The Bowdoin Orient

I was on the prowl for pasties in Oxford's indoor market. The Office of Off-Campus Study will tell you it's the intensive tutorial system that lures Bowdoin students into spending Michaelmas at the world's oldest university. I'll tell you it's the cheese-filled balls of dough whose stench is heady enough to convince tourists to languish in queues for the whiff.

In one such queue, I jostled a gentleman striding by—the height of poor comportment in a country where etiquette is sovereign. “'Scuse me,” I tried to dither out in my best Oxonian-American, before the impish figure in a bowler hat and trench coat knocked the words straight back down my gullet to mingle with esophageal perfection. I, a bumbling foreigner, had backed into Thom Yorke, resident of Oxford and frontman of Radiohead.

My friend Christopher introduced me to Radiohead in tenth grade. I must have said something morose, using words I didn't really know to describe feelings I didn't really feel. He must have wanted to channel my pubescence out of English class rants about Sartrean nausea and into the private realm of Radiohead, lords of sob. In the computer lab we logged into Windows XP. I pulled up 2009-era YouTube. He pulled out 2009-era earphones. “Listen to 'Idioteque.' You'll like it.” I didn't.

I've forgiven myself, and not simply because my music taste in early high school could have been outpaced by an evolutionarily stunted prokaryote. Radiohead challenges, and I didn't like to be challenged. Radiohead also rewards, and I thought the reward was overstated. To be fair, one of the first reviews of the band's seminal 2000 record “Kid A,” which houses “Idioteque,” described hearing the music as “witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on IMAX.”

My thinking is that listening to Radiohead—a band bigger than the band bigger than Jesus—for the first time is like losing your virginity to your best friend in the back of your brother's jalopy on the eve of graduation. Which is to say: uncomfortable, exciting, terrifying, and world-historical. The bleating squalls of “Idioteque” were the sounds of evocative fiction, the kind that provoked the dismissive “hm” I gave Christopher only to guide me to study abroad in Oxford in search of the music's authors.

Radiohead shouldn't exist. They rocketed to fame on the same combustive consumption of American self-loathing that fired Kurt Cobain's shotgun. “What the hell am I doing here?” misbegotten Yorke pleaded in 1992, after Jonny Greenwood's signature squawk sent the band to assured one-hit-wonder-dom with “Creep.” Radiohead's debut “Pablo Honey” is not good, but only because it caters to the lowest common denominator of disaffected asshole-aesthetes. When they became uncompromising in 1995 with “The Bends,” they apotheosized as guitar heroes who could will modern alienation into transcendent celebration. When they heralded technological apocalypse with 1997's “OK Computer,” they became nothing short of prophets.

Where does the best band in the world go after releasing the best album of the decade? They enter a new decade and do it again. I'm too young to remember Y2K, the residual paranoia from Damocles' ballistic missiles, but I imagine “Kid A” disintegrating into the desperation of a billion electrons. Which is what happened to the chimerical album-as-art—diced into compressed data, scrambled into .mp3s, teleported from servers to earbuds, first through Napster and now through Spotify. What if the best album of all time was also the last, arriving on vinyl already vestigial, on compact discs already discarded? “Kid A” issues soothsayings, autopsies, and elegies for the same humanity that died in its creation, at the incipience of the wireless age.

Dylan went electric in 1965, but Radiohead went digital in 2000. I didn't know anything about the band's history, let alone the history of Musical Statements, but I did know that after a night of gallivanting with friends, I had to clamber, boozed and bloodshot, under my sheets to let the descending resolution of “Everything In Its Right Place” wash over me. The notes collapsed into each other while I soared into the barren soundscapes of the title song and “The National Album.” They're cruel but compelling, a disaster and a dawn, stitched from Thom's vocoder wails and flairs of demented brass. The lyrics are dense, unintelligible, and often mundane, like snippets of conversations dredged from data trawlers or the concomitant propaganda that none of this is really happening. But they also suggested a peace beyond the clash of competing cell lines, ineffable and effaced. Loss in the era of hyper-connection wasn't a new idea in 2000, but in 2009 it was innovative to a student trying to piece his world together.

Hence the irony of discovering Radiohead through the jittery opening of “Idioteque” on library computers. The song can't play by command, summoned from the depths of the Internet along with its demons. It unfolds along the infinity of the record's 48 minutes, discernible only in fellowship. For that, “Kid A” is not unhopeful. Its beauty persists if we let it, 15 years later, from the palpitations of surrender of its opening, the cacophony of its uncertainty halfway in, and the ending requiem to “red wine and sleeping pills.”

Because as much as “Kid A” seethes of techno-dystopia, it breathes something else into life. Maybe it's the memory of friends like Christopher, to whom I haven't spoken in years but nevertheless could strike up conversation—even about Sartrean nausea—with affection. Maybe it's the pasties wafting from Oxford's impossible, ancient kitchens. Maybe it's the nights spent in search of love and refuge with the radio on. Maybe it's the humanity embedded in digits by design, the link we have to each other even from our furthest distances. Maybe it's the same hope that Thom kindles at the record's close, whether it turns out merely true or merely comforting: “I will see you in the next life.”

I have a confession, gentle reader, and I hope the same grace which brings me to admit my sin also inspires you to forgive it. When last we met, I declared the impossibility of the singer-songwriter in 2015. Sincerity is dead, I thought, taking with it our affable acoustic mensches. I spoke too soon. (Even tastemakers are mortal.) 

