So I have been kicking around the idea of doing some kind of playlist "radio programme" for a while now and it's finally taken shape into a little not quite 30 minute long mix that I have uploaded onto the service known as Mixcloud (if I make 9 more, I get to pay them!). It all began, like a few other things in my life right now, with the trip down to Portland last month to play the Sarah Douglas Home for Wayward Squirrels and Bugs on July 29th. There, I saw this band with whom Rat Paws shared the bill called Parlor Hour that I knew, upon hearing them live, was quite good and special. Then, a few weeks after the trip to Oregon, I listened to their EP Personal Best Club on Bandcamp, and suddenly, in my kitchen, listening with the phone plugged into the box-radio's aux. cable, I found myself doing the same dance I invented at age 7 in response to hearing the Beatles, which consists of exuberantly galloping the length of a room / hallway, back and forth until I tire myself out.
There was a time, back in like 2014, when any talk of new bands getting praise and material success would send me into a tailspin. It was unattractive, but it was, and sometimes is still, true. I was in a really bad place with no grounding to any community, musical or otherwise. And everyone knows, either from experience or from listening to the news, that an internet connection in the absence of IRL community grounding is a recipe for Bad Stuff. P4k was emotional kryptonite to me. Same went for "Badass Women" Spotify playlists four years later. Not that I ever wanted Rat Paws to be on a cheesy Spotify playlist or be rated Best New Music by some mealy-mouthed ivy league graduate. There is a more fundamental (and, in my own defense, less careerist) an explanation: I will always want to be told my art is Good by strangers and friends alike. I don't think that it's possible to get in the guts of my brain and change out that circuitry (without psychedelics??? LMK). If you tell me you like my music, it must mean I am welcome to "hang out for a bit," which is the only thing the danger-obsessed brain ever wants. The heaping of material praise on other artists multiplied by a scarcity mentality = emotional tailspin and, eventually, as a means of self-protection, abstention from listening to new music as coping mechanism.
Fast forward to 2023: I really think that the Parlor Hour EP is good! It hits a lot of my fav buttons. For example, it's got that irreverent, stompy Uncle Wiggly wiggliness that courts the endearingly grotesque* with the help of out-of-phase, layered vocals and counterpointal, overdubbed guitar chords, played clean but slightly fried, obscuring the tangled harmonic weirdnesses therein. And while the EP yearns, nothing in the PH universe seems purely for fun or escape: on the rollicking "Happy Birthday Cowboy," the Cowboy's mother misses him, and with every passing year his sheets are thinner as he grows older.
This is a pretty long-winded way to get to how I decided to make a 30 minute mix. (It's definitely been at least that long that I've been sitting here typing this.) But I'll try to sum up quickly here: feeling such a sure and embodied response (see galloping above) to the PH EP got a certain nerve throbbing in my body that I hadn't really been paying much attention to. So I went about searching for other music that got a similar intense vibration out of the same "nerve." Almost all of the songs on the mix are of this category. Topics include landlords with "demon morals," moms, alienation, the possibility of romance, "that man [who] was so rude to me," a "long distance call from all sides on your dime"...
I really really loathe that cheugy-ism "it gives me the feels" - a saying whose purchase depends on this society of doomers' chronic repression and suppression (aka conscious repression) -- e.g. we can't talk about or express our feelings beyond invoking what appears to be the world's most repressed toddler. All to say, I'm not going to use the phrase, but if I was more cheugy, I might.
Or, instead of spewing this verbiage, I could've directed you to Parlor Hour's bandcamp bio tagline: Heartfelt noise.
Now shake it all out to this mix.
*some synonyms for grotesque: odd, whimsical, distorted, farcical. Antonyms: ordinary, normal.
NOTE: Rat Paws is NOT playing the show in Oly at the Crypt on 8/26
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