OCTOBER + NOVEMBER MUSIC..NOT ALL ADDED YET

LOTS OF NEW LISTENS AND RELISTENS!! I love how cold it's been progressively getting, i feel like i get to hatch into my winter form and my fangs peek out. and maybe a horse and an intricate gown with a corset and a cape . The last two albums I listened to being Gehenna - First Spell and Summoning - Stronghold. Well, here's the list:

FALL - Fallistheseason 

First Day Back - Forward  -First song i came across was "Us" and it absolutely blew my mind. This album was exactly what i needed at 3am on a rather unsettling night at my grandma's house. This album just ties so many things for me like my past present and future somehow. I've talked about "Paint" here before too!

Train Breaks Down - Train breaks down

 Estrela - Demos

Very Honorable Mentions:

https://youtu.be/Lt0m-Qzb2ZQ?si=SqY__uqWDAooXj7P (chelsea logue - incarnadine) -Finding this was actually my intro to Estrela! I just fell in love with her voice here and even more with whatever I could find as part of Estrela. Just magical 

 https://youtube/n-wbUeySfRU?si=FpMfskQ-C-tZpHru (and so your life is ruined - sad songs for happy girls)

 https://www.ninaprotocol.com/releases/myveronica-sacred-heart (myveronica - sacred heart) -This felt like a ribbon wrapped present in a cold haunted attic somehow..i really like how it made me feel one night when i was putting away laundry.

 https://youtu.be/02OeozHCRzg?si=ZtvEqWBsvf2IaOG7 (rosasharin live) -Absolute riot, I see so many ways how their sound could develop!

 https://www.ninaprotocol.com/releases/untitled-halo-headbanger (untitled (halo) - headbanger) 

https://hkcr.live/shows/taqwacore-stargirlmorocco-invites-tarozan-10-17-2025 (hong kong community radio got tarozan to do a mix!!)  -Absolutely loved the energy of this, every song is freaking perfect. Koda Kumi and manako songs made me feel so many things. Even the songs he picked are in perfect heisei compliance of his atmosphere, like im sitting in a carnival watching my nephews and nieces and thinking of ways to travel to far away lands

 https://youtu.be/cnwApre3RUA?si=1f4_fhm1XmUmVPTa (Last Chance - Sarcasm) -In reality has been stuck in my head for like. I don't know, since it was uploaded i just keep coming back to it. Nothing gets me going like a good desperate yearning melodic acoustic anthem such as this

 

Gakouen Handsome ... or Heaven?

 If anyone hasn't heard of or watched the masterpiece that is Gakouen Handsome i advise prompt action towards that end. It's crucial to experience it. A parody of the BL genre as a whole around the early 2000's. While scrolling through an anime streaming site with my cousin, i found something that caught my attention but my wifi was being slow so i gave up on it and just decided to search through the Shounen Ai genre until both my cousin and I landed on Gakouen Heaven cause we thought it might be related to Gakouen Handsome- I mean it obviously is in the sense that it's a cliche weird BL anime but Gakouen Handsome was a broad parody of everything. Anyway I hope the main character's love interest isn't actually his brother, cause so far he is also a first year highschool student, the fucking chairman and the person the main character keeps having childhood flashbacks with. The soundtrack is way too good for what it is. It nailed that feel good vibe with a lovely mix of pianos, drums and synths..truly early 2000's anime never skimped out on the soundtracks.

https://youtu.be/aim4bbUpwq0?si=FLgWa-02cWJfTSCT  

These might be my favorites so far:

https://youtu.be/9Io3iO4uXLU?si=ryTS0ys3NPxx4uIw 

This could be an intro or an outro to a prefab sprout song easily: https://youtu.be/mOmG7XCzdKY?si=qUkSqOADE8VNN7qr

 

FIRST DAY BACK - FORWARD

This is my 3rd listen of the album[dl] and it just gained new life to me as i listened with my window open to a rainy afternoon while doodling on my notebook with the crayons i bought not too long ago. I love this album and the feel this band has, the live performance was very sweet to watch as well. "Us" was the first song i ever heard and the lyrics immediately pulled me in, like a childhood friend talking about something we both experienced but were never allowed to talk about it..then forgot about it.. until we became adults and it naturally came up. At least thats how it made me feel, like i was pulling something from underneath. "Paint" is one of my absolute favorites, maybe because i feel it sort of expands on that feeling, like something i started when i was kid and im only just realizing i can finish now..because i'm more in control now..but still lost..in a new way. 

