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malodorousmalcontent · 5 years

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Sixteen92 Review

Hi everybody, welcome to my Sixteen92 review, where I feel unnecessarily self-conscious about how many times I describe scents as 'perfumey'.

I've been sitting on these for a good couple... Weeks? Months? I don't know, but a fateful weekend came where I took a look at my exceptionally busy Notes file, and felt very sad, so I figured i'd knock a couple reviews off my list. Work through all this shit I still needed to review. And that brings us here! Hooray.

I'll be reviewing Kuro Lolita, You Who Swallowed a Falling Star, New Radio, Hydromancy, Telepathy, Mellifera, Vlad Dracul, Paper Moon, and An Excellent Day for an Exorcism.

Hold onto yer butts, folks, this one gets pretty long, here we go

KURO LOLITA (PERFUME OIL) || Black sandalwood, burning resins, straw, porcelain, delicate lace, wet stone, fog, wind-blown leaves.

This smells like a cold rainy fall day in a small southern gothic town, encompassed by farmland, with cobblestone streets and dotted with tiny run-down churches. Bales of hay are speckled around the area: leftover decorations from autumn festivities that happened a week or so ago.

...Just had to get that outta my system, onto the stuff that matters!

The first thing I get, punching me in the nose as soon as I put it on, is sandalwood and damp hay. It's a very warm, woody, dusty scent, with just a little bit of sweet acridness that makes me think there's a dry/decaying leaf note in this (I haven't double-checked the notes yet, so I only remember some of them), and enough petrichor to put the 'damp' in there. The burning resin note comes out after about 10 minutes of wear, and, boy, it's unmistakable: Sweet, with a kick, and a good amount of burniness to it. It smells dark. Like you just walked into one'a those imaginary churches and they were performing a sordid ritual in there, the chapel overrun with incense and candles.

Another 15 minutes, and the sandalwood fades, the resins mellow out some, and i'm mostly left with the hay and that gentle sweet smell of decay. The final note I smell on the drydown: leaves and cold, wet atmosphere. Really interesting atmospheric, evokes a lot of mental imagery.

tl;dr: Sandalwood at first, followed by burning, incensey, sweet resin that mellows out to hay and a decaying leaves note that is present throughout the whole wear. Dries down to leaves and cold, wet atmosphere.

RATING: 3.5/5. Nice, a very good atmospheric, but I feel like it's bordering overly complex, with some of the notes getting lost in the mix and my nose feeling a bit confused. I also don't know how much i'll want to really wear it.

YOU WHO SWALLOWED A FALLING STAR (PERFUME OIL) || Dark stone fruits, glowing embers, night rose, sweet sandalwood, plum blossom.

Oh, smells like rock candy.

So this is sitting on a weird edge for me. See, "stone fruit" (peach) notes tend to not work on me more often than not: they go acrid in this terrible, burning bodily fluid kinda way, and this... This is sitting juuuust on the edge of that. It's sharp and tart and kinda heady, rounded out by that rock-candy sweetness (which i'm 90% certain is frankincense. Source: I have a bag of pure frankincense), and just like... It's thinking about being a burny bile scent. But not quite. Nooot quite. There's a smooth, perfumey floral undercurrent to this, too. Lots of smells goin' on at once.

The drydown is basically lush, smooth, perfumey, rich-as-hell flowers, with a slight sourness to 'em. It's actually very pretty, that rose is killin' it. I don't get the threat of burning bile anymore, or the rock candy. It's a little humid-smelling, too - a great summer night scent.

tl;dr: Bright stone fruit and powdery, rock-candy-like incense which fades to lush, smooth florals.

RATING: 3/5. Well made, but i'm not big on how the top notes play out at all.

NEW RADIO (PERFUME OIL) || Vanilla milkshake accord, maraschino cherry, pink lemonade, grass clippings, waffle cone.

So, full disclosure, I had no interest in this scent. I saw it and went, woof, that sounds way too bright and sweet and youthful for me, and passed it over time and time again. I ended up getting it as a free sample when I ordered some of those Sea Salt Hair Sprays, and... Wow. I like it way, way more than I thought I would.

In the bottle, it's... Perfect. It's everything. Rich, foody, smooth vanilla; SUPER bright, almost candied, nice n' tart maraschino cherry (this is the note I was most worried about, too, as I don't like cherries - but this note is perfect). The gentlest edge of sour pink lemonade. A perfect, toasty waffle cone, which is honestly one of my favorite scents... I don't get much grass, but I don't need it. In the bottle, it's the perfect summer scent.

