First Listens

Hi, welcome back to Taxonomy. Thanks for opening this email. If you’re new to the newsletter, I regularly do a little post in which I reflect on records I heard for the first time in the previous month, paired with a little intro-ish essay. That’s this. It’s a longer one this month.

The Cindy Lee piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago seemed like it struck a chord with people. I came out in May 2023, and I’ve published plenty of work under this name, but this is the first thing I’ve published that directly addresses and is obviously informed by my experiences as a trans person and as a woman. It’s a nerve-wracking thing to put yourself out there in this way, for a number of reasons, so I’m very grateful for the response I got.

I started writing criticism in 2004, when I realized I could get into shows for free if I put together a review. The first show I reviewed for the now-404ed liveneworleans.com was Deftones at the House of Blues. The setlist.fm listing says that show was on October 10, 2004 (and that the set was heavy on Adrenaline and Around the Fur songs, which is weird considering Deftones was only a year-ish old at that point). At the time, I was deep into a burgeoning-hipster repudiation of anything I’d been attached to in my younger life (i.e., like 16 months earlier). Deftones had not yet been reinterpreted and properly presented by writers like Ian Cohen—you can go read Andrew Bryant’s 4.7 stunt review of Deftones on Pitchfork right now—but they’d managed to slip through the filters I was carefully attaching to my perception of music, bands, songs, scenes, vibes—all ways of keeping things out, rather than preserving the "purity" of what I'd let in. I remember being astounded that the crowd at HOB was mostly dudes who I understood to be frat bros, and who in retrospect were probably Madball-ish hardcore bros puffed into Affliction tees. I’d absorbed the idea that Deftones made soft, emotionally supple, breathless romantic music, and that the aggression was essentially a kind of mask, or maybe just an unsophisticated way of expressing their essential softness, a way of saying “we really meant it when we said ‘Hey you, big mood, guide me to shelter.’” Or maybe the heaviness was essentially amplification—a way of making the music swoon harder. Not for making the audience lose their collective shit or because heavy music is simply fun to listen to. In other words: It was music for people like me, not people like that. That’s how I felt about Deftones in October 2004.

Here’s how I felt about Deftones in October 2003. That month, they played Twiropa (RIP), and they were so loud they blew a cone in their massive speaker array during “Change (In the House of Flies).” The roof above the stage was low, and they had a wall of klieg lights behind them that kept the band silhouetted. I don’t remember my impressions of the crowd. Everything was a blur: the lines between people, the borders of the songs, the whole room seemed to churn in a gentle but persistent way, lurching like your shoulders at the end of a long cry. That night, Robbie and I let the crowd push us across the warehouse floor. We drifted with the flow of bodies. At the beginning of the night, we were stage right, halfway back. By the end, we were three rows from the front, extreme stage left. At some point between October 2003 and October 2004, I abandoned the ability to lose myself in a crowd, to give my body over to noise and sound, to sway and be moved. I started working the door at Twiropa shortly after, making me both an insider and a mere observer of the scene.

I wrote as a man for 19 or so years before publishing my Dead and Company odyssey with The Ringer, which was the first piece I put out as Sadie Sartini Garner. (Salute to Justin Sayles, my editor on the piece, who didn’t miss a beat on the name thing in our correspondence while I was putting it all together. One day he saw my coming-out post on twitter, the next he called me Sadie in an email without making it into a whole thing.) I’ve been thinking about Dead and Company a lot lately, in part because their run at Sphere has lit up what I thought was the dying flame of my affection for the music of the Grateful Dead. Rachelle and I had written off the idea of going to Sphere for multiple reasons, as had most of my deadhead friends, but by the end of the first set of the first night, I was texting people in two time zones to see if they wanted to put together a trip to Vegas.

