#with his perfect bone structure and tall lanky self

[liilacwine]

stimming by holding his face in my hands and tracing his eyebrows and his cheekbones and his jawline

stimming by pressing my face against his, or against his hair or his hands

stimming by following the paths of bones and veins in his arms with my fingers and eyes

[aiden-png]

This is kinda self projecting but Red hearing an offhand comment about his weight/him thinking he's getting chubby and just cutting back on stuff he loves, training, working out and eating less and less in an effort to lose weight under the guise of being healthy but it soon spirals out of control to him skipping meals, overworking and fainting etc [it prob wont get that far unless he lies and says he ate without them or something.]

ooooohhh poor Red!! ;o; what a mood, I could project that on him too rip. I usually choose Vio for overworking + skipping meals + passing out x-x but aww with Red that hurts even moreeee.. he’s so sweet and I am a biggg fan of the chubby Red headcanon, so to reverse it like that is just ;;o;; that is some Angst right there. and I def headcanon Red to just be built for that weight distribution, so he’d be fighting a losing battle trying to be “thin” when his body just has a bone structure that doesn’t allow for the tall/lanky look

I’m sure the others would step in once they noticed x-x they’d help him accept that his body is perfect just the way it is, and that his build has some awesome advantages! of course tho gjdfhgjkdf Red angst is delicious but I’m also a huge fan of Red just being proud of how he looks regardless, and being body positive in general. he’s a comfort character for me so I’m usually very nice to him XD

[alternativewinxcontinuity]

Winx Alt Con Season 02 Recap:

Previously: Season 01, Weeks 9.2, 10/11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

Week 19: Episode 216 - HalloWinx

During the first few days of the week, Bloom video calls her parents on Earth, and introduces them to Daphne.

Vanessa and Mike are as welcoming towards the older fairy as Bloom had hoped, and Daphne almost starts crying with relief when she considers how lucky it had been that her protective spells had brought Bloom and the Earth couple together.

While on the call, the couple tell Bloom that Mitzy has invited her to a Halloween party. The Rest of the Winx, and their pixies, who had been hanging out off screen from the call, immediately crowd around and ask for details.

As soon as Vanessa mentions 'costumes' Stella is pulling an art book from her carry space, flipping through until she finds a section labelled 'Bewitching Winx' showing it to Bloom and Vanessa, asking if they'd be appropriate for the party.

Bloom laughs, saying they'd be perfect, and telling Vanessa to 'please RSVP me for plus 5?' Kiko Jumps into her lap, 'plus six.' (off screen the pixies protest, until Flora reminds them that normal Earth Humans can't see them anyway.)

Daphne leans over Stella's shoulder and looks over the designs, considers for a moment, then offers to teach Stella how to imbue the costume wings with a flight and sensory spells so they'd work almost like the Winx's real wings.

After Mike and Vanessa say their goodbyes, the Winx settle down for 'class' with Daphne.

 Bloom sees Mirta later that day and extends an invite, but Mirta turns it down when she finds out the day, blushing as she explains she and Lucy have a day out planned before exams start.

Bloom wishes her friend good luck with her date (“it's not a date date!”), but before she can leave to check on Stella, who is determined to make the 'costumes' herself (“no one else will do it right!”) Jolly stops her with a dire warning, of deceit, and three women.

Bloom feels a chill go down her spine, thinking automatically off the Trix, but Jolly shakes her head when Bloom asks if that's who she means. Jolly tells Bloom to beware of the masks people wear, as a cruel trick awaits her and her friends.

Unsure what else to do, Bloom thanks the Pixie of Fortune Telling for her advice, and heads off to find her friends.

After talking it over, the group comes to the conclusion that Jolly may have meant the party they're planning to attend, where people will be wearing masks.

 After letting Faragonda know they're going, and confirming what time their first exam is the next day, (having arranged the trip with her earlier in the week,) the Winx, Kiko, and the pixies head off to Earth, via Stella's staff powered teleport.

They arrive around midday at Bloom's home, where she introduces everyone to her parents.

The girls help add a few final touches to the house for trick-or-treaters before getting dressed.

All of the girls are pleased with their outfits and the fit, Kiko shows off his matching vest and cape, while the pixies change into animal inspired outfits, made mostly of soft fluffy looking clothes, and ears on headbands.

