I keep catching little words, but the meanings thin.” I just occurred to me is that the expression of vulnerability is very metaphorically, but on the literal manifestations are different. The Hozier!Character is very much a “tell me with your words”; the beloved is very much “tell me with your actions. “Don’t you hear me howling, babe” takes on another meaning in which the question is literally “you’ve seen me vulnerable, but did you hear what I actually said. I love you so much that it’s animalistic and consuming the humanity in me.” That’s oddly beautiful. 

Track Fourteen: To Be Alone 

So I bet you were wondering when I was going to talk more about the location part. Well, here is it. I grew up in the middle of the Bible Belt. Sometimes when you’re not conforming you feel like everyone is looking at you whether they are or not. At on a more concrete level, my hometown used to have a festival called the Fall Festival, and they would have a series of out door concerts of various artists. This event was usually held downtown. Honestly, I’m not to big on crowds, but at the same time, I adore being alone in a crowd or with one person while out in public. To Be Alone captured that vibe very well. Returning the relationship, at this point, the air of ambiguity of relationship still exists; however, the relationship is heading toward stability in my opinion. I just love the image of Chaotic!Hozier dancing in a crowd simultaneously ignoring everyone else while be fully away of the contained space he’s got to be close with his lover. Then just going the fuck home for sex just because the mood allowed it to feel sacred in some way. Maybe it was the dream of the two lovers dancing in the field. 

Track Fifteen: In A Week 

The only duet on this album! UGH SO DAMN GOOD! A lovely balances of vocals; they are playing off each other. It’s very much stereotypical “we finish each other’s sentences” concept but actualized very well. So maybe the sex didn’t happen after the festival, but that closeness and intimate is still present. Despite being allergic to grass, I like lying in the grass. I also like the macabre. So nothing is out of place, and it’s all intimate joke to describe a seemingly tragic love that is no longer tragic. 

Track Sixteen: Like Real People Do 

Something tragic about that this song (it’s probably the true story behind it) but also romantic. As the penultimate song in the album, it’s very much the final acceptance of all the flaws, frustrations, and the opposition within. Not to be sexy, this song is the foreplay to the final song. This is the outside conversation on the porch before you invite your lover into the house to stay the night and lead your lover upstairs or to the couch or the floor Whatever floats your passionate boat. 

Track Seventeen: Work Song 

It’s the only song on the album that doesn’t seem to have baggage behind it. It’s purely romantic. I put this song in opposition to Take Me to Church really. I imagine that’s why I put it at the the end. This song is true acceptance not the fake acceptance in Take Me to Church. The line “Heaven and Hell were words to me” signifies this point. Everything I’ve described throughout this narrative as been about duality and finding where the lines blur for this relationship to be functional. “Work Song” finally rejects that ideology and allows the relationship to heal and flourish. So in this moment, let’s return back to this abandoned church that this couple has made their own sanctuary (face it they are fucking weird) but it’s not broken down or stuffy. It’s homely as they camp out for the night making their bed at the abandoned altar. The couple makes love in the moonlight that peeks in through the shattered window. The whole damn cosmos witness the rebellion that manifests in their love. So yeah, I’m curious to what the narrative of the reverse of this track list. I didn’t have this narrative planned out in my head. It just came organically as I was writing. Honestly if i had written my original idea it would have been more fantasy driven and a lot more Chaotic!Hozier. If you’re curious about that let me know. Also, I will try to do one of the original track list because it’s more of a challenge.

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on July’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too… 

1. Don’t Drink Poison - Sarah Anne Wallen

“Through a sly directness that seems inspired by Williams, the New York School, Sylvia Plath, and Ariana Reines, Wallen crafts a punk female poetics located in the weird slippery surface of tone. Compressed, smart and raucous, the poems shimmer as they turn language back on its strange self.” - Karen Weiser

2. Diary of A K-Drama Villain - Min K. Kang

“Min K. Kang's The Diary of a K-Drama Villain is alive and subversive: each line undermining misperceptions of the Asian female condition with vinegary wit. Kang reclaims the lyric for the digital age; her style is the Engrish IM, the confessional missive as late night text, shredding that Anna May Wong avatar with vengeance. A startling and vibrant debut.” - Cathy Park Hong

3. Go Find Your Father | A Famous Blues - Harmony Holiday

“The voice in A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father is so absolute and addicting and completing (Holiday, you complete me!) and enduring. And yet there is a specific politics underlying the poems in this book regarding the ‘work made for hire’ clause in many recording contracts. The poems in A Famous Blues feel like direct confrontations with this fact, but that’s mainly from interspersed texts telling the story of Holiday’s father, Jimmie Holiday. This half of the book spells out the concept of inheritance in concrete and explicit terms. Literally, Holiday has been in dispute for royalties she and her mother should be earning from her father’s songwriting. And so the concept of father as artist present in Harmony Holiday’s artistic life takes on a concrete character. It’s a point which A Famous Blues takes further when it speaks to influence with a listing of artists in ‘Lament for the Brilliance of Wolves.’ And I would say it’s this conceptual interlock surrounding the idea of inheritance that allows for so much centripetal motion in the poems. They hurl themselves outward in syntax and content and sentiment and everything, please. Yet they still hold together.” - Kent Shaw, The Rumpus

