Two Songs That Amazed Me Last Winter

File under: Non-hip hop listening that somehow spun bleak mid-winter mid-evenings into pre-bedtime revelations. Mucho gusto.

“Monomania,” Deerhunter
Amazing how a sprig of melody can tease despair into a wider, protean ache pulsing with ecstatic light. You can feel hope or rage or some nameless, riveting aggregate of the two. That's one of my favorite moments as a listener: "What, exactly, am I feeling right now?" And upon subsequent listens: "What techniques are being used to do this to me?"

This landed on my playlist after I found an article about the 10th anniversary of Deerhunter's Monomania. The writer talked about frontman Bradford Cox's state at the time in relation to the title track, which I listened to right after reading the article.

“In my head/There's something rotten and dead/I can't compete with,” he croaks in a highly processed voice seconds before the song launches into one of Deerhunter's signature Heroic Layered Fadeouts that take up half the song. Except they subvert the formula so the usual dreamy surrender becomes disintegration. There's a very pretty and simple guitar melody, but it is subsumed by what I take to be an obsessively sculpted sonic portrait of allostatic overload. Alcoholism. Nervous breakdown.

The little melody gets buffeted and nearly drowned by groaning walls of feedback (wait, is that the sound of a go-kart engine or chainsaw they're throwing in there?), and it's oddly soaring, if soaring means escaping any geometric plane at steep angles regardless of the orientation of the surrounding world. I listened to it six times in a row before bed and it felt like the only important thing that happened all day.

“Unwritten Law,” The Sound
Most of the time I "shop and hunt" with my music list. I hear a track that wallops me. Calculate that a track that good will have maybe two others that make me feel that way. Play the LP, harvest the handful of star efforts into the big list and move on.

But if intriguing singles from a particular act keep surfacing—especially one whose sound and smarts feel ahead of the curve or spring out of a lacuna in my mental map of an era—I'll stop and listen longer. Enter Jeopardy by The Sound. For the purposes of feeding readers a morsel, I'm going to put a single track at the end of this entry, but I played this thing front to back and was rewarded.

At first I assumed I was hearing a polished and studied post-punk revival band from c. 2008, like somebody trying to subtly optimize old recipes. But I looked it up and gaped at the result. They did this in 1980. They predicted every slick, moody trick that bands like INXS and Flock of Seagulls and U2 would use to flood the charts in '83. It's punchy and saturnine. Full of good hooks. Rutilant with a smoldering confidence. It shifts from austere to jubilant—within and between songs—with such sure-footedness and absolute trust in their arrangements and mixing. Like a sentence that reveals just what it means to and not a syllable more.

After I did my first room-to-room tour of Jeopardy, here's the track I circled back to put on repeat while drinking Starkville-style toddies and pitying every dunce who was not in that room with me. (One of many nifty touches here: I love how the chorus is just instrumental the first two times and he sings on the third one. Showcase that toothsome bass string and beautiful lead melody, let it glisten and chug while the lead singer broods in the cut to emerge at the end. All the best drugs at all the right potency in the divine sequence.)