The pixies decided to do something fun just for them since Mike and Vanessa are the only adults that can see them on Earth.

The girls fly from Bloom's to the mansion where the party is being held, testing out the enchantments on their false wings, which hold up amazingly well throughout the flight. Kiko seems a little worried in his place in Bloom's arms, but she puts that down to him not liking the extreme height.

As they fly, the girls talk about the somewhat uncomfortable feel of Earth, the way it feels drained of magic. Bloom admits she didn't notice before she met Stella, but she's fairly certain it's always been that way, and that tonight, it actually felt less drained somehow, than last time she'd been back on Earth, which Stella and Flora agree with.

They girls wonder if drained feeling has anything to do with the disappearance of Earth's fairies, but they arrive at their destination before they can get too invested in the topic.

 When they see the gloomy nature of the woods they'll have to pass through to get to the house, the girls rethink their landing point, but decide to make the trek so they aren't seen landing by the other guests. Stella changes her Ring into its staff form, and conjures a soft protective light to it's ornamental disc, using it to light the area.

The girls don some basic outer robes to keep their costumes clean on the walk up to the house, and Bloom keeps hold of Kiko while the pixies flit around. Bloom tells Kiko to stay with her until they get inside so he doesn't dirty his costume. Kiko nods in agreement, and Musa turns her head to find the source of the strange sounds that creep from the woods.

Between her, and Tecna, they confirm it's coming from speakers.

Aisha reminds everyone to be on their guard concerning Jolly's warning, but to try to have fun.

Flora giggles and asks 'what if solving this mystery is the fun?' Stella takes the set up to deliver a subtle jab at Mitzy, 'well, if what Bloom's says about the hostess is true? It probably will be.'

The girls giggle as they begin to navigate the path to the front door. As the girls pass through some of the narrower parts of the path, they form a single line, with Flora at the rear. As she passes a black cat on a short post it turns its head and greats her with a monotone 'hello Flora.'

She calls the girls back to her as she turns to find the cat gone.

When they ask her what's wrong, she tells them about the talking cat, which had greeted her by name .

Musa checks for the sound of movement, but can't catch anything that sounds like a cat.

The group would put it down to electronics, but the fact the cat had known Flora's name was concerning.

Adding it to the list of things they had to figure out, the group continue on, finally spotting lights through the trees. As they enter into the jack-o-lantern littered ground surrounding the mansion itself, murmuring from the trees catches Musa's attention. She focuses in in time to hear someone female sounding say something about a 'bone white mask'.

She whips her head around to see someone tall and lanky with long dark hair and a pale dress move further into the woods. Quietly she lets the others know what she's seen.

Tecna declares that 'that's it' and pulls a container out of her carry space, opening it, she presents the girls with small decals to place on the area just behind their ears. She tells them it's a project she's been working on to improve their communications long distance, with out the standard bulk. The Decals include a pink flower, an orange star, a blue love heart, a red music note, a green drop shape, and a purple triangle.

The girls apply them and do a quick test, confirming they can quietly radio each other. Kiko makes a sad noise when he realises he doesn't get one, then stroke his fur in a sad way that seems to say 'that's okay, it probably wouldn't have stuck in my fur anyway :( '.

Bloom tells him he'll just have to stick close to her, which brightens his mood.

('Alright, now let's get in there, we just vanquished Satan, we can handle some high-schoolers with no magic.'

'...who's 'Satan'?'

'Darkar, I was talking about Darkar... it's an Earth based cultural reference, I'm sorry, I'll explain it later.')

The Winx finally mount the front steps and knock on the door. It creaks open to reveal no one for a second before a jack-o-lantern in a jest hat drops down. A loud rip and thump sound out as Stella uses the butt of her staff to smack it away.

A maid appears in the doorway looking very annoyed.

'Sorry, a few too many years of self-defence training,' Stella tries to laugh it off, but the maid dismisses her, turning to Bloom to ask who she is and what she wants. Bloom tells the maid her name, and hands over her invitation. The maid frowns but allows the group in, showing them to the main room. Tecna makes several comments concerning the house's structural integrity, or lack there of.

In the main room, the girls see plenty of people in costumes, but no sign of Mitzy. The girls consider mingling, but a few seconds later, their hostess arrives at the top of a staircase. She descends 'gracefully' as music plays, and she talks about how expensive her dress is.

