TUNES // Sidney Gish – Persephone
post by misha
i’ve posted about my views on new years resolutions on this blog before: historically i don’t trust them.
resolutions have always seemed to me like a written record of new ways to disappoint myself and others (which, if you’ve spent most of adult life in the surreal terror that is imposter syndrome, you need those like you need a second asshole). unchecked items are haunting enough when they only exist inside my own brain; when their unfulfilled promises are brought into the public record – scratched in a notebook, taped on the mirror, or god forbid, spoken aloud – the humiliation is complete and devastating.
last year i resolved to stop making resolution lists and would tell anyone foolish enough to ask me, known cynic, about my goals for the year to take their futile hallmark card traditions and shove them up their sentimental ass.
this year i planned to continue this antagonistic and widely unpopular protest, but i keep bumping into things about my life that i really do want to change. lots of them are small: i want to start composting (like, why don’t i do that already?), some are bigger (hey, maybe this is the year we really get serious about what the fuck it is we’re doing with our life, yeah?) but more importantly, lately i feel not so afraid about what will happen once i give my aspirations a voice.
partly because for the first time in several new years, i feel like i have the emotional energy to focus on goals beyond getting out of bed on a day-to-day basis, but also because i’m less concerned about what failure means. how acknowledging hope can be its own sort of victory. how the point of the exercise might be self-reflection and not self-flagellation.
how (at risk of being painfully and uncharacteristically sentimental) maybe the only really important resolution is to make one.
Sidney Gish‘s new album, No Dogs Allowed, is officially the first record to sweep me off my feet in 2018. It’s a clever and intimate album of clashes and juxtapositions. It’s both funny and poignant – tunes with names like “I’m Filled With Steak, and Cannot Dance,” “I Eat Salads Now,” and “Bird Tutorial,” peppy lyrics about death and dysfunction, lo-fi drum machines underneath warm, jazzy hooks that butt up against the occasional youtube sample spliced in like a digital visitor from the future, or the past.
Persephone is a beautiful and simple guitar song about commonly mispronounced words, and how the only way to avoid making mistakes is to never do anything at all.
Buy No Dogs Allowed here.