The Hollowlung Review: Darkwave
I can tell you what precipitated the creation of Darkwave.
The cold malaise of fall and winter had settled on me, and as the chill crept over the midwest I had some belittling times. Shit happens. I got used to it with this playlist.
I can tell you what Darkwave illustrates: the anger of a 21st-century man coming into contact with the reality of life beyond childhood. It's not a tragedy, nor a definitive narrative; It's a story of doing the math of life and not getting the answer you were told was right. Disillusionment, in a word.
I can tell you the mindset that I harnessed to draft the list, and all the little communicative bits of witty lyric and solemn riff that texture its runtime…
…but…
Prior to Darkwave, I repressed the urge to be expressively angry. I was infrequently peeved, sure, but it was also my penchant to employ gritty motifs to artificially express turmoil. One hard Fall and I found it necessary to become piercingly genuine, and to vocalize an emotion I had never given myself permission to feel: raging disillusionment.
I can’t tell you where that one came from.
The thesis of Darkwave is an utter confession: honest expression and anti-repression.
The first time I heard Destruction by Joywave I cast it aside. It was too brutal at the time, but I picked the track back up for Darkwave.
"Will the soundtrack kindly produce a sound?"
[Distorted Buzz]
"Go on, don't be nervous. Go ahead, any sound."
[Distorted Buzz]
"Well, that isn't quite what I had in mind..."
It sets the tone perfectly: laced with manic aggression and the notion of having become a monstrous version of onesself. Was I a monster at the time of drafting Darkwave? No, but I was acknowledging the fact that I could still become one, and it was to be increasingly likely to happen under the duress of contrived expectation. A guy named Jung once wrote about that potential as “The Shadow” of human personality. His advice was to stare the shadow down until you know how to apply it properly. That’s in large part why Darkwave exists.
Destruction slams closed on harpsichord hinges and the playlist lurches into IDKHOW's Leave Me Alone, which is tonally somewhat obviously in-keeping with the aggression of the song prior. Willow's Transparent Soul follows in similar blatant fashion, but then the tone of the music slides into a smoother spite in Alrighty Aphrodite. It subsides even further into a strange calm with the Half Moon’s pulsing dark tone. It may seem strange for a playlist meant to express anger to so quickly peter out the high-tempo and grating distortion of “angry music” in just 5 songs, the slow fall is purposeful. This run of the first 5 songs describes an outburst of The Shadow. As Half Moon fades into the black, the first phase of the playlist concludes.
The next phase of the playlist shifts themes: the defensive jabs give way to woozy disillusionment and disassociation with punkrock and psychedelic tracks, and the songs become decidedly more bitter. Phase two warms back up with IDKHOW’s New Invention, which carves back into the “angry space” with tumbling bass riffs and soaring synth.
“You've got the devil on your shoulder
(shoulder, shoulder, shoulder)
You better shut your mouth just like I told ya
(told ya, told ya)
You've been controlling me through fiction, it's obvious
I've got to break you like a bad addiction”
Jackie immediately follows. Definitely a breakup song, but that’s not why I placed it in the playlist. While the lyrics convey a familiar punitive post-relational tone, the ragged, cavernous electronic sound Yves Tumor crafted for the track tells more of the story I was aiming to invoke. It fits the plalylist in spite of the pouty lyrics. Jackie echoes into the first crucial track of the playlist’s story: Shakey Graves’ Backseat Driver: the first instance where you can get a peek behind the curtain and compute where Darkwave’s angst is coming from.
“Ever after
Never felt so wrong
The radio plays our song
Now I remember
What's lost and gone forever
Lost and gone forever”
Backseat Driver is about reminiscing on the good times. It’s a profoundly sad thing to do when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. The problem of nostalgia, of course, is that you can’t go back and fix things up to be perfect again; there is only going forward. Accordingly, after some time thinking of “the good old days,” Darkwave launches out of asking “what happened” and into “what the hell is going on”. Sports Team’s Here’s the Thing rolls Darkwave back up to speed with its breezy punkrock panache:
“Here’s the thing, if you smile enough
then everybody smiles
If you just work a little harder
you’ll get by
(Here’s the thing) or you can trust a man
who wears a suit and tie
It’s all just lies, lies, lies, lies
Here’s the thing, and if your parents worked to
earn it, then it’s yours
(Here’s the thing) and if you’re barely getting by
then that’s your fault
(Here’s the thing) and everything in life is fair
and that’s the rules
It’s all just lies, lies, lies, lies
You’re worth as much as any luxury
you buy
(Here’s the thing) the world will be okay
if we stop taking flights
(Here’s the thing) And if you just change the way
you eat, you’ll never die
It’s all just lies, lies, lies, lies.”