The Winx try not to snort as Stella whispers 'that is the wrong way to glitter,' in reference to Mitzy's outfit. They're fairies, their normal outfits were 85%+ glitter, they knew how to glitter.

As Mitzy's slow walk down the stairs reaches two thirds of the way, the music begins to skip, and the hostess rushes down the last few steps to berate the boy in charge of the music table.

She tells him to leave and never show his face again.

The Winx watch as he gets up, and makes his way to the front door, tears in his eyes. Musa goes after him, to make sure he's okay. She offers some words of encouragement as she escorts him down the path, a hastily conjured lantern in hand, and by the time they reach the exit he seems like he'll be just fine.

As he heads off, a short man in a red and blue outfit arrives, he tells her he's there to deliver some cakes to Mitzy's party. Musa offers to take him up to the house, but he says he has other deliveries, and just hands her a box before leaving.

Musa opens it as she walks, floating the lantern with her magic, she picks up one of the pumpkin shaped cakes and raises it to take a quick nibble.

'I wouldn't eat it,' a monotone voice says, and Musa sees the shape of a cat in the corner of her eye, but she has to catch the box before it falls from her startled grasp. When she finally turns to check, there's no sign of any cat. Musa drops the cake back in the box, and casts several of the food inspection spells Stella and Aisha had shared with the group.

The cakes weren't poisonous, but they apparently tasted terrible.

Musa contacts the others as she walks to tell them about the cat and the cakes, the others let her know she hasn't missed much, Mitzy has been throwing a mild tantrum about everyone ruining her party.

Listening to the girls, she misses three figures lumbering around moaning about maggots in faces.

Just as she reaches the house, they tell her to hurry up, because Mitzy has just turned on them about their 'lame ass robes'.

Musa makes it through the door, and shoves the cake box into the maid's hands, just in time to drop her robe with the other Winx.

The other guests stare in shock at the group's witch inspired darkly-cute-and-fun fairy outfits. Even Kiko works his dashing cape and vest.

The other guests crowd around and ask about the costumes, the girls remain vague, and when asked how they'd made their wings, Flora replies with 'it's a secret.'

Because it was a secret.

And a fabric that didn't exist on Earth.

Mitzy shoves her way forward, cake box in hand, offering the Winx some cakes. Bloom looks up from a chat with one of the other girls about her skirt, and tells Mitzy to 'pick out a good one for me.'

When the scowling Mitzy opens the box, the small pumpkin cakes jump up, glowing, they begin to circle around Mitzy, who freaks out and dashes from the room. Most of the guests follow her, trying to beat the floating cakes away.

The Winx laugh amongst themselves, and when Musa asks if anyone had recorded that, Tecna lets out an affirmative hum, and 'fixes' a lock of her hair, drawing Musa's attention to the large bow in Tecna's hair, where the music fairy can see a small ladybug just peeking out. The same kind of ladybug Tecna's micro camera's are typically disguised as.

Looking around with new eyes, she spots a few more of the little bugs.

Tecna remarks nonchalantly how it's 'amazing what one can do when others are distracted by tantrums,' and the girls have another laugh. (Bloom told her friends about Mitzy, they know exactly what kind of person she is.)

Mitzy reappears a short time later, no sign of floating cakes. The party gets back to its boring baseline of everyone standing around, barely talking, and no one dancing. The group splits up to mingle, and look for any sign of the conspiracy Jolly had hinted at.

Tecna notes a large crack on one wall, which seems to originate from behind a photo. When Digit notices it's a picture of three women, it strikes enough of a chord for Tecna to comm the others. When Tecna describes the three faceless women in the picture, Musa mentions that it sounds like the 'bone white mask' figure from the woods outside.

In an upstairs room, Aisha finds another crack-sprouting-picture, a news paper clipping with a picture of the mansion they're in. It talks about the 'Silent Villa', and how no renovators would go near it, because the house aged 50 years a just weeks whenever some one tried to refurbish the house. Millions of dollars had been lost trying to fix the place up.

'So, haunted house, or part of the trap?' the girls wonder amongst themselves.

Bloom is pulled away from the investigation though, when the maid arrives to tell her Mitzy has fallen sick, and is asking for Bloom.

