#365songs (24 / 365)

No song has ever made me cry as often or as reliably as this one. I can hear it and keep it together these days but the number of listens it took to get to this point was probably in the high double digits.

#365songs (23 / 365)

In honor of today's article on independent music writing website Hearing Things, an interview with Dawn of Midi, who have not released an album since Dysnomia in 2013 (!) but have apparently been performing again in recent years. What they have been performing is Dysnomia in its entirety. I find it hard to write about any song without putting it in the context of the album on which it appears, as you may have noticed if you're reading these, but Dysnomia in particular is really just one single piece with "track" divisions that feel pretty arbitrary.

Still, though, this is #365songs, not #365albums, so I'm picking the track, "Ijiraq," that has my single favorite moment on Dysnomia. It happens at about 3:45, and it is also the single moment that the Hearing Things article linked above describes in detail:

For a few minutes, the band sounds more or less like a skipping CD. It’s hard to hang on to any one beat; try to nod along and you might start looking like Jay-Z at the Coldplay show. Then, a single looped piano note enters the fray and rhythms that were previously teetering at the brink of chaos suddenly start to bounce and strut and wiggle, as if that one note were the key they needed to unlock their funky potential.

I myself called that precise moment out in my micro-review of this album on Bandcamp. I referred to it as a "drop," and I did and do still find it as thrilling as any dubstep drop I've ever heard (admittedly, I haven't heard that many). All the playing on Dysnomia is astonishingly tight but the way "Ijiraq" goes from chaotic to totally locked in at that moment is beautiful. And I don't know if it was intentional but in the studio recording there's a slight clatter of drumsticks or something just prior, as if to remind you that the intricate rhythmic counterpoint you're hearing is not computer-generated (contra the band name) but the product of people hitting and plucking instruments in a room.

#365songs (22 / 365)

"Epilogue" is the last song on The Antlers' album Hospice, a fairly devastating concept piece whose protagonist is a nurse for a woman who seems to be on the verge of death for the whole thing. She dies at the end, but I think the whole "hospice" framing is a metaphor for an emotionally abusive relationship. There seem to be some people who think this album is sad because it's romantic in some way and the woman dies, but to me "Epilogue" makes it clear that Hospice is a horror story. Its melody reprises that of an earlier song, "Bear," which seems to be pretty clearly about an abortion, and I find it quite chilling and effective to echo that melody in a description of how the abuse the protagonist suffered reverberates through his life even after its perpetrator is gone. Hospice is a great if kind of hard-to-listen-to album, and "Epilogue" to me is the skeleton key that turns it from sad to frightening.

#365songs (21 / 365)

"Dr. Yen Lo" is the name for the collaboration between Ka, an incredibly good and unique rapper who died in 2024, and DJ Preservation. Preservation is one of my favorite rap producers because all the shit he's done in the last, like, decade has sounded like Days with Dr. Yen Lo: dark, spare beats often with few or no drums that sound somehow antique. They are the perfect things for Ka to rap over, in the husky, weathered near-whisper that he rarely strays from as he delivers bars incredibly dense with internal rhymes and multiple meanings.

The album's strange title refers to a character in the film "The Manchurian Candidate," which I don't know anything about beyond the broadest strokes of the plot. But you don't need to know the film to appreciate Days, which mostly uses it as a framing device for Ka to rap about the topic he returns to semi-obsessively across his whole catalog: grappling with a childhood spent in precarity and the things he did to survive it, and trying to transcend it to live a decent, moral life as an adult.

Days with Dr. Yen Lo is incredibly cohesive in sound, and the titles of the tracks (all of which are "Day N" for some value of N) don't make it easy to distinguish them. So why did I pick "Day 811?" Probably just so I could quote the 5/5 tinymixtapes review of the album, which demonstrates why I still like to read writing about music: sometimes it has an insight like this that makes me appreciate an album or a song in a new way.

On “Day 811,” Ka spits, “When you’re raised around rage and vengeance/ You can change, but in your veins remains major remnants.” It’s the type of rhyme that, coming from someone else, might be used to put an exclamation point on an entire song, an “Oh shit!” moment typically reserved for the end of a track. From Ka, it’s bars 13 and 14 of a 24-bar verse.