I hinted at this in the Ringer piece, but in the five or so summers that I paid deep, deep attention to Dead and Company, they gave me a way back into a personalized, affect-driven relationship with music. That’s a depersonalized, affectless way of saying I cried at so many Dead shows between 2019 and 2023. In New York, in July 2022, while we were sitting behind home plate at Citi Field, the last night of a tour Rachelle and I had traveled up to the Bay and later across the country for, they played “Ramble On Rose,” I song I’ve loved for a long time, and I screamed and cried and wailed and got a rose tattooed on my leg the next day. Jonathan Williger was eight rows in front of me, I’m sure he could hear me.

I’m still not sure what moved me so profoundly in that moment—it wasn’t that good of a version—but we’d seen four shows on that tour, and listened to all the rest of it via bootlegs, and we were there thousands of miles from home for its finale, fully aware that in a few moments, we’d be nine months away from once again being in an environment capable of producing the kind of wail to which I’d given myself in that moment. The 2022 tour was the first time in ages that I’d found myself a part of a music scene that seemed to make space not only for artistry, but for a deep emotional response to that artistry and a physical expression of that response. In other words, going to Dead and Company shows made me feel the same way going to basically any kind of show made me feel in high school—the same spirit that made me skank across the House of Blues floor at an all-ages Less Than Jake show in 2002 is the same spirit that made me weep any time Dead and Company played “Terrapin Station.”

I spent a lot of time last summer and fall thinking about how my relationship with music and fandom and criticism would have been different if I’d been raised a girl. One of the things I keep coming back to is that girls are allowed to be fans—girls are expected to be fans, which is to say, merely fans. Historically, this has been one of the music press' most pernicious ways of not taking women's opinions seriously, as they’re presumed to have been derived from an emotional response to the music. It’s also meant that women’s reaction to music, the effect of pure witness, of standing in front of a band and allowing their music to do whatever it is their music is trying to do, is essentially void if you're someone who thinks they take music seriously; it is unmanly, which is to say, intellectually suspect. And if you’re a person of any gender with any self-awareness and a lack of self-definition or self-sufficiency, it's not hard to conclude that any kind of direct, immediate reaction to music shouldn’t be trusted.

There's an episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete in which Little Pete becomes obsessed with a local quality control inspector, because the tidiness he brings to all interactions is everything his own father is not. The episode ends with the inspector eating an entire barbecue chicken, cleaning the bones perfectly, then reassembling it—which the Petes' dad knows is, simply, not the way you're supposed to eat barbecue. Cool-headed standoffishness is a reasonable modality sometimes. But sometimes you find yourself articulating a dead bird's skeleton when you should be enjoying yourself.

At some point between May 2023 and May 2024, I think something in my writing began to shift. Maybe it began a few years ago, when I stopped trying to justify or perpetuate hype as a way of inserting myself into the company of good taste. But whatever the case, I’m trying to kill the critic in my head and nurture the fan in my heart. It takes a lot longer than you’d think.

Here’s what I listened to for the first time in May 2024. If you can’t stomach more black metal, please be patient—it’s finally warm enough to wear short sleeves, which can only mean it’s nearly dub and tropicália season.

(Albums with asterisks are highly recommended.)

Hellish Form, Deathless (2023)

Willow Ryan screams and plays guitar, bass, and synth in the brutal, sludgy Body Void. Sometimes with certain kinds of slow and heavy music, the thickness and ugliness can transmute into a form of beauty. I love that kind of thing—it’s what keeps me attached to black metal and sludge and drone—and Body Void is absolutely not it. Their album Atrocity Machine was one of my faves last year, in part because it never threatens with the magisterial; you get the sense that if you closed your eyes to try and get lost in the sublimity of their music, they’d spit in your face. Hellish Form is a different project from Willow, still sludgy as hell but with a stronger goth/funeral doom vibe. What that means, functionally, is that the synths aren’t distorted, they’re kept high in the mix, there’s a clean guitar every now and then, and the music itself is very, very pretty. These are long, slow, theoretically heavy songs whose chords sustain long enough to melt into one another. It feels like the music that would play at the moment of death—it’s profoundly shaped by noise and dissonance but radiates light. At its best when it’s mixing the two, like most things.

