Week of 7/21: Caroline Polachek, The Wonder Years, Midwife, Wednesday
Eric fawns over the new Caroline Polachek song, Miranda ponders the nostalgic joys of an early Wonder Years tune, Eli reflects on listening to shoegaze in the woods, and Michael celebrates Wednesday.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Caroline Polachek - “Bunny is a Rider”
Eric Bennett:
It’s obvious by now that much of 2021’s music is material shelved during the pandemic. Mostly, I think that the decision to delay was misguided. Perhaps now there’s touring on the table, but otherwise what was the benefit?
Despite that being my belief, Caroline Polachek’s excellent new single is my most salient example against it. “Bunny is a Rider” is a summer pop smash that could only come from Caroline and is completely worth the wait. This is a song I’m going to sneak into the queue of every party and that I’m going to blast in my friends’ cars. I can’t imagine experiencing this song without these settings full of joy to accompany it.
Musically it feels in line with Polachek’s leering latex pop styling, and its production is classic Danny L Harle. I mentioned to a coworker familiar with Harle that he’d thrown bird sounds on “Bunny” only for her to reply “that man sure loves a bird call.” Me too, Danny, me too. Along with those birds, Harle has furnished the production with whistles and the laughter of his baby daughter Nico. Upon my first listen, I thought maybe this could be a reclamation of the whistle chorus. It did not turn out to be that, but I’d still like to see someone attempt that. Polachek’s vocal performance is fascinating as her voice is stretched out to an inhuman degree. She goes from elongated delivery to choppy, staccato performance at complete random. While they might not announce it for some time, this is almost certainly our first taste of a follow-up to Pang, and I will wait impatiently to hear more.
The Wonder Years - “Leavenhouse. 11:30”
Miranda Reinert:
On a recent bonus episode of the podcast counterpart to this here newsletter, Michael made his first Tumblr dot com account. To figure out the context of that you’ll have to pay us $5 and listen to an episode about Ed Sheeran, but today for free you can hear my thoughts on the song I titled my longtime tumblr account after: “Leavenhouse. 11:30.” by The Wonder Years.
I consider this among my top 10 favorite songs of theirs and maybe that’s not a good take but it’s how I feel. I think a lot of The Wonder Years’ early work is maligned because it’s somewhat jokey and far from what they’d become, but I think there are a lot of songs— especially those that ended up on Sleeping on Trash— that strike a good balance of humor and Dan Campbell’s signature hopelessness of the first two real records. I’m not sure where the consensus lies with The Wonder Years as a band and whether people who are maybe younger than me enjoy the early stuff, but “Don’t Open The Fridge” is my most played of all their songs.
I think “Leavenhouse. 11:30.” just encompasses everything I was so drawn to about Dan Campbell’s writing when I was first listening to them. It’s just a song about playing local shows with your pals, but the specificities place it in this very real world. You can find the VFW hall he’s talking about. He mentions people by name (Brian in this one is the singer from a band called Inkling, or so Genius tells me). He’s making grand, romantic statements about moments that changed his and his friends’ lives, but the song remains self aware. He’s overly referential (both a reference to The Get Up Kids and his own high school band in this one). But it’s also just fun to listen to and will always have a place in my heart.
Unfortunately, making my tumblr and listening to The Wonder Years in 2011 are probably the catalysts to following ten years of my own life … just being an asshole online talking about music. Jeez
Midwife — “2020”
Eli Enis:
Last week, I was on vacation with my family at a cottage we rented on Keuka Lake in Western New York. It was an idyllic setting — a near-100-year-old little house directly across a small access road from one of the most gorgeous bodies of water in the United States. The building was also surrounded by a small yet isolated patch of untamed woods, and one day I climbed up through the brush while wearing just my flip-flops, running shorts and t-shirt, and made my way up to a small clearing that was filled with overgrown weeds. I was listening to the new Midwife album while I was puttering around in nature like I used to do all the time as a kid, and it was one of those inconsequential experiences that I’ll hopefully never forget.
I got hip to Midwife back in the beginning of 2020 when she released her album Forever on The Flenser label. On that record and her other 2020 release, a 34 minute 7” called In / Heaven, Madeline Johnston made cloudy, droney ambient music with the swollen beauty of shoegaze and the threatening aura of black metal. It was interesting music that I almost wanted to enjoy more than I actually did, but her new record, Luminol, is exactly my fucking shit. For this one, she recruited three members of DIIV, Dan Barrett of Have A Nice Life, and a couple other folks to help fill out her sound into something more robust and gazey. The guitars are more present, the looped, hymnal hooks are stickier, and there’s an aching spirituality to the delivery that’s really impressive.
One of the standout tracks, which I listened to on-repeat while prancing around the woods hacking overgrown weeds with a big stick, was the song “2020.” It’s a very innocuous title, but the track threw me for a loop when I instantly recognized the iconic refrain: “And it feeeels, and it feeeeels like, heaven’s so far away.” It’s from the Offspring’s 1997 power ballad “Gone Away,” a song that I blasted frequently as a kid but that I hadn’t thought about in years. I certainly never expected anyone in Midwife’s world of gothic ambient shoegaze music to be interpolating that line, but Midwife flipped that shit into one of the most pained, pleading and succinct encapsulations of the song’s titular year. Despite its dismal implications and drowsy sonic character, hearing it in the setting that I did was a rejuvenating joy, and a personal reminder of how great music sounds outside of the urban setting I’m constantly confined to (my desk, car, city streets, etc.).
Wednesday - “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do”
Michael Brooks:
These days, there’s not a whole lot that I’m too sure about, but I do know how much I love the band Wednesday. Since the release of last year’s excellent I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, the band's second full-length but first album with a full lineup, the music of Wednesday has only continued to grow on me. Their upcoming album Twin Plagues, which will be out early next month, is easily one of my most anticipated records of the rest of the year. I’ve loved all of the singles so far from it and “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do” is no exception.
The quickest way to my heart is with a little bit of pedal steel, everybody knows this by now, and the latest single from Twin Plagues finds the band channeling their alt-country influences into one of their prettiest songs to date. Whereas previous singles were filled with fuzzy guitars and woozy melodies, “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do” is quiet and reserved but every bit as satisfying. Over a shuffling electronic drum beat Karly Hartzman delivers an achingly beautiful vocal performance, detailing the feelings of being in love and longing for someone, and taking those universal feelings and turning it into something special. Wednesday… what a band.