I Am Doll Parts

Hiya, welcome back to Taxonomy. Thank you for your indulgence.

This weekend, Rachelle and I saw Mannequin Pussy and Soul Glo at the Fonda in Hollywood. Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven is one of my favorite indie rock records in a long time; the last time I felt this energized by a band (both on record and on stage) was Parquet Courts ca. 2012-14, when Light Up Gold and Sunbathing Animal and a dozen Chicago shows made it feel like they were the only people in the scene who were even trying to take being alive and making music seriously. (This is the myopia of love, I know that, and it's mysterious.)

When I reviewed I Got Heaven a couple of months ago, I was thinking constantly about Hole’s Live Through This. Like that album, it’s stridently feminine music that snarls and defies without posturing; neither record feels like it could’ve been made by a man. Both almost feel as though they exist in a world where men don’t, where women are the ones who invented and own and maintain punk. Almost. Missy Dabice, prowling around on the stage in a gorgeous white dress with a flower trim on the neckline, screaming into her mic, breathily teasing the audience between songs—on I Got Heaven she’s always fully herself and fully conscious of what it means to be herself, to be a woman singing about being a woman, and on stage she plays up both parts, the immense self-belief and the immensity of the forces that dedicated to snuffing out that belief. She never flinches. I told some friends the day after the show that seeing Mannequin Pussy right now, on this tour, is what I imagine seeing Hole in 1994 must have felt like, only if Courtney had channeled her artistry into belief instead of grief. There’s plenty of power in both.

At the risk of reducing them to a parenthetical, Soul Glo is brilliant at a level that’s genuinely difficult to describe. I knew they were a great hardcore band, I’m not sure that I expected them to be so good as a noise band. They string together long, dissonant passages, then thread them through an incredibly thick set of hardcore songs; the noise never really abates, it just coheres with form for a minute or two at a time and becomes part of the order. Pierce Jordan always sings like he shouldn't have to say the things that he's saying—the speed of his vocals often obscures the words themselves but it also makes clear his own frustration at having to not only has to go through everything a Black man has to go through in the US, but that because of the music he likes and the general shape of power, he has to explain it all to (and for the entertainment of) the very same kinds of white people who keep him down. When he pounded out a beat on a drum pad and shook his ass at the front of the stage, to the delight of the entire house, it wasn't clear to me whether he was being bitterly ironic or just having a good time; I'm guessing part of being in Soul Glo is doing both at the same time.

It's hard to imagine a better pairing of bands right now. The Fonda was packed to its 1000-person cap, and Soul Glo used the crammed feeling to make it feel like they were playing to 100 or so people in a small room. Mannequin Pussy felt like they were playing to 5000. Truly, it was a great day for a concert.

Thanks for hanging with me. April's First Listens are below. Hope you like (reading about) black metal!

Sam Wilkes & Sam Gendel, The Doober (2024)

When The Two Sams put out their first joint record in 2018, Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar, the wispy, tentative way it welcomed you into a cozy form of DIY jazz was incredibly comforting to me. It’s no stretch to say that that album, and particularly Sam W’s first solo album WILKES, shifted my priorities as a listener at a time when I was very burnt out from relentlessly following the release schedule and frustrated by what I perceived as the narrowness of what I could spend my time listening to as a mag editor. Those two records gave me a place to catch my breath and helped me to find a path out of website-core and toward everything I’ve wandered through in the years since. I’ll always be grateful to both of them for that.

Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks (2013)*

If I’d been paying attention to NIN in 2013, the tiny Din EngSchrift type and the Russell Mills artwork would have instantly turned me off of this album. In 2024, though, it feels like you can read Hesitation Marks’ dubbing of the Downward Spiral cover (and the uneasy imagery of the title) as a commentary on the idea of a “return to form” record. Considering how good Hesitation Marks is, it seems like Trent must have known that would be how the album would be received and chose to fuck around with the whole concept. Which is a shame, because Hesitation Marks doesn’t really return to the muddy chaos of The Downward Spiral or the thin-production/thin-skin EBM of Pretty Hate Machine so much as it reflects on both from a place of artistic wisdom. The synths are grainy and minimal, the songs are tight and well-structured. It’s a great record that stands on its own and didn’t really need to play around with NIN history to prove it. Kinda feels like dad looking at his high-school class photos despite being in better shape now.

Nine Inch Nails, Add Violence (2017)

Our (parked) car was totaled this month, and I spent the week after it in a fog. I know I listened to this on the way to work like two days later. I have no memory of what it sounded like.

Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth (2005)

At the time it came out, I was so far past NIN as a concept and so deep into what I understood as the advanced refinement and heightened artistry (which is to say sublimated coolness) of indie rock that I couldn’t have let myself hear this properly even if I’d wanted to. I did see NIN at the miniature version of Voodoo Fest they put on at The Fly a couple of months after Katrina, and I remember thinking “The Hand That Feeds” sounded like Trent’s attempt to do something current and poppy and that it sounded like The Bravery (who also played that day, insultingly). I still think it sounds like his attempt to either get a radio hit or a spot playing McCarren Park Pool, but it sounds way more like TV on the Radio than I was aware of at the time. I could’ve liked it!!

