HYMNS: Ween - "Roses Are Free"

Ween - "Roses Are Free"
(from Chocolate and Cheese, Elektra, 1994)

"Roses Are Free" is the kind of song, it's so catchy that if you wake up with it in your head in the morning, which you will, you'll start out on your commute to work already singing it, only to find that it didn't sync onto your iPod, so you'll scroll through the hundreds of artists that did successfully sync, and then you'll start to recognize a weird dissatisfied feeling in your stomach as you read the names of your favorite bands, and realize, absurdly, that you would rather give up -- now that it's there, in your head -- and walk the ten minutes to the train, and then ride the train for another thirty-five, all without playing any music at all. Just your headphones in, fogging out the city noise a bit, so that you can better hear the little recordplayer we all have in our brains play this song on repeat. The thought of other music becomes impossible. The bright keys, the dwarfish voices. Tinsel and pumpkins. The way the chorus winds itself up. The guitar solo, the fuzzy, perfect thing. 

That's just it. I think this is a perfect song. Capital-P Perfect. Which is weird, because it sounds like maybe what you'd get if you mixed a chorus of elves singing a Christmas jingle, a Van Halen concert, a trashy amusement park carousel ride and 450milligrams of mescaline sulfate. Ween is one of the most perplexing bands in the history of pop music, and "Roses Are Free" may be their ultimate achievement. 

I do not know what this song is about, but I am convinced that it is pure evil. That it is doing twisted, gloriously debauched things to my brain. 

MP3: Ween - "Roses Are Free"

HYMNS: múm - "Green Grass of the Tunnel"

From Ryan from Swaziland:

If anyone out there read my last HYMN detailing my relationship with Hood’s “You are Worth the Whole World” you know my affinity for electro-acoustic bands from the early 2000’s and the brittle sputter of a drum machine over a piano’s minor chord progression plunked from within the bowels of some forlorn lighthouse atop some Bronte-esque crag half-hidden by Iceland’s Volcanic clouds. Actually, that is exactly how this song was recorded. The Icelandic collective nested inside a lighthouse during the writing and recording of Finally We Are No One. Sometimes things are just too precious.

HYMNS: Hood - "You Are Worth The Whole World"

My apologies to Ryan Hall, good friend and author of this post, for the delay in uploading "You Are Worth The Whole World," the delay in posting this, the delay in saying how much we miss you now that you are in Africa, how much we hope that you and Addy are doing well, doing good (we know that you are).

“It’s a blank city, baby, where the buildings get stepped on.”

In an attempt to create something beautiful before my wife wakes up I have only managed to check my e-mail a couple of times. Do adult things like updating my linkedin corporate fascistbook account and looking up the last name of anyone who can service a Volkswagen in rural PA.

Doing something more than sitting on my hands (5 days and we leave the states for a very long time), I recall the first time I ever heard “You’re Worth the Whole World” by British post-IDM/slowcore band Hood blessed with the vocal presence of Yoni Wolf of Why? and Adam Drucker (Doseone). The genealogies of both bands would preoccupy most of my twenties and would eventually culminate in a mixtape, a marriage and a blood-pact to name our first-born Yoni. But, that’s not where it started.

In fact, I don’t really recall where it started. I am extremely fuzzy on the details of how this album even came into my possession. I can’t remember if this was before or after I rescued cLOUDEAD’s self-titled debut from a used CD rack in Salt Lake City. I vaguely recall Skyler Hitchcox saying something about this album…I don’t know. All I remember was a prevailing sense of sadness of Hood’s muted acoustic-electronic compositions. Beats that snap like brittle twigs, acoustic guitar lines plucked faintly through the thin walls of your neighbor’s post-WWII house. Bass rumbling through floorboards of basement practice spaces.

The sadness and sparseness of an acoustic guitar lick, a floor tom, gently plucked piano and a three-note synth horn line is exacerbated by Drucker and Wolf’s ping-ponging of Doseone’s half-sung/half-rapped, chopped and processed polyphonic delivery and Yoni Wolf’s deadpan spoken word beneath the surface. It is impossible to make out more than the occasional snippet and phrase and only then with very liberal interpretation, but still this song cuts to the quick. It is a sad and beautiful strangeness that soars above any sort of genre classifications.

