Originally Published via the old filters / new light newsletter on February 1, 2022
Yot Club – Japan
Like a video game with divergent narratives based on player choices, Yot Club’s indie-surf rhythms have high replay value (I got covid in early Jan so yeah I’ve played some Witcher 3 this month). If I do manage to get off the couch before the snow melts, “Japan” will surely fuel frigid parking lot gear up sessions and more than likely be looping within the confines of my cranium while I (god willing) carve some powder.
Chastity Belt – Fear
Just going to lean into the RPG theme this week. The girls out of Walla Walla, Washington bring all their Pacific Northwest grunge chops out on this 2021 single, which has been doing battle with “Japan” for my most played in the past few weeks. “Fear” is a straight-forward dish cooked to perfection, it’s few ingredients meshing perfectly to produce a feast worthy of a ki–ahem–queen.
Kendall Street Company – Marty Song
Where my Wahoos at? Kendall Street serves up the southern funk and jam rock from the land of Monticello and plentiful national championships (I cater to my audience, which by some elite twist of fate is UVA dominated). Powerful sax and odes to Widespread Panic similarly dominate “Marty Song,” my personal favorite off Kendall Street’s diverse catalog, which draws on bluegrass, the great American jam bands, plus improvisational funk, all of which lend themselves to impressive live performances. I know this because I was fortunate enough to catch them in Cambridge this past year. I also know this because the aforementioned UVA contingent likes to remind anyone within earshot of how many times they’ve seen Kendall Street Company in their native Charlottesville.
Milo Korbenski – All Hallows Grieve
That drum machine could use it’s lint screen cleaned but boy are we glad Milo didn’t bother.
This song feels very discrete in its components but still manages to come together in a progressive fashion; those sharp guitar licks serving as the glue between disparate sonic pieces.
Graham Nash – Better Days
All this controversy surrounding Neil, but what about Graham? What about the “N” in CSNY? The Ringo of the Deja Vu crew? Alas, I yearn for better days…
When your (favorite artist) love has (re)moved away (their songs from Spotify)
You must face yourself and say
I remember better days At least he can’t remove my vinyls
Addison Del Mastro on why we should put automatic doors between station platforms and subways, plus a cogent takedown of rugged individualism in the public realm:
“The deeper problem—the problem that this folk libertarianism is congenitally incapable of seeing, much less addressing—is that getting from A to B should not require one to put skin in the game. Crossing the street, or driving it, should not entail a meditation on one’s mortality.
[Matthew] Crawford does something that right-leaning intellectuals do often, and almost never notice. They find justifications for hardship or risk, and praise the character that can face them, without distinguishing between natural or inherent risks and manmade ones. They treat policy failures, or problems easily remediated by policy, as opportunities to build character. They betray a touch of self-loathing masquerading as self-reliance. They implicitly view solving problems through policy as cheating one’s way through a life that is supposed to be difficult.”
We visualize the world as we saw it over the last 15 seconds, not as it occurs instantaneously:
“In our latest research, we discovered a new mechanism that, among others, can explain this illusory stability. The brain automatically smoothes our visual input over time. Instead of analysing every single visual snapshot, we perceive in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds. So, by pulling together objects to appear more similar to each other, our brain tricks us into perceiving a stable environment. Living “in the past” can explain why we do not notice subtle changes that occur over time.
In other words, the brain is like a time machine which keeps sending us back in time. It’s like an app that consolidates our visual input every 15 seconds into one impression so that we can handle everyday life. If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would feel like a chaotic place with constant fluctuations in light, shadow and movement. We would feel like we were hallucinating all the time.”
Indie rock makes everything better. Especially zoning board meetings.
Photography by Maam Fall @stilllyyfe
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