I underestimated a certain musician from Detroit with a penchant for geographic grandiosity. If Father John Misty is the crucifixion of songwriting, then Sufjan Stevens is the resurrection.To be fair, Stevens is an unlikely martyr. The year 2005 belonged to the baroque absurdity of his record “Illinois,” with its soaring choruses and site-specific splendor. What business does Stevens have in 2015, being five years removed from his last LP (unless you count the disturbing amount of Christmas music he has recorded, which sounded more like the data-driven apocalypse than a flurry of hushed hymnals)? After all the left turns his career has taken, Stevens goes the one unexpected route remaining with “Carrie & Lowell”: making a straightforward folk album.

No, “Carrie & Lowell” is not the fifty-first state. Stevens doesn’t humanize the midwest’s most famous serial killer, nor does he harmonize with gospel choirs in praise of God. These eleven songs are not sweeping declarations of anything, really, except the muted intimacy of childhood. The record is named for Stevens’ mother and stepfather, two parents trying to hold together a family as it disintegrates in the midst of disease and drug addiction. It is as if “Casimir Pulaski Day,” the heart-wrenching opus on “Illinois” about an ambiguously gendered subject’s relationship to faith while dying of leukemia (and doubling as a history lesson in military holidays), was not entirely fiction. On “Carrie & Lowell,” Stevens doesn’t have to weave grand narrative arcs with oblique metaphors in order to convey the desperation of sickness and of love—the pain was inside him all along.

Carrie’s ghost haunts every song on the album. She died in 2012, but Stevens recounts that she had abandoned him long before that, whether she forgets about her toddler at a Blockbuster or takes him on a car ride and drug trip to Oregon. As much as he may wish it, Stevens cannot escape the memory of his mother, whom he both pines for and despises. 

“I don’t know where to begin,” he admits on “Death with Dignity,” awash in memories too painful to confront head on. But he attempts a start, regardless: forgiveness.

Yet what happens when death robs us of the chance to forgive? On “All of Me Wants All of You,” Stevens wonders, “shall we beat this or celebrate it,” wondering if it’s better for his mother’s illnesses to end with death or if she should keep fighting. The backdrop, of course, is their troubled relationship—more time to live means more time to be let down as much as it does more time to earn redemption. “I’m just a ghost you walk right through,” he continues, conflating himself with his mother’s apparition and the ephemera of innocence. “Now all of me thinks less of you,” he confesses. But that doesn’t break the bonds of familial love as he sings, “all of me wants all of you.”

The most important lesson we learn from our parents isn’t something they can teach us. It happens slowly, the decay of their superhero status, though Stevens realized it quicker than most. Witnessing the unbearable humanness of mothers—imperfection, ambiguity, mortality—devastates us, threatening even our own eternity. Stevens employs his historic falsetto to make this point: “we’re all gonna die,” and even now “in a manner of speaking” we’re already dead. Our parents’ mortality is our own, even if their mistakes are not.

I’m not sure “Carrie & Lowell” is the best record in Stevens’ discography, but it is the best record of the year. With it, he does more than redeem the singer-songwriter—he redeems his mother, turning it into the redemption of the human race. 

Loss stems from love, Stevens reminds us—even as he wishes he could tear his eyes and his arms out to numb his senses. He urges, “Everything I see returns to you somehow,” mother, center of the universe, black hole, “should I tear my heart out now?” And when fireworks blossom on the Fourth of July, a rainbow salute to passing, may we remember what it means to love and be loved.

There are many ways to be an asshole with an acoustic guitar: cover “Wonderwall,” for example, or play Dave Matthews. The democratization of music consumption (once, you had to be nobility to hear Mozart) mirrors, I think, the decline of earnest musical talent (see: your Spotify Free usage and the number of milquetoast Coldplay wannabees dotting your Facebook newsfeed). The advent of audio recording meant you no longer had to read sheet music in order to experience Gilbert and Sullivan—but can we call this a happy development if it culminates in Iggy Azalea?

The asshole-with-guitar rarely means to be such a thing. He picked up the instrument either to accommodate for his lack of personality or to lyricize sentiments best left in his diary, yet we heap on him derision rather than pity. Why? Because the storied history of the singer-songwriter progresses from sincere to sweet to sentimental to saccharine. Singer-songwriter as a quote-unquote genre has already had its wunderkind beat poet protestor (Bob Dylan), its self-loathing and conflicted sneerer (also Dylan), its Brill Building cinematic sell-out (Burt Bacharach), its soft-rock schmaltz establishment crooner (James Taylor), its alcoholic roustabout raconteur (Tom Waits), its whimsical psychedelic druggie (Harry Nilsson), and its fuck-it-I’ll-play-harpsichord virtuoso (Van Dyke Parks). Which is all to say: it’s tough being a white guy in show biz these days. A six-string and a broken heart don’t get you as far as they once did.

Maybe the singer-songwriter of today has been reduced to your annoying acoustic first-year floormate, but it wasn’t always so. Let’s remember that before he turned us all into hanky-soaked nostalgists with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” Randy Newman was an acerbic pianist. Instead of sentiment, he laced his songs with scathing satire. His song “Rednecks,” for instance, sends up the trope of the titular southerners who “can’t tell [their] ass from a hole in ground” while damning white northerners for their hypocrisy and complicity in systemic racism. Far from the middle-of-the-road emoting of Ed Sheeran, Hozier, and your cousin whose cover of “Fearless” was retweeted by Taylor Swift, Randy Newman had edge. Who will deliver us from Sam Smith in 2015?

Enter Josh Tillman, alias Father John Misty, asshole-with-guitar, but not the kind who only knows the chorus to “Wagon Wheel.” Under an abbreviated name, he used to perform mopey folk music, the kind of “sensitive lumberjack” tunes that made Bon Iver famous. After a stint with Fleet Foxes, a band that injected emotional highs into listeners straight through a catheter of pastoralism and four-part harmony, he abandoned white-male melancholia. I remember his Facebook post from the Fleet Foxes page declaring, “into the gaping maw of obscurity I go.”

