Chapter 7


Maybe we should do a kind of emotional ranking of the tracks. Everyone will have a different response to certain things, but it's useful to get a sense of the overall flow of an album. 

Mine goes like this: 

Side a

1 - neutral

2 - whoa, nature is a whore and the i killed you part is something

3 - neutral

4 - neutral but funny (i like putting words out of order)

5 - depressing, but like seeing it not experiencing it yourself

6 - that's so bizarrely messed up 

Side b

7 - just pure vicious sarcasm and anger

8 - this just feels disgusting

9 - neutral

10 - kind of a self deprecating thing, but neutral

11 - slightly depressing, but mostly neutral

12 - oof, just soul crushingly depressing

13 - hidden track included on second run versions (all mine are original run, so i don't have it as a hidden track, hilarious when you consider people traded in their first run copies just to have it on there) 

That's an interesting contour to me. Side A is mostly neutral with a couple blips and an intellectually difficult ending. Side b is the exact opposite, it starts supercharged, levels out, and just crashes into misery at the end. Your reaction might differ, but clearly there's a long range structure that resonates with me and gives the whole experience a feeling of completeness. Whether or not i can describe it to you, there's some tangible emotional response going on when i listen to it. That's a pseudo-psychological apparatus, but i'm not being dishonest when i describe it that way. If your response is just neutral all the way, or all over the place with disgust, anger, confusion, etc., then clearly we'll have a different response to the experience of listening to it. Mine is quite pleasing in the most abstract sense, i'm not bored, i don't get lost or feel impatient or need to skip anything, subject matter aside it's a completely lovely album to listen to from start to finish. You might disagree. 

Some lyrics stand out more than others, In Bloom and Drain You have a lot of them. The squeak toys that sound like rats in a sewer tunnel is highly disturbing, and everything about Something In The Way feels like the guy in the alley next to the trash quitely sobbing on the cover of p(nmi)t's We Get Tired EP. 

What's your emotional trajectory for this album look like?

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