You'll notice I keep saying 'in the bottle'.

It touches down on my skin, and lives in that perfect blissful state for about two seconds, and then, boom. My skin absolutely gobbles up most of those wonderful notes. That bright maraschino cherry? Gone. Pink lemonade? Barely there, just giving a bit of a sour zing. All i'm really left with is vanilla and the faintest hints of that waffle cone note. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Like, it still smells good... But, god, not as good as it could. I might get a scent locket for this, though.

Virtually no sillage, but I can smell that vague warm sweetness on my wrist for a pretty good handful of hours.

tl;dr: A delicious, foody, bright, sweet and warm and toasty summer scent that's a dead-ringer for its notes... That my skin devours instantly, leaving only vanilla, a touch of lemonade, and faint breadiness.

RATING: 3/5. This would be a 5/5 if my skin didn't DEVOUR half of it. RIP, beautiful scent.

HYDROMANCY (PERFUME OIL) || Fog, cold violet, lichen, ambroxan, mineral accord, petrichor, glass.

This was recommended to me when I went out and asked people for a scent that makes me smell like a ghost, and honestly, this fits the bill pretty well. It's a pretty specific type of ghost, though: the ghost of a waifish maiden who went down with a sinking ship, who you find, suspended frozen above the water, in the air pocket of an underwater cave that she managed to swim to but ultimately starved to death within.

...ANYWAYS

This smells empty, silky, ethereal, dark in a spooky way, and most importantly, pretty darn oceanic and green. The first thing I smell upon putting it on is the lichen and ambroxan, the former being green, sort of dry-smelling (like lichen that's growing just a foot or so above the water, hasn't touched it in a while, y'know), with that weird tang that lichen can have, and the latter giving a very oceanic sweet-saltiness. The mineral accord and petrichor blend really well with the ambroxan note and it genuinely just ends up smelling like very realistic dank cave ocean water.

And then there's the fog and the glass. The Weird Notes.

The fog is less a scent and more a feeling - it makes the entire scent sort of... Soft and fuzzy. It's what's giving it that silky quality. The glass, you can actually smell, and it... Smells like glass, y'all. Cold and clear and giving off a faint sterile scent, but, it's there. Notably, I can only really detect it if I huff so hard that I become anosmic to the ambroxan and lichen, and it comes out more on the dry-down, but. ...Yeah, it's there. Combined with the fog, it's like... The scent equivalent of looking through a window that's become clouded with condensation. If that makes sense.

This doesn't have a ton of sillage - I can just barely detect it from 3 inches away - but wears very strongly on my wrist.

tl;dr: A realistic ocean water scent made fuzzy and silky by a fog note, with a fascinating, realistic glass note that peeks out on the dry-down.

RATING: 4/5. Too oceanic for me, but well made, and that glass note is WILD.

TELEPATHY (PERFUME OIL) || Winter narcissus, tonka bean, immortelle flower, sleet, ozone, white amber.

When I first got this, it was basically just straight sleet for the entire wear, and I wasn't wild about it. It was a very realistic sleet note, mind you, but that's not necessarily a good thing: the scent basically smelled cold, bitter, and a little dirty, which is not at all what I had been expecting from the notes.

The good news is, after considerable rest, it's verrrry different.

I put it on, and for the first minute, it's still that dirty sleet note, but then it softens up and out comes the florals - Light and lush and just a little stereotypically perfumey-smelling. It's still a little dirty, which gives the scent some complexity, and there's a gentle undercurrent of something sugary-sweet underneath the florals. This is more... Elegant smelling than I think I expected it to be. I expected it to be light and femme and kinda... Younger-smelling, but the actual scent smells like something a very refined woman in her 40's or 50's might wear.

Looking at the notes, yeah, basically what i'm smelling. Florals from the narcissus and immortelle, sweetness from the tonka bean and probably the white amber, and atmospheric, colder, dirtier notes from the sleet and ozone.

It's very, very light on me - if I huff it too much I quickly become anosmic, and while I was getting a little bit of sillage while it was wet, I have to have my nose pressed to my wrist on the dry-down.

tl;dr: A delicate, perfumey floral with undertones of cold, wet, dirty atmosphere and gentle sugary sweetness.

RATING: 4.5/5. I like this quite a bit. Has depth, but isn't overly complex, and the florals and sweeter notes are so pretty. I'd wear this to something very professional. Docked half a point for being so light, though.