You know what they say: if you can’t beat ’em, caricature ’em. Tillman’s new project, Father John Misty, is the Adult Swim version of Bon Iver, a Newman-esque satire of the possibility of a singer-songwriter in 2015. He even has his own (anti-)origin story: depressed dude fails at music industry, takes psychedelics, internalizes life’s nihilism, and transforms into shamanic and cynical asshole-with-guitar who knows he’s the asshole-with-guitar. Tillman is the kind of asshole who would laugh at the kid trying to lead the entire camp in a sing-a-long of “Skinny Love,” and then sleep with his mother. Bon Iver sings about losing love and innocence alike; Tillman thinks you can recapture the former with his specialty perfume called   “‘Innocence’ by Misty” (it goes for $75.00 on his website).

The funniest part of the Father John Misty joke, then, isn’t the absurdity of a singer-songwriter releasing an album of love songs in 2015—although “I Love You, Honeybear” is full of self-referential asides suggesting Tillman is as bored with singer-songwriters as the rest of us. No, the punch line is that the Father John shaman character isn’t really a character at all. Tillman really is just that bitter, scathing, outrageous, hilarious, and at times, brilliant. He was faking it while drumming for Fleet Foxes, champions of sincerity. Maybe it’s the difference between Tinseltown and Medford, Wisconsin, but Tillman’s only himself when he lets his asshole-with-guitar run free.

“I Love You, Honeybear” plays with performance. The title is tongue in cheek, but only because Tillman knows what it’s like to have been chewed up and spit back out, both by love and by commercial failure. “Save me white Jesus,” he sings over canned laughter on “Bored In The USA,” clearly expecting no salvation from either the Lord or the Boss. Tillman even leaked a version of his album early, with his voice and instrumentation compressed into Super Mario Bros.-style blockiness.

Despite such ironic affectations, there’s a brutal honesty to these songs, which document Tillman’s neuroses, sins, and lexicon. Addressing his honeybear:“I’ve brought my mother’s depression / You’ve got your father’s scorn and a wayward aunt’s schizophrenia.” Addressing a judgmental hookup who “hoovers all [his] drugs”: “She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes / And the malaprops makes me want to fucking scream.” The album is an account of how he met his wife, and surely Tillman makes a loving if troubled husband but the misogynistic womanizer in him is never wholly disowned. That’s the point, though. Tillman is through with hiding, even his nastiest characteristics.

Father John Misty is too clever for his own good—that sharp tongue is bound to puncture his cheek—but he never backs away from who he is, which is a giant asshole with a mariachi guitar. He’s a jerk whose honesty is almost lovable. By serenading us with snark couched in sentiment wrapped up in equal parts schmaltz and cynicism, he delivers this truth to a dying industry: sometimes, it takes sarcasm to be sincere.

Swans are animals which symbolize romantic love because when you put two of them together, their necks almost resemble a heart. In addition, I’m told they mate for life, which might also have something to do with it. They should not be confused with Swans, which is a band whose music bores its way into your soul only to leave an abyss that listens back. This is a very important distinction.

When I heard the latter was coming to Portland, I asked my friends if they wanted to go see Swans with me. “The bird?” asked Garrett Casey ’15. “The Frisbee player?” chuckled Sam Miller ’15. “No,” I said, “the band.” See above.

“Sure,” said Leo Shaw ’15, who doesn’t listen to anything released after 1988, the year Sonic Youth made “Daydream Nation” and won music. “Do we need to get tickets?” Hugh Ratcliffe ’15 wondered aloud, boyish charm dancing across his face.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, figuring that Swans was one of those bands driveling hipsters claim to like but never really follow through on seeing live, or, you know, listening to. It is difficult listening for some people, after all. 

“For some people,” I guffawed, before putting in headphones. “What’s that?” Peter Nauffts ’15 said. “What’s that?” I said, gesturing to the headphones. “What’s that?” Thom Yorke said, because that is a lyric to the Radiohead song I was intellectualizing at the moment.

Several months passed until the night of the concert, and then Leo and I clambered into Hugh’s car. 

“Let’s get some earplugs,” Hugh said. I intuited he was referring to Swans’ tendency to make their audience’s ears bleed during live shows. “I got us covered,” I said, brandishing the box of $4.95 earplugs I had purchased for this very occasion. “They reduce noise by up to 33 decibels!”

On the way to Portland, Hugh and Leo were involved in a heated conversation regarding the kind of music Swans makes. “It’s like if Sigur Ros had a baby with doom metal,” Hugh posited. “Not really doom metal,” countered Leo. “Noise rock?” ventured Hugh. “Experimental,” shrugged Leo. 

I had been busy laughing at the comedy of existence in the backseat, but even if I were one to participate in boxing Swans into a corner, I wouldn’t have said “haven’t you philistines heard of No Wave?” because I am only that kind of asshole in print.

When we arrived at the venue, we ditched our coats and I ran into my friend Shaun. “I really want my ears to bleed tonight,” said Shaun. I laughed in a manner which I hope conveyed the sentiment “me too” while I strategically tucked my box of earplugs further into my pocket. Shaun is more hardcore than I am.

Back up by the stage, Leo and Hugh were ordering beers. They are both 22. I am 21, so fortunately all three of us could purchase alcohol legally and consume it safely. “Unlike some people,” I muttered. “What’s that?” Hugh said. “What’s that?” I said, gesturing to my earplugs.We barely had to stand around talking awkwardly for five minutes when Michael Gira came onstage. Michael Gira is sixty years old but I can’t imagine him being a grandfather. For one thing, he has long oily hair. For another thing, he is the frontman of Swans. 