Trhä, endlhëdëhaj qáshmëna ëlh vim innivte (2022) * (Pick of the month)

Any time you encounter a black metal artist whose name seems vaguely scandinavian, take pause. When I started listening to this music, I knew that two kinds of people played it: raging white supremacist neo-nazis and leftist trans girls. (Turns out other people play black metal, too.) Every band I got curious about, I’d nervously google “is [bandname] white supremacist” and inevitably end up on this very long, impossible-to-navigate series of posts on r/rabm (red-and-black metal) that painstakingly goes through metal band after metal band to determine whether or not they’re fascists. Some of this is helpful, some of it boils down to a kind of Six Degrees of Burzum game that can feel very tedious. Nevertheless: The name and album title here made me nervous, but turns out it’s some dude from Texas named Damien who sings in a made-up language and has been assessed as “fine” by r/rabm. If you read last month’s First Listens, you know I’m a sucker for black metal recorded at a low enough fidelity to turn the guitars into gray mush, and this album does precisely that. Damien’s got a great command of dynamics. Sometimes when atmospheric black metal bands play around with melody and tone, it all feels like textural churn, like they’re just trying to change things up. The second track here has a little jewel-box keyboard line that eventually starts to sound like a gamelan, which turns the song around and heightens the drama without resorting to vague Wagner-esque metal cliches. Damien seems genuinely melancholy, and he’s not a fascist.

Despiritualized / Toorvond, Despiritualized / Toorvond (2024)

I bought this split because I’ve never encountered a black metal album with ducks on its cover before, and to be honest with you, I wanted to encounter a black metal album with ducks on its cover.

Fuubutsushi, Meridians (2024) *

Sometimes I think Sage, Jussell, Prymek, and Shiroishi’s 2020 album Fuubutsushi is the last plainly beautiful album I’ll ever fall in love with. That record was made by remote in the middle of everything, and it felt like every Zoom birthday party I went to that year was trying (and failing) to capture the same feeling of warm joy radiating across distance. It pains me to say that I don’t listen to a ton of this kind of music anymore, but it makes me very happy to see them continue to push themselves and the idea of an avant-garde tenderness.

Björk, Drawing Restraint #9 (2005)

It is hard to listen to Björk. Not because the music is artistically challenging, though it often is, but because it demands that you get on her level. I’m not usually on Björk’s level. I’ve never heard an album of hers that I didn’t admire, but, with the exception of Vespertine, I’ve never fallen in love with one, either. I keep trying to find a way around saying something about how it reminds me of opera in that I know I will love it when I sit down with it but I also know that I’m never going to sit down with it. But I think what I really mean is that I have yet to hear a Björk record that simply makes me want to dance without making me feel a little bad about just wanting to dance. I know that’s not always her intention, but the rhythmic complexity of her music, and the way she rubs textures against one another to create a little locomotive friction, nevertheless makes me want to move my body first and my heart second, if at all. I will grant that there is likely the residue of misogyny gunking this up for me, but the obvious singles aside, this is where I always seem to find myself when I hear her. If you have a key for me, please share it.

Church Chords, elvis, he was Schlager (2024) *

You could break this album down into its component parts—and the massive guest list that includes Takako Minekawa, Nels Cline, Jeff Parker, Josh Johnson, Macie Stewart, Eric Slick, and a thousand others certainly encourages it—but, wonderfully, it doesn’t sound anything like anything those artists have done before, with the possible exception of Minekawa. The knocking drums of “Recent Mineral,” the way Genevieve Artadi’s vocal slithers over them, the shaker, the very distant ghost howls—if you approached trip-hop or Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” the same way Stereolab approached exotica, you’d at least be in the neighborhood. I can’t believe Elvis turned out to have been schlager, though.