Mizty claims to have seen 'them', flailing about in her bed as she tells Bloom the backstory of the house.

Of three sisters who'd lived there with their younger sister, until the youngest was killed when someone tried to destroy the house.

One of the other guests shows them a newspaper article about it, and tells them how, to seek revenge, the three sisters made a deal with powerful witches.

The Winx share a look over the alleged magic contract that had taken place roughly 100 years ago, during a time when the only suspected magical on the planet would have been the Fairy Godmother that Daphne had been trying to send Bloom to during the second siege of Domino.

Stella says 'these sisters must be pretty ugly if they're breaking mirrors' but manages to refrain from adding 'are you sure it wasn't your face that cracked the mirror Mitzy?' Because Bloom doesn't need her to be that level of petty right now.

When Mitzy starts begging Bloom to help her, since Bloom is 'the only one who can help' her, Bloom listens to her heightened instincts, and while out loud she is kind and compassionate to Mitzy, inside, she calls bullshit.

Bloom and the Winx move into the hall, and Bloom begins signing to her friends, who read the hand signals with ease. Tecna and Stella lag behind, while the others move downstairs to listen to the other guests as they wail to Bloom, going on about how all the glass on the pictures and mirrors broke at once.

Bloom takes charge, ordering everyone into groups, she gets them to search the cupboards for salt and iron, acting like she's preparing them for a battle against the supernatural. (Of course, Bloom bases her preparations on her 'knowledge of the supernatural' which she'd picked up from her childhood fascination with fairies, and not on her actual Alfea learned knowledge of warding.)

Mean while, Stella and Tecna have slipped 'out'.

Only when they reappear, does Bloom tell everyone to stay inside while she and her friends take a look around outside.

Through the fog they see movement, lanky figures by the tree line, Musa and Flora reach out with their powers. Getting a sense of what they are facing.

'Stilts and costumes,' Flora confirms, before Bloom gives the go ahead. Flora brings the wood of the stilts back to life, and Musa snatches up the sounds of three screams before they can go anywhere.

The costumes slip up and off the trio of human girls, leaving them looking terrified, bound from the knees down by wood, and unable to make a sound as their costumes seem to come to life, swaying in the air.

The Winx 'react' like frightened teenagers, running for the only opening the trio wouldn't have blocked off.

The three wraith costumes drift to the ground, and glide along behind them, moving in awkward swaying motions that would be impossible for any human to mimic, let alone one on stilts.

They move into the cemetery where lights float above the grave stones.

While Flora says 'we're surrounded' she adds a signed 'humans' to her warning. They'd expected as much.

When she hears the comments around them, Musa signs to Stella and Aisha.

Echoing groans begin to sound through the graveyard as the lights from the 'floating' pumpkins rise from their grinning shells, the fog thickening on the ground until no one can see their own feet.

The 'three sisters' slither into the clearing amongst the tombstones, circling around the Winx as they continue their diatribe about maggots and faces and bone white masks.

Bloom calls out to the others, telling them to be brave, they can handle this, that they defeated that demon army, and the witches, and the embodiment of evil itself, a few angry ghosts will be nothing.

Around them, the guests in on the prank are getting worried, Bloom's 'pep talk' making them realise that something is not right.

They notice how far above them the lantern lights are just as 'the fourth sister' steps into the clearing.

Bloom steps forward, while the other Winx strain to keep in character, and begins trying to negotiate with 'the fourth sister', who just moans until the other three suddenly seem to notice her presence. The turn, and swoop across the clearing, leaving trails in the thick fog that covers the ground.

'Sister' they begin chanting, swirling tighter and tighter around her, and higher and higher above. From the shadows of the forest dark creatures seem to emerge, half hidden by the fog and gloom, half seen, half imagined nightmares.

The fourth sister begins to scream, batting the others away as the girl beneath the mask realises it's not her minions beneath the sheets. The fog roils, and the others guests add their screams, as the dense vapour peels back to reveal every surface, and quite a few guests, covered in a variety of insects up to the waist.

Mitzy tears off the costume, ripping things in her haste to free herself from the confines. She takes off running for the house, her guests not far behind her.

The Winx are silent for a moment, until laughter from the air above them causes their poker faces to crack. The insects swarm back into hiding, and the monsters on the edge of sight vanish. The fog takes a little longer to ebb back into a light, atmospheric haze, but Musa shutters the sounds instantly.

