#everyone's crushed

[furiousdinosaurdestiny]

Emotionally wrecked after this episode and need sad music that emits the feelings of despair and saddened. Anyone have suggestions to add to my playlist on Spotify?

[dustedmagazine]

Water From Your Eyes — Everyone’s Crushed (Matador)

Photo by Eleanor Petry 

Everyone's Crushed by Water From Your Eyes

Everyone’s Crushed pulls apart the idea of rock songs, turns them inside out and chops them to pieces, then just when you’re getting accustomed to the deconstructive chaos, interrupts with an inexorable beat, a fragile melody, a danceable beat. You can’t get comfortable even being uncomfortable. There’s always something unexpected around the next sharp corner.

Everyone’s Crushed is the duo’s sixth full-length, taking Structure’s gleeful art experiments into even more fractured territories. And yet though Water From Your Eyes clearly expects you to be brave and open-minded, the two of them — Rachel Brown and Nate Amos — also want you to dance. A frantic, cerebral hedonism animates “Barley,” as it swells from minimalist chant to a breezy, bubbly OOIOO-style synthetic bop.  “One, two, three, four, I count mountains,” intones Brown, expressionless and austere, as a kickdrum racket blows up behind her, arguing for frenetic, cathartic movement.

These songs are always morphing, a kind of stop-motion being/becoming cycle unfolding as you tap your pencil to them.  The title starts with the bare blurt of funk bass, trebly accents of snare and high-hat punctuating at intervals, like ESG pared down to a line drawing, or Pere Ubu lying bleached out on the beach. Brown plays with a phrase, pushing it from cliché into ever-odder absurdity, “I’m with everyone I love, and everything hurts,” then “I’m in love with everyone, and everything hurts,” and finally, “I’m with everyone I hurt, and everything’s love.” You think you’ve got it, the syncopated beat, the evolving repetition, the giddy plinks of pizzicato strings, and then it all changes with a raw, rupturing onslaught of distorted guitar. It’s an art song, it’s an electro-beat, it’s guitar rock. It’s all that.

These songs are prickly, stood up against the blinding white light of negative space and shot through with sharp, stabbing dissonance, and yet it’s hard to overstate how much fun they are. “True Life” rocks on a pendulating, sirening, octave-jumping riff, an antic, frantic snarl of pop noise that necessitates movement. Then it clears for a serene melodic interval, just Brown’s voice singing and some soothing synths, and then the two elements mix (I won’t say blend, because they remain separate) in a fascinating amalgam. Later “14” tips the balance towards beauty, with lush strings and undulating waves of melody and hardly any beat at all, and still, even here, you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next (the funky, jittery “Buy My Product,” like Gauche crossed with the Boredoms, comes next).

It's been a while since an album surprised me, not just the first time through, but continually, throughout the listening experience. Everyone’s Crushed keeps you guessing, all the way through, and that’s kind of a miracle. Bravo.

Jennifer Kelly

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Track of the day // Water From Your Eyes - Barley

From the album Everyone’s Crushed, out May 26th on Matador.

[plakatierenverboten]

Water From Your Eyes: Barley (Official Music Video)

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[wasabi-gumdrop]

local ladies man’s signature move totally useless against autistic monster enthusiast. more on Kabru’s fumble era at 6

[chloesimaginationthings]

Everyone “hates” Mike in the FNAF movie..

[ruoyeming]

A lirtle wangxian wip cause I've been rewatching The Untamed <3

[demigods-posts]

currently obsessed with the idea of everyone viewing percy as a forced to never be messed with. for the sea is unpredictable and does not like to be restrained and all that jazz. except, frank and hazel. who only see him as just a little guy. a soldier left to his own devices out on the streets with nothing to comfort him but a panda pillow pet and a lingering memory of a girl he loves. he's just a little guy you guys.