MELLIFERA (PERFUME OIL) || Wildflower Honey Accord (not vegan), Violet, Jasmine Sambac, Vanilla Infused Sugar, Sandalwood.

So, i'm not big on honey scents. Unless the honey is very subtle, it can quickly go super overwhelming and cloying to me. Hex's Papa Legba was downright unbearable with how strong and sweet it was.

Mellifera, though, is not!

I mean, it's very honey forward, don't get me wrong, the honey's basically the star of the show, but it's a different kind of honey. It smells... Clearer. Rather than being overwhelmingly sugary-sweet, it's far more floral, with little pinpricks of something kinda sharp and tart and tingly. It's bordering on being kinda cleaning-supply-ish, but it's not quite there. There might be a citrus note in this? That's what i'm basically getting: Clear, gentle honey with a floral edge, and maybe citrus.

Let's CHECK! THOSE! NOTES

Not a LICK of citrus! Go me. The wildflower honey accord explains the quality of the honey, though, and I bet that sharpness that's a little cleaning-supply-ish is the jasmine. The violets are in there, but they're so well-blended with the other floral notes that I wouldn't be able to identify their trademark Purple Burp smell on a blind sniff. I can recognize them now that I know, but seriously, the other florals balance them out so well.

The wildflower and jasmine pinpricks eventually mellow out to a smooth, bright sweetness - a combination of the vanilla and honey, I imagine. I... Still don't get any sandalwood, which makes me sad, 'cause I love sandalwood. :( My wood-gobbling skin strikes again, I guess.

Virtually no sillage - it wears kinda light on my wrist, and I can only smell it from about an inch away.

tl;dr: A clear, floral honey with pinpricks of sharp jasmine that loses its floral edge on the drydown and simply becomes bright-yet-smooth honey and vanilla.

RATING: 3.7/5. Not bad, but the jasmine is just too sharp for me, and I can't see myself wearing it much.

VLAD DRACUL (PERFUME OIL) || Carpathian fir needle, red cedar, black amber, black patchouli, scorched earth, opium, blood musk.

This smells like a cologne for someone who dresses in refined clothes but also feasts upon the entrails of freshly-killed deer, so, I guess the name is apt. It's dirty as hell, but in a kind of bright way: like walking around on a very dry fall day through a forest that's all reds and yellows and dry cracked earth with sparse yellow grass. I get a cool airiness from it, and piney freshness, and d i r t. That scorched earth note ain't playin' around. I'm pretty sure that man-stank smell is the blood musk, which is this sorta... Feral, almost pheromonally sweet smell? But it's not bad or actually stinky, just kinda hanging out under the atmospherics.

On the drydown I get a resinous, very light sweetness, I assume that's the opium and/or the black amber, and the atmospheric notes are still there, most notably that scorched earth, but way subtler. It's warm and smooth and just... Prettier than I expected it to be, given the way it started.

tl;dr: A fall atmospheric that's distinguished by its scorched earth note and a sort of pheromonal, feral musk. Dries down to light resinous sweetness and that scorched earth note.

RATING: 4/5.

PAPER MOON (PERFUME OIL) || Soft vanilla musk, benzoin, oakmoss, trailing ivy, peach blossom, rose.

Mmmm, this is delicious. It's so sweet and mellow with the prettiest, smoothest florals. The vanilla musk is the strongest thing in this, humid and sweet, with a super well-blended floral edge. The florals are kinda perfumey-smelling, but the rose doesn't go overly chemical, is just lush and smooth, and the peach blossom is soft and delicate. I've never encountered benzoin before, so i'm not entirely sure what it smells like, but The Internet says it's a warm and sweet note - I bet it's part of what i'm reading as the vanilla musk. I keep sniffing this looking for the ivy or oakmoss, but honestly, i'm not smelling anything that hits me as particularly green.

The most morphing it does on the dry-down is that the florals mellow out some, but otherwise, it stays largely the same. It wears close to the skin, but is strong on my wrist.

tl;dr: A warm, humid vanillic sweetness with a floral edge that's lush and perfumey from the rose and soft and delicate from the peach blossom.

RATING: 4.7/5. An EENSY bit too perfumey for me, but that's about it.

AN EXCELLENT DAY FOR AN EXORCISM (PERFUME OIL) || Cathedral incense, black clove, burned parchment, tarnished silver, sacred woods.