#365songs (20 / 365)

Sometimes you just gotta take that leap of faith with music. I've described my own music listening habits as "purchasing music I want to like and bullying myself into liking it" and while that's somewhat hyperbolic it's more or less what I did with Wednesday's most-recent-as-of-this-writing album Bleeds. I still find music mostly by reading things — other people's opinions, generally — and I saw a lot of ecstatic praise for their last album Rat Saw God. I sampled a track or two and it sounded like kinda scrappy but unremarkable rock music to me, and it didn't grab me enough to stick with it. Then Bleeds came around and I guess I must have heard something in it that convinced me to plunk down the $10 or whatever for it. Once I've spent real money on an album I can generally let the sunk cost fallacy do the rest.

"Townies" is a reminder that that leap of faith can pay off, and that music that doesn't surprise or delight or shock on first listen can still have those effects as it unfolds in subsequent ones. Karly Hartzman has a wonderful and expressive voice and she uses the hell out of it here. The wild melodic swings are tied to pivots in the lyrics and make them even more hard-hitting, and after two stories of meanness and betrayal in the verses there's a raspy, exhausted resignation to the absolution she offers in the bridge.

I don't know if "Townies" will stick with me or not, or how much I'll still be listening to Bleeds in six months or a year, but right now it just feels nice to listen to a new album of straight-up rock music by a band I'd never really listened to before this year and be like, yeah, sometimes rock music is pretty fuckin' good.

#365songs (19 / 365)

My first foray into noise music, still a genre I've barely dipped my toe into but one I should maybe explore more based on how often I've listened to all 90+ minutes of Frozen Niagara Falls. "Dragonflies to Sew You Up" is emblematic of the contradictions that run through the album: bludgeoningly noisy percussion, nearly-pretty synth melodies that might be warm in isolation but still somehow fit right into the forbiddingly icy soundscape; harsh vocals that are incomprehensible either due to being extremely processed or just because they're straight up death metal screaming, as here. It all sounds pretty hostile, and it kind of is, but the synths give you something to hold onto amid the tumult.

Frozen Niagara Falls as a whole ranges even farther out than "Dragonflies to Sew You Up" would suggest. There's noise, of course, and a wider variety of it than I might have thought possible. Some of it is really just ambient music, a sort of reprieve from the intensity of tracks like this one. There's twenty minutes of spoken word, split across two tracks, accompanied by gorgeous if chilly acoustic guitar and what sounds like field recordings of some kind. It's incomprehensible that all this gels into a cohesive album but somehow it does, and a really compelling one at that.

#365songs (18 / 365)

My first Laura Stevenson album was Wheel, after reading a rave review or two on the community music review site Sputnikmusic. It made me a fan for life, helped immensely by her continuing to release songs like "Value Inn," on her fifth album The Big Freeze.

It's a tragedy that Laura Stevenson isn't playing to crowds of thousands like, say, Phoebe Bridgers, and I like Phoebe Bridgers a lot. I mean, it whips ass for me, because I've gotten to see Stevenson twice at the Vera Project, my favorite venue in Seattle, in an audience of, like, 80 people. I guess her music tends to be a little more opaque and a little less pithily quotable than Bridgers but that doesn't feel like it explains the vast chasm between their popularity levels. But anyway.

"Value Inn" is about struggling with self-harm in a hotel room, I gather, and it's a study in tension. The insistent repetition of the simple chorus "I am so nice" becomes a kind of ominous self-harm of its own: "a point of pride," sure, but also maybe part of what led the singer to where she is. (Based on interviews it's reasonable to assume "Value Inn" is autobiographical, but I think there's always a little narrative distance between the real singer and the "character" in their songs, just as there's always a little of the singer in even a song explicitly about an invented character.) The singing is calm and dispassionate but the distorted guitar swells and roils behind it — especially at that conflicted "I am so nice" chorus — then recedes. "The waves crash down," indeed.

