Week of 8/25: Paramore, Deafheaven, Self Defense Family, Kacey Musgraves
Eric writes about a Paramore outlier, Eli finally gets his mind blown by Deafheaven, Michael scratches his head at the new Kacey Musgraves single, and Miranda finally likes a long song.
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.
Paramore - “(One of Those) Crazy Girls”
Eric Bennett:
Paramore are a unique band in the unmatched way they’ve been able to keep a tight grip on their place in music for more than a decade. Their influence has become clear, you can hear it in so many new rock bands that have cropped up over the past few years, and Hayley Williams has become a sort of high priestess of pop-punk, despite her recent drift towards soft, interior indie rock. Paramore’s discography is one that I look back on and can remember distinctly, with each era coming at a moment of change for me. They were key for developing the music taste I have now, with my fandom reaching its apex with 2009’s brand new eyes. I saw them on the Honda Civic Tour, which was that record's promotional tour, at what would be one of my first rock concerts. However, the first letdown they ever gave me was their follow-up, their 2013 self-titled record.
Don’t get me wrong, I have come to like a lot of the album, and now understand that much of what I feel are its weaknesses are born of its hour runtime. Some of it is plainly filler. There is one song on that massive tracklist that has always felt unique to me, though, and that is the wide-eyed stalker rocker “(One of Those) Crazy Girls.” Complete with a ‘60s girl group drum pattern and a melody that sways, you can practically hear Willams tilting her head to one side, eyes wide as she sings deranged, yet clearly tongue-in-cheek lyrics about breaking into a new ex’s house. It’s some of the most entertaining storytelling Williams has ever done.
I am fascinated by outlier songs like this, moments where bands with established sounds veer off course for just a moment. I don’t know that I can say it’s my favorite Paramore song, but it’s refreshing in the context of their self-titled. It’s a moment of levity and humor on a record that is terminally self-serious. It’s also one of the very few songs in their catalog that follows a narrative. I think it’s primed to be covered by an artist like Phoebe Bridgers, who would undoubtedly play up the creepiness of it with her soft cooing vocals.
Deafheaven - “Come Back”
Eli Enis:
You ever have one of those bands that you should 100% love, because if you went down a checklist of your favorite musical characteristics then that band would check every single one of those boxes, but you still, for some reason, can’t get into them? Like, at all? For me, that band was Deafheaven. The blackgaze progenitors broke through with the quintessential Sunbather in 2013, back when my taste wasn’t nearly elite enough to appreciate its mountain range of dynamics and textures. At the time, shoegaze and black-metal were two genres I had practically zero reference for, and by the time the even heavier and mightier New Bermuda arrived in October 2015, I was just beginning my years-long journey into the trenches of indie-rock. I wasn’t ready for blackgaze then, either.
By the time Ordinary Corrupt Human Love dropped in 2018, I definitely felt like I had missed the boat. My ears were certainly tuned to appreciate a heady, quasi-shoegaze metal record like the ones Deafheaven had been making, but I remember sitting down to give the band a few college tries only to slam that pause button once the vocals came in and flip to something to cleanse my palate. As someone who’s always tried to appreciate all different types of metal music (black-metal, for whatever reason, was one genre I never gave a fair shot in high-school, back when I was gobbling down literally every band that was mentioned in Revolver or Metal Hammer), vocals have never been a tough sell for me. Some people are acutely picky with how a singer sounds and have to throw the entire band out the window if the vocalist elicits the slightest twinge of displeasure, but as someone who came up on emo, pop-punk and metalcore, spotty vocals are my bread and butter.
That said, something about George Clarke’s shrieks just did not do it for me. I had a viscerally repellent response whenever his voice came shooting through the dreamy patchworks of Sunbather, and watching live videos to try and “get it” that way was to no avail. Ironically, the week Deafheaven decided to drop their controversial Clean Vocals album, Infinite Granite, is when their older stuff finally clicked with me. You’ll have to subscribe to the $5 patreon tier of the podcast and listen to our latest bonus episode to hear my proper takes on that record, but man, I finally get this band now! No one needs to read another glowing graf about what makes Sunbather so spectacularly Brutal Yet Beautiful, so I’ll spare you there and just say that New Bermuda is the one that really blew my mind.