[mirmirma]

Bill Cipher is the aroace experience

[treef-greef]

touya pillleeee

[noodles-and-tea]

the way you draw baby stan and baby ford is absolutely adorable you really capture the wonder of the world as kids with them !!!

They’re so silly

[theeverlastingshade]

Everyone’s Crushed- Water From Your Eyes

Pop music never stays stagnant. That's part and parcel of its charm; it globs on to whatever stylistic parameters are currently shifting the zeitgeist and leaves its imprint. The best pop music isn't any exception to this, it just tends to be the most success at imbuing the music with a real sense of personality and purpose without sacrificing the immediacy of the form. The album from this year that best demonstrates the power of pop's mutability (thus far) is Everyone's Crushed, the excellent 6th album from the Brooklyn art pop duo, Water From Your Eyes. WFYE consists of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, who have been making playfully chaotic, unabashedly flippant, genre-agnostic music together for the better part of the last decade. Their earliest work was considerably more straightforward and serviceable, but showed great promise all the same. With their next few releases their music became bolder and more multifaceted without losing focus, and we got faithful covers of cultural touchstones like "Lose Yourself" and "Call Me Maybe" that almost seemed like they were designed to dare you to write them off despite their deft execution. On EC, the wide swath of influences guiding WFYE has been distilled to a fine point that they've used to create some of the most striking pop music of the last several years.

The most immediate, undeniable draw of EC is the band's versatile command of sonics. EC flows with impeccable sequencing throughout the course of its 9 songs in 31 minute framework, and it packs some of the boldest, and most inspired sonic shifts on any 2023 album that I've heard thus far. Opener "Structure" is a string-laden series of loops imbued with mesmerizing vocal manipulation that was actually repurposed from their song "16:17". Despite its status as a brief, callback outlier "Structure" nonetheless bleeds perfectly into career highlight "Barely". "Barley" is the record's real showstopping tour de force; with the exception of a slightly more verbose verse the lyrics consist of nothing more than "One, two, three, four/I count mountains/One, two, three, counter/You're a cool thing, count mountains" but an entire universe of sound erupts around them. Synths, keys, horns, guitars, and drums seamlessly swirl around in what might scan as delightful discordance if it wasn't for the band's masterful command of melody and mixing. Nothing else on EC reaches the height of "Barely", but everything impresses in its own right. "14" brings back the strings for a baroque pop dirge laced with electronic flourishes while "More" is more or less a full-blown noise segue imbued with strings and richly-rendered found sounds. Throughout EC WFYE imbue the music with jarring juxtapositions and logic defying arrangement so acutely that it quickly becomes evident that, despite having a few comparable peers, there's still no one making music who's quite on their wavelength.

EC is imbued with irreverence at every turn. WFYE utilize weed humor and absurdity to combat a growing restless despair brought on by late stage capitalism with pitch perfect precision. The disquieting synth soundscapes of the centerpiece title track speak volumes before serrated guitar riffs, a squealing saxophone, and cowbells enter the fold like the most natural pairing of elements imaginable as Brown touches on how increasingly common substance abuse has become "Cracks a picture on the screen, yeah everyone's crushed/And with everyone around, everyone drinks". "True Life" utilizes rollicking noise pop to underscore comments about colonialism and the re-writing of history to suit the victors' narrative "Deep down, understand/Bodies talk with shaking hands/Dirt bones, stolen land/Spell a story, so hellbent" while the art-pop oddity "Out There" finds its character trapped in suburban limbo struggling to stay afloat in a life that's eating her alive "She plays the piano/She stole it from the mall/All of my best friends lost out here in the sprawl". The most obvious example arrives on the post-punk closing cut, "Buy My Product", a song about the relentless march of consumption that finds Brown softly murmuring lines like "There are no happy endings/There are only things that happen/Buy my product" over an infectious baseline and over-caffeinated drum programming. It's far from a happy ending, but it is, nonetheless, the perfect ending to an album so fixated on finding humor within the mundane hellscape that we've built for ourselves.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Dungeon Meshi crew 'leap' into action!