Plastikman, Musik (1994)*

My encounter with Hesitation Marks sent me back to Liars’ Wixiw, an all-time favorite that came out in 2012 and in retrospect is obviously a massive influence on Hesitation Marks. There’s not a ton going on in that music most of the time: the synths make small statements, the buzzsaw teeth are tiny, there’s a lot of space left over for atmosphere. I interviewed Liars when that album came out, and in addition to them telling me how much they loved the Clippers, they made it super clear that they were embarrassed to have never made electronic music despite being signed to Mute Records. “Totally,” I probably said. Anyway, in a belated effort to understand the context of Wixiw, I read a ton of interviews with Liars conducted by people with more curious sensibilities than I had in 2012 and came across Musik that way. Guess what? It sounds like Wixiw. It’s great.

Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin, Ghosted II (2024)*

Like shaking a velvet bag of emeralds.

Gast del Sol, We Have Dozens of Titles (2024)

A strong, surprisingly even collection of unreleased work from the experimental-ish Chicago supergroup. Look at that lineup: David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait), Bundy K. Brown (played in Tortoise, recorded Chicago Underground Trio and others), John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, recorded half of the great records released between 1994 and 2005), Jim O’Rourke (mixed the other half, played in Sonic Youth and Wilco and Stereolab, is Jim O’Rourke). (Let’s listen to the Jim O’Rourke version of “Fast Car” now.)

Genital Shame, Gathering My Wits EP (2023)*

I’m sure the logline for this EP was “black metal meets midwestern emo,” but in my day we simply called the latter indie rock and we moved on. There’s some lovely parking-lot chorale vocals here, as well as detuned and deflating avant-jazz guitar, but its core is terribly affecting black metal whose synths and perversely—almost showily—minimal drum programming defangs the tremolo picking and basically makes the scariness feel hollow and impotent. (That’s a compliment.)

Culturist, Overdose at a Dungeon Rave EP (2024)

Black metal and acid house are both bootleg-cassette genres. The warm scrim of tape, which in theory distances the listener from the music, serves to make it sound bigger, like you’re experiencing room ambience in a way that higher-fi recordings don’t give you. It’s like how you always look taller in a low-ceilinged room. I’m not sure that they fit together perfectly (I’m not even sure if this is acid house, properly considered, or black metal for that matter), but this is a fun idea and it’s always fun to fuck around with black metal conventions, and to listen to acid house in any context.

knights of rain, the witch’s garden stays hidden (2023)*

Faint antifascist black metal that’s mixed with the noise very low and a pretty, clean guitar as the prominent sound. Something closer to ambient music and more purely beautiful, with the blast beat drumming sounding closer to taps than actual drumming. Very beautiful.

Wolves of Desor, Lost Kingdom of the Giants EP (2023)

Intensely lo-fi black metal. It sound like a tape that was recorded on someone else’s boombox and left in a very cold compost pile until the spring thaw.

Within Thy Wounds, Into the Forest of Iniquity (2020)

Stirring and beautiful black metal/blackgaze from the Pac NW, feels as webby and foggy and verdant as the forests near the base of Mt. Hood. In case the name didn’t tip you off, they’re a Christian black metal band, and while I get that that is confusing and upsetting to some people, it strikes me as just as radical a mutation of the music as trans black metal; both are equally likely to upset Varg Vikernes, and to me, that’s just great.

Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile Deviations 1 (2017)

“1”? This is a 4xLP instrumental deconstruction of an album that was already like two hours long. They plan on putting out more of this? Even as a fan of The Fragile, I found it profoundly inessential, but it is intellectually interesting, I will grant, to try and turn a big-budget double album that was made for the radio into an art object. It’s too atmospheric to work as sweeping electronic post-rock, too structured to work as ambient music, and too familiar to stand on its own outside of the frame of the original album. I’m glad it exists, I just don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense.

Nine Inch Nails, “The Perfect Drug” Versions (1997)

The combination of genuinely original artistic vision and cultural ubiquity makes it easy to think you completely understand a band or an artist without having to investigate them any further; you get the general idea and, if it doesn’t seem like your thing, that’s probably enough. This is one of the effects of canonization, I think, and it’s part of why I ignored the Grateful Dead for so long. That reducibility means you’re dealing in stereotypes (of both the music and its fans), and the further from mainstream aesthetic values that music is, the more it feels like a gimmick; if it were truly that far a departure from radio rock, I guess, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. So it’s always thrilling to realize that a RNRHOF-level band you’d pigeonholed on cultural grounds (i.e., you know what type of person likes them, you know that person couldn’t ever be you, therefore you understand the music and know it’s not for you) is both way more complicated and way easier to love than you thought. And by the time you end up becoming the type of person who, actually, would love that band, you don’t really care about the cultural connotations. This is known as “liking things.”