For those of you who don’t know, Swans’ live act is described by Ticketmaster user Lightninger as “a metaphysical assault.” “Uh-oh,” I said, digging my earplugs in a little deeper.

Thus commenced two hours and 15 minutes of punishing and soul-baring experimental-noise-rock-meets-Sigur-Ros. I don’t know how many songs they played, though it’s possible the number is as low as five. Half-hour epics tend to sprawl out. 

In celebration of life’s absurdity, the deafening barrage of guitars, glockenspiels and trombones shook confetti, that vestige of simpler times, from the venue’s rafters. 

At the end of a song, a crowd member dead-panned, “Hey, that was pretty good,” as if to say, “There are no atheists at a Swans concert.” Michael Gira ignored him. The band promptly launched into a suite whose sole intelligible lyric was “We’re living in a wonderland.” 

As Swans deconstructed every conceivable performance trope and built from the ashes of rock ‘n’ roll a new idol of burning, aqueous passion, I thought, for a brief but beautiful second, that something mattered.

The final chord, a death knell, sounded. I awoke from my stupor. “Iron and Wine’s sound really did a 180,” I said, winking and pointing at one of Swans’ hirsute drummers. “Unnngh,” Leo said, drained. “What’s that?” Hugh said, his boyish charm aged by decades. 

Editor’s note: Garrett Casey ’15, Sam Miller ’15 and Leo Shaw ’15 are Orient staff members.

One of life’s great mysteries, ranking above the existence of Bigfoot but below Wallace Stevens’ morbid economy of beauty, remains the fact that two of the best bands in the world were, in fact, largely the same band. 

On May 18, 1980, after viewing Werner Herzog’s “Stoszek,” Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself while listening to Iggy Pop. His death marked the demise of the band, whose despairing lyrics and rhythmic guitar work defined where music was headed in the post-punk era of the late 1970s. From Joy Division’s ashes rose New Order, a pioneer of electronic dance music whose sound married guitars and synthesizers to create instant club hits. 

Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, and Peter Hook of the proto-goth Joy Division, who sang such dour lines as “love will tear us apart,” metamorphosed into the euphoric pill poppers whose “Bizarre Love Triangle” soundtracked Manchester, England raves. In short, a mere handful of humans is responsible for populating much of music’s evolutionary tree.

Despite committing suicide a quarter of a century ago, Curtis has survived like few other musicians who are not Nick Drake and did not die at 27. Journalists evoke his name every time they use the phrase “angular guitars,” and singers of the last decade have channeled his spirit with ubiquitous monotone, baritone deliveries. 

Allow me an example. A friend once described a music writer who brandished a Ouija board at Paul Banks, frontman of New York City post-punk revivalists Interpol, as if Banks had some connection to Curtis’ spirit. 

The perfection of Interpol’s 2001 debut, “Turn On the Bright Lights,” indeed suggests some supernatural soul-swapping. My theory is that when Kanye West rhymed “séance” with “parents” in 2010, he was referencing our modern gothic necromancy. Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, The National—Ian Curtis has had no shortage of resurrections.

In last month’s debut from Viet Cong, we have a rightful heir to the ancestor as well as the descendants. Their razor-sharp arrangements, claustrophobic grooves, and yes, angular guitars, are indebted to Interpol as much as Joy Division. So is it 2001? Or 1979? Have we reached the era of post-modern post-punk? 

Fortunately, Viet Cong is no mere copy of a copy of a copy. While the band revels in DeLillian despair, its angst is more xenial than Xeroxed. If anything, its guiding light is Ezra Pound’s maxim, “make it new.” “This incessant march of progress,” singer Matt Flegel observes, “can guarantee our success,” so he relinquishes the ball-and-chain of originality for the liberation of kaleidoscopic irony. 

If My Bloody Valentine—the last innovator of guitar rock—is Gertrude Stein, then Viet Cong is T.S. Eliot, curator of culture-as-collage.And what a wasteland this self-titled debut is! In punishing monochrome, Viet Cong bend their influences into labyrinthine melodies with reverence, not reference. Joy Division, Radiohead, Interpol, and Wolf Parade are all subsumed into the record’s oblique guitar licks and charging momentum. 

Above the other influences, however, hangs Women, one of the great underrated rock bands to come out of Calgary, Canada. Viet Cong formed out of the dregs of that band’s onstage implosion in 2010 and the subsequent death of frontman Christopher Reimer. Rather than undergoing a radical surgery to graft dance beats onto guitars à la New Order, however,Viet Cong has convalesced with a renewed sense of purpose.

Purpose, of course, is relative. If this record has a theme, it might be nihilism. With song titles like “Pointless Experience” and “Death,” Viet Cong does not seem interested in either earthly or transcendent redemption. On the former, Flegel drones, “if we’re lucky, we’ll get old and die,” at once a poignant remembrance of a lost bandmate and an ironic gesture towards that Stevensian economy of beauty. 

The white noise intro to “March of Progress,” a grinding tumble reminiscent of “Kid A,” culminates in the question, “what is the difference between love and hate?” Flegel intones it bored, not caring about the answer. But the question matters, and it always has, whether you’re a modernist or a musician. 

To call Sleater-Kinney the best rock band of the last two decades is to miss the point. It's an argument that has stormed across the internet like, well, a Sleater-Kinney song ever since the trio announced its return a few months ago after a ten-year hiatus. 