The dreamy implications of Pinch Me suggest that things might be a bad dream– or at least that the singer wishes they were. Themes of innocence lost lace the lyrics. Then Turning Into Water locks in on a central idea:
“Now I'm freezing in winter of the heartache
You ask me how it feels
Well, time wounds all heals
Ice preserves these bitter chills
Gloria, I don’t ask for your lovin’
Just a little time for you to recognize
What is just beyond my will”
Turning Into Water was another track crucial to my effort to process the weight of the nebulous “distress” inflicting the angry themes of Darkwave. If you were to combine the thread of themes leading to Turning Into Water with its lyrics, (hopefully) an idea will present itself: anger can be controlled, but it needs to time to be processed. The message that can be derived from a song like Turning Into Water is that in order to “recover” through anger you have to melt a little, and that’s okay.
There’s a distress that lies under most anger, and the disillusioned lyrics up to this point in Darkwave contribute to a sense that maybe the distress of Darkwave is some sort of sadness or regret over how life has gone. It was certainly the case that at this place in the playlist’s creation process I was trying to sort out why life had been so full of suffering and dissonance. I don’t mean that morosely: to live entails some amount of suffering. Of course, the term “suffering” is commonly used to say “extreme suffering” in shorthand, but that’s not what I mean. To wake up every morning is to suffer the responsibility of the day. That’s a normal part of life, and many suffer it well enough to make something of their day. With enough practice, dealing with the suffering of the day-to-day becomes easy. A problem occurs, however, when one is sucker punched by a burdensome quantity of unforeseen additional suffering. That’s dissonance, and dissonance is painful.
In my personal life, I had particular expectations about how certain people were going to behave, but when they too imparted such “sufferings” as I had expected them not to, I became hugely distressed. It was the sort of distress which motivates radical action, but I didn’t know what to do with the new infusion of energy. I wanted to unleash it and bottle it up and take it out on myself all at once. While Backseat Driver describes a desire to go back to how things were before that distress, Turning Into Water acknowledges the necessity of taking time to feel such an instance transform you. Thinning out, “transforming into a translucent pool,” and even allowing resentment to bloom are part of that process, and by listening to Turning Into Water I was able to remind myself that it was okay to be brought low for a time.
Now, the theme sadness is not brought out in full until the last strains of The Rifle's Spiral ring out and Madison Cunningham's Common Language skips in. Simply put, this track is what saved my ruminations on anger from calcifying into total bitterness. Cunningham expresses another crucial idea with her beautiful orchestration and lyricism:
"Here we are once again, can't get out, can't get in
We're the same note in different octaves
You see blue, I see in turquoise
We're the same note in different octaves
I've been looking for something, a sound or a sentence
I see a thousand doors but I can't find an entrance
You could put it into words and I'd still be confused
I could hold you in my arms and never really know you
…
Similar hearts speak dissonant phrases
Differing souls speak a common language
…
Similar hearts speak dissonant phrases
Beauty and pain are a common language
You and I, we're a common language
Beauty and pain are a common language"
Cunningham's clarion observations in Common Language can be summed up as a solemn reminder: wallowing a single strain of such distressing thought only produces further dissonance
Despite the angry front, the secret of Darkwave is that I never created it to stew. It felt good to stew in the process of listening and relistening to angry music, of course, but it was never my goal. Rather, I started arranging Darkwave with the exclusive purpose to genuinely self-express. Not even I knew that at first, but as I processed the turbulent mental states I was traversing while making Darkwave, that’s the purpose that generated. What I can claim intent on is the vague notion to explore and express the aggressive feelings of anger with the intent sublimate the habits of anger (read: bitterness) into something worthwhile. Common Language is a song which sees the validity of embracing dissonance, but which calls the listener to diversify their own narratives. It is a nuanced composition which simultaneously encourages the listener to validate one’s extremes (beauty, pain) while also self-exposing one’s self to new ideas. The idea is that that worthwhile dialogue comes from diverse points of view. As a function of that wisdom to seek diversification, I decided to not just include “angry” songs, but just whatever songs that seemed to flow emotively. So I diversified. Just as anger, disillusionment, fear and bitterness make their appearance in Darkwave, so too do anguish, grief, horror, and resignation begin to appear after Common Language.