Woods. Strong, evergreen woods, with a surprisingly light airiness to them - a real nice cold air note, i'm assuming. Genuinely makes the scent smell cool. The woods are strong and perfumey, which puts them a hair off realistic, but I also get that fresh, sap-sticky (I love that term pardon me for using it across reviews), slightly bitter mintiness that smells very much like the real thing.

I have, literally, NO idea what the notes in this are at the time that i'm writing this, apart from a tarnished silver note - which I think might be part of the cool airiness of the scent, i'm not sure. If I had to take a wild guess, i'd say that there's... Woods, resins, maybe a floral giving that perfumey nature, and some kinda cold air/ozonic note.

Here we go, let's take a peek at zee notes

...Wow, I was way off. At least I got the woods and the cathedral incense must be what i'm reading as resins, and is probably the source of the perfumey-ness, and, by process of elimination, the silver note must be what's making it so cold. The burnt parchment and black clove come out a couple hours into the drydown, giving this a tingly, burning quality, and a good bit of sharpness. The sweetness of the incense rounds it out nicely.

Doesn't have a lot of sillage, but says strong on my wrist.

tl;dr: Perfumey incense, fresh woods, and a cold and clear silver note that dries down to a burning, sharp smell that's still accompanied by the sweetness of the incense.

RATING: 3.5/5. Not bad, I love that silver note, but gets too sharp on the dry-down.

#perfumes #perfume reviews #sixteen92 #kuro lolita #you who swallowed a falling star #new radio #hydromancy #telepathy #mellifera #vlad dracul #paper moon #an excellent day for an exorcism

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ljbarks · 6 years

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Julien Baker, My Father, Two Decades of Noise, and the Quiet

Soda guns make a funny noise. Like a dozen dentists doing work all at once, some suction and a strange gurgle.

Usually, it’s also a noise that happens nonchalantly, especially in a place like this, the gurgle drowned out by the din and dissonance of the band and the crowd and the night.

Right now though, a couple songs into Julien Baker’s set at White Eagle Hall, the soda gun — and the cracking of a fresh beer, the opening and closing of the standard-issue industrial doors at the back of the room, everything — have become some kind of strange and unwelcome accompaniment, dropping in at all the wrong moments, a laugh-track mistakenly placed over A Very Special Episode.

This, of course, is partially my fault. I’m perpetually late and the kind of short where I’ve had to turn my annoyance at the dozens of phones shooting video that’s never gonna be revisited into an argument for how useful all those glowing screens are as periscopes. Too anxious to push my way to the front under some false “I’m looking for my friends” pretense, because I know my friends are not up there because they’re all at home because it’s Tuesday and we’re in our mid-thirties. And then what happens when I get to up there? Then I’m awkwardly planted next to a person who’s not my friends, inserting myself into this stranger’s night like I just hatched from my pod and am enjoying my first moments in this human body, cumbersome and lumbering, exploring the thing the earthlings call music.

Instead, I don’t move from the spot on the floor that I’ve acquired simply by ordering a beer at the bar and then turning and taking only the amount of steps required to get out of the way of the next person. But the hypothetical awkwardness stays, permeating the room in some other way. As I, from my tippy-toes, and the other 799 people packed into White Eagle watch Baker take the stage, it’s to a strange kind of silence.

The first live music I ever saw that wasn’t my father playing the organ in our house — like the first thing that involved a band and instruments, and an in-hindsight surprising lack of any kind of adult supervision — was a punk show at the Rockaway American Legion.

It was 1997.

I was the kid who wore Nirvana shirts to school every single day. A girl in my first period biology class was passing out flyers.

“I think you like music, I don’t know.”

She tossed the thing on my desk. I was never cool to begin with, but in this moment she was infinitely cooler than me.

I convinced my best friend to come, and my father happily volunteered to drive us, depositing two fifteen year-olds in some random parking lot with only a vague idea about when to return to collect us.

This, that he was so willing to do this, volunteered to do it, was a confusing thing about my father. He was angry and strict, though only about the small and specific things. I never had a curfew, but food falling off your fork at dinner as you awkwardly tried to get this adult-sized utensil into your child-sized mouth would launch some kind of international incident. It always ended with slamming doors and crying and him storming out and me climbing up into the treehouse to write some other life in my head.

The flyer, because it was 1997, had a phone number to call “for directions or sex advice.” I blacked out that second part before I showed it to my parents, marching into our kitchen with this photocopied paper adorned with a giant hand-drawn, bug-eyed and bemowhawked creature with a safety pin through its tongue, the names of a bunch of bands they wouldn’t have known even if their entire record collection wasn’t The Kingston Trio, the soundtrack to The Big Chill and Donald Fagen.

