I'd probably rather nap than wonder, restlessly: will you ever be impressed by me?
Track 7: ES
Get Olde/Second Wind is a compiled re-issue of Crying's first two EPs Get Olde and Second Wind. This compilation release celebrates a decade's anniversary in the next few months and it's been on my mind again lately, it's a beautiful album.
This is one of my very Important Albums, musical things which affected me and which still affect me, that shape me in to the person I am and continue to be sign-posts in my life. I still get so much out of this album when I listen to it, every three or four years I've gone through a period of change in my life where parts of this album very deeply resonated with me. And that, I think, is what this album "is about". The two EP compilation presents a vignette of a person transitioning from adolescence to adulthood and trying to make sense of what is happening and what happened and what should happen next:
: Bon voyage : Forget that olde worlde : I'm inching away from the darkest slump of my life : and I don't know if I'm coming back #+CAPTION: Track 5: Vacation
Track 5: Vacation
It's a common story, really, we find ourselves going through times in life where this sort of molting and shedding must occur. Over the course of 32 minutes, ES's lyrics delivery trend from self-deprecating dreampop and vulnerable and introspective pop punk to triumphant anthems of self-love complete with frenetic guitar solo.
: Been there from the start, who else? there was nobody else : Who'd never gotten bored of : Or finally had had enough : I love : I fuckin love ..... : I am slowly falling in love with myself #+CAPTION: Track 11: Emblem
Track 11: Emblem
It's interesting how one can be so confident and then uncover whole new depths of things that leaves their sense of reality deeply shaken. Listening to this album is an experience like that, every few years I find new things to love about it, and new ways to relate to it and to myself in the process. Music can do that, act as a window of feeling-possibility which you can occasionally climb through.
For a long time I thought I knew what it meant to feel love toward myself, for example. This summer, I got to see an entirely new depth to what I was capable of feeling toward myself, and simultaneously how false a life I have been leading since transitioning out of adolescence, since transitioning out of infant-hood. It took me singing Emblem to myself riding long on my bike after one of the most difficult summers of my life in a long list of difficult summers. The blur of your life can fall away as one slowly learns to fall in love with their self, and can start to understand what is happening and what could happen next. Maybe. Much has come in to focus in the months following that long ride. Music can act like a spot light, or maybe just a laser; it can serve to illuminate things under the right circumstances.
Of course it's not just spoken poetry, it's bouncy fun chip-pop. I think as the years go on, that Galloway's square waves overpower Galloway's guitar, but that's fine, I would just mix it differently in 2024 than 2014. It's fun stuff. I think it is a bit distracting to people who don't "get" chiptunes, especially the stuff that is not just nostalgia bait, but if you can get through the square waves you can get through anything 💪
After Crying's 2016 album Beyond the Fleeting Gales came out they kind of fell off the radar, especially ES, but they quietly released some experimental solo work under different names that I oughtta check out. Crying's bandcamp page came out of hibernation in 2020 to announce that Ryan Galloway had put together a 4 song EP with Michelle Zauner (of J Brekkie/Crying in H Mart fame) that is pretty important to me in its own right: pop songs 2020 by BUMPER. There's been a handful of weird little indie chiptune people and weird artists who I really resonated with over the years who have simply disappeared in to mundane life, and I think that's really nice. Sometimes I wonder if ES is well, sometimes I wonder if Spamtron is well, at least I sometimes get emails from PFSC when they are well. I hope they are. I've been feeling a certain sort of way about choosing to play in the Minor Leagues, there's an uncertain quality to thinking you've hit your apex in your early or mid twenties and have a whole ass life to figure out how to live after that, but there's always more important things to do, even if it's not as spectacular as playing a live show on Audiotree or briefly working for a top tech company.
: check me out, riding regular : where the hot shots already were. : I don’t care to finish first. : : Carve the trail : At your own pace #+CAPTION: Track 8: Easy Flight
Track 8: Easy Flight
Also, this album's got songs in the very narrow and very good genre of "songs about taking the bus".