music moots with joel vs. joel ("Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)" by Cymbals Eat Guitars)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we have joel vs. joel! A multi-instrumentalist in Kansas City, Missouri, joel vs. joel's Joel Stratton released the vibrant and witty Smile In The Mirror LP in August on "Midwestern small-batch label" Enigmatic Brunch Records.
Now I listen to a lot of music because I Enjoy It and sometimes I press play on an album and within seconds am just like: oh hell yeah, let's fuckin go. If there were an indie music version of NBC's singing competition The Voice that involved me dramatically turning my chair around at first listen of a song, that would have happened here. Smile in the Mirror contains lots of lush and confident instrumentation—it really makes three square meals and a late-night dessert of the acoustic guitar, for example—and that sense of deep musical assurance feels rare and exciting right now.
Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 8, 2024
Such assurance finds a counter-balance in Joel's lyrics, which emit lots of wit but also deliver just a touch of anxiety around finding le mot juste...vocabulary is a gift and a curse, I know this too well as I refresh Thesaurus.com for the millionth time. Take the slow-burning title track, a neat slice of pop rock as catchy as it is verbose: "I've been solipsistic, anaerobic, demiurgic, catatonic all my life / Always pollyannin', too neurotic, callin' on a can of cola to ease my mind." Also compelling is Joel's voice, which is deep and hushed and has a very alluring timbre; I feel like if it were utilized for a Nespresso commercial, it'd move a significant amount of pods.
Joel recommended the song "Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)" by Cymbals Eat Guitars, with a specific story: "This was a song I hadn't listened to since high school but randomly threw on last week, paused at the first extended instrumental section, and then accidentally gave myself a concussion hitting my head on a wooden beam as I was running up some stairs. I felt myself kind of lock in to that liminal space for a few days as my brain recovered."
So that extended instrumental section DOES seem to pair perfectly with a head injury. It has that stunned, swimming, nauseous feeling. And I'm influenced by Joel's backstory, but I started thinking about the concept of consciousness, and the way various insults to your body go on to fuck up your mind. The lyrics to "Rifle Eyesight" even have this baked in, in the extreme—the first line is "Shot through the head / I'm coming up on an overpass." Elsewhere the singer is "shot through the neck" and has "learned a new way to see" from "having a stroke." There's lots of fleshy imagery—guts, teeth, fingers, an empty skull—but "you can't bore a hole to a cavity where the soul lives."
I'm reading this book called God, Human, Animal, Machine about humanity in the age of artificial intelligence, and right now the author is grappling with the idea of the soul. (No big deal, just the humble human soul, haha.) She calls on dead philosophers and living techlords to determine whether there is any empirical proof of some kind of quality that separates thinking, feeling people from computers managing inputs and outputs, or animals following instinct without emotion. And this song makes me think about how a change of consciousness can make the soul—THE SOUL!!—visible, at least to other people.
I'm thinking about my friend who had a stroke in the Neuro ICU, hooked up to many machines, possibly indistinguishable from them, only he kept making jokes about the Burger King commercial that kept playing on the hospital room television—the one that goes whopper whopper whopper whopper in an irritating voice. I'm thinking of fainting, which the singer Lola Young did onstage, and which I have done quite a lot of in life—how for the fainter, fainting feels like becoming nothing, which is kind of freeing, but for the witnesses, fainting looks quite disturbing and is not very freeing at all. I'm thinking of the visceral headshots of One Battle After Another, instant life-enders sniped from somewhere out of frame. I'm thinking of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck and everyone watching it at the same time on their phones, and the subsequent Christofascist pageantry that attempted to give him a soul I am not sure he had. Do souls need a witness in order to exist? Does everyone think this already? Is this way above the pay grade of I Enjoy Music Dot Net?
It's so crazy that Shakespeare came up with one of the most enduring concepts of soul/body all those years ago, when Hamlet first held that damn skull. It's hard to believe your consciousness exists within that shapely bone, hard to believe your gorgeous brain is just meat. That's kind of what I get from "Rifle Eyesight"—the nausea of that instrumental breakdown is the feeling you get when you think about how fragile your body is.
Thanks Joel! Really you must listen to Smile in the Mirror.
And thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
