Thursday, February 2, 2023

Mono No Aware, Grief, Disembarking on an Avalance: In Praise of The Midnight

The Midnight is one of my favorite bands. I would call them cheesy in some way, but I unabashedly love their music. Big cheeseball energy, and some of my absolute favorite music I've discovered in the last few years.

I use Spotify and I have a large, rotating playlist called "Syncd,"  to indicate that it is synced up to my phone, downloaded. I use it as a general repository for any music that I am currently interested in or listening to. Sometimes I shuffle the entire playlist. Sometimes I listen to specific albums on it.

The Midnight's entire discography has been on that playlist since May of 2020 when I first started listening to them. I, of course, have added their new albums as they've come out. Their most recent album "Heroes," for example, was released on September 9th, 2022. I added it to my playlist that day.

The Midnight is two different people, Tyler Lyle (an American singer-songwriter, I think from Georgia), and Tim McEwan (a Danish producer). Their most recent album apparently expanded the band to a full 5 piece and these new members were involved in the songwriting (I remember reading).

Part of the reason I resonate so deeply with The Midnight is because their songs are often about loss. Their Spotify bio, for example, contains a brief paragraph about the Japanese term "Mono no aware."

They write: "There is a Japanese term: Mono no aware. It means basically, the sad beauty of seeing time pass - the aching awareness of impermanence. These are the days that we will return to in the future only in memories." I appreciate the sentiment. I also think of Wabi-sabi.

Their first song they ever made together was called "WeMoveForward". I think it was the first song I ever really heard and loved by them. It was initially released as a single and later appeared again on their EP "Days of Thunder." 4/6 songs are total bangers. "The Years (Prologue) is beautiful and sad; "Gloria" is upbeat and exciting (and a favorite of my old friend Efron); "WeMoveForward" is track three and just makes me feel great (it reminds me of when I worked at a nearby mental health clinic); tracks four and five, "Days of Thunder" and "Kick Drums & Red Wine" don't do it for me; and the final track "Los Angeles" is wonderful, it has one of those bass lines that just vibes and vibes and vibes and stays steady for an entire song. I love songs with consistent rhythm sections or elements that don't change for entire songs (Disappears' "Elite Typical" and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" come to mind).

I am listening to WeMoveForward right now. The chorus' lyrics are simple and resonate deeply with me: "We move forward, because we can't go back." The verses are more a love song, and I don't want to write about that right now.

2014's Days of Thunder was followed by their first full length release, 2016's Endless Summer. Of the 12 songs on the album I really like 5 or 6 of them and don't mind the other ones. "Endless Summer," "Sunset," "Synthetic," "The Comeback Kid," and "Memories" are my favorite songs. "Memories" is probably my favorite: "Everything is clear in the rear view mirror.... You'll always be a part of me... Some wounds will always sting..." I really like the lyrics: "All of this was planned when the world was started. The red blood hearts. The final word was never said." Because of course in the beginning was the word. The final word was never said.

2017 saw the release of the Nocturnal EP which has some great songs, especially "Light Years." I also like "River of Darkness" featuring TimeCop1983. Synth wave stuff is so silly (TIMECOP) and I love it.

After releasing Endless Summer they began a trilogy of records that would be completed in 2022: Kids (2018), Monsters (2020), and Heroes (2022). Their sound changes on each record but always feels unmistakably like them.

The theme of nostalgia dominates all three albums. Nostalgia is secretly the problem of loss, or the desire to return to a past that is now gone.

Most of the songs on Kids are great but there is a bit of filler that works in context but not on their own. "Lost Boy," is good (and its remix by A.M.R. is incredible). I remember a time, I think when I first started going into the office after the pandemic, that I was totally consumed by the experience of time passing, so attuned to the reality of daily loss, that I was listening to this remix all the time. "We were young once, but then we grew old..." That lyric leapt out at me every time. Its a wonderful remix. The original is good too, but I like the remix more. "Explorers" and "America 2" are the standout tracks, and "Kids - Reprise" is definitely a good time, worth the listen.

2020's Monsters is a bit more aggressively electronic or sample heavy. There are many good songs on it. "Seventeen" is great, with this big, clumsy distorted sample of a voice saying "SEVENTEEN, SEVENTEEN, CITY DREAMS, CITY DREAMS" repeats over and over. At times Tyler Lyle joins the sample, adding "We were... SEVENTEEN, SEVENTEEN... We had... CITY DREAMS, CITY DREAMS." Fuck. Good song. "Dream Away" is a beautiful song that tells a sad story about wanting to picture a perfect world. "Brooklyn" I also like quite a lot. I learned much later that Tyler Lyle actually has done a version of Brooklyn on his solo albums, much more singer-songwritery, not really at all synth wavey. This is also true of the first song from Heroes, "Golden Gate." The final song on Monsters, "Last Train," is also very strong. They seem to have a knack for closing songs.