The pixies ditch the heavy costumes on the ground, and Mirta and Lucy float down far enough to be seen through what remains of the mist, Kiko held securely in Mirta's arms.

Chuckling, Lucy admits that the Winx are alright, for a bunch of fairies. Mirta drops to the ground completely and thanks the girls for thinking of her. Tecna shrugs and brushes it off, saying they needed the help, and Mirta had once told them about how she and Lucy had always planned to pull of a Nightmare Prank like this, it was the only logical conclusion.

Bloom apologises for interrupting their date, but the duo brush her off, saying this was plenty of fun, and a great way to spend the night.

'It was, indeed, very amusing,' comes a monotone voice, and the group turn to find the black cat sitting on a gravestone.

Bloom asks after the cat's identity, but it merely shrugs, and says only that it is 'a passing mischief maker who happens to be a fan of the way you girls... turn tables, shall we say.'

In less than a blink the cat is gone.

In the quite that descends, Stella clicks her tongue, and asks if anyone wants to head back to the party. Lucy tries to decline, saying she and Mirta aren't dressed, but as soon as Bloom retrieves her rabbit, Stella snaps her fingers, casting an outfit changing spell.

Mirta and Lucy's clothes are changed to outfits similar to the Winx's, though Lucy sports what Bloom has told her is considered a 'witch's hat' on Earth, rather than wings like Mirta and the rest.

('what, you thought I didn't plan for them just in case? Please, I have an outfit for Diaspro too.')

On the way back to the house, Tecna does some quick research on Earth's internet (which is slow and terrible and just let her fix it! please?) and finds out that the three sisters had been real, but there had been no fourth, and the house had only swapped hands a few times, with almost no attempts at renovations.

The group makes their way up to the house where they find a bunch of scared teenagers (the trio in the costumes had been released remotely by Flora and rushed for the house alongside their co-conspirators.)

Bloom tells everyone that, Mitzy had woken the three sisters who had actually lived in the house, the trio had been aggravated by what Mitzy had done, but also infected by her version of events, and forced to play out Mitzy's falsehood.

Bloom goes on to tell everyone that the situation has been handled, and that Mitzy not need worry about those three sisters again.

'Also, two more of my friends showed up after all, that's okay right?'

Between Tecna, Stella and Musa, the party has lights and good music in no time. The Winx, Mirta, Lucy, Kiko and the unseen pixies all making themselves at home on the dance floor. Slowly, the other guests unfolded from their frightened huddle and joined the girls.

 The group manages to get a few hours of sleep back at Bloom's house, and gratefully eat breakfast cooked by Vanessa, she and her husband wishing all the girls luck on their exams before they teleport back to Alfea, Bloom promising to see her parents in a week, once exams were over and done with.

[rockandrollportlandor]