Autechre, Incunabula (1993)

I think this was a further effect of Hesitation Marks/Wixiw. I’m not sure there’s a group I’ve spent more time listening to in the last five years that I have thought about less than Autechre, who I know are terribly important and whose music never seems to hold on to me. I could never be someone who likes Autechre!

Lycopolis, The Procession (2021)

Egyptian black metal is such a rich idea. Just as the Norwegians had their whole pre-Christian norse god thing to exploit, Egyptian musicians can pull from a very dense cultural cosmology—and not risk white supremacy in the process!

[Ahmed], Wood Blues (2024)

Free-jazz take on bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s “Oud Blues.” If you’d never heard jazz before, but had read about it, and then you imagined what it would be like if the jazz in your head was played on a loop until it began to lose its grip on itself like when you repeat a word too many times, and then you snipped out all the early loops so you were just stuck with that repetition-drunk take, it might sound like this.

ZZ Top, Eliminator (1983)

Not just the inspiration for “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”

Loveliescrushing, Xuvetyn (1996)*

There’s a song on here called “Staticburst” and another called “Milkysoft.” Play them at the same time, and that’s what the whole album sounds like.

Jesu, jesu (2004)

Ca. 2004 bands like Jesu and Mono were everywhere, the world was full of metal dudes trying to figure out how to make pretty music without sacrificing the edge; Jesu did it by distorting the bass, hammering the beat, and writing actual melodies. Deafheaven would flip the idea a decade or so later, rapid-etching howls and shrieks atop plainly beautiful guitar swells.

Curve, Doppelgänger (1992)*

As someone whose musical values were formed by American indie and alt rock of the 90s, I’m always taken aback by how profoundly dance music influenced British music of the same period. How different would things have been if Curve had been as big here as they were in the UK? Would our heads feel more connected to our bodies? Would Calvin Klein ads have been criticized for glamorizing ecstasy chic? Would the sarcasm of The Dismemberment Plan’s “Do the Standing Still” have been directed at the square listener instead of the stoic audience? And so on. RIYL the first Garbage album, which, come to think of it, was a massive smash and didn’t make any of the above happen.

Thou, Umbilical (2024)*

Twenty years ago, 225 Magazine said the three most interesting artists in Baton Rouge Louisiana were: Lil Boosie, Terror of the Sea, and Thou. Boosie went on to become one of LSU football’s unofficial hypemen and say horribly homophobic things, the latter leading Mike Tyson to suggest Boosie might be gay. Terror of the Sea made one phenomenal EP of noisy, bubbly indie rock before atomizing and if they ever came back would probably sound like the Grateful Dead with a punk drummer (i.e., the Minutemen). And Thou became one of the greatest sludge-metal bands in history. I really love the way Thou’s records sound—there’s a clarity to the recording that’s missing from e.g. Eyehategod, and, because they typically all pull in the same direction, it makes their pummeling feel professional and highly efficient. Imagine if the devil didn’t fuck about and really got on his game. Scary stuff.

Bowery Electric, Bowery Electric (1995)*

A giant glittering cave with mold growing on distant walls.

Cloakroom, Time Well (2017)

I recognize that a big part of the appeal of bands like Cloakroom and Greet Death is how they draw together and contrast heavy, thick, dissonant, beautiful music with sincere acoustic songwriting. I’m not sure if the idea is to show how beneath all the noise lives a brittle expression of individual frailty, or vice versa, but to me it always demonstrates the insufficiency of words and melody to convey ineffable sadness. I don’t know if I really believe that; I’ve been moved beyond language by language plenty of times. But when these two methods are placed side by side so conspicuously, the idea of bringing the music’s emotions down to a human level makes it feel too precious to me. I like Cloakroom—Dissolution Wave is a great record—and suspect most of Time Well will grow on me. But acoustic music played alongside or as if it is shoegaze (slowly, languidly, with so much left up to implication but without anything floating in the atmosphere onto which one might project those implications) sometimes feels hollow to me. Neil Young was able to make this kind of thing work on Live Rust in part by letting himself have a good time with his bros, but also by not letting the slow burn of the electric “Cortez the Killer” inform his approach to “I Am A Child.“ They’re both great songs, but the hot haze of “Cortez”’s long, sustained chords carries so much more tragedy than any acoustic version ever could. There’s a form of power inherent in heavy music that suggests the ability to feel or be full (in the emotional sense) despite feeling awful, as if the pain can’t diminish the person who’s experiencing it. I’m not totally sure what I mean by “the person” there—whether a person’s spirit or will or sense of self or the simple fact of their existence. Because certainly the world and the people in it have the ability to wear a person away until nothing is left, and music should be made from that pencil-light place, too. Still: Heavy, slow, beautiful music suggests self-containment in the face of greater powerlessness, or at least it does to me today. It feels like an expression of love, to carry oneself aloft despite one’s own fragility.