I put on my son’s goggles and swam down to the bottom of the pool to see if I could figure out how to turn on the pool cleaning robot that looked like it had a past life detecting hidden land mines. I was down there touching it and fiddling and trying to figure out what was going on like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and I never got it right but when I came up I took the goggles off and the world looked vibrant and new. The blues were so blue. I asked my son, “Is this the way you see the world whenever you take these goggles off?” and he said “What are you saying dad? I don’t understand what you mean.”
Lync, These Are Not Fall Colors
Because the music writing world is, uh, what it currently is, my conversations about the reissue of Olympia band Lync’s sole album, 1994’s These Are Not Fall Colors have taken place entirely via group chat. One chat was hearing it collectively for the first time, and the conversation quickly dissolved into whether the album was emo or not. The answer is: yes, sort of, in that same way that Sunny Day Real Estate were emo, but the knotty, mathy, messy kind of emo, not the wining kind. Truthfully, I’ve always heard Lync in the context of another band from the Olympia area: Unwound, whose dark, hypnotic riffs gestured at barely controlled simmering rage. My other group chat was much more familiar with the album so we mostly spent our time talking about music like this, i.e. music that sounds like its being held together with duct tape and the kind of youthful desperation that comes with endlessly screaming into the void because no one is listening. In his recent Deep Voices column, my friend Matthew Schnipper writes about Lync and the unofficial subgenre that sometimes veers toward post-hardcore, but really is its own thing entirely: falling apart music. Schnipper, who is on that second group chat, is deeply familiar with Lync. In fact, I’d guess he put me on to the album somewhere around 2008. Despite growing up in Seattle and going to college in Olympia, it took me moving to New York and working at a music magazine to find out about Lync. That’s probably how it should be—the album feels like a secret. Back in 2016, I wrote a short blurb about it for Pitchfork as part of their 50 Best Pacific Northwest Indie Albums list. What I wrote then is still true:
In 1994, the Olympia-based trio Lync released These Are Not Fall Colors, their one and only studio album. Co-produced by Calvin Johnson and released on his K Records, it feels out of step with the label’s significantly less dark output; to hear music similar to Lync’s, you’d have to look to Tumwater, the next town over, where Unwound were also excavating emotional turmoil from scraping feedback. This was the Northwest in the mid-’90s, after all. Anguish was plentiful.
These Are Not Fall Colors unspools like a collection of song sketches, half-formed ideas that members Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider pummeled into working shape. Bertram’s bass sounds like it’s being piped through a wet cardboard box, and his and Jayne’s lyrics are repetitive sentence fragments, endlessly spiraling toward a nonexistent conclusion. It all hangs together beautifully. Album opener “B” begins mid-sentence: “And you’ve proved once again/In the bubble that you only need your own air to breathe/And a knife in the bubble says/It’s not killing unless the killing is serial.” Jayne and Bertram repeat slight variations of this until the song fades away. It’s a shame that These Are Not Fall Colors is currently out of print, but it makes sense, too; an album this insular was designed to be discovered and passed around covertly, forever a hidden gem.
Lil Yachty, “TESLA”
Look, it’s not lost on me that the last time I wrote one of these newsletters was, like, a full year ago. It was about Lil Yachty’s sad, ethereal, accidental smash hit “Poland,” which felt fragile and beautiful and weird, and, as expected, got discussed into the ground. After releasing an “experimental” album that was his most critically acclaimed work but sounded less adventurous than when he just raps, he dove back in to what he does best, and what he does best is “TESLA.” Over a stuttered synth with plenty of grit he brings back that “Poland” warble. Crucially, he’s entirely alone in the video—this song isn’t sad, but it’s not really a party song either. It’s the sound of restless creativity, a willingness to not only try some stuff but actually release it. Rap’s filled with fearless experimentation, Yachty is one of the best at realizing that experimentation can be an accumulation of small, semi-nonsensical but hyper specific ideas. I listen to “TESLA” right around 4pm every day.
World Sick, “Empathetic Blues”
“Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing” muttered over and over against the despondent crunch and bleed of loud guitars. Meditative and devastating. This is an Australian band with a good name. I know nothing else except that it takes a certain kind of a confidence to hinge a song on a common question, to allow its depth to just exist. To let words be words. There are other lyrics here, they’re all mundane. They’re all good. The end of the song is just trails of grungy feedback and a simple patter of drums. It came out in 2019. A different time.
Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, “Targeted Individual”
I hear this Wicca Phase Springs Eternal song as being about the weirdness of internet fame—of being perceived at a level that far outstrips your importance, of the parasocial relationships people develop so deeply and easily. Adam McIlwee, who records as Wicca Phase, doesn’t have the answers to why these behaviors are cultivated online—”I don’t know what to make of it, how am I to know what to say about it?”—and why they’ve been cultivated in such a way that benefits him. He just has mixed feelings about how the internet and social media have brought him a career, but also make it so that his every movement is scrutinized and tracked. It almost sounds paranoid until you remember that it’s exactly what is happening to all of us, it’s just far more mundane in reality. Someone, somewhere, can access every single one of my browsing habits—mostly they just seem to use that information to sell me boxy white T-shirts though. We all make deals with the devil sometimes! Anyway. On a trip to Greece with my wife and child this summer, I listened almost exclusively to Wicca Phase, his awkward baritone acting as revelation and meditation as I tried not to throw up on a series of really bumpy boats.
Dirt Buyer, “Changes”
Listening to Joe Sutkowski, aka Dirt Buyer, is like staring at the sun. Are we supposed to be hearing this? Are we allowed to? This is existentially tortured music written by a person who sounds like he leaves nothing on the floor. His voice, full, melodic—he almost gets into a Thom Yorke warble for a second here—is destructive in its ability to convey emotion, but even if it wasn’t, I’d be pretty clear on his POV based on the lyric: "You’re chewing on your fingers and the whole world runs out of time,” which he repeats over shambling guitar, sounding defeated. The song is a couple years old, but that sentiment applies to…everything more than it ever has. There’s a new Dirt Buyer album out, it is a huge bummer but in that way where you can’t stop listening because of the deep truths that come with the indignities-slash-dignities of everyday living. Sometimes it feels good to feel bad.