Poignantly, the pulsing beats of LCD Soundsystem infiltrate the playlist and flip the tone to grief in Someone Great. I didn’t know why I originally included this particular track, but after having gone away and come back with some new knowledge I can reasonably propose this: I was grieving the death of my ideal self. All of the anger in Darkwave can be traced to that central idea, borne from dying naivety. I could no longer be who I had envisioned myself to one day be. The possibility was simply gone, and this grieved me.
Smashing Pumpkins naturally follows such a statement. 1979 espouses themes of suburban disorientation and meaninglessness. Incinerate follows suit in similar tone. I stuck the song in because it has a genuine “burning” quality that eventually became common in the last quarter of the playlist, though upon looking at the lyrics I found some parity with the author’s original intent and my own life. ICU carries the sentiment of being in a hospital with someone: a cocktail of anxiety, love, and guilt. It’s followed by a combination of songs which I find sufficiently illustrate an existential panic attack: Black Rainbow by St. Vincent and Panic Switch by the Silversun Pickups.
Then a familiar thread weaves back into the fray. PVRIS’ No Mercy rekindles one last explosion of incendiary rage. It’s followed by a mouthful of a title: W.D.Y.K.A.G. by King’s Kaleidescope. Why do these songs carry the torch once again, and what has relit it? The whole playlist had amounted to an exploration into the things below anger and bitterness, and yet they were back again. Here’s why: another one of my goals for Darkwave was to seek a powerful, truthful form of anger– one that made sense beyond the limited scope of reactionary spite. In the end we see two types of anger, which I’ll affectionately coin, “What the hell, dude?”, and “Righteous Indignation.” The anger is finally refined, and it’s ready to be shipped out.
Genius’ synopsis of No Mercy is crisp:
““No Mercy” is about wanting to be set free from a relationship, but staying and watching it go up in flames and waiting for its inevitable end. Blood imagery is used throughout the song to signify the arguments the couple go through, juxtaposed by the purity of water.”
It’s a goad: a beckon to “bring it on.” Most importantly, it’s a call to step up and be forthright: unleash one’s anger and genuinely express it. But the song is important because it’s not just internal; No Mercy is explicitly intended for the other side of a strained relationship.
“Show me no mercy
And let it rain (If you're gonna make it hurt)
Show me no mercy (Hey, hey)”
“Be real about where you’re at and bring it on,” in other words. It's followed by "W.D.Y.K.A.G" (what do you know about grace), which unseats false piety:
"Two plays on one stage, you're two-faced
Five shades of fake, only one snake
Don't ever question your methods
You made the message a weapon
Out of our way!
Watch what you say!
Bury your blade!
Carry your weight!
[…]
You wanna hoard the future
But you're trippin in the moment
Your world is gonna fall.
What do you know about grace?"
W.D.Y.K.A.G my guilty pleasure addition which can be interpreted a number of ways. Originally the song was composed in the wake of the great dialogue of anti-racism we all joined in 2020, but the gospel themes of the track made it easy to slot into Darkwave as a final message: self-righteousness is unwelcome and pitiful. If there is anything that validates anger, it is being made to suffer under another person's brown nosing self-righteousness.
Darkwave concludes with Covet's "gleam", a lilting, burning math rock piece which resolves… nothing. Instead, the final moments of the playlist smoulder in the gloom of Covet's signature heavy sound. The listener is left waiting in the residual warmth of the playlist's echoes.
Darkwave's ending is intentional, and descriptive of the place I was in when I finished the playlist. Truth be told, the same unresolved issues still lingered months after the playlist was finished and running on repeat through my earbuds. It would not be until the next major playlist in this saga of disillusion that I would resolve some of the deeper issues I constructed Darkwave to process.
Darkwave is a seminal playlist. I have constructed plenty of purposed playlists in the past five years, but few dove so close to the more destructive emotions as Darkwave. The creative process for Darkwave enabled me, however, to contain and neutralize a host of the associated destructive impulses. As I progressed through the process, the tracklist blossomed into a delicately-orchestrated composition of tone, lyrics, and pacing, and the finished arrangement became fundamentally narrative, even beyond the scope of the lyrics or my own intents.
I take issue with a few things, but they mostly amount to songs which might misconstrue the meaning of the playlist. Read: Breakup songs. Everything is a relationship in the music industry, I guess. Especially when it comes to the grungier music.
…but most important of all is that the playlist is just bursting at the seams with bangers. I hope you enjoy whatever you listen to, and if there is one song you imbibe I recommend Madison Cunningham's Common Language. You can access the playlist and get a sampler of each song below in the embedded playlist!
