KILL or KEEP Vol.12

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher

someone walks into a bar. It’s someone. I am johnnyoftheWell. It was a slow afternoon, and there we were. KILL or KEEP? Aye, why not – which record? Several meaningful opuses were teased, all of them beyond the space of our timeslot. Where does gravity default to on a slow afternoon? Well… has anyone ever listened to Phoebe Bridgers on a fast afternoon? Is such a thing even possible? Please do contact us immediately if you have pulled this off. We signed our rights away. It was time: time to get punished! Has her downer norm-magnet SowingSeason “5.0 Classic” passport to all of social media all the bloody time throughout the whole pandemic aged well? Time to find out…

Rules

The team is johnnyoftheWell, and someone.

Every song must either be KILLed or KEEPed.

There is no minimum KILL threshold. 

Every time a song is KILLed, the KILLer must name a vaguely Boygenius-adjacent artist whomst’ve the youthes should be consuming instead.

Okay.

Starting Impressions

jotW: Um, I expect little from this album and am ready for anything? It has disappointed me many times and probably aged more than anyone including me is/was prepared to admit. This is very exciting boy I can’t wait to see what someone does to it.

someone: I remember listening to the record a bunch back in the olden days of ancient yore, the forgotten times, the bygone epoch long behind us now, in the godforgotten and forbidden 2020. Yeesh, what a year. I believe I enjoyed it, for I am a sadgirl deep down… and sometimes high on the outward. I really do not recall the album that well and my memory of her stuff revolves mostly around boygenius (which is great) and that Oberst collab (which is not great)

(1) DVD Menu

jotW: Okay lfg. Fuck this does really sound like the start of that Brand New album dunnit. Sput has such a scratchable belly.

someone: At nearly 20mln Spot scrobbles, this must be the most popular field recording ambient song out there.

jotW: They did field recording on a violin?!

someone: i believe a field was nearby, a violin closeby, and a recording studio surrounding the instrument

jotW: Wow she really is a Texas.

someone: she indeed is a whole state of Texas, yes.

jotW: Flames and frames the wildest pairing since stars and stripes cool your shit America 

someone: Garden Song i for some reason remember as having had me moderately excited back then… cannot recall why. My jadedness.

jotW: Wow we have already moved on from this song lol savage. 

someone: I mean, is your version of the DVD whatever 7 minutes or sth, mine just switched to the next track. But sure we can talk about the whole one minute of nothing and rehearsals that the producer forgot to cut out.

jotW: Mine is 4:44??? Did I download this album wrong on release or something 

Someone: Oooh, you have the intro and the first song mushed together into one.

jotW: But I also have Garden Song as a separate track??

(2) Garden Song

jotW: and it just started damn OH SHIT no you’re right and for some reason I have ICU where Garden Song would have been this KILL or KEEP is a disaster! Awesome. So uh thoughts on Garden Song?

someone: I mean, if we conversed through Discord [and not on a google doc], this would have been easier but whatever you think

jotW: But that would  take way longer to edit… 

someone: Oh and this will be a walk in the garden, lad? We’ll see after our fourth restart

jotW: This is an UNPRECEDENTED event in KILL or KEEP history you should be shooting fireworks in surprise rn, more KEEPING and KILLING please

someone: Ok ok, youve invited an amateur over now hes wreaking havoc upon your system, child. Anyhoo, Garden Song is a tepid tedious intro that does little to accurately set up the album. Its main strengths, i suppose, are the crispness of sound or whathaveya, cause i really like when the album sounds like you are right inside the recording room.

jotW: Phoebe is cute when she plays the fretboard scratchy sounds most def. Um yeah this is nothing-song to ease the gang in, I guess? Some people consider it a highlight, do we have words for them?

someone: You people have only ever witnessed a highlight as a pale blond stripe in your pale-ish blonde hair, you don’t know what a highlight is.

jotW: Every song is a highlight if you’re living the downer crudely abstracted within Phoebe’s liver agreed

someone: a highlight is what my cousin calls the UV light for his weed. This is unironically the song he’d get high to. KILL

jotW: KILL um who are the other Boygenius artists, I swear Julien Baker has never been this flaccid?