But I suspect Corin, Carrie and Janet don't give a damn what we think about them. “No Cities To Love,” a searing record of tight melodies and gripping charisma, asks many questions, but “do you still love us?” is not one of them. “What if your mom could kick your ass?” however, certainly is.

Indeed, these riot grrrls are now riot women. They've come a long way since the early ’90s DIY punk scene at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wa.

Carrie Brownstein's fame as curator of hipster hodge-podge “Portlandia” has eclipsed her fame as snarling guitarist in Sleater-Kinney—though you wouldn't know it from “No Cities To Love.” It's less a reunion album than a reignition record. There's no painful attempt to recreate the sublime here. It turns out lightning can strike the same place twice. Or, in this band's case, eight times.

We first caught a glimpse of the album back in November, when the single “Bury Our Friends” announced Sleater-Kinney's take-no-prisoners return. The song is a piece of pop mastership, anchored by Weiss' thunderous drumming, and driven to sing-along heights by Tucker's wild-eyed yawp and the band's signature dueling guitars. 

It was a reminder of what made them so good in the first place—an unpretentious dedication to craft that never sacrificed fury for listenability. Sleater-Kinney is the rare band that pulls off pissed and pop.What's all the more impressive is the trio's command of tone. Tucker sings with all the urgency of a wildfire, yet the flames never consume these songs' emotional subtlety. The fuzz-rock opener “Price Tag,” for instance, evokes the concept of social cost for cheap consumer goods, as told through the eyes of single mothers stocking shelves at a department store. 

The irony, of course, is that this kick in the bourgeois derrière is even more relevant now than when Sleater-Kinney soundtracked the anti-globalization debate two decades ago. “I was lured by the cost,” Tucker admits of marked-down sale items, a godsend for those who live paycheck-to-paycheck. But really, “we never checked the price tag,” since there is so much—child labor, dangerous chemicals, carbon pollution—unaccounted for. Call it econ 101, or call it the way Sleater-Kinney open an album, capturing consumer guilt with poise.

Of course, this whole project is kind of meta. On “Surface Envy,” Tucker sings, bordering on platitude, that “we win, we lose, but only together do we break the rules.” Later on, she rhymes that with “make the rules.” We could take this as something of a manifesto. Sleater-Kinney have the trappings of a great punk band with distorted guitars, leftist politics, and shred-your-throat vocals. Yet they've also become everything a punk band is not supposed to be—idolized.

What happens when an anti-authoritarian band itself becomes an authority? Sleater-Kinney, after all, might be described as our version of the Sex Pistols—brash and iconoclastic, if infinitely more talented. They themselves are certainly not asking to be revered, as “No Anthem” makes clear. That is why the “best rock band” argument is absurd. 

Unquestionably, Sleater-Kinney deserve to be added to the pantheon of musical divinity, not because they are the token feminist punk band, but because they are so much more. Instead of comparing legacies like phalluses, their fate is to “invent [their] own kind of obscurity,” one in which the music speaks for itself.

I first fell in love when I was 16 and immediately regretted it. Love was sticky and smelled slightly off. It consisted of long, oozing tendrils wrapping themselves around my heart and yanking at inopportune moments. I felt both weightless and claustrophobic in it, buoyed and breathless in love's thick embrace. To fall in love, I discovered, is to be suspended in something resembling my aunt's endearing attempts at bread pudding (a dish, no less, savored by my then girlfriend). By the time I was 17, I realized how thoroughly I had fallen in when I tried to extricate myself from love's mess. Evidently, love, again like my aunt's bread pudding, goes bad. It's even stickier and holds on ever tighter, when it does.

Sharon Van Etten knows this. She has lived this, and she has sung about it. Nowhere are her thoughts more refined, nor her feelings more concentrated, than on her masterful fourth album “Are We There.” It is a sonic tour de force of the daily triumphs and trials of love, a testament to the endurance and occasional idiocy of the human spirit, as well as to the healing powers of the heart. The record does not ask love's burning questions so much as slam them—as stark and question mark-less as its title—on the altar for sacrifice: is there an elegant way for a heart to break, a graceful falling out of love? 

Van Etten has no answers, but in crafting the record she makes the case for something which I have suspected since I was 16 and accidentally belonged to another person. Our turns of phrase are in need of updating—we don't fall in love, so much as stumble into it.

Perhaps it's because our emotional wiring dangles like stubborn shoe laces, perhaps it's because because we're rarely as honest with ourselves as we'd like to think, but love is what happens when we're busy making other plans. Van Etten sings with all the intensity this cruel irony—that our most intimate feelings might only be intelligible in retrospect—inspires. With “Afraid of Nothing,” the album opens with the swirling haze of an arpeggiated guitar grounded by a gentle, melancholic piano line. The effect is the passage of time, as if soundtracking the car on the cover forever whisking by suburban neighborhoods. Van Etten stares out the window, searching for something unseen ahead. She knows she won't find it: “I can't wait 'til we're afraid of nothing.” Waiting for love's confirmation is the wait of a lifetime. Love requires risk and leaps of faith. It is urgent, and will not abide by “a lame 'wait shit out,'” as she chides the song's second person. Love is fickle. It does not come with a eureka.

“Are We There” is not a break up record, though it could function as one. It is more an album about thresholds, the spaces in between lovers, getting mired in the mess. On the show-stopping “Your Love is Killing Me,” Van Etten, in one of the finest vocal performances of the decade, captures the vulnerability of hearts that live outside our chests. She needs the language of violence in order to describe the inner turmoil of a long-distance relationship: “break my legs so I won't run to you” and “stab my eyes so I can't see,” but “steal my soul so I am one with you.” It's easy to forget that the person in charge of your heart is a real human being. The physical force of Van Etten's performance—and the message to “taste blood, everybody needs to feel”—helps to remind us that we are just flesh, even our ex-lovers.