Heroes was released in 2022 and I eagerly anticipated its release. I followed the EPs they released, consuming whatever they put out. The sound changed. All of a sudden it felt like arena rock, big sounds, weird samples. The first single they released was a song called "Change Your Heart or Die." Such a dramatic title.

The whole thing almost feels silly, this explosive chorus:

"FIRE! Ticking like a time bomb! FIRE! Burning like a napalm! FIRE! Waiting at the crossroads, how will you survive!?! CHANGE YOUR HEART OR DIE!"

The whole thing makes me smile and chuckle as I listen to the song now. I tell you what, its a great song to have coming through some headphones. Such a silly banger.

"Heartbeat," the second single they released, is also big and flashy, goofy synths announce its beginning. I do like the lyrics, though. It opens: "If the world is made out of love the pain is proof that it isn't done..." And the chorus: "If you can feel your heartbeat, your not done yet, you can't be. If it hurts its working, there's love enough for you and me..."


No wonder I like these lyrics. I never stop talking about love. I never stop thinking about loss and grief and the passage of time.

They combine these things in a way I appreciate. "Heartbeat" ends with a refrain of the lyrics from "WeMoveForward": "We keep going 'cause we can't go back... Just keep going, there's love enough for you and me..."

My right lung hurts as I recover from pneumonia. I feel a pain, both dull and sharp, when I fully inhale. I'm nearly well. I am aware that in traditional Chinese medicine the lungs are associated with grief. I had pneumonia as a child, and once in high school. What is it with my lungs? The more I've looked into my family history the more I've come to think that there are tremendous amounts of un-grieved losses in the line. I sometimes feel like I've fallen into the role of "griever," but I also wonder how much I've taken that on myself.

The next single released was the song "Avalanche." It was released on July 6th 2022 as an EP along with "Heartbeat" and "Change Your Heart or Die."

"Avalanche" begins with typical Midnight synths, some cool sounding guitar, and this wonderfully awkward vocal sampling of a voice just going "WHOA OH OH" over and over again. I love these "WHOA OH OHs," just like I used to love the "whoa ohs" on 12 Rods' song "I Am Faster". 12 Rods, I think, wield "Whoa ohs" like this in masterful spirit. I love that The Midnight just fucking went for it on "Avalanche," "WHOA OH OH. WHOA OH OH. WHOA OH OH. WHOA OH OH." Just over and over.

I can't tell you how deeply I resonate with this song. A brutal series of events began for me on July 3rd or 4th of 2022. Lost love, family conflict, death, illness, pain, pain, pain.

"Sail on in my memory
I'll wave from the shoreline
A ship so grand you could not believe
Disembarking on an avalanche
From butterfly wings
Saw my last chance
In a faded dream, when it's gone
Wherever you land, sing your song
Take this dance, avalanche"

The song ends with the word "avalanche" repeated over and over.  Actually, the song ends with the same "WHOA OH OHs" that we began with. Beautiful. I listen to it over and over and it just begins to sound like a voice making noises rather than words. I crave the space where animal voice and human speech blur.

Disembarking on an Avalanche. Whatever my life was in the first half of 2022, it was not what my life was in the latter half. Whoever I was before July of 2022, I am no longer that person. He disembarked on an Avalanche. Several Avalanches.

A friend asked to talk tonight because they were worried about a decision they made at a new job. We talked for 20-30 minutes, first just calming them down, circling the topic, making sense of their experience, and then ultimately coming full circle to just chatting. They commented on my voice; it is still hoarse from my pneumonia. I have sounded like this for more than 2 weeks. I speak for a living. Speaking is my greatest pleasure. It is hard for me to be this way.

I told my friend that I have been changed by the things that have happened to me since July. I told my therapist yesterday that any one of the events would have changed me. This lost love would have changed me. Massive conflict with my family would have changed me. The death of my final grandparent, my grandmother, would have changed me. Contracting covid and having it become pneumonia would have changed me. All of these things would have changed me on their own. For all of them to occur in the span of six to seven months has been astonishing.

I am currently wrapping up a 4 week workshop on "writing about the women in your family." It is built around various free writing prompts and I've been enjoying my time.

On Tuesday I did an exercise in the workshop: write a prose piece based on a photograph, turn it into a poem, turn the poem into a prose piece, don't refer back.

