WKNC 88.1 FM - North Carolina State University Student RadioBetween her time making playlists for future DJ sets, Wordgirl loves to watch movies and read books. You can find her hanging out with her cat, Mouse, and playing music too loud in her headphones.
For years now, my obsession with Bladee has been a not-so-secret not-so-guilty pleasure. It’s one of the gaps in my music taste where most people go, really? You listen to that?
Honestly and non-ironically, I find Benjamin Reichwald, known by the moniker Bladee, to be a fascinating, ever-changing artist who has created an intentional, deep mythos around himself and his work.
It’s undeniable that music and movies have a symbiotic relationship.
In my Introduction to Film class freshman year of college, we covered Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the famous bar fight scene set to The Marvelettes “Please Mr. Postman.”
I remember very clearly my professor leaning forward towards the projector, excitedly taking in the seven-minute affair, watching for his hundredth time like it was his first. The scene is incontestably perfect, the juxtaposition of the sweet and sugary anthem with the rough and tumble brawl, the kids who should be listening to this very song under school bleachers instead of starting useless scrimmages.
It’s no secret that there are some hard facts no one likes to think about. One of those facts is the truth of the world, that there is violence which persists daily, people who go without, people who suffer and are turned away by society. This is a fact which many people choose to ignore from the safe bubbles of neighborhoods or college campuses.
Yet, this fact permeates. It’s hard to truly ignore, it’s always there. In the news, on the street corners, in the lived experiences which we try to push down and move past, injustices people have overcome, injustices people still face.
There’s just something so appealing about “Columbo.” Maybe it’s Peter Falk’s rumpled brilliance portraying this character, from his coat to his hair, or the dog named “Dog,” or the inverted concept of a mystery story as a howcatchem instead of a whodunnit.
Now, I have a long history with on-screen detectives. I love the unreliable narrarators, the scandal, the often sleazy environments. The first season of “True Detective,” has one of my all-time favorite characters in Rust Cohle. One of most-watched movies is “The Long Goodbye,” which features Elliot Gould’s amazing portrayal of the private eye Phillip Marlowe. My mom and I have watched nearly all twenty-five seasons of “Midsommer Murders,” religiously, with cozy blankets and cups of tea in hand. For me not to fall in love with “Columbo,” would be like a dog not wanting a bone.
I was introduced to the show only a week ago, as a friend put on an episode for us to watch. Needless to say, I was instantly hooked.
I can’t remember my first introduction to Vampire Weekend, but I can remember how I felt listening to “M79,” at maybe nine or ten years old and feeling absolutely starstruck. From then on, the music stuck with me, dominating my ipod playlists. I carried Vampire Weekend with me everywhere. On the way to school, before bed, packing up and moving from our house in downtown Carrboro to Chapel Hill, sifting through all the boxes to find my CD player so “Campus,” could be the first song to grace my new room.
So, with all that history, I’ve been waiting patiently for “Only God Was Above Us.” The day the album came out I was waiting at the train station to visit my longtime friend in Washington, DC. I listened to the album once waiting in the lobby. I listened to it again staring out the window. Then again, then again.
Read more: Growing Up With “Vampire Weekend,”Staring out through the glass, watching the fields and farms and green trees race by, I was struck by how similar “Only God Was Above Us,” sounded to Vampire Weekend’s previous works. Not so much 2019’s “Father of the Bride,” but the albums that started it all, such as “Modern Vampires of the City,” and the self-titled “Vampire Weekend.”
There was the sparkling instrumentation, the return to jaunty themes and arrangements, the tongue-in-cheek lyrics.
To my suprise, this similarity was intentional. Reading about the album, the things that I had only thought sounded familiar were actually familiar. Keonig and his bandmates picked up some of the motifs from Vampire Weekend’s most popular songs and expounded upon them, calling back songs like “Mansard Roof,” on the song “Connect.”
The result is something strange, uncanny, and to me, a bit jarring. I was filled with an uncomfortable nostalgia. My mind wanted to take me back, but my body was rooted firmly in the present.
On the first few listens, Vampire Weekend was trapped in a moment in time, back to when I was a young kid dancing around my bedroom on my days off from school, but more so, back to the hipster culture of the early 2000s.
But then something clicked. I tried to separate the past and present in my mind, appreciating the artistry of returning to your roots, taking the songs that become so boring to perform and think about after 20 years, and adding new flairs to them, recreating history.
All of a sudden, “Only God Was Above Us,” became something entirely fresh. Among the old there was new, the jazzy touches, the roaring orchestrations and the flurries of sound in “Connect,” and “Classical.”
“Classical,” I think, captures the whole of the album. Koenig sings, “I know that walls fall, shacks shake / Bridges burn and bodies break / It’s clear something’s gonna change / And when it does, which classical remains?”
When stripping away the legacy of the band, unpacking each of the songs, what remains? What pieces can be salvaged, what new things can be built? The classical is the old Vampire Weekend,the old me, the old you. I think this album can be seen as growing up, as rearranging the past messy bits of your life, of moving on and becoming a more well-rounded person.
There’s also the song “Hope,” which is an almost nine minute long track which is epic, hopeful, and future-forward. “I hope you let it go,” says Koenig. “The enemy’s invisible / I hope you let it go.”
In an interview with Exclaim!, he stated in regards to the song, “What does hope mean? Well, I hope I have the ability to let things go; I hope I have the ability to go with the flow of life; I hope I have the ability to love life, no matter what form it takes.”
I think this quote encapsulates what I didn’t recognize about the album before, what was missing from my view of the past. Stepping ahead and becoming an adult means re-contextualizing everything you’ve once done and being able to think more clearly. That’s what Koenig and his bandmates have done here, quite literally, extrapolating on their old songs and adding more.