[plakatierenverboten]

Water From Your Eyes: Live from Nate's Bedroom (2023)

[mythology-void]

okay so I was doing a Research™️ about ancient Greek etymology as one does and I found some Things that made me want to Violently Claw My Arms Off please allow me to force feed you my discoveries

So there are 2 words for "not" in ancient Greek, depending on the context: ou and mē. Having introduced himself in the Cyclops episode as " ou tis", or No-man, he then stabs Polyphemus in the eye. When Polyphemus' brothers come to check on him, they say this:

"... surely no man [mē tis] is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man [mē tis] is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?"

Right after this, after the other cyclopes ditch Polyphemus, Odysseus's inner monologue goes something like this:

"Then they went away, and I laughed inwardly at the success of my clever strategem [metis]." (pronounced mEH-Tis)

Now, there's a difference between mē tis and metis. [mē tis] (pronounced mEH-Tis with a space between the syllables) is the literal translation for "no man". Metis is a word for extreme intelligence/cunning, which is something Odysseus is famous for.

Now, there are several examples of abuse of metis/intelligence in the Odyssey, but I think the juxtaposition between [mē tis], or the concept of anonymity, and metis, or extreme intelligence, is REALLY interesting. Odysseus's adoption of the title "No-man" was characteristic of metis--it was a really smart move that simultaneously hid him from the cyclops and avoided any future consequences. It was a highly effective strategy all wrapped up in a nest little package with a bow on it.

But when he revealed himself as Odysseus of Ithaca, effectively throwing off No-man (anonymity and [mē tis]), that was characterized as idiocy--he's essentially doxxed himself, and now he's doing to (spoiler alert) get tossed around the Mediterranean by Poseidon for the next 10 years.

This is really interesting because it lets you see the parallels/codependency between metis(intelligence) and humility. When Odysseus refused to allow himself to go unnoticed (hubris) he suffered for it. BUT when he declined instant glory/satisfaction (kleos) in order to achieve the long term goal of survival, he was rewarded with Athena's favor (pay attention. This part is important).

And this situation repeats itself MULTIPLE TIMES in the Odyssey--the EXACT SAME THING happens near the end of the book, with the suitors. When. Odysseus is dressed as a beggar and the suitors/Antinious are abusing him, he ACTIVELY CHOOSES not to react--he doesn't stand up and rip off his disguise and start hollering "TIS I, ODYSSEUS OF ITHACA! FEAR MY WRATH"

No. He sits there patiently and waits. He plans and schemes and quietly orchestrates their downfall without alerting them of it. Why? Because he learned his lesson the first time this happened. He buried his rage and adopted what was, according to Grace LA Franz, a more feminine form of metis, weaving a web of destruction for his enemies that ultimately resulted in their total annihilation (see Weaving a Way to Nostos: Odysseus and Feminine Metis in the Odyssey by Grace LaFranz). His patience allowed him to win the whole prize--no questions asked, no 10-year-long-business-trip strings attached--just the sweetness of a full victory. And he is, once again, rewarded with Athena's favor--both in the battle with the suitors and in the aftermath (cleanup/reuniting with Penelope).

This really reinforces the idea in the Odyssey that Odysseus's defining characteristic is not just his intelligence--it's his ability to learn from his mistakes. He used what he learned at the Lotus Eaters Island against Polyphemus--the Lotus Eaters drugged his men, so he drugged Polyphemus. He used what he learned from Circe and Polyphemus against the suitors--Circe used false sweetness and honeyed words to lure his men into a trap, so that's exactly what he did to the suitors. His hubris on Polyphemus' island cost his whole crew their lives, so he intentionally left well enough alone until the right time. He didn't just learn from his failures--he turned them into BATTLE STRATEGY.

i don't care what anyone says that is completely totally and objectively awesome