(3) Kyoto

jotW: Best song named Kyoto that is not about Kyoto? Has anyone done a ska cover of this?

someone: this could have been the opener tbh. Idk why start an album on that mid-tracklist breather. Brass is a nice touch, not too tacky, not too buried either

jotW: The, um, real KILL or KEEP Punisher starts here? That little guitar arp’ing that comes in around Called on his birthday is some nice shit ngl.

someone: as far as im concerned, this is the first track.

jotW: What does a Scorpio sky look like, is that just a November reference or is she projecting?

someone: my literal brain just imagines a sky with clouds shaped like a scorpio.

jotW: Dope she is the poet. KEEP this song it is catchy the album has started. 

someone: yeah, the album’s hit by right. KEEP

(4) Punisher

jotW: Someone who is your doctor why are we in their waiting room

someone: my doctor is the one who holds a grudge against me. He is about to punish me, i hope.

jotW: Hope I can get some lucky collateral of that hehe

someone: On a side note, i kinda both like and hate genteel artists naming things with death metal tropes. There’s a band called Skullcrusher playing the most tepid dream folk or whathaveya. Listening to Punisher, my inner metalhead is distraught. So kudos, not even metal can distress me these days.

jotW: Skullcrusher is a scam artist using death metal nods to camouflage her naked Grouper aping, we ignore her. Phoebe at least is maybe actually trying to punish us here? When she says “stop” and the track stops I feel winded.

someone: with the T/T we are back to square one. Makes one think that Kyoto was a fluke and her actual interest laid with the drap genteel drag all along. Turns out she needed the other boygenius artists to get her actually emoting

jotW: She just wants to snare us into staring at the same walls as her for sure, this is definitely where that  “Emily I’m Sorry” bullshit stemmed from. Chords/arrangement are somewhat more intriguing than her usual downer fare, but this is another KILL. Who’s the other Boygeniusgirl? Lucy Dacus? She’ll do.

someone: yeah i definitely like the distant cold orchestrations behind. Some piano and some strings. (also .. uhhh… the tattoo lady…. Julien Baker). I’ll wait with the verdict, veering toward KILL, but this might end up the more exciting track on the album.

jotW: This bodes…

(5) Halloween

someone: i am starting to be rather astonished that the violin try-outs and scratchings of the recording room on the intro are so far among the most memorable things here.

jotW: Lol this one definitely needs more scratch. There’s enough hard-panned stuff at play here that my ears would defs soak it up.

someone: i remember this song speaking to me somewhat back in the day… i definitely was in a break-up sad girl mood and feeling every word. Now i look back the way people look at their poetry from their teen years. Embarrassed and mildly smirking.

jotW: Sad :[[[ what anything did you choose to be on Halloween? 

someone: I chose to be alone, turns out

jotW: Damn maybe you should have made this album 

someone: this was almost my break-up album proper, but sadly Purple Mountains were still a thing

jotW: Ngl you owe your soul to David Berman 

someone: but in the end he gave his soul to all of us and we took it, ripped it to shreds and said what a marvellous art he has made.

jotW: Treasure that boi / omg what a completely useless Conor Oberst feature

someone: hol up, there was an Oberst feat on Halloween?

jotW: Yes lol he drops in for like two lines on an empty diaphragm and then the song expires

someone: that’s like that whole Oblivion Communion or whatever album.

jotW: He at least carries a couple of tracks on that, but um yes. Definitely something that happened. KILL this song in favour of half-decent slowcore I guess – Boygenius crowd could do with some Shizuka.

someone: I might still Keep-ish. KILL by default, but for nostalgia purposes I will keep it secretly. But by all means, this is a boring song. This song needed Lucy Dacus to add some electric guitar and shouts over it. The tune seems right up her alley.

(6) Chinese Satellite

jotW: This song um.

Someone: At least there already is more depth in sound than either Halloween or Garden Song. some wibble wobble happening in the back. Distant drum machine too. 1:30 in and the bridge or chorus or sth starts and it is some Nashville-level ass writing. But from You were screaming at the evangelicals it gets atmospheric again, so that’s nice. 

jotW: That do be a bassline lfg. This song always felt very Discovery Channel, feel like we’re watching a baby elephant gradually recovering from smallpox or some shit. Is it just me or is the chorus mostly a note-for-note repeat of Kyoto?

someone: Wait, was the chinese spy balloon debacle in 2020? *looks it up* no, this is referring to sth else. okay

jotW: She was ahead of her time ig? This climax is a Disney moment and I do not have the fibre for it KILL. Rope in um Saya Gray she will teach the Boygeniuses how to oblique and not ham their shit. Petition for emo bands to stop ripping off PhoeB it is too much!

someone: is it? Hold on, gotta check. Not even close, but she does have the song-writing style of “just drag out a vocal or instrumental lick and add a spice of emotion”. Cheap way of evoking emotional response, but emo bands use it all the time. KILL for me, i suppose. But i fear that this still may prove the highlight of the album. I’d sign that petition, were it not for emo bands actually having emotion.

jotW: There can be no more emotion after this album, um next song?

