#my boyfriend said it sounded like brutus so i went to listen to the song

[yescallmejosey]

may a clay dagger strike the prince

Clay is molded. It takes the shape of whatever the user wants it to be and it hardens, taking that shape forever. It can be a figurine, carving memories in a child’s life who will always remember it as his favorite toy. It could be a bowl in which a woman cooks her favorite dishes for her husband with love and with the hope of comforting him after a long day of hunting. 

To Ctimene, clay takes the form of all her sorrows and all her pain. She moves her fingers down this new jar, shaping feathers across the handle. Her nails drew the lines, every pulse of her heart making them less steady. Feathers, for Lord Zeus, king of gods. He is greatness incarnated, respected by both gods and mortals. And unlike her, no one dares to question him. 

Time and time again she had prayed to the father of all in hopes that he would take pity on her. Time and time again she has begged for not even greatness, but a place in her family. Ctimene was merely born in it. The princess, yes, but never their princess. 

Anticlea teaches her how to weave, an art that should be simple for the princess. But the queen’s piercing gaze on her back and lack of words of encouragement made the threads tangle around her fingers. They tangled to her arms, to her throat as she struggled to apologize for her mistake. There was an apology for everything. For messing up the weaving every sunset, for turning the conversations at dinner uncomfortable with her direct words, for snapping at her father when he talked about Odysseus’s new achievement. 

There was an apology for being born. Because perhaps if it never happened, perhaps if Anticlea and Laertes did not try to have another hero, they would not have a parasite leaching to their royal wealth. Ctimene was not an embarrassment, because that would mean being someone who makes themselves noticed for a mistake. No, Ctimene was the dark corner that candles never illuminated, the stories lost through years of talking, she was a nobody.

The thoughts swirled through her mind, like sharp rocks tearing a ship at sea, paralyzing her like the eyes of Medusa. Her pulse quickened, the lines became blurry and the feathers became a phantom of what they were supposed to be. 

Her hands curled into fists and she tore her work, standing up and kicking the clay before clutching her hair in frustration. Hot tears rolled down her eyes, tears of jealousy, tears of hot rage. Rage of not being good enough, rage towards her brother. 

She wishes she could simply take the threads of her failed weaving and wrap them around his neck. Perhaps then she would finally stop hearing about his great achievements, about his future golden reign of the island. 

Ctimene’s eyes widened, her hands on her mouth now as if the mere thought of articulating her words would get her in trouble. She could not think like this, she could not-

She could not wish death upon her own blood. 

Oh but she did, and she craved the carnage so badly, more than her bitter heart could accept. And so she sat in a corner, the candles of her room not being bright enough to illuminate it. She wept even after dawn with rosy fingers painted in the sky. She let her dress and cheeks be stained by salty wrath and green envy. 

Clay is molded, it takes the shape of whatever the user wants it to be. And Ctimene’s heart was slowly being molded into a decorated dagger of anguish and desperation, a dagger that was pointed to the chest of her own brother. 

Odysseus.

[grimelords]

I’ve finished my September playlist, only almost a month later. It’s got everything, The Weeknd, desert psychedelica from Niger, and Australian yodelling from 1941. What more could you want!

listen here

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XO / The Host / Initiation - The Weeknd: First of all Trilogy is a masterpiece. The Weeknd is a legend forever for this alone. Back when he was an anonymous character and before he tried to pivot to being a proper pop star and started beliving his own bullshit. This trio of songs for me is one of the highlights of the whole thing because this is where things really take a turn and it serves as a nice flipside to earlier songs like Glass Table Girls (even quoting some of the lyrics from it in a very cool reprise). Where most of the songs from House Of Balloons are about his own descent into this hedonistic life, by the time you get to Echoes Of Silence he lives there comfortably, and he's turned from cool,  dark and tormented to coldly evil and calculating. He's the master of the dark palace and he's drawing this woman in. The chorus of XO is straight up cult language 'all we ever do is love, open up your mind you can find the love'. She's broke and addicted trying to escape her life and he offers her this community. Which is where Initation comes in and things get really dark. This song feels like the real truth of those stories you hear of Drake flying instagram models around and it's a masterpiece of the dark underside of the drugs money and models bragging you're used to.