GOOD CHEER RECORDS HOLIDAY SHOWCASE

I've expressed before my affection for Good Cheer Records, a local label that emerged from the DIY all ages indie rock scene in Portland, but whose personnel have connections and influence in the mainstream of local and national indie music. Geek rockerMo Troper, also a writer for the Portland Mercury (cleverly disguised as Morgan Troper), even scored the coveted Pitchfork review, something which has eluded many of the best bands in town at the moment. Troper, the label's co-founder with Blake Hickman, has vanished to Los Angeles, replaced by Maya Stoner, a performer in several GC bands. Kyle Bates' project Drowse has seen praise from Vice's Noisey blog and SPIN Magazine, while another one of the label's star acts, Little Star, have gotten great reviews all over the place, including here on ROCK AND ROLL PORTLAND, OR. My favorite Good Cheer band, Mr. Bones, is sadly over, but the label, with so many other good acts, has hardly been damaged by these shifts--or a scandal that saw Jackson Walker, a member of Good Cheer band Naked Hour, excommunicated in the wake of his much younger ex-girlfriend's allegations of physical/emotional abuse. Good Cheer's bands are each unique, but broadly speaking they traffic in a hyper-sincere, heart-on-sleeve, guitar-based pop/rock that seems to trace its roots back to the 90's and early 00's, a time before MP3s--or at least a time when a single MP3 took a whole morning to download. It's the art-damaged cool and guitar abuse of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth injected with the bloodletting melodicism of emo and the sweetness of twee-pop. It's a reminder of the truth in that old quote about Pavement being "the band that launched a thousand Weezers." These tendencies make the label's roster a refreshing departure, perhaps even a necessary counter-reaction, to the various fusions of psychedelic rock, dream pop, and blissed-out oddball party music so often seems to dominate Portlandian "pop". The earnestness of Good Cheer's bands, which the label proudly declares free of "mercenary ambition", makes a lot of what was represented by 2016's now-tainted "Mt. Portland" compilation seem positively decadent. On the other side of the coin, that comp's hip groups, often resented across the music scene for their perceived complacence and supposedly undeserved "fame", offer a sense of easy fun and trippy euphoria that the Good Cheer bands often lack--the label's name is pretty ironic, since good cheer is just about the last thing you'll get from most of these bands. Rather, they provide what Kurt Cobain ambivalently called "the comfort in being sad," the paradoxical sense of suffering as painful but life-affirming. At best that means a strangely joyous catharsis on the other side of the pain, at worst it might be written off as wallowing, navel gazing, and irksome preciousness. It's not for everybody, but it's way up my moody emo kid alley. These bands' music is about intimate feelings--even at its most bombastic, it's introverted almost as a rule, and perhaps that's how they create the feeling that they're Your Special Band, even when you're, as I was on this December Wednesday night, surrounded by a bunch of other people watching them. Good Cheer maintains the sense that their acts are the best band in your shitty hometown, who you see in some basement when you're 17, and finally, you've found a place where you fit in, finally, some people who speak for you. Perhaps the ideal place to see these bands is indeed someone's basement, but it was also fitting to see them in a major mid-sized venue like the Holocene--it was a sign that Good Cheer have emerged from a scrappy underground operation to become a major force in that vague genre known as "Portland pop". I didn't catch the entire show, which crammed six acts, successfully, into three hours, but the first group I caught was ALIEN BOY, one of the moodier bands on this moody label. Frontwoman Sonia Weber sings with the lovelorn yearning of Morrissey, but without the sass--unlike with the Moz, we never wonder if she's just milking it. The guitars hiss like TV static and twinkle like stars seen out a car window in the vanishing autumn, the rhythm section sprinting with teenage energy, paradoxically despondent and enthusiastic. At the Holocene, Weber's vocals seemed pretty off key a lot of the time, but it didn't really matter. The melody's largely in the guitars, and even the melody isn't that important. It's the mood the band creates with all of these elements that makes them such a powerful emotive unit. Even off-key, Weber's vocals are the definite not-so-secret weapon here, her contralto timber pitched perfectly in the dead center of the human vocal spectrum, neither male nor female, and therefore unusually universal in a social order still cleaved traumatically in two by a gender binary inherited from a religious order no one even believes in anymore. The group's latest EP, "Stay Alive", is a fantastic piece of gothic power pop, the fury of the instruments on tracks like "Burning II" contrasted to heart-rending effect with the vulnerability of Weber's vocals. These guys are one of my favorite acts Good Cheer has in its corner for 2017. Next up were a pair of musical twin bands, both involving Kyle Bates: DROWSE and FLOATING ROOM. Drowse is the more ambient of two, creating a storm of darkly psychedelic mood energy, as if Bates were some mad scientist attempting to isolate The Feels in their pure plasma form. Bates has been admirably candid about his struggle with clinical depression, even in his press releases, and some of his music is meant to be a literal translation of these horrifying experiences in musical form. As a person who's visited similar hells, I can definitely relate, and if you haven't, Drowse can give you a taste. It's the kind of music you