I think it was this inability to place this unknowable, impregnable last track of Cold House into anything I had experienced that has set me on a search to figure it out and has had such a palpable impact on my life. Forest Gospel, starting the Tome, my friendship with Nick, Erin and Atlas, hurriedly typing this before I start a day with a wife who stopped me in mid-sentence when she heard “Crushed Bones”, all stem from hearing this song and wanting to relive it over and over through analysis and experience.

Will Sheff said something true when he said that musicians and writers who write about music are cut from the same cloth. They hear a song that made them feel something and want to recreate the experience again and again. Musicians want to reinterpret that feeling to others, while writers want to explain why it made them feel a certain way.

Five years later and I still can’t figure out if I can separate depression and exaltation in this song or reconcile the ubiquitous sadness of this song and the incredible direction my life has taken because of it. I guess I never will.

Hood feat. Doseone & Why? - "You're Worth The Whole World" by ForestGospel

HYMNS: Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"

Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"
(from The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts, Burning Heart, 1998)

When I was a youngster, on days when it seemed certain the world was out to get me and I was certain to fight back, my mom had a final desperate move that -- in memory at least -- always worked: we'd read Mean Soup. This book would direct me through a series of screams, scratches, spittings and kickings, and then, at the end... I was okay.

"Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull" kicks off one of two great Mean Soups for my adulthood: The Shape of Punk to Come (the other being Coltrane's Giant Steps). It's much, much more than a great anger management record, but these days I seem to visit it most often after a few hours of storming around pulling my hair, kicking out at the nearest objects and animals, cursing stream-of-consciousness under my breath like Albert in I ♥ Huckabees. Just hearing the quiet carhorns honking in the track's opening seconds slows my breathing down... even before the ripping sheets of filthy-hard guitar bursts come in, before Lyxzén's vicious scream announces the band's bone-shattering intentions.

And then all Hell breaks loose, and I'm airdrumming and screaming and pounding the floor and airguitaring and screaming and jumping and swinging and anything I had felt before the song kicked in is lifting heavenward out of me, just exploded out into the ether. It's one of the most dynamic, perfectly executed blasts in all of late rock music, an incredible, heart-stopping cacophony of guitar-and-vocal violence held together and multiplied by some of the most brilliant drumming ever. Ever. His name is David Sandström. Pay attention.

The song builds to a final, no-holds-barred catharsis ("Let's tAke the first bus outta here / Let's Go DDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOWWWWNNN"), punches the f**king lights out, and then the radio fuzz hits like a bucket of icewater to the face, and you're hooked, you need more immediately, you feel good, thanks, keep it coming -- and it's only a minute or two before the chorus of "Liberation Frequency" is breaking all Hell loose again.

MP3: Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"
and for the parents: Mean Soup

HYMNS: Red House Painters - "Cruiser"

HYMNS is a new feature on Forest Gospel. The point is to post about songs that epitomize and create moods, and times, and places. Songs that are formally exciting and emotionally resonant. Songs, basically, that are perfect. We hope to introduce you to new things, but there will be some really obvious, part-of-the-collective-cultural-consciousness entries, too. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded.
Let us know what you think: you know where the comment box is.



Red House Painters - "Cruiser"
(from Old Ramon, Sub Pop, 2001)

This is pouring out of me. What's coming out of the speakers -- she made a motion like scooping piles of stuff out of her stomach -- are my actual real emotions as music. This sounds exactly as I feel and am thinking, right here and now.

Once, a girl lay in my bed, the night before we were separated for a long time, and said this about "Cruiser". The precision and efficiency with which Mark Kozelek is able to get to that whole gut-shoveling thing is still surprising after years of listening on repeat. The song is so simple, so at ease with itself, and so cutting for that. The guitarwork is absolutely elegant.

"LA took a part of me / LA gave this gift to me"

It's a sort of lament, a slow drive across a city and through the grief of leaving things behind. Kozelek quietly conjures the contradictory feeling of gain and loss both -- grateful for having had, mournful for having no longer. "Cruiser" churns with that particularly fresh strand of nostalgia we feel just as the thing is slipping away, still in sight, sparkling on the ground below us.

MP3: Red House Painters - "Cruiser"