What I'm Listening to This Week 2025.2.10

I’m exhausted and the world is going to shit faster than anticipated, but hey, at least there’s still music.

When I first ran into this video a few years ago, it totally changed my understanding of what a "cover" might mean. Kae Tempest's Let Them Eat Chaos is an incredible record. Atom Willard is a legendary drummer. Even still, the notion of watching someone drum along to a Kae Tempest track, even one like "Ketamine for Breakfast", a song in which the rhythm carries much of the emotion of the song, seemed uninteresting.

I was pretty clearly wrong. Willard brings something entirely new out of the song. It heightens the anxious pain and gives it an unflagging propuliveness that changed the way I hear it. Now, when this song pops into my head, it does so with Willard's drumming accompanying it. It has completely replaced the original version for me.

I think I might be the only person on the West Coast who still remembers Canasta's 2005 release We Were Set Up. It's one of those albums that condensed a time in my life. I listened to it on repeat for a few months my senior year of undergrad and it gripped me. Listening to "Slow Down Chicago" now, it reminds me of an era when it felt like the future of pop music actually could be weird chamber pop arrangements and guileless earnestness. Glitzy hyperpop prevailed, but it's always good to go back and pay homage to what could have been.

A relevant biographical fact for this pick is that the first major label show I ever saw was Eve 6 and Third Eye Blind (they played, improbably, at the hockey arena in my shitty hometown). As such, I will pretty much always be a massive Eve 6 fan. I think it’s congenital. Fortunately they make it easy to justify my fandom when they keep putting out such perfect, grimy little gems like this. Since Dream Fist came out last year, this has become one of my go to hype-up songs. It’s the perfect addition to any high-energy playlist you might have, whether it’s labeled “wake up”, “gym pump up”, or “crush my enemies and see them driven before me”.