It’s heavier than Sunbather, with a few passages of straight-up death metal chugging and mosh-able riffs, but it also has the languid, meditative flow of an ambient album, shape-shifting gracefully into serene bouts of circular clean licks and breezy grooves. “Come Back” ends with a passage that could loop for 10 hours and I wouldn’t be bored, and the first reference that came to my mind was Alex G’s Beach Music closer, “Snot,” a song that was released exactly one week after New Bermuda and that could arguably be held singularly responsible for stealing my attention away from heavy music in the years to come. There’s a very good chance that if I never heard Beach Music, had my mind completely blown, my taste reoriented and my life course altered (becoming an Indie Kid is ultimately the catalyst for Eric and I’s friendship…), then I could’ve transitioned from hardcore dude to black-metal dude in 2015. I like the way things worked out, and I like that I like Deafheaven now. It feels right.
Self Defense Family - “Dingo Fence”
Miranda Reinert:
Of my many arbitrary artist preferences, my crusade against long songs is maybe my oldest and hardest belief. Few songs deserve to be over five minutes. That’s just how I feel. Lately, though, I’ve been listening to Self Defense Family. They’re a band I’ve always been aware of with a catalog of music that’s too daunting to even approach, but I’m a big Drug Church fan so when they became a subject of discussion between me and a friend I took the recommendations on starting points. After a few primers via the single series I was sold and all in. Then I listened to their album, Try Me. It’s an odd record, notably split by two twenty minute tracks of just an interview with the woman on the cover. I think it’s a compelling record, but the track before the second half of the interview, “Dingo Fence,” has sat with me most.
An over 10 minute, mostly repetitive track that opens with a little bit of fun studio banter that feels sort of out of place in context of the sprawling, arty gruffness of it all. It features an argument about word choice. Cops vs cocks vs cunts. It’s a compelling argument that gives way to the first movement. Heavy bassline. Vocals that only grow in their aggression as the repetition through the bulk of the song flips between the words of the aforementioned arguments. All the dumb (cocks / cunts / cops) they get what they want. The song grows into a roar then collapses into an almost whispered final minutes of repetition. If you’re happy then I’m happy. The alternating softness and aggression of the vocals against the meditative, driving instrumentation breaks through a format of song I think I typically would find uninspiring. Long songs are cool when I like them and this one’s the coolest.
Kacey Musgraves - “star-crossed”
Michael Brooks:
One of my favorite experiences as a concertgoer has to be seeing Kacey Musgraves in Indianapolis at the Murat Theatre back in 2019. It was the first stop on her tour following the release of Golden Hour and about a month before that album took home the Grammy for Album of the Year, so being able to catch a somewhat intimate gig in a modest 2,500 capacity room from one of music’s biggest stars right before their career skyrocketed was pretty awesome. Such a huge part of the DNA of Golden Hour was her blossoming relationship with fellow musician Ruston Kelly, the two ended up getting divorced in July of 2020, which leads us to “star-crossed,” the title track from her upcoming album out next month.
As our first taste of the upcoming Kacey Musgraves album, “star-crossed” ultimately asks more questions than it answers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Released only a couple of weeks before her new album officially drops, “star-crossed” isn’t your traditional lead single in the slightest. The track starts slowly and gently, morphing from something sort of Disney-esque into a flickering neon haze of shimmering synths, gradually building up to something big. What is that something you ask? I have no clue! We know that star-crossed is going to be a divorce album and the intro track certainly doesn’t mince words about that whole situation, but in terms of what the album is actually going to sound like your guess is as good as mine. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, patience is a virtue after all.