Week of 9/15: Faye Webster, Wilco, Turnstile
Eric writes about a Faye Webster song that clicks live, Eli finally listens to a band called Wilco, and Miranda gripes about the placement of Turnstile's perfect interlude on their new album.
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.
Faye Webster - “I Know I’m Funny haha”
Eric Bennett:
Last night I saw Atlanta musician Faye Webster play to a sold-out room of fans who knew every word. Club Cafe is a unique venue for Pittsburgh, part rock club, part cocktail bar, it’s in the South Side, a neighborhood that makes many Pittsburghers groan at the thought it. While not the most spacious room, I love seeing shows at Club Cafe because of its inherent intimacy. While Webster could have had just as much draw at a larger space like Spirit Hall, the closeness you get from the low stage at Club Cafe helped the music connect better with it's audience.
“I Know I’m Funny haha,” the title track from Webster’s new record, came about halfway through the set. If her lyrics didn’t convince you of her inherent comedy, the audience engagement riffing about Animal Crossing villagers calling you out for how long it’s been since you last played, or rattling off Survivor cast favorites certainly would. “Funny” is my favorite song on the record because it finds the perfect balance between Webster’s hushed vocals, the wry storytelling it conveys, and her luxurious arrangements. The pedal steel acts as though it’s talking back to her. This is a song, and record, that I’m glad I saw translated to a live setting. It’s so casual, and that comes across even to a packed space.
Wilco - “I Am Trying to Break Your HearT”
Eli Enis:
So I randomly started listening to Wilco a couple weeks back. And when I say “started” I mean that I had not previously put much effort into listening to the band Wilco. Maybe one cursory Yankee Hotel Foxtrot listen like five years ago. Perhaps a couple Summerteeth songs. The genre Eric and I created Endless Scroll to primarily discuss is indie rock, so I find it funny that I have very little knowledge of one of the most seminal bands in the genre, and until earlier this year when she listened to Yankee for the first time and wrote about it, Miranda wasn’t schooled in Wilco either.
What can I say? Wilco was the last thing young emos and punks were listening to in the early and mid-2010s. While Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene were being referenced by bands like The World is a Beautiful Place…, The Hotelier and even Foxing, it’s hard for me to think of any bands that I listened to in high-school and early college who sounded anything like Wilco. So they missed me. And then when I got fully into indie-rock when I entered my 20s . . . I don’t know, I just reached for other bands. You’re a music listener, you know how it goes. Music selection is fickle and often random and premised on equally fickle circumstance, and the stars just never aligned for me to get to know Jeff Tweedy.
But now I’ve made that album one of my go-to’s over the last couple weeks, and I’ve really enjoyed listening to it! It definitely sounds like it could have a big sticker on the cover that just says Indie Rock, because everything from the thoughtfully downward-glancing vocal delivery and personal yet cleverly relatable lyrics to the blend of acoustic and electric rock instrumentation that sounds intimate yet also primed for car stereos has all of the accoutrements of what people who don’t listen to indie rock think indie rock sounds like. It’s weird to listen to an album like this that’s so canonized and simultaneously have it sound exactly how you expected it to sound but also like so much more.
It’s way more psychedelic and surprisingly structured than I anticipated. Like when “Heavy Metal Drummer” comes in and it suddenly takes a turn into Beck-influenced trip-hop, only to 180 once again into scorching fuzz guitar on the Stones-esque “I’m the Man Who Loves You.” Most surprisingly, though, is how much this album sounds like the damn Beatles. As you, Endless Scroll readers, may know, we did a podcast episode earlier this year with Mo Troper about the Beatles’ influence and lack thereof on indie rock, and one of the conclusions we came to is that it’s been a helluva long time since indie rock bands shamelessly sounded like The Beatles. At first I thought songs like “Kamera” and “Jesus, etc.” sounded like Elliot Smith, and then I was like, “Oh, shit but Elliot Smith sounds like the Beatles.” So yeah. Add Wilco to that list, I don’t know if we mentioned them in that episode.
Anyways, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” is a phenomenal opening track. You probably already know that. But if you were like me and you just skipped over this band for so many reasons because you thought to yourself, “Eh, I get it. It’s Wilco, how essential can they really be?” Well, give it a listen.
Turnstile - “No Surprise”
Miranda Reinert:
Turnstile. What a band. We didn’t talk about the new album on the podcast because the timing just didn’t end up working out, but the amount of times I’ve played “MYSTERY” at bars over the last couple months is probably an even more important testament to how much I enjoy the songs on that record. While it is undeniable that Turnstile rocks, I’m in a bad mood so I’m going to gripe. I think the Turnstile Love Connection EP they put out this year is perfect in every way. The songs work perfectly in a way that, while I really like most of the songs, the album doesn’t achieve for me. My issue mainly centers around the song “NO SURPRISE” which is a perfect interlude/intro track that I have stuck in my head all the time. It’s a goddamn Instagram caption song and I love it.
On the EP, it’s positioned as the shimmering, dreamy intro to “MYSTERY.” It’s the perfect choice. It sets the perfect tone for the accompanying video. It’s perfect. Then on Glow On, it’s pointless. It’s the penultimate song and feels awkward. It doesn’t go into “LONELY DEZIRES” very well. It leaves no impression. I’m just bummed about it. Still a great record though.