The confusion comes to a fore on “I Love You But I'm Lost.” Even the assuredness of a feeling in the present doesn't guarantee it's longevity. We're all changing (or do we call it growing?) and disappointment is inevitable: “to know somebody in and out, it's a real challenge.” 

How accurate are our representations of each other, and can love endure the transitions from one picture of a person to the next? “You know me well,” she half commands on the next song, but it isn't enough to fill the brick house of a relationship, built without the sides. We might never actually know each other fully, but going through hell together at least offers familiarity. Whether that's enough, to conceive of the significant other with emphasis on the “significant” and downplaying the “other,” is debatable, but it's a start. Relationships work through willing partners, and Van Etten displays such determined compassion as she sings “I will reach you.”

“Are We There” is a difficult album to listen to because it grabs your attention by punching you in the gut. It's hard to relegate it to the background, because it makes whatever you are doing—cooking, doing homework, lounging around on the internet—seem insignificant to the torment of heartbreak. Raw and rich, “Are We There” rewards multiple listens, as it unfolds to the haunting, gravelly quavers of Van Etten's voice. Listening to it is a little bit like falling in love for the first time, stickiness and all.

Before Vampire Weekend proved it was more than an Ivy League novelty, before Frank Ocean crooned his way into our bedsheets, before LCD Soundsystem bade farewell to a generation of dance-punk converts, before Nicki Minaj silenced the haters with her spitfire feature on “Monster,” and before Mark Kozelek told the War on Drugs to suck his cock, I listened to Taylor Swift. 

Once, an age ago, I was a romantic. You may not know this about me. There might be a positive correlation between acne and sentimentality, or pubescence and feelings, or maybe this teenager was just born to pine. 

My stoic demeanor and baggy shirt hid an exploding heart (the metaphor, not the band). I once delivered roses to a girl at the ballet. When I couldn't bear the weight of  the heartbreak that my adolescence invited, I'd close the door to my self-hate-nest, cozy up to a teddy bear, and break out my Tay Sway. I loved “Fearless.”

I think Swift is very good at what she does. Even as a moody male teen I identified with her love-lorn characters. Her transition from bright-eyed, tug-at-your-heart-strings acoustic classics to four-on-the-floor pop hits felt inevitable, but she has done it with elegance. 

That is why I would not call her a guilty pleasure—why should we be ashamed of enjoying good craft? But sadly, the magic has run out. If Taylor Swift's new album “1989,” is guilty of something, it's of never even entering the orbit of guilty pleasure.

I stopped listening to Taylor Swift after making my blood pact with hipsterdom. In fact, I stopped listening to female artists at all. In switching off the car stereo, I not only turned away from the trite lyrics and predictable chord progressions of the Top 40, but also fled from a land where queens reigned supreme. The Best New Music section of Pitchfork was filled with edgy acts—though most were all-male outfits. 

Convincing myself that I only liked to listen to lead singers who were male, I flirted with, and fell for, the homoeroticism of Franz Ferdinand. 

I bought my first pair of skinny jeans, donning a sultry look that put the “sexual” in “metrosexual” (no high-end accoutrement could afford me the prefix) and channeled my teenage heartbreak into the aesthetic of a wounded but snobbish hunk. 

I found romance not in Taylor Swift's high school dramas, but in Arcade Fire's tragic tales of love and woe and in the Civil War shanties of the Decemberists.

At the turn of the decade, the phallocentricity of the Great Albums canon makes it read like the Great Books canon. I mean this almost literally, with Sufjan Steven's biblical history lessons and the romantic erudition of Bon Iver. 

Where are the women in the “Best Of” lists? The collapse of punk in the early 1990s gave birth to an aggressive female style, as bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney upended essentialist notions of femininity. Of the top thirty albums of the 1990s, according to Pitchfork, only one can claim the appellation “feminist”: Liz Phair's “Exile in Guyville.” (The only other female artist in the top thirty is Bjork, though a handful of the bands listed have female members.) 

The riot grrrl movement of the 1990s was at the margins of marginalized music. Compare the riot grrrl to the trope of the sensitive male singer-songwriter of today. With his aching falsetto, skin-tight denim, and wistful coo, he approaches the classical feminine with more commercial success and cultural caché than the riot grrrls. At what point does masculine sensitivity edge out female versatility?

This is just to say that there are women who compose fearless pop music who should not be eclipsed by the bland pop affect Taylor Swift adopts on “1989.” 

Mary Timony, best known for her work in Helium in the mid-90s, comes to mind. The snotty power-pop of the debut of her new band, Ex Hex, is memorable without resorting to the generic yawns rampant in “1989.” 

Ex Hex may contribute nothing new to a long tradition of garage rock, but to hear a trio of women perfecting the art of rocking the fuck out with insta-classic riffs is a sonic windfall.Speaking of rocking the fuck out, Sleater-Kinney announced its return in style with its first new song in nearly a decade. “Bury Our Friends” is a three-minute whirlwind of slashing guitars during which Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein exchange yelps as sharp as the cuts of a rapier. Their advice: “Exhume our idols, bury our friends!” Maybe it's time we put down the Taylor Swift and dusted off our Bikini Kill. Let's dig up a better sort of feminist. Resurrect the riot grrrl.

 It's mid-October and Bowdoin students have found themselves—inexplicably, astonishingly and possibly for the very first time—in the unenviable position of prioritizing which concert venue they'd like to patronize on a Friday night. I mean patronize in one sense of the word when I refer to Port City Music Hall and in the other sense when I refer to Colby College. 