(7) Moon Song

jotW: Okay this one is quite pretty

someone: as a side note, i went back to my soundoff. In 2020 i gave this a 4.0 and wrote a whole bunch of nothing. Not even sure what that was supposed to mean. I guess the heartbroken Gene was still breathing out emotional blood

jotW: You were a sad moonboi and now you are um um um thriving? KILLing? KEEPing? Doing big better!!

someone: this tune has some niceness to it. I kinda like the ever-so-slightly out-of-tune guitar

jotW: Clapton diss is still a whut moment but yeah, chords and 3/4 and guitar tones are v soothing

someone: tbh Clapton can get fucked for all humanity should care.

jotW: Clapton can most defs get fucked but Phoebe still being in the Eminem-diss phase of her career here has aged somewhat. This was the same year she called David Crosby a little bitch iirc

someone: well he did call her pathetic. And the fact that i know this piece of internet drama at all is upsetting to me.

jotW: She was the face of stockholm syndrome in lockdown. Nice song though, KEEP.

someone: the track fizzles out into oblivion. Was sure there’d be a payoff at the end. Nevertheless KEEP for me. The quirks, the breezy nature, kinda does it for me.

jotW: Yeah, weak ending for sure but it had a soul to it

(8) Savior Complex

jotW: Been ages, but I remember this being by far the best track on the record?

someone: ooh, key shifts. Already more into this than most of the album.

jotW: There’s so much more going on in the back of that arrangement – and the front! That violin finally found its way out of the field.

someone: did you notice how the best cuts here all have some cute, intricate background that is both understated and complex? While the duds are just her and the reliance on the mid lyrics and guitar.

jotW: Great songwriting is supposed to be able to weather mid lyrics and one-on-one communion with a guitar, this is a damning accusation

someone: string interlude stellar, adds a slightly nocturnal feeling. This, of all the songs, most sounds like something you’d hear in the album cover’s setting.

jotW: Yeah, digs how she lets the whole song drop out and catch itself for a moment there. Is that a banjo underpinning those strings as they swoop back up? Lovely sound. Oh, that’s the end? Well-earned I guess, easy KEEP

someone: towards the end, once all turns hazy, it’s almost a callback to the intro. KEEP for sure. Oh it even has a lovely lead in to the finale. Really pretty all around. KEEP KEPP KKEP KPEPEP KOPPOP K-POP KOP KROP POROREOJPAJPMV

(9) ICU

jotW: This intro gives me somewhat misplaced Arcade Fire energy. I’ve been playing my dead my whole life / and I get this feeling when I feel good – it’ll be the last time smdh did the pity party have to come back so soon. 

someone: something unnerving about a person saying “I hate you” in such a soft way. Whoa that vocal rise… almost showed she can pull off loud singing.

jotW: Don’t count those chickens. Hmm. Guitar fuzz and vocal rises ain’t gonna make this one any less of a snoozer, KILL and bring in idk Neko Case

someone: tune is okay, i might be more into it than you, but that may be due to this being the most energy she has displayed on the whole thing. KEEP for now. And seeing as the album is not all drowsy melancholy after all, I’ll go ahead and call the T/T a KILL

(10) Graceland Too

jotW: This song is a little twee, but it does have a lot more direction than the majority of the album hmm. 

someone: disclaimer: i hate banjo. It’s an instrument hellsent to make everything it is in goofy and far from serious. Her on a banjo backdrop immediately makes me think Hannah Montana or some crap.

jotW: What no! I mean yes, but also so many gorgeous things also have banjo, are you KILLing all of bluegrass?

someone: i am sure there is a banjo in the Smithsonian and that place is great. So to that extent, you are correct. But this is not a hill anyone is willing to die upon, it seems. Banjo is an instrument people at most find tolerable. Here it is a distraction to my sensitive ears. Sad, cause the tune beyond that is quite decent. I probably KEEP but want to KILL for the backing instruments. Will do as you do here probs.

jotW: Phoebe’s main vocal melody wears pretty thin by the end, but I like the backing vox and can feel the song’s trajectory so I guess it’s an obligatory KEEP

someone: that’s most of her vocal melodies tho. KEEP it is then

jotW: Wel, the thing about her melodies is um um um wow next song

(11) I Know the End

jotW: Do you know the end?

someone: i sometimes like when the album’s closer somehow references the end or somesuch.