Sociopath (feat. Kash Doll) - Pusha T: Get a load of this new Pusha song where he's got Rodney Dangerfield ghostwriting for him. I got a bitch that'll master your card.. my wife ova hea!! Also the funny gritted teeth way he says it cracks me up. He also says boop bop be boop bop. There's so many good moments in this very silly song from a man that is normally terrifyingly serious.

Ice Cream - Muscles: I suddenly remembered this song the other day and I'm so glad I did. A good example of how you can get so much feeling out of music that has no relation at all to the lyrics. In the right mood this song makes me so emotional and I can't even pin down why. The way he sings 'ice cream is going to save the day' somehow just makes the urban alienation of the verse even more pointed. It's such a silly little dance song and that's what's so strong about it. It's dancing at night and unsuccessfully trying to forget what happened today.

Running - Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx: It’s extremely strange that this remix album ever happened, thinking back on it. Stranger still that a Gil Scott Heron song got remixed by Jamie xx and then remixed again by 40 and turned into a Drake song in I’ll Take Care Of U and all three versions rock. Anyway, this song and this whole album remain fantastic - it still sounds futuristic in a way where nobody else really followed Jamie’s sound, everything else went a different direction so this an In Colour feel more and more unique to me as time goes on.

Boyfriend (Repeat) - Confidence Man: I’m in love with this album. It’s the closest I’ve found so far to the level of absolute fun in dance music since Duck Sauce’s album. I love the the attitude of her lyrics, which carries through the whole album. I love when her Australian accent peeks out for a second on a few words. I love his rebuttals that almost but not quite put it over the edge into a comedy song. I love the big fading out leadup to the drop near the end where a huge throat singing drone just swallows the whole song for a second.

Ever Again (Soulwax Remix) - Robyn: Extremely hot remix alert!! Thankyou to Zan Rowe's Monthly Mixtape playlist for putting my onto this.Sometimes all you need is one ferociously hot bassline to make a life complete.

$50 Million - !!!: !!!’s new album has one of the best covers I’ve seen recently, I advise you to check it out. It’s interesting to be so far into your career (this is their 8th album since 2001) and still be writing songs about selling out, a concept which has largely disappeared from music discourse since musicians started making no money post napster. I vaguely remember the turning point being when Kimya Dawson, after blowing up via the Juno soundtrack, turned down a coke ad for a ludicrous amount and the blogosphere at the time turned on her and said she should have taken the money because she was living in a van at the time. Nobody gives a fuck about selling out anymore because bands make more from tshirts than streams so you’ve got to act like a brand just to make a living. Anyway I’ve gotten off track. This song rocks, especially for the breakdown near the end.

Tipped Hat - The Paper Scissors: A song I haven’t heard in over ten years that suddenly popped into my head the other day. I love the way this guy’s voice sounds, just completely committing to sounding like a hand puppet. I’ve been playing bass a lot more recently and so have developed the worst man habit of becoming more sensitive to and pointing out extremely hot basslines to people, so I’d be derelict in my duty to not share this one.