bathe in almost more than listen to. I find it pretty hard to articulate with a vocabulary developed for pop songs--do yourself a favor and just listen. Undergirding the pure emotional whirlpool is a theoretical edge, at least according to Drowse's bio, which references Roland Barthes and Sarah Manguso alongside Mt. Erie and Unwound. I'm pretty sure those are uncommon influences for an indie music bio. Floating Room is the more conventional indie rock side of Bates' muse, but he still hangs in the background, and Maya Stoner writes lyrics and sings lead, while he continues his role as a sound-sculptor. Under this moniker he deals in his version of the Good Cheer house sound, described on the group's Bandcamp page as "the type of sadness felt at 4 in the morning, reserved for the heartbroken and the nervous." The guitar squalls of Drowse, almost more like weather patterns than music, wash over the structure of the songs like photo filters, providing a depth and texture that the more purely rock n roll acts on Good Cheer can't touch. Eschewing the crunchier "alt rock" guitar tones and punk rock enthusiasms of Alien Boy, Mr. Bones, or Cool American for a generously reverberated, fuzz-soaked, more plodding sound, Floating Room crosses definitively into shoegaze territory. It's gloriously eerie and ice-cold in temperature. It's the perfect soundtrack for walking through the woods in the snow, when all sounds are muffled by the falling flakes a the beautiful deathly calm seems to pervade the landscape--and it is a landscape, one you can seemingly gaze far into. On some tracks, the band is almost too delicate for this world, and the sounds seem made of glass, or icicles, ready to crash and fall the moment the temperature gets back above freezing. It's music for winter, for the low-hanging winter sun, gone as soon as it comes up, peering over the leafless treetops, secretly gathering power again once the solstice has passed. TURTLENECKED, the stage name of Harrison Smith, came up next, playing a very short set. Lanky and nervous, he paced the stage, singing R&B songs about being neurotic and narcissistic and romantic, all from electronic backing tracks played from his laptop. It was a very amusing break from all the intensity--even as he sang about heartbreak or unrequited love, Smith was funny, unlike anyone else who I saw perform that night. The stuff on his Bandcamp is mostly minimal indie pop, just electric guitar and drums, very dressed down and sparse, focused on Smith's deadpan vocals, both snarky and pathetic, but always charismatic. An older album, "Pure Plush Bone Cage", was fuzzier and noisier, but Smith's newer style, clean and clear, works better, matching the music's emotional exhibitionism. This presumably even newer R&B stuff is another pretty much genius leap forward. Turtlenecked captures the fine line between self-pity and self-aggrandizement, or rather signals its non-existence, refusing to apologize for anything--or else apologizing for everything--it doesn't really matter which--who ever believes an apology anyway? Good Cheer's brand can, as I said above, come off as overly precious, but Turtlenecked is an exception--one gets the wonderful sense that he barely even believes himself, but it's only the same sincerity of his labelmates doubling back on itself. Morrissey knows this trick well--it's basically his bread and butter. While most of the Good Cheer bands seem to work as band entities, Harrison Smith of one of the few who doesn't really need a band, or for whom any backing band would only be a backing band. He's just an entertaining and engaging enough figure in his own right--perhaps only Mo Troper, among his labelmates, rivals him for sheer personal charisma. Finally was the band I was most keen on seeing, COOL AMERICAN, named for a brand of Doritos. It's the project of singer-guitarist Nathan Tucker, a serious-looking dude who blew through the set with apparently great anxiety, often failing to sing directly into the microphone, seemingly wound tighter than a human can be wound. The band's tall bass player, Tim Howe, with his goofy grin and a santa hat borrowed from Maya Stoner, provided the necessary humorous counterpoint. Cool American's style is a pleasantly loose but melancholy power pop, filled with breezy riffs, mid-tempo grooves and smoothy shifting tempos and beats. But there's also a punk edge in it--at some point in every song, Tucker upshifts into a cathartic yelp, from which I felt sympathy pangs in my own vocal chords, before this explosion of his nervous energy receded, and he began to recharge again. Tucker's vocal range is limited, but the melody's in the guitars, spinning circles around each other, swirling and looping when they aren't exploding. Probably the most direct example of my Pavement-meets-emo description above, Cool American's unusual combination of mellowness and tension feels very much like West Coast life as I've come to know it, the cycle of putting up a veneer of "no worries" chillness and having it break down in the face of un-chill reality, only to put it up again, because fuck life, life should be better than it is. Better to try and fail to be chill and hopeful than live in cynical detachment. And for all their moodiness, the Good Cheer bands are never cynical. They don't just express heavy feelings, they believe in them, affirming their value and meaning in a society that usually runs scared from them. Unlike so much of the buzzy music in Portland, these bands never come off as careerist--you get the sense that any day one of them might break up because so-and-so had to move away for school or whatever. One could be cynical in response and argue that this sincerity is just another brand, but if so, I'll take it over the glassy-eyed smugness and empty glitz of so much of what passes for indie music these days. Long live Good Cheer.