What I'm Listening to This Week 2025.02.17

I got my ass kicked by work this week. I ended up drinking champagne with a buddy on the roof of my apartment building on Friday night. The champagne was free and the company was good. Who could really ask for more any night of the year.

I can’t fault any band for being obtuse. The Shins often take the coward’s path of being musically legible and lyrically nonsensical. I have to admit, though, that when it works, it really fucking works. “Saint Simon” is a dark, slinky little gem of exactly this kind of gibberish. Chutes Too Narrow, now old enough to have a 20 year remaster, was basically glued into my car CD player 20 years ago. In the summer of 2005, I was an intern at the Department of Energy laboratory in Richland, Washington. Close enough to my parents’ place that I could stay with them and listen to half the record on my drive up the river to the lab. I’d listen to the other half on my way back down the bend in the Columbia in the evening.

I remember it being an unusually hot summer, even for the high desert. I listened to Chutes Too Narrow, ate too much Taco Bell, and spent the weekends hanging out with my friends Mike and Charlie either at the shitty sports bar that sold $5 pitchers or in Mike’s apartment. (“Apartment” glorifies it. It was an attic space above his mom’s attached garage.)

What I’m saying is, “Saint Simon” might not be as good as I remember. I think it holds up, though. The wandering vocal melody and the battle march snare drum give it just the right amount of intensity to be set off by the “la-da-da-da” chorus. The minor verse to major bridge is interesting, even if a little twee. Like the Canasta song I included last week, it feels like a holdover from an era when we thought surrealist indie pop might be the future.

I’m still working my way through the magisterial collection of Mark Fisher’s essays, K-punk. Today I read a few of his essays on Goth and it revived the long-haired, black-denim-wearing, black-nail-varnished dork of my youth. As a product of the Catholic-to-Goth pipeline, “Painted Bird” is more significant to me than any saint’s finger bone in a reliquary. Goth has a reputation for being sonorous and haunting and self-serious. “Painted Bird” shows that it can be vital and urgent.

I didn’t learn about the inspiration of the song, a novel by Jerzy Kosiński, until I read Fisher discussing it. Apparently, in Kosiński’s novel of the same name, a bird catcher paints a bird vibrant colors and releases it. It flies back to its flock. The other birds, not recognizing it, violently swarm it and kill it.

In this light, the song’s sense of aggressive alienation feels altogether more sinister.

Still an absolute jam, though.

I reconnected with another high school friend, Brett, recently. We were talking about musical tastes. I recommended he check out Sean Nelson’s solo albums. You should too, they’re pretty great. That set me in search of recordings of my favorite Sean Nelson track that hasn’t made it onto any of his albums (solo or otherwise). “Shark” is one of those rare distillations that produces a shining crystal of human experience that we can all resonate with: the intense sensation of getting into a relationship with someone with whom you don’t have “love”, but you sure as shit have something, and it’s definitely going to fuck you up for a bit.

It’s worth listening to, if only for the lines “every summer’s endless ‘til every summer ends / the consolation prize is we’re still technically friends”