Heimsdalgate Like A Promethian Curse - of Montreal: I love this song about literally pleading with your brain to come good. Here’s a good quote about this album “I went through this chemical depression, and that's when I was writing a lot of the songs for Hissing Fauna. They're all songs about that experience. And I was experiencing it in the moment that I was writing the songs, and sort of asking myself: What the hell is going on? Why are you all of a sudden totally paranoid and plagued by these anxieties? And why is everything so distorted and confusing and fucked up? My lifestyle hadn't changed that much. And then I realized, well, there's something going on inside of me that I don't have control over, and then you realize how vulnerable you are to these things, these elements that you can't understand, or unless you go on medication and get it under control. It's like you're being betrayed by your body.” Something I really admire about this album is that the lyrics reflect black metal levels of mental anguish, he was absolutely going through it the worst anyone can go through it “I'd gotten to that point where nothing was working. I was borderline suicidal, and my relationship with my girlfriend had totally eroded and she'd gone back to Norway with our daughter and everything was totally fucked, and I was just like, What can I do? "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" is about that.” But the music is one hundred percent committedly twee and I really admire the effect that that split mood gives. “The lyrics tell the story of what was really going on and the music sort of represents this other emotion that I wish existed. The music was really happy because I wanted to make something that would lift my spirits.”

Jesus Rabbit - Guerilla Toss: I love the wobbly weird bass sound in this weirdo UFO cult song. I love the bleepy bloop melody that runs through it and I love how fundamentally unstable the whole song sounds, like it’s made out of paperclips and foil and papier mache.

Suburbia - Press Club: I can’t believe I didn’t know about Press Club for so long. I only found out about them this performance https://youtu.be/bCmtc-T5Unk which I’m shocked to learn has less than 5k views considering it’s one of the very best TV performances I’ve ever seen.

Come For Me - Sunflower Bean: I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this song before and I’m probably going to say the exact same thing but who cares! This song fuckin rocks. I love how assured it is, like “if you’re gonna fuck me then stop fucking around and fuck me already.” It also feels so musically similar to I Can Hardly Make You Mine by Cults to me, which is a great excuse for me to listen to that song every single time I listen to this song.

Thousands - Club Night: This Club Night album is really really good. It's like a really nice middleground between midwest emo and Cymbals Eat Guitars. The way this song blows up halfway through with 'what if we want it!!' is so good. This whole band feels like they're from 2009 but in a good way, the tail end of indie and twee with these prog or postrock structures where the songs just go and go, and you can just get completely lost in it.

Cemetary - Brutus: The first thing you've got to know about Brutus is the drummer is also the singer. Normally who plays what is not really important but in this case I think it's very important because it makes the drums a lead instrument more than they normally would be. When she's not singing my focus is still on the drums because they're linked and I absolutely love it. This song is great and every song I've heard of theirs is just as good, I love Brutus and they're one of the best new bands I've found recently. Someone in the youtube comments said 'there's something really special about hearing a song for the first time and just knowing you're going to listen to it hundreds of times in your life.'

Enter By The Narrow Gates / Spirit Narrative - Circle Takes The Square: I think that I think of Circle Takes The Square as a household name just because they have such an outsized importance in my own life when they're definitely not at all. They're legendary for making The screamo (good kind) album in As The Roots Undo and then taking 8 years to make a followup, which is this album Decompositions, but I don't really know if they're well known outside of like, people who have opinions about what were the hottest music blogspots in 2010. I chose both of these because you can't really have one without the other, the whole album basically runs as one long piece of music and so this just kind of jarringly ends at the end of Spirit Narrative, sorry about that please listen to the entire album. Because of the status As The Roots Undo enjoys I feel like this album was kind of ignored, or overshadowed by the reputation it was trying to live up to, almost exactly like The Avalanches with Since I Left You and Wildflower, when just like Wildflower it's a more expansive, developed take on the original sound that trades some of the rawness for a more polished and considered approach and comes out arguably better than the orginal. I feel like I have so much to say about this album but I don't really know where to begin, just listen to it.

Vitrification Of Blood (Pt. 1) - Blood Incantation: I am by no means a metal scholar, but I know that when the word 'blood' is in both the song title AND the band name that means it's good metal. I love this song, and this whole album is great. It's very 'classic' death metal but there's touches (beyond the extreme length) of psychedelica as well that puts it on another level you can just get lost in. The way the guitar goes to space at 3:40, and again properly into orbit at 6:50 is just magical. The more I listen to this band the more I understand those guys who only listen to metal, there's a whole ecosystem in here and it's really got everything you need.