On Portrayal of Guilt

This is the interview that made me have so much more respect for this band and not just for their powerful music. Their type of heavy comes in slow punches even when they're playing fast, the melodies serving as some sort of bridge to suspend and accentuate every hard hitting swing felt in the core of their music..within their messages, their voices, their talent. In this interview only the lead singer is present. I know this video is old so naturally some of his opinions might be outdated, I do want to point out that I don't agree with what he said about breakdowns being childish or poser-like or the equivalent of shock value when it comes to the genre- well he didn't exactly say that but it did make me think about metal (and whatever stream of endless words to categorize the sub-genres exist) elitists and how a certain sound doesn't necessarily disembowel the power and the emotion behind a song..or even just the concept and image behind a song, some breakdowns are gay. and that's okay. because they sound a certain way. because they paint a certain picture. because they came up with it on the spot and thought it sounded good at the time. But I digress. 

https://youtu.be/KJ-A1_KoCXA?si=8iHekchPL2eIH41U 

After watching this and some digging, I realized Portrayal of Guilt had their own label and found a shoegaze band under it, Nuclear Daises. Their self titled album was a delight, Love is a Lie stood out because it sounded like you're lost in a shopping mall going through a bad trip and an insane sugar rush. They rock.

Nuclear Daisies - Nuclear Daisies 

The Impact of Soft Macabre

After reading Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery", I felt the heaviness of her intentions shift the air around me. A certain hesitance in writing this story made it's theme that much more lustful and evoking. To question tradition, to play into the dark nature of it rather than neatly package it away as a decorated trophy. As a framed portrait of rules to point to and gather around beyond the dust settling and the ink fading. Why is it still hanging? Hasn't the nail been bent out of place enough? How does it still hang? Who keeps putting it up? "The Lottery" swipes at a handful of angles across the undeniable, cold, certain and final nature of keeping up with community traditions and upholding those suffocating values. A sacrifice so "symbolic", a need, an utter pillar in keeping the ties of those people alive. To question this is to question ancestry, is to question identity, is to question the walls that hold the houses together, is to question day to day life, a consequence fatal to an already dwindling town. The power behind a sacrifice so raw, the ritualistic nature of it's preparation, the sheer excitement of the participants at the communal perversion of morals, raised proudly, drawing from the broken and doomed catharsis set in place by those that came before. The promise of winning the lottery and the joy that it might imply hangs taut in the air towards the end of this story, an effect left reverberating in me, to reveal the lottery is nothing but a fate dealt by the cruel unforgiving past the town holds. The people's talk, that was held only by the weight of air ringing from one ear to the other. The people's convoluted sense of representation, control and entitlement, was standing only by the pictures they paint in their heads. Their sentiment becomes real when it takes the form of rocks to be hurled, prestigiously, to end the life of a once well placed member of their society. 

Read The Lottery

Cultish traditions, heavy feelings, generational trauma and all the implications it brings is implicitly interesting to me, this mood created in "The Lottery" immediately brought Ethel Cain in to mind and The Sharp Objects series (that I was able to find out about thanks to her!). It serves as a reminder to me of something I had pondered before..how the land around us, everything around us is able to soak up a lot of pain and trauma..all the psychological hell that is kept by people is not wasted or hidden because its silenced but it marinates it seeps it slips and it takes up a very real space in the world. It seeps into the air, roots of the trees, the waves of the ocean because nature always yearns for truth and so it's easy for it to welcome that with open arms and keep a record of everything in it's own way and that nature tends to be met with resistance from humans in the shape of be it deceit,  shame or guilt but it just ends up being etched into nature and that's why we can feel it. If nature could whisper anything to us it would probably say that it had enough. A similar feeling i get from Ethel Cain's music, in that southern gothic atmosphere she tries to capture. A reminder that even in sunlight there is the daunting reminder of being repeatedly banged against the walls of an internalized horror and a void of a damned psyche, playing with the harmonies of cicadas and crickets. Amidst a world you minimized as a personalized hell, you find yourself tugged by it's thread, when you hear it's call, you answer without much thought. That's how that generational trauma quicksand gets you, except it's slow, really slow and deeply paralyzing. Glistening from the outside, burning from the inside.

To commemorate a chapter

Reminded of a feeling

I forgot

I cherish what

I sought

To tie the roots

Unearth the me from you

and hang our fruit.

The Cultural Decay

 The Cultural Decay - Eight Ways to Start a Day

 

An album that tied my night of reading Brave New World analysis and scribbling down ideas on my journal perfectly. I felt almost immediately at home within the discordant vocals and the ever swaying melodies that feel like an easy current and a dance between punches, a drunken stroll and a blissful swim across oceans of strobe lights, a whimsical violence at times poking at times stabbing, a timeless cold wave post punk atmosphere I could fall back into. In 1981 they released their 7" single with the songs Brave New World and End of The Corridor. In 1982 their 12" ep with Business Business/Fragile Object and Song of Joy. Then, in 2009, they release the album "Eight Ways to Start a Day" which essentially compiles everything (singles, demos) a bit more info can be found on their bandcamp! I think the last few songs, and how this collage of an album blends together in a stream of more disarray leaves quite a finish, an after taste of punk overbearing..somehow feels like staring at a well endlessly for hours. I wonder if anyone's uploaded the booklet online, haven't checked yet.