#365songs (17 / 365)

It's kind of surprising that two of my favorite songs on Future of the Left's third album The Plot Against Common Sense are the ones in which Andrew Falkous sings in exactly one pitch for the entire song (the other being "A Guide to Men") — though, perhaps it shouldn't be. After all, this is the man who sing-shouted "Freedom from notes" in the chorus of "Arming Eritrea" on their last album... but once again, I'm digressing.

I actually debated with myself whether to write about "A Guide to Men," which has one of my favorite lines on Plot ("History is written by the man who stays acquainted with the thug who has the biggest sword") but "Failed Olympic Bid" has more of what makes Future of the Left great. The I-don't-know-how-many-octaves synth riff that underpins the whole thing is classic FotL, straddling the line between catchy and annoying, and it gives the rest of the band something to lock the fuck in over, and they do that. Even aside from the monotone vocals, pretty much everyone here is doing something very simple. The guitar riff is basically two notes and the drums are following it; the bass isn't doing anything fancy either. I don't know. Maybe making my own music without being good enough at any instruments to do fancy shit has given me a deeper appreciation for music that so successfully becomes more than the sum of its parts.

And I haven't even talked about Falco's lyrics, a high point in any good FotL song, which are in fine form here even though I don't know where Rotherham is, or when (or if) (or where) there was an actual failed Olympic bid in England, or who Sebastian Coe is. Doesn't matter! (In my defense I do know who Saddam Hussein is.) If Falco is being snide over some noisy-ass rock music, I'm happy. And when I'm listening to "Failed Olympic Bid" I'm very happy.

#365songs (16 / 365)

Was this my first Open Mike Eagle song? I must have heard him before this, at least as a guest rapper, but I think this was the track that got me to say "I gotta listen to this guy some more." I know for sure I didn't originally hear it on his own album Dark Comedy, but on the Dorner vs. Tookie mixtape from the sadly now-defunct Hellfyre Club, which included four legends of the indie rap scene (OME, Busdriver, R.A.P. Ferreira f/k/a Milo, Nocando) and basically just put out the one mixtape before dissolving semi-acrimoniously. OME would devote a verse to this in a later song, but I'm going to try to bring this post back around to "Qualifiers" now.

It seems ridiculous in 2026, but when I was in college I made a deliberate, conscious attempt to like "get into" rap music, as a person who would have had to go well out of his way to encounter it all through grade school and frankly probably had some racist opinions about it as a kid. "Qualifiers" came well after that attempt turned out to be what I consider a success, but it would have been an absolutely perfect onramp for my nerdy too-clever-by-half self at the time: melodic, catchy, funny, incredibly likable, confrontational but only just enough to give a frisson to someone intentionally going out of their comfort zone. Literally grown-ass man with a child rap. Literally poking (gentle) fun at people who think rap music is just "bitches and hos" rap. "Words With Friends!" GoldenEye! And in a masterful coup de grâce, it interpolates like 30 seconds from a They Might Be Giants song at the end. Not just a "song." A B-side!!

I don't really think that Mike Eagle wrote this song for people like high school me to get into rap music, but I don't think he could have done a better job of it if he had. He even leaves other breadcrumbs for inquisitive people to follow: to one of his own older songs ("Bright Green Light"), to other rappers (Busdriver, Serengeti). And the thing is, despite this being an absolutely fantastic "Baby's First Rap Song," it's also still great even after you've been a rap fan for 20 years.

#365songs (15 / 365)

I was just doing the Scylla fight in Hades 2 and it got me thinking about video game music that I especially like. With apologies to Supergiant Games: it doesn't have lyrics, that's for sure. The Undertale soundtrack is highly regarded, and with good reason, but while it's got a lot of Bangers on it, this placid, uplifting and vaguely Pachelbel's Canon-esque tune is one of my favorites. It's another song where I can't really pinpoint what's so good about it. The melody is pretty but simple, almost childish (like a lot of Undertale), the build is moving but pretty standard. If I hadn't heard this in the (quite powerful) context in which it appears in Undertale, would I have such affection for it? An unanswerable question. The fact is I did hear it in that context, and I do love it.