With that, my nostalgia doesn’t feel so uncomfortable anymore. This album secures fluidity in the legacy of Vampire Weekend. They don’t have to be trapped, they’re a living and changing organism like anyone else. I can still dance around my room, just a grown up kid, knowing this music will grow alongside me.
Top Tracks:
Yeah, the guitarist and the drummer are brothers. Once I realized this small, yet crucial fact after a quick wikipedia search, their entire performance made sense.
The Pale White are a three-piece rock band from the United Kingdom. I saw them play as the opening act for the Pixies at the Olympia Theater in Dublin, which I was lucky enough to visit with my mom on her birthday trip. We bought the tickets last minute the day before the show, as we had previously thought it wouldn’t even be worth trying to attain them. The Pixies were playing a three show stint and the first two nights sold out instantly. We were thrilled to get seats in a stroke of fortune and went in blind about the opener. I had never heard about The Pale White.
We went early to the venue, and it wasn’t quite full yet. Our seats were up on the balcony. The Olympia Theater is beautiful, with French-style plaster flourishes in white on the maroon walls, chandelier, and a large red, velvet curtain half-hoisted behind the stage.
In a chaotic burst, the drummer came first onto the stage to hype up the audience. His presence was instantly frenzied as he raised his arms for applause and cheers. I think the entire audience instantly got the sense that this guy was wildly intense about his craft and meant serious business. Then, in succession, emerged the lead singer and guitarist, as well as the bassist.
Instantly, my mom leaned over and whispered, “Who’s band do you think this is?”
Relationships are often marked by the music shared with people. There are songs I can’t listen to without remembering certain points in time, points in relationships, or points in states of mind, whether it brings pain or pleasure.
The worst breakup of my life left me turning to the grounding capacity of music. Japanese Breakfast’s new album “Jubilee,” had just come out, and I spent all my free time wallowing and projecting onto the song “Kokomo, IN.”
To this day, I can’t listen to that song, or a myriad of others without thinking about that specific person and stretch of time. I think of “Kokomo, IN,” as a capsule holding all of my emotions towards that relationship. They’re placed there for me to return to whenever I want, or to discard with appreciation for how it helped me process a difficult moment.
It was empowering for me to mark the song as a memorial for my relationship. I never considered that it must be even more empowering to create your own album as a form of remembrance, and Faye Webster’s new album feels just like that.
With her smooth voice and beautiful accompaniments, Atlanta based singer-songwriter Faye Webster quickly became a household name for indie music lovers. While I knew her new album would be good, I didn’t expect it to resonate so hard with my past experiences.
Her highly anticipated new project “Underdressed at the Symphony,” is full of nostalgia and lost love. The album is lush and graceful, featuring Webster’s recognizable crooning and lengthy jam sequences. It is, unmistakably, a breakup album.
The only time Spotify has ever recommended anything worthwhile is when the first track of Rei Harakami’s “Lust,” began playing on autoplay while I was sitting in a coffee shop studying. Instantly, I was transported.
With simplistic sounds, Harakami captured a whole mood within his last album. It sounds like laying in a field of flowing grass in early June. The sun is hot, but not too hot, glossing over your skin. You’re in the middle of a big cityscape, possibly central park, listening to the sounds of happy kids playing and shrieking in the background while your eyes are closed, soaking it all in. You walk home the long way, feeling a soft wind against your skin. Maybe you stop and get ice cream from a truck, a chocolate drumstick like when you were little. The sky is bright blue and you feel at peace.
I immediately added the album to my library and it’s been on repeat ever since.
Rei Harakami got his start making music for student films. He preferred the simple sounds of electronic devices over computer-generated sounds, creating the entirety of lust with a Roland SC-88 synthesizer. These intentional, repetitive sounds contribute a lot to the magic of “Lust,” creating sounds that are almost meditative.
“Lust,” was Harakami’s last album, and perhaps his most masterful. My favorite tracks from the record include “come here go there,” “joy,” and “owari no kisetsu.”
Harakami recorded the vocals for “owari no kisetsu” himself. Translated to “season of endings,” the song is a melancholic portrait of leaving something that no longer serves you. “The dawn burns through the horizon,” Harakami sings, “and leaves me with a feeling of salvation.”
These lyrics, to me, perfectly capture why “Lust,” is so addictive to listen to. Harakami has created something that feels like a new day and a new beginning.
If you’re a fan of electronic music and soothing sounds, I’d highly recommend giving this album a spin.
Recently, I went to see Wim Wenders’ new film “Perfect Days.” You may be familiar with the director for his work on the movie “Paris, Texas,” which is widely regarded as a classic, featuring a spectacular performance from the late Harry Dean Stanton and sprawling shots of the Texas countryside.
“Perfect Days,” has the makings of a classic in its own right. It follows Hirayama, an aging man who feels content with his life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. He focuses on the quiet beauties in life, cultivating plants, listening to his cherished cassette tapes, and taking photos with his small point-and-shoot camera. Every moment of his day is carefully routinized, almost like a meditation, as the entire first hour of the movie follows his routines. However, encounters with other people and his estranged family leads him to reflect on his simple style of living.
One aspect of the movie that stuck out to me was Hirayama’s cassette tapes. He listens to one tape every day on the ride to and from work, and the music settles him. Hirayama has collected hundreds of tapes ranging from The Kinks to Otis Redding.
There’s a point in the film where his younger colleague, Takashi, needs a ride because his bike has broken down. Hirayama is forced to give Takashi and his moody girlfriend, Aya, a ride. While Takashi frets over his bike, Aya is drawn to the stack of cassette tapes on the dashboard. She picks up Patti Smith’s album “Horses,” and asks if she can play it.