Out Of Line - Gesaffelstein: This whole song is basically intended as an intro for Pursuit on the album but it’s so powerful just on its own. I love imbuing weirdo lyrics like ‘a bitter sunken love in a bleach blonde submarine’ with such ominous power through the commanding delivery. I love the way the big grunting vocals on the offbeat build to sound like a summoning ritual. I love making a big processed bell the centrepiece of your extremely evil sounding song. It’s sort of a shame that Gessaffelstein has never really gone back to the vision of his first album and has spent his time since diluting it down for guest production on Weeknd songs and the like because it feels like there’s still so much more to get out of this sound. That he hasn’t gone back and dug deeper makes Aleph stand out more and more as a singular masterpiece as time goes on.  

Kamane Tarhanin - Mdou Moctar: Turning to Mdou Moctar after the new Tinariwen album kind of disappointed me, with all it’s big name guests nothing really hit me. I love this song though and I think a big part of it is the sort of loping, 6/4 rhythm that combined with the drone gives it this feeling of endlessly tumbling over itself in place, especially as the guitar heats up.

Achabiba - Fatou Seidi Ghali: I know very little about Fatou Seidi Ghali except that I saw she was supporting Sarah Louise at a show. From some googling it turns out that she’s the leader of a Nigerois band called Les Filles de Illeghadad who you can probably look forward to seeing on next month’s playlist. I also learned that the demonym for someone from Niger is Nigerien or to minimise confusion with Nigeria, Nigerois (said in a french way). They play a sort of desert psych in the realm of Mdou Mocter or Tinariwen, but this song (also the only solo song she has on spotify) shows her acoustic side. I love the swirling melody over the drone as the hand percussion keeps it in place and I love the very delicate vocals, but a probably unintentional thing I love a lot about this recording is the unmistakable iphone locking sound near the very start that instantly removes so much of the mystic exoticism that these sorts of artists are often written about with and places it firmly in the same sprawling modern world we all live in.

Floating Rhododendron - Sarah Louise: I love Sarah Louise. She’s a phenomenal guitarist and has such a big love for traditional folk music with her side project House And Land, but unlike everyone else in the genre is also very interested in pushing guitar forward to new and strange places. Her latest album was super experimental layered electric guitars and voice that still managed to maintain the deep connection to nature that runs through all her work. I would also highly recommend following her on instagram because her passion runs over. She’s regularly just out in the woods somewhere explaining how wonderful a particular mushroom is.  This song one of the first ones I ever heard from her, and it’s back when she was just doing very beautiful 12 string acoustic work, but she recently added it to spotify and it’s a very nice reminder of where she came from and how far she’s gone in such a short time.

Lark - Angel Olsen: The new Angel Olsen is absolutely great. I love how much she is just completely going for it on this album, absolutely unleashing. Taken against earlier songs of hers I’ve loved like White Fire, where the majesty was in her quiet power and the ability to absolutely command silence with a whisper quiet song, this song feels like the direct inverse, an about-turn into all the gigantic majesty of swirling strings and top of your lungs vocals - going all out and leaving nothing on the table. The way this song blows up about three different times until by the end you’re caught in this gigantic swirling maelstrom of screaming sound is just out of this world.

Door - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek’s brain is huge. When I first heard the chorus of this song I couldn't believe it. Are you allowed to have a chant that runs in a spiral like this be the chorus of your pop song? Is that allowed?

North, South, East And West - The Church: The Church feel like they don't get enough respect. They don't seem to be in the same league as Cold Chisel and The Angels and all the other dad rock Australian bands from that era for some reason. They're very good though and I've been really getting into this whole album and this song specifically lately. Maybe what's working against them is just how much his voice sounds like Bono's in this song but surely that was a boon at the time!