Alex Zhang Hungtai, Young Gods Run Free (2024) *

Ten years ago, Hungtai was a Montrealer doing David Lynch motorcycle grease post-sock-hop haunt-pop under the name Dirty Beaches ("The Lord Knows Best," absolutely, yes, what a song, now we're talking hauntological pop). Now he’s doing completely abstracted, virtually (though not literally) formless music that sometimes gets labeled jazz because there’s a sax every now and then but really feels more like a Fluxus project or, simply, minimalist noise. Young Gods Run Free is mixed extremely well; it’s technically busy music, but it sounds like it’s being staged in all four corners of an airplane hangar with the listener in the middle. There are moments of lamentation and a noir-ish vibe that does remind me of those Dirty Beaches records, and if you’re not someone who’s spent much time with abstract music it may feel a bit too chaotic for your taste. The best path in I can give you is to trust that there’s a logic to the music, follow the beat of the tambourine, and try to let it convince you that the rest of the sound is being drawn in huge arcs around its central beat. Then, once you believe that, forget it entirely.

Glitter, Pasteboard (2005)

Shoegaze-lookin-ass band name and album title.

Bratmobile, Pottymouth (1993)

One of the reasons why I stole this First Listens concept from Daniel Bromfield is because I like that it forces a kind of public honesty about where I’m coming from as a critic. It also means it can be uncomfortably humiliating when I wander into a blind spot. I have plenty of writerly understanding of riot grrrl as a scene, both politically and musically, but very little actual musical understanding—which is to say, I haven’t really put in the time with very many of those records. This isn’t the moment, but some day I’ll write about what it feels like to search for an unexperienced girlhood, and how being a 39-year-old music critic shapes who I “believe” the teenaged me would’ve been. Because it reasonably matches my values now and flatters my self image, I often think I’d’ve been deep into every one of these bands. Realistically, I would’ve probably been less uncomfortable with the artful artificiality of Garbage and would’ve listened to No Doubt even more than I already did.

The Julie Ruin, Hit Reset (2016) *

And that means that my feelings towards Kathleen Hanna, while strong, are based more in my perception of how she’s conducted herself as a public figure than in my love of her music. Years ago, Rachelle and I watched The Punk Singer, and while I was at the time more struck by the pure and deep admiration Adam Horovitz has for her, it also helped me to see that she was/is a much more interesting model of a kind of femininity than the mainstream press gave her credit for, at least at the time I was most ardently absorbing it.

Dr. John, In the Right Place (1973) *

For decades, I thought Dr. John represented every bad and half-informed New Orleans cliche at once: the yat-zat-zattin’, alligator poboy, down da bayou, strawberry daiquiri, above-ground grave, low-hanging moss, 100% authentic real deal the likes of which only Nawlins could make. And it’s true, that is the image that he projected into the world, or at least the image the rest of the world projected back to him when they heard the lil Toussaint swish and oooh! of this record’s title track. What I got wrong is that all of that stuff is great as long as you don’t believe it means anything. Spoiler alert: Authenticity is a performance, too.

Winter, ...and she’s still listening (EP) (2024) *

Out of the crop of New Wave of American Shoegaze musicians, Winter is the one I find myself returning to the most. I like a decent amount of these artists, but so much of the music they make seems to rely on gradual swells and melodic uplift that, yeah, definitely makes you feel things, which is why most of the praise and worship music they played at evangelical churches in the 00s used the same tactics. It can be easy to let the genre’s inherent characteristics—including the longing and nostalgia that was implied in the original shoegaze bands’ records, and the longing and nostalgia that invoking them now can provoke in people my age and older—do all the heavy lifting. Winter’s music is more artfully constructed and emotionally present, and probably closer to dream-pop than shoegaze anyway. Her 2022 album What Kind of Blue Are You? was stately and poised (listen to how elegantly she bounces the lead guitar line off of the beat in “wish I knew”), but on this new EP she’s taking a few more risks—there’s candy-colored trip-hop, a song that reminds me of ML Buch, Visions-era Grimes, and George Clanton in equal measure, and another that sounds like an acoustic bedroom-emo version of Shawn Mullins’ “Lullaby” that explodes into breathy “Fire Eye’d Boy” love rock.