Woohoo Germany shoutout. Cannot palace it, sounds about right. Most of Germany looks the same.

jotW: Doors cover when. Oh okay, the My Chemical Romance bit is starting and her vocal melodies are good for the first time.

someone: once again, the strings and guitars are doing some heavy lifting. I like the haze and the gloom.

jotW: Don’t forget those horns! And the drums! And other things that aren’t her!

someone: this song picking up certainly makes up for the bland start of it. Choir addition to transition into the finale is great, really underlines how satisfying the payoff is.

jotW: We are now floating and someone has found their overdrive pedal and lol oh fuck hearing this post-guitarsmash gate hits different

someone: repeating The End is Here in this is great and makes for an almost haunting listen, especially as it gets all loud and blistering. This is the crap i wanted all along. Every backing instrument that laced her subtlety until now gets a front seat and blasts to high heaven, even her shouting here is deserved and cathartic.

jotW: That was big and good and defs better than the majority of the album, but I maintain that her vocal wheezing at the end comes very close to ruining the whole thing. Gets so solemn and dramatic and then she drops a haha geddit pfft.

someone: cute cough at the end. Johnny tripping, twas cute. KEEP like nobody’s business.

jotW: There is literally no point in running this album unless you KEEP it and I will respect them rules.

Closing remarks 

jotW: Hmm I think Kyoto has worn off just a little, but otherwise the gap between floor and ceiling on this album is much wider than I remembered – which is to say that the majority of it is an absolutely useless pathos trip for sentimental flops, but the good stuff is legitimately kinda excellent? Savior Machine potentially her best song overall (certainly the most subtle)? I guess this has cemented for me that Phoebe’s songwriting pitfalls (all of which have since been retrodden heavily on the Boygenius album) are a huge chore, but it’s reminded me that she does have some of the real stuff in her somewhere. Still don’t trust her judgement as an artist, but guess I’ll un-write her off for the time being.

someone: i have difficulty recalling what my actual thoughts on the album were. I must have been clouded by the highlights, which are indeed strong. Kyoto, Savior Complex, and I Know the End are a banger, a driller, and an explosion respectively. I suppose my initial enjoyment came from the place i was in my life at the time, which is understandable. Phoebe’s work often relies on your emotional distress carrying you through hers. Or, if you are neekafat, you’ll just stan regardless. But revisiting now, 3 years later, i am finding myself in quite the ditch for opinions, as outside of a few truly magnetic tracks, the whole package is quite exhausted and lost like a puppy in the woods. I have grown jaded of these emotionally superficial lay-it-all-out-there folk-isms that rely heavily on the band leader’s personality. Phoebe has neither the unique experience, nor the insight, nor the finesse to carry a piece like that. Her carefully placed loud moments or experiments are clever, but she seems ill-inspired as to what their effect is to be. Most of the musical depth on this album seems almost accidental, the orchestral backgrounds do work well to craft an atmosphere of unease among the generally genteel sentiments, but her insistence on muting those when “important” moments come is quite tiring, especially when the “important” moments carry little to no weight with them. Still holding on hope that the true strong points, the choice selection of instrumental palette, the musical themes repeating, the more electric-oriented production ends up taking over the framework of her music in the future, but for now it is all a sparse blossom among prickly weeds.

Well, Johnny still hasn’t cut me off, so i guess ill rant a bit about the lyrics too. See, having attended a plethora of free poetry readings, i found that most people, regardless of their prime influences, end up writing in quite the same way. They wish to express some experience that eat away at them, while not revealing too much, but what ends up happening is just a vague rant/heartbreak pour/contemplation/rememberance/etc that tries to be both personal and universal, while ending up quite lacking in personality and having little to no factors to identify with. And without particular deeper analysis or a shred off critical thinking, this kind of writing can appeal to one’s immediate grievance, as it did (i suppose) to me then. When you don’t think about it, you can write lyrics as generic and vapid as “I am sad, now I am smoking, i’ll go to sleep soon” and deliver them in a way that suddenly obtains character. And you can interpret these lyrics onto anything, whatever your life situation may be. Provided, of course, you are a smoker. Whichever way you spin it, you can make it fit your emotional demand. End of rant.

Final KILLstats

jotW: 5/10 (50%)

someone: 4/10 (40%)

Surviving Tracklist

The following are the remaining songs that not one competitor elected to KILL.

They constitute the new, official version of the album:

1. Kyoto

2. Moon Song

3. Savior Complex

4. Graceland Too

5. I Know the End

KILL or KEEP will return soon, please be excited and stay posted!

 ・・・・

Archive

Vol.1: Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie…

Vol.2: Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile 

Vol.3: Carly Rae Jepsen – Emotion

Vol.4: Deftones – White Pony

Vol.5: Nightwish – Once

Vol.6: Tavito Nanao – Heavenly Punk Adagio

Vol.7: Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain…

Vol.8: The Beatles – The Beatles

Vol.9: Taylor Swift – Red

Vol.10: Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Vol.11: Weezer – Pinkerton