Western Questions - Timber Timbre: This has become one of my new favourite songs to sing. The way the words fit together is my favourite kind of poetics where they just sound incredible, phonetically, and can mean anything you like for large chunks. Like “the gelatinous walls of the seeds that seldom remain / while the bulls are  browsing needles through computer casinos / honour the name”. Especially “bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos” is just extremely nice to say. I love the character of this song and am yet to completely understand what it’s saying other than personifying some worldwide blackpilled spirit of nihilist evil. What I love is the experience of all encompassing evil in this song, like a worldwide conspiracy connecting everything together that makes it all make sense. It doesn’t make you happier but it makes it make sense. I also love the finality of the big fill near the end that ushers in the outro riff that ties everything up.

Cold Cold World - Blaze Foley: I got heavily into a country music thing this month and spent a bit of time trying to find ‘real’ country, which of course turns out not to exist at all. The entirety of country music is built on a false nostalgia for an imagined time long past when things were real, some unspecified time in the collective consciousness between cowboy times and coal mine times. I don’t say this to say ‘country music is a fraud’ but that it’s built on a foundation of myth and that’s what’s so good about it. It’s constantly reframing the past as it relates to the present and is energised by the friction between them. Blaze Foley is a good example of this in the modern era because he seems to exist more as a myth than a man. He had three studio albums, the master tapes of which all disappeared through various means (lost, stolen, seized by the DEA) and so the majority of his surviving material is live recordings or long-lost studio recordings that resurfaced decades after his death when his fame and mythology already preceded him. He also thankfully lives up to the myth, he was truly a great artist and it’s a shame more of him hasn’t survived.

Where The Golden Wattle Blooms / Why Did The Blue Skies Turn Grey  - Shirley Thoms: Further to what I was saying about country music before, Australian country is a whole other thing. Transferring the myth and the mythmaking to a new location adds another layer of abstraction. Shirley Thoms was the first female solo act to record country music in Australia in 1941 and was most notable for her yodelling of which she is damn fine. This is a great song and a good a starting point as any in trying to trace the origin of country music in Australia. That it's so english in its identity, so evidently imitating an american style (which is in turn imitating a german yodel) is just more good evidence that nothing is 'real' and traditions of the past and future are malleable at all times.

Talkin’ Karate Blues - Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt is widely regarded as a songwriter’s songwriter and one of the best country songwriters to ever live, but like a lot of great country songwriters also has one or two songs like this - strange comedy songs about learning karate and getting your arm ripped off.

Strange Tourist - Gareth Liddiard: This album is a masterpiece on the level of Ys and it feels criminally underlistened in my opinion. Luckily in the last week or so some renegade has done up the wiki article on it to a couple of thousand words so that's a start. Because this is a song I've listened to one million times and love a lot, it's hard for me to write about it in a general way so instead I'm going to talk about something very specific and new that I've only begun to appreciate recently. The way he uses the vowels of the japanese words to create these assonant runs in lines like "Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas / I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi / Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji" and "They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest where them harakiri weirdos go" is really something, and a nice illustration of the two sides of Liddiard's songwriting: densely technical poetics in a song about living with a housemate who was a real freak.

I Dream A Highway - GIllian Welch: I’m not even going to go into the lyrics of this because it’s such an out of this world perfect song but I’m going to say this: it’s really something that this song goes for nearly 15 minutes, sits on the same three chords the whole time and never ever feels long. This song is longer than Emily by Joanna Newsom but doesn’t feel like an epic of the same scale at all. It’s just a mournful slow ode to change and decay that goes on forever and could keeping going on for twice as long if it wanted to.

Deep Water - The Middle East: The way the vocals in the verses are delivered, trailing off and mumbling bits and pieces is somehow magical, like it’s more interested in communicating the gist and the feeling than the actual words. You can just pick whatever part of it you like. Petrol stations and a copper mine, the kind of place I think I could die. This song also has two minutes of silence at the end for album reasons so enjoy that.

listen here