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drippeddaily · 7 years ago

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Album of the Year #5: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane) - volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)

Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Label: Self-Released

Release Date: January 29, 2017

Listen:

YouTube

Spotify

Bandcamp

Apple Music

Background

Bedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.

After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”

Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:

I keep getting emails from people.

I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.

All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.

what else can i do.

im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.

but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.

polemic yelp review of american heath care system:

"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.

After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.

3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.

I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.

I had been reaching out

Calling.

Emailing.

After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.

I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.

I didn't know what else to do.

What else are you supposed to do.

For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.

Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.

Vomiting children.

Bleeding Fingers.

Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.

Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.

Their broken humilated spouse at their side.

I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.

Surrending my freedom.

Surrender of my routines.

After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.

Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.

Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.

One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.

Not sure what that was about.

Empty though.

A bed and a chair.

Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.

You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.

I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.

I sat and waited in my gown.

Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.

I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.

I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.

I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.

This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.

Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:

"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"

No.

No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.

No.

No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.

wrong answer.

I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.

Back right where I started.

Nobody is gonna help me.

Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.

Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.

By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.

Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .

Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.

On hurting yourself:

This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.

On hurting someone else:

This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.

I've read old yeller.

They dont care. Neither do I.

boo hoo.

Conversely:

lock them in a room and keep them safe.

Is this really that hard?

"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"

How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:

"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"

Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.

It creates that understanding.

In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.

even if that wasn't a real compulsion.

a last resort.

This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more.

"well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".

I'll get better one day.

Not today.

Maybe I'll have fingers.

Maybe I won't."

thanks for the well wishes.

i'm fine.

i'm just angry.

i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.

i hate that you are dealing with this.

Review

I don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.

Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.

The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”

This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”

In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.

While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights�� cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.

Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.

This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”

The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.

And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.

volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:

I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.

Favorite Lyrics

Crouched down by the tree at his neighbors

He liked the way the bark ripped off like paper

He pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasers

Every step he took turned earth into craters

Little brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuff

Bowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks

“man wearing a helmet”

Waking up in situations

Feeling like I'm living in suspended animation

Guess I'm still sober on occasion

And that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation

“stoop lights”

I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going in

Just shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friend

I don’t want to stretch you more than you extend

I don’t want to spit in the hand that you lend

I did it to myself, I get what I deserve

Thoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerve

I’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt but

I just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth

“stoop lights”

Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a scream

Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green

Bashful baby boy, so distracted by my toys

Rode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, Illinois

On a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegrates

The only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate

“haze of interference”

You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madness

You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?

“haze of interference”

If I was glass I'd revert back to sand

Scattered through the sea, I could pass through your hands

None of this will happen, nothing will ever

The things that I believe can never ever happen

I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall

Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all

“haze of interference”

Talking Points

How does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?

What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?

What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?

I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?

And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?

Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.Label: Self-ReleasedRelease Date: January 29, 2017Listen:YouTubeSpotifyBandcampApple MusicBackgroundBedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:I keep getting emails from people.I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.what else can i do.im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.polemic yelp review of american heath care system:"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.I had been reaching outCalling.Emailing.After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.I didn't know what else to do.What else are you supposed to do.For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.Vomiting children.Bleeding Fingers.Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.Their broken humilated spouse at their side.I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.Surrending my freedom.Surrender of my routines.After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.Not sure what that was about.Empty though.A bed and a chair.Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.I sat and waited in my gown.Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"No.No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.No.No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.wrong answer.I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.Back right where I started.Nobody is gonna help me.Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.On hurting yourself:This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.On hurting someone else:This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.I've read old yeller.They dont care. Neither do I.boo hoo.Conversely:lock them in a room and keep them safe.Is this really that hard?"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.It creates that understanding.In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.even if that wasn't a real compulsion.a last resort.This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more."well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".I'll get better one day.Not today.Maybe I'll have fingers.Maybe I won't."thanks for the well wishes.i'm fine.i'm just angry.i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.i hate that you are dealing with this.ReviewI don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights” cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.Favorite LyricsCrouched down by the tree at his neighborsHe liked the way the bark ripped off like paperHe pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasersEvery step he took turned earth into cratersLittle brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuffBowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks“man wearing a helmet”Waking up in situationsFeeling like I'm living in suspended animationGuess I'm still sober on occasionAnd that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation“stoop lights”I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going inJust shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friendI don’t want to stretch you more than you extendI don’t want to spit in the hand that you lendI did it to myself, I get what I deserveThoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerveI’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt butI just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth“stoop lights”Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a screamGreener on the other side, how about nothing's greenBashful baby boy, so distracted by my toysRode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, IllinoisOn a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegratesThe only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate“haze of interference”You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madnessYou're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?“haze of interference”If I was glass I'd revert back to sandScattered through the sea, I could pass through your handsNone of this will happen, nothing will everThe things that I believe can never ever happenI'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wallPick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all“haze of interference”Talking PointsHow does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.

#IFTTT #reddit

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