I didn’t know the bands, either, really, but I knew I needed to go to this thing and see it. And so I also armed myself with an argument for why I should be allowed to go. Instead, I just got a “yes.” Simple. Too easy. My father, for all the other stuff, became his opposite self when it came to matters of music.

That November night in the American Legion, I found the thing I didn’t know I’d been looking for for all of the 15 years and four months of my life before it. My home, my people, my thing. My father came to pick us up at the end, and I surely got back in the car, tired and happy and smelling of cigarettes, but really, I never left.

Twenty-one years later that flyer hangs on the wall of my apartment.

Through the rest of my high school life, I’d check out the arts listings in the paper, picking out concerts and pulling out the phonebook so my parents could call Ticketmaster, using the money I’d made from working at the family business and then my job at the mall to finance these miniature adventures. And every time, my father would volunteer his services as driver, dutifully dropping us off somewhere in the middle of Manhattan so that we could enjoy a night with The Offspring.

Once I could drive, we’d spend weekends traversing the state following handwritten directions scribbled on a pick from the stack of flyers we’d been handed at the previous show. Living in all the wonder that comes with the kind of places willing to host an afternoon of complicated-looking kids too into something that was mostly dissonance and sometimes childhood music lessons repurposed into bad Bosstones knockoffs. Elks lodges, VFW halls, American Legions, firehouses, basements, the storefront of a diet food restaurant, high school gyms and random rooms in churches.

Then we’d take the train into the city and see the bigger touring bands that came through. Take a quarter for the payphone to call my mom from Penn and let her know the train didn’t derail on the way. Take the Midtown Direct from Dover for Pennywise, All and Strung Out in the city on Friday, drive to Asbury Park for Blink 182, Silverchair and Fenix TX on Sunday, go to school on Monday. Lars Frederiksen stealing my friend’s lighter outside a Dropkick Murphys show at the Wetlands. Smoking in the downstairs of Roseland as we browsed the tables of patches and buttons that lined the room. Summers with multiple Warped Tour dates, a car accident on the way to Asbury leaving the front passenger side door of my ’95 Golf in a permanent state of not closing right, our nostrils still filled with dust from Randall’s Island the day before.

Then, college, a degree I'd never get and mostly shitty jam bands in a small market city not on the way to anywhere. The other nights, more special. When Rainer Maria came to Higher Ground or AFI played at 242. River City Rebels with Catch 22 at a barn in rural Vermont or Bane in the middle of winter in some school gym. Kill Your Idols and Sworn Enemy and Agnostic Front and My Revenge and the show stopping to throw out some boneheads after they tried to rip a SHARP patch off a kid’s jacket. That night Death Cab played at UVM and someone from the band chased a kid who threw a disc golf disc onto the stage through the halls of whatever building that was. That same place where I saw Q and Not U and I think the only two times I was ever in that building. Our little NJ Scene expat crew, four people strong, watching some punk show on the second floor of the extra-strength hippie dorm.

Post-weird four year exile in Vermont, our little Jersey scene had shifted and died and grown up too much, but the city was still there. I’d learned by then never to take New York for granted. I went to shows.

So many.

Our Wilco/Ryan Adams cousins crew getting too drunk in Brooklyn bars and me as the only one over 21 buying bodega tallboys for everyone to drink from brown paper bags in Greeley Square. Getting lost in Macy’s and losing the car in midtown and getting actually lost on the way back from Camden. Perfect nights walking around Williamsburg and sunny Saturdays in Greenpoint and spending the night on Saint Marks after the War on Drugs got rained out. Happy hours at Matchless and tacos at that spot in Port Chester. The conversation before the Ty Segall show that started with me being excited for my friend and ended up with me on Uncle Einar’s first tour two months later. Too hyped after Run the Jewels and dropping my car key in a rest stop toilet because I hadn’t slept and went to see Rancid and Dropkick anyway. Too much whiskey and the side-effects of a tetanus shot and 13 staples in my leg and a Titus Andronicus show at Maxwell’s that I don’t remember. Getting a contact lens straight kicked out of my eye at that Vandals show at Irving Plaza. The lost weekend that was Punk Rock Bowling.