I wrote a long poem that I concluded by writing:

"Just the summer of falling.

My sickness also felt like a sort of falling, the way Jeffrey told me that his septic infection felt like a free fall.

I’ve fallen and I hope to continue to fall through my life.

I’ve lost all these things. I want to lose it all

Because then I know that there will only be things that are truly and properly mine."

Loss is hard. Loss is good. These are poetic things to say and I partially know their truth and partially don't.

There are so many things that pass through me, so many fears and anxieties, so many pains and troubles. I know they are not all mine. I know the world is a great repository of pain and suffering.  The world encodes this suffering in living bodies and written languages and constructed buildings and improvised tools. Suffering always leaves evidence of itself. Some of this evidence endures more than others. But all life leaves traces; all suffering leaves evidence.

I find myself strangely attuned to suffering. I think this makes me strangely attuned to experience in general. The Greek word for suffering could also be understood as "experience" or "undergoing." An old classmate of mine preferred to talk about "patients" rather than "clients" because they liked how the word "patient" had roots in the Latin word for suffering. I have often reflected on how patience therefore holds some relationship to suffering.

It is only within the last several days that I have been recognizing how my experience with pneumonia has changed me. I told my friend tonight that I had come to regard it as a culmination of a series of events in 2022 that deeply changed me. I have suffered. I have undergone. I have experienced. I am different.

It is a story that I tell, this notion of "culmination." I said to my friend that "I hesitate to call it a culmination lest I invite more 'culminations'." I hesitate to name all this trouble, or to imply a climax to this trouble, lest I invite more trouble. This is not the end of trouble.

Although I feel grateful for trouble. My recent reading of Michael Meade's Fate & Destiny has given me new language to express this gratitude. The two agreements. The first is the agreement of the soul to do its best to become itself. The second agreements are made in fitting into a family and navigating a social or nomic order.

The trouble has brought me closer to the first agreement. I spoke with another friend tonight, had a Focusing session with him. I encountered a purple ethereal body within my physical body. It could be mostly but not entirely aligned with my physical body. It did not and does not need to be aligned with my physical body.

The two bodies constitute the two agreements. The physical body occupies space and answers to the second agreement. The purple body, the body of the first agreement, does not occupy space but time.

The patterns of love are the patterns of time. The patterns of politics are the patterns of space (and their interrelations with time).

There are patterns that exist in time that cannot show themselves in space. 

The telos of the body is the soul.

An Avalanche has shown me how to navigate these agreements and how to continue to understand what my body leads me towards.  

When the full album "Heroes" was released I was pleasantly surprised at the range of styles on it.

The best songs on the album are "A Place of Her Own" and "Loved by You." Wonderful songs. "Brooklyn. Friday. Love." is also a lot of fun, really great and interesting song. It is the only song on the album (I think) that has rip roaring saxophone on it. Some of their earlier albums, mainly Endless Summer, have notable saxophone. Great big sax solos. Ha. "Golden Gate," the opening track is charming and it reminds me of the pacing of both The National's "Fake Empire" or Frightened Rabbit's "Death Dream." All of them are strangely slow, patient opening tracks that introduce wonderful albums (The National's "Boxer" and Frightened Rabbit's "Painting of a Panic Attack"). There are a lot of good songs on the album. It is probably their strongest effort so far and I really look forward to following them as musicians.

I love nothing more than to witness and understand people in their development. To witness and understand people in their development is to love them. Following an artist, seeing what they do, is nothing less than witnessing the dialectic of implication and explication. The consumed product is only a thin aspect of a much more complex being. It is a product of a soul. The important thing is to have contact with that soul. I only know the soul through its explications. But I also know more than the explications. For the explications point to the implicit.

This has been a long and meandering post and I intend to conclude it now. I have been enjoying more and more writing about music. Talons', Tomberlin, The Midnight. Music is so important to me. Part of my experience this summer involved sharing with someone my 2017 essay on Mount Eerie's album "A Crow Looked at Me." It was important to me that I wrote it and it was important to me that someone took interest in it.

Music is important to me. Writing is important to me. Writing about music seems like it could also be important to me.

But here I am making it clear to myself that I vibe so hard with The Midnight in part because they are constantly speaking to the reality of time, loss, and grief.

I grieve so much of what happened to me in the last 7 months. I have lost so much.

But in losing I know that I've grown and in a sense gained.

All this loss is taking me somewhere. To many more losses, no doubt. But to great havings and doings, as well, I'm sure.

"Disembarking on an avalanche."

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