What I'm Listening To, 2025.4.14
"Lying in a bed of greed / you know I had the strangest dream"
I have a birthday coming up. Every few years I throw a giant party for myself. The other years, I do pretty much nothing. This is one of those nothing years. I think I’m still recovering from two years ago. I rented the basement of Knee High Stocking Company here in Seattle and invited dozens of friends and acquaintances. This year, my partner and I are going on a long delayed vacation. I expect I’ll spend my birthday sitting in a riverside cafe with her, both of us happily reading a book. For operational security reasons, I’ll decline to say which river.
The twin forces threatening to rip apart any good psych rock band are the psychonaut urge to explore and the stoner urge to Just Vibe. Night Beats navigates the tension via a kind of gentle oscillation from song to song. Their new single “Behind the Green Door” is firmly on the vibes side of the spectrum. It’s a spacey, laid back jam with interesting layers and textures that rewards repeat listening with deep grooves but no concrete conclusions.
Night Beats have always excelled at slinky, haunting rock music, and this feels like a distillation of that trend. I’m firmly on record of being skeptical of music videos, but I think in this case it accentuates the vibe of the song. It focuses on the vague menace latent in the song, like the ever-present threat of a bad trip, and de-emphasizes anything resembling a plot. It feels like they made the art house movie that they wanted the song to be a soundtrack to, which seems to me to be a sensible approach to making music videos.
Year of the Cobra is one of those low-key, yet innovative bands that changes the way I understand music. Or at least they’ve provided a mathematical proof for how few people you need on stage to have have a truly sick metal band. The depth and texture they’re able to create with drums, bass, and vocals never ceases to amaze me. I went to the album release show for their new, self-titled album. Their openers were all excellent, fully staffed metal bands with lots of sick guitar solos and face-melting, sternum-shaking layers of sound.
Year of the Cobra easily stood up to all of them, with the added advantage of their comparative simplicity allowing Amy Barrysmith’s vocals to cut through and the virtuosity of both members to stay center stage. Their music is great, but they’re even better live. I will turn out to see them every time they play anywhere even vaguely near me.
“Sugar for the Pill” is not only a dreamy, heartfelt little gem of a pop song, it’s also unusual for its pedigree. If someone told me they were going to play me the second single off a British shoegaze band’s first album in over two decades, I’d ratchet my expectations down. Shoegaze is one of those genres that’s always felt era-bound to the 90s for me. Biographically, my own shoegaze period (every earnest young man is required by cosmic law to have one) was about three months in the Fall of 2003. Suffice to say, it feels like an anachronism in the category of songs I’ve had in heavy rotation.
The opening hook is the musical equivalent of “one of those faces” that everyone thinks they know. Even if you’ve never heard this song before, you know the sparse, spacey reverb of that line. It makes you feel immediately at home in the song. It’s like walking into a random hotel to use the bathroom and having the man at the front desk say “welcome back” without looking up.
What follows is artfully crafted, moody pop music. The reverb combined with the spare drums, mixed low, give it a sense of motion. Even if it never went anywhere, it would still be great, digestible background pop music.
The fact that it also has a nice slow burn build and develops the hook into a motif makes it reward subsequent listens. I won’t draw the hack comparison to the title of the track, but I always appreciate a tune that’s easy to listen to but provides some depth for closer examination.