On Friday evening, and no doubt into witching-hour Saturday, both establishments will be alit with the flame only live music can bring. This flame will be punctuated only by the flitting of bearded Portlanders doing their best CBB cat impersonations, and college students acting the part of debonair Portlanders. Neither will succeed, though that hardly matters. 

Never underestimate the spiritual healing power of a concert. Rejoice, driveling hipsters of Bowdoin: a musical renaissance is upon us.

I refer, of course, to We Were Promised Jetpacks’ lamentably pedestrian arrival in Portland and Chance the Rapper's spontaneous decision to tour schools already disappointed by Macklemore. For a city and a college that has booked, in recent memory, Skrillex and Wiz Khalifa, this is indeed a renaissance. 

I leave it up to my readers to decide which brand of diatonic delivery—Scottish braying or frenetic free association—best satisfies their nocturnal needs, though I can offer some advice for students looking to up their indie cred. 

At Port City, order a local brew (or, if underaged, a tonic water, no ice) and whisper a bit too loudly to the Portlanders around you that the only reason you're here is to see the opener, The Twilight Sad. Bonus points if you can work in a joke about Scottish independence, or heckle them with Frightened Rabbit lyrics. At Colby, simply look dour and unapproachable, with a scowl that states—not screams—“I go to Bowdoin.”

Not that we have to nurse our superiority complex for long. After all, Saturday night brings noisy surf-rock poster boy Wavves and his punkish super soaker sound to Morrell Lounge. Time will tell how kindly Maine autumn and 2014 treats his music, though I remain cautiously optimistic, if only because I retain a pinch of nostalgia for the time when musicians added a redundant consonant to their names. 

Between his hyped sophomore effort “Wavvves” and “Afraid of Heights,” the album he apparently released last year, Nathan Williams has amassed an array of tight, catchy tunes about sunshine, alcohol and bikinis. Since Saturday's event will feature, at best, two-thirds of the content of Williams' auditory output, students ought to apply whichever they can get their hands on vigorously. I, for one, will be leaving my Best Coast tanning oil at home.Pending any unforeseeable disaster, Wavves will be the first fall concert I've attended at Bowdoin, and I intend to enjoy it immensely. In 2011, a failed attempt to change Bowdoin students' narcotic of choice from alcohol to marijuana was thwarted when contract hysterics caused Neon Indian and his chilled out psychadelia to withdraw last minute. Surfer Blood went on in his stead. I am told he is Kreayshawn’s cousin. However, I can't vouch for the veracity of this, for I was at the Cumberland County Civic Center with my father—and possibly the newly outed Deadhead Paul Franco—seeing Furthur, a jam band formed out of the dregs of the Grateful Dead. 

My sophomore year, I was shacked up in Reed House, taking the term “lock-in” much too seriously to bother checking out RJD2. Last year, as my readers surely regretted, I was studying in England and not writing about music. (Instead, I wrote about pasties and saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor).

Usually, fall semester is a much more agreeable time for live music at Bowdoin than its spring sibling. Over the past month, I have seen Future Islands and Sun Kil Moon work magic for their Portland audiences in two very different ways. If I trust the musical taste of a punk legend turned medievalist, I'll be seeing Quintron and Miss Pussycat at the Space Gallery in November. Our tiny music scene, though once a crime scene witnessing the death of Galaxie 500, has never quite bulged like this before. 

Hopefully, the E-Board can bring someone to #Ivies150 who neither graduated from Tufts nor will break the endowment. My suggestions: Hansen (a band only ’90s kids will remember), a newly revitalized Death Grips, The Pizza Underground, a CD playing Robert Pollard's “Relaxation of the Asshole” or GWAR. 

Until then, this weekend will suffice. I'll go to Wavves, and possibly Chance, or perhaps just dance to the new Flying Lotus album. Bowdoin super-senior Tanner Horst, both older than granite and hewn from marble, says it's some “next-level shit.” Either way, the weekend will rock.