Plenty of solo trips, too, not wanting to miss what could be — because you never know — some band’s last time, and I’m not even going to bother trying to sell it to my friends. Sleater-Kinney five times in a week, the Piebald reunion, the sweatiest night ever when the AC broke at Webster Hall during the Bouncing Souls, and a fear of frostbite at Sonic Youth after putting a Chuck Taylor-clad foot into the depths of one of those curbside lakes the New York winter creates.

A thousand more that escape me now, but show me the ticket stub and I'll tell you the story.

The one constant is noise. There is always noise. The expected kind, of the band and the crowd cheering and singing along. And the annoying kind, of the full-on conversations everyone’s having as the band plays ten rows up, like the Bowery Ballroom is just an extension of their living room.

There is nothing better than a full-crowd singalong.

There is nothing worse than the people behind me at Sleater-Kinney’s first NYC show in nearly a decade having a full-on conversation — as the band was ripping through ‘Start Together’ or whatever — about an article one of them read about a Maraschino cherry factory that was illegally dumping whatever the byproducts of Maraschino cherry-making are into some Brooklyn waterway. It is a bonkers story that also involves a secret basement pot growing operation, but also, in the words of the great Sue Simmons, “the fuck are you doing?”

But both of those parts are also what make up the show. We’re in a room, simultaneously strangers and best friends. Together, doing a thing. That the gaps between songs are filled by this low mumble, that the band sometimes gets treated like nothing more than a backing track to an evening, because this is New York and we’re still too busy to even take this part out of our day to make it an actual part of our day.

There is some strange comfort in that noise, all of it, together.

This night, back at White Eagle, is different. It is silent. Starkly so. In an hour, I will be — we all will be — spit back out into New Jersey’s endless winter, down the steps and onto Newark Avenue, having learned no more about Maraschino cherries than we knew before we entered. I will hear nothing about who’s lunch Susan stole from the fridge at work today, or just how fucked up it was to get to Jersey from Ridgewood on a Tuesday night.

The only conversations I will hear are ones of faintly whispered commentary about how good this is. About “thank you for bringing me.” About “this is amazing.” And at first, it’s weird and jarring and uncomfortable, and every time another beer gets cracked at the bar the people all around me let out some barely audible groan, because for the first time at any show I’ve ever been to, we’re all sitting in that silence, and none of us know how to behave.

The show opens with ‘Over’ and ‘Appointments’ and no one even knows what to do when that’s over. Like, none of us know if we should even clap. Forever and ever, before and after this, the answer is obvious, but here, we’re all in some kind of silent agreement that there’s at least a question as to whether anything should pierce the quiet. Like we’d be as annoying as another person’s vodka soda order being fulfilled if we did.

Slowly, somewhere around the end of ‘Turn Out the Lights,’ we all agree to figure out if clapping is okay. Then light cheering. Eventually we’ve navigated it, all settled into a balance between the silence and the act of being at a show. Some of the people around me even risk a low singalong during parts of ‘Rejoice’ and that one part of ‘Everybody Does’, though the intermittent activity at the bar is still at least as loud.

And maybe, beyond the lack of talking, that’s why I’m so shaken and uncomfortable with this silence. Life is about noise, even in the background. A podcast, music, the TV I’m not watching. The fan that runs at night just so I can sleep. The silence outside my parents’ house makes me uneasy. I am home with sirens piercing the pre-dawn air. Stop the noise and the quiet can make things deafening in your head.

Shows are ringing ears and not knowing if you’re shouting at each other when you talk about how good it was on the way home. Why in some other social setting you’ll find me nodding in agreement even though I didn’t really hear what you just said. It is inherently about noise and sound taking over a room and taking everyone in that room with it.

Here, we’re trying to navigate that same journey with the quiet. Like turning up the volume on the car radio as you try to find your turn.

The thing I know about Julien Baker, because maybe I read The New Yorker while I’m brushing my teeth, is that she came up in some kind of punk scene that I imagine was similar to, though at least a decade and many states removed, from the one I did. Sonically, her music, just a guitar and some loops and piano and the occasional string accompaniment, is miles away from the basements and VFW halls and Elks lodges where I spent my teenage years. But it’s familiar somehow, too.

Maybe it’s because she’s here, on Tuesday night that’s too cold for April, mostly alone on stage, with just her songs and a couple guitars, a pedal board, a piano, and someone sometimes popping up to play violin, and she’s gotten this entire crowd to stop, to be quiet and sit in this silence and in these songs and find solace or something like it, in it, in them, in this. And that? That’s about as loud, and as punk rock, a thing as you can do.

#long reads #music #NYC #NJ #julien baker

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