music moots: Lynskey
Greetings, we are so back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask people to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today B from Lynskey recommends a song! Lynskey rips. They are from Manchester in the UK, and they play a heavy and hard-driving dance punk / metal hybrid that dares you to channel your rage in a rhythmic fashion.
Lynskey
They've called new EP here, this is for you "a thank you to everyone who has helped make them feel a part of the community" of musicians in their DIY scene. I'm partial to "KiCKiT," a blistering opener propelled by crunching guitars and pummeling drums, which delivers a stirring directive to keep your mosh pit etiquette in check: "Dance, don't fight!"
B recommended I listen to "No Good Al Joad" by Hop Along for this Music Moot: "It's a track that, when I first heard it, got me to think differently about song structure and vocal performance. Just, like, a bit of an eye opener for me personally, and also at a great point in the album it's off (which is also amazing)."
Well I've been doing Music Moots for over a year now and this is the first time I've actually heard the recommended song before—I'm a huge Hop Along fan!! I miss that band, though I also love Frances Quinlan's solo work. And Get Disowned was the album that T-boned me just in time for a gnarly megabreakup, though my favorite song off that album was always the dense bruiser "Tibetan Pop Stars." I feel like I didn't give "No Good Al Joad" its due at the time because my heart was such raw meat in that era that I wanted it tenderized by the big crashing full-on numbers, so I set the sparer songs aside...
....but listening to it now...after some more life experience...whew baby. Quinlan has said in interviews that this song is about witnessing a cousin die of cancer; their lyrical style feels incredibly short story-esque, with precise material detail that feels lived-in, but enough abstraction to let you spill your own experience into it. It ends with a devastating couplet that's a short story on its own ("The first person I realized was dying / Thanked everyone for the cake, soft and low") and the narrator's brutal understanding, drawn out over nerve-jangling strings, of being able to walk away from this awful party—to escape, to cheat death for at least another day.
Walk with me on this comparison, which I swear is not just because the titles have names that sound similar, though that's a funny coincidence: the fear, resentment and pride in the face of someone else's imminent death in "No Good Al Joad" remind me so, so much of the narrator of Amy Hempel's short story "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," who is watching her best friend die of cancer in the hospital, and who by the end becomes "fluent in the language of grief."
Near the end of the story, the narrator prepares to leave her friend after an uncomfortably delayed visit ("Two months, and how long is the drive?") and looks forward to the rest of her night: "I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated. I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway...I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, life, and stay up all night." Compare that to Quinlan at the end of "No Good Al Joad," on foot, not buzzing with heat or shimmering with lust, but still sneaking away from death undetected all the same.
Cheating death is cheating, I guess. It's not meant to feel fair. How funny to feel like you're getting away with something merely by living.
Thank you Lynskey! Get into here, this is for you and check out their link aggregation.
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