Crumb, Jinx (2019)

I like it when it reminds me of The Cardigans, get nervous when it plays with the backbeat/electric piano combo that now signifies low-stakes young-adult jazz, and try to justify the difference between those two things to myself for the rest of the album.

Hysterical Love Project, Lashes (2023) *

It’s fun, sometimes, to be forced to reckon with how much rock criticism shaped my understanding of what “good” and “bad” music was at a very young age. Why did I not like Portishead? It’s too late to be 14 and listening to “Sour Times,” but it’s actually a perfect time to be 39 and listening to Lashes, an album that sounds more like Garbage drained of their technicolor, really, but nevertheless makes me feel the way Portishead does: like heartbreak is a way of looking at the world that has little to do with your relationship status.

Cornelius, Ethereal Essence (2024) *

A decade or so ago, Keigo Oyamada played the Hollywood Bowl as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra's backing band. (The night also included Towa Tei, Buffalo Daughter, and a reunited Cibo Matto, plus an appearance from Yoko Ono.) If 1997's Fantasma brought the globetrotting polyglot vibes of YMO's Haruomi Hosono into The Beastie Boys' Nineties, Cornelius' last few records have felt far more influenced by YMO's Ryuichi Sakamoto. Like last year's Dream in Dream and much of 2017's magnificent Mellow Waves, Ethereal Essence bubbles along on layered modular synth tones that have been tuned toward a kind of sighing nostalgia—not bittersweet, just noting the effects of the passage of time. This one's almost entirely instrumental, and includes a cover of Sakamoto's "Thatness and Thereness"; listen to the Sakamoto original and you'll get a feel for how much of the Cornelius record sounds. I'm not sure what to make of the bullying allegations that got Oyamada fired from the Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony team, which is not an equivocation—I'm genuinely uncertain how to or what I think about the whole thing.

Lust Hag, Lust Hag (2024) *

Oftentimes, black metal artists are praised for the ways their music departs from the genre’s conventions, as if the best thing a black metal record can do is not be black metal. It’s easier to write about exceptions than it is to qualify norms, especially norms that are executed at a high level. This is probably why so many metal writers (including myself) resort to digging up the most fetid adjectives we can find in hopes of conveying why this particular brutality works for me. I can’t give you a why here, at least not an easily translatable one, other than: This is very, very, very well-executed blackened death metal. The songs are built patiently and destroyed quickly, rhythms are chopped into being then abandoned for the sake of sludge, and it's all exceptionally dynamic without steering too far away from black metal and death metal in a substantial way. The songs imply a largeness that never feels cosmic or spectral, just viciously human. None of this is revolutionary. People tend to privilege the creation of new forms over the perfection of existing ones, which is reasonable: Praising a post-punk album for its fidelity to Gang of Four can make you feel like a rockabilly babe doing up her Bettie Page cut before the Reverend Horton Heat show, i.e. hopelessly devoted to a scene that is functionally inanimate. But there’s something beautiful about being able to work within an inherited form and find new ways of expression within it. Most trans women who play black metal tend to approach it from a skewed angle. This makes sense to me—when a style of music is perceived to be as masculine as metal tends to be, and you’re trying to drain every drop of testosterone from your body, it’s counterproductive not to find ways around that masculinity. This is part of what made me fall in love with black metal years before I even began to wonder about my gender, and it’s what powers some of my favorite artists. Lust Hag’s Eleanor Harper will throw in a spare keyboard melody that might be read as girly in another context, and she’s not afraid to play around with a little cutesy imagery on her album covers, but it all stays subservient to the primary goal, which is making an album so good, so heavy, so powerful it’s completely undeniable. She’s playing by the rules that were set down decades ago by boys in Norway and Tampa, rules that have been tied up in and definitive of various forms of masculinity ever since, and she’s using them to hail “the beautiful pissed-off princess in us all.” What else can I say? It works for me.

Ace Frehley, Ace Frehley (1978)

Not much I can say here that hasn't been said already.