4. Essay Stanzas - Thomas Meyer

“A life of such patience must have led to Thomas Meyer’s Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave, 2014). In long poems in which each stanza offers itself as a discrete meditation, Meyer creates a book in which the largest of universal truths find themselves manifest in the minutiae of daily attention. My favorite of the poems, ‘Caught Between,’ opens the collection, is an exalted catalog of the things of existence—from light to ocean to river to tree to, most movingly, the animal kingdom—one that knows no list can be complete, and highest praise of the ten-thousand things must be modest enough not to strive to compete with the world of which it sings. Meyer renews poetry’s oldest dictate, placing upon his shoulders Caedmon’s own mantle: Now must we praise. Such praise isn’t a form of faith necessarily, not a religious tenet, but a kind of light, so that song brings to the eye what all there is that can be seen.” - Dan Beachy-Quick

5. Tender Points - Amy Berkowitz

“’Trauma is nonlinear,’ writes Berkowitz. I am impressed by the sensing form she makes. That has the day in it, as well as the night. The body, that is, in variable settings, frames and weathers. The stairs that ‘climb up my arms and neck.’ The ‘I am bitterly jealous of people who can always go back to being a barista for a while.’ This book is a kind of clutching and being there for real, and that is what I like. A book. That takes up. A visceral form.” Bhanu Kapil

6. Rumored Place - Rob Halpern

“Rob Halpern implodes new narrative tenets, collapsing all views of our condition and the means to express these views into each sentence at once: learned, aroused, mournful, and full of hope. His book conveys the intolerable crush of the ongoing, the grand brawl of contending institutions and concepts hectically alive past their deaths. Meanwhile the self continually gains and loses ID. The intensity of what is said displays the extent of what can’t be said. This emptiness travels along with the story in the future perfect tense, a negative space that has not been, an arcadia that cannot have been lost, beyond knowing but not beyond needing. It is also an orifice in the mind or body where the unspeakable of history might enter and speak.” - Robert Glück

7. Neighbor - Rachel Levitsky

“Levitsky interrogates just about every nut and bolt that goes into community, civic and otherwise, and incorporates political theory gently into Neighbor, particularly Giorgio Agamben (and her sly and irresistible sense of humor certainly makes us aware of the double entendre behind The Coming Community). ‘God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority,’ Agamben writes. The neighbor insists on the private made public, public made private, and in that movement, inflicted upon both self and other, is the taking-place, taking of place.” - Marcella Durand, Jacket2

8. The Book of Light - Lucille Clifton

“Clifton's latest collection clearly demonstrates why she was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. These poems contain all the simplicity and grace readers have come to expect from her work. The first few pages set the title in a larger perspective at the same time that they announce the book's premise: ‘woman, i am / lucille, which stands for light.’ This is a feminist version of Roots, charged with outrage at the sins done to women of previous generations. There are the typical heroes and anti-heroes: Atlas, Sisyphus, Leda, biblical women—but even these tired figures are given a new, often comic, twist: Naomi, for example, doesn't want Ruth's devotion, just to be left alone to ‘grieve in peace’; several poems are addressed to Clark Kent as the speaker comes to terms with the realization that he doesn't have the power to save her after all. And what do today's women have instead of superheroes? Jesse Helms; fathers who ‘burned us all.’ Though it is based more or less in traditional Christianity, the poetry also is concerned with how spirituality can be personal. Low key and poignant, poem after poem takes the form of a conversation, whether woman to her dead parents, Lucifer to God, or poet to reader.” - Publisher’s Weekly

9. Heath Course Pak - Tan Lin

“The book is interesting in that it’s specifically not interesting, it’s successful because of the way it fails, it succeeds so adequately at what it sets out to do that as a book it becomes a mere chore, an exercise. But the stamina required is beautiful, and Lin’s trajectory through the world of literature, as an outlier questioning things completely different than anybody else, is entirely necessary.” - Impossible Mike, HTML Giant

10. i be, but i ain’t - Aziza Barnes

“Barnes commandeers the page in her startling debut, putting into language a range of lived experiences that expose crucial gaps in language and history. These poems brim with black voices, so with some winking irony she marks the collection's five sections with quotes from Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, including his final words: ‘Let us cross over the river & rest under the shade of the trees.’ Demonstrating a firm grasp of the interplay of form and content, Barnes varies tone and structure to meet her needs. Her opening poem emulates the shape of a framed picture of Miriam Makeba used to kill a centipede in her apartment, ending with ‘a colonizer's thought’: ‘if I don't kill it now, how will I find it again?’ The collection rolls from there. With justified annoyance and amusement, Barnes expounds on sexual and racial identities, fraught social interactions, and various modes of desire. As the poems shift location (New York City, Los Angeles, Mississippi, Ghana), those issues reveal their interrelatedness even as they manifest individually.” - Publisher’s Weekly