 “No family is safe when I sashay,” announced Mike Hadreas, under the moniker Perfume Genius, this summer with the release of his brilliant, scintillating single “Queen.” Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your hard-cover copies of the NAS report—because on his latest album “Too Bright,” Hadreas emerges from his bedroom to prance saucily down the catwalk. His previous efforts, 2010’s intimate “Learning” and 2012’s intense “Put Your Back N 2 It,” felt cloistered and claustrophobic, but “Too Bright” shines with a defiant radiance. In the past, voice cracking and spirit shaking, Hadreas sang about having an affair in high school with a teacher who then threw himself off a building. Now, still haunted, he offers no apology.“I Decline,” the record’s opener, sets this tone with its lyrics of modest refusal. He describes an angel hovering overhead, arms extended in a welcoming embrace, warm smile plastered on its face. It’s a nice image, but Hadreas is in no mood for otherworldly support. He considers the offer for a moment over spare piano chords, and finally murmurs, “that’s all right. I decline.” From this Majical Cloudz-like moment, Hadreas does an about face and channels his inner Freddie Mercury on “Queen.” The power-chord thrust, tingling synths, and hip-shaking gutturals certainly recall Queen the band, but “Queen” the song retains Hadreas’ trademark discomfiting lyrics. “Don’t you know your queen?” he asks, no coincidence that it sounds very much like “don’t you know you’re queer?” Decay features prominently in “Too Bright.” Internalized shame becomes corrosive, as Hadreas’ damaged soul eats away at its cage. On “No Good,” Hadreas wonders if he is “meant to fray to the end” as his body unravels, leaving no place to hang his heart. Not one to give in so easily, he turns the decay into a dare: “I wear my body like a rotted peach / You can have it if you can handle the stink.” The spooky, spidery lurch of “My Body” makes it one of the best dance songs on the album, all the more when it explodes halfway through into the best synth pulse Depeche Mode never wrote.The true centerpiece of “Too Bright,” however, is the soul-swinging, thumb-snapping ode to love-induced idiocy, “Fool.” Hadreas croons to an anonymous lover about picking out a dress for the night, before flitting out of the room to dance. The song fades almost to silence before the synth grows stronger, and Hadreas lets out a swelling gasp of ecstasy, like a fool in love who can’t believe his luck. He sounds more assured for the rest of the song, helped along by the sexy sputter of a sax, when he “does a little move...like a buffoon.” At once self-deprecating and self-accepting, “Fool” showcases all of Perfume Genius’ strengths: his evocative lyrics, impeccable arrangement, and tight sequencing. Most of all, it highlights just how powerful of a singer Hadreas is, his voice shimmering and glimmering, as much Jónsi as Antony. “Fool” is not only fluttery and precise, but also firm and proud, a balance Hadreas maintains perfectly throughout the album.On “Too Bright,” Perfume Genius proves he is deserving of the eponym. He is able to distance himself from the camp of disco music while drawing on the aesthetic of othered musicians who turned the marginal mainstream. But Hadreas does not write gay anthems in the vein of the Village People. The introversion of being raised as the ugly duckling of chillwave’s final brood still shows on “Too Bright.” Like Youth Lagoon before him, Hadreas takes bedroom experiences and blows them up into arena-sized stories. If there’s a manifesto for what “humanity” means in 2014, it’s the message of this record—we’re all a little hurt and a little beautiful. Hadreas claims he is “Too Bright,” but we can’t look away.

Maybe it’s the lack of a ubiquitous crotch-affirming anthem a la “Get Lucky” this summer, but hasn’t the music released in the past few months felt a little, you know...flaccid? Such is the neutering toll of poptimism, the inevitable pushback against driveling hipsters, which has turned Coldplay from a bunch of saccharine try-hards into a band of inveterate everymen. 

I’ll be the first to defend Ariana Grande, but when Questlove (a member of The Roots, a record collector and a tastemaker) acknowledges the supremacy of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” as the song of the summer, we need to take a cultural step backward. “Fancy” is not the best song of the summer. It’s not even the best song this summer to feature no-fucks given whilst chandelier-swin-ing—that honor would go to Sia’s high-flying single, “Chandelier.” 

At its best, the hegemony of poptimism leads to a torpid summer of forgettable music, epitomized by Calvin Harris’ unforgivably unimaginative “Summer.” At its worst, poptimism becomes a vehicle for whitewashing the Billboard charts, under the cynical aegis of “if you can’t beat ’em, appropriate ’em.” We need only look so far as poptimism’s main beneficiary, Taylor Swift, and the god-awful four minutes she tries to pass off as a song in “Shake It Off.” Turn down for racially insensitive stereotypes.

In the words of a rubbery legged Future Islands frontman, however, “seasons change.” With the chill of September, we leave behind this summer’s musical dysfunction (but hold onto that Spoon album) and throw ourselves into another semester at Bowdoin. Let us turn our flannel collars against autumnal winds and poptimist entreaties alike, with thoughts of Weird Al for #Ivies150 to keep us warm. Here are songs to soundtrack the introspection that a Maine fall brings.

“War on the East Coast” by The New Pornographers

Chugging power chords and a euphoric chorus are good indicators for a song vying for the summer title—except this is the New Pornographers, meaning Dan Bejar drawls about total war, sea level rise flooding British Columbia and “wild gypsy shit.” His impenetrable lyrics yield to the sort of hermeneutics you learn at small liberal arts colleges, so dust off those Lacan compendiums. My theory? It’s about the hopelessness of facing down the apocalypse. As for “blondes, brunettes, paper jets?” You try writing a better hook.

“Ultraviolence” by Lana Del Rey

The singer of the decade’s finest song proves she’s no one-hit wonder. Drawing on “Clockwork” and the Crystals, Lana pushes her is-it-satire schtick into the realm of physical abuse. It’s a dangerous game, but she pulls it off beautifully, turning from victim to menace with the swell of the violins. Lana flourishes on the fringe of camp where there is no black and white—only (fifty) shades of grey.

“Chambers” by Cymbals Eat Guitars

If ever a song is to get you to shout “baby’s got cataracts!” in the middle of HL, it’s this one. The bass line and sputtering guitar is enough to drive the song into your memory, but Joseph D’Agostino’s snotty narrative of drug withdrawal keeps it there. Getting high might not be what it used to be, but you wouldn’t believe it from his falsetto.

“You Know Me Well” by Sharon Van Etten

Much how Victoria Legrand stepped into her own with Beach House’s “Teen Dream” four (!) years ago, here Sharon Van Etten embraces her heart and her voice. The result is one of the year’s most devastating couplets, “you know me well / you show me hell,” made all the more poignant with the added sting of, “when I’m looking.” The song is full of such clever but affecting lines, as she implores her lover to “cut me to the chase,” or bellows the title, daring herself to believe it.

“Ancient Ways” by Interpol

Interpol’s Paul Banks remains the king of insufferably dense lyrics on the obviously titled new album “El Pintor.” But that just gives us more fodder for intellectual appraisal. Banks exhorts us to “fuck the ancient ways,” though of which ancient ways he disapproves remains up for debate. Certainly Intrepid’s well-cultivated angular guitar slash, atmospheric production and Joy Division aesthetic don’t need to go on the ancient burn pile.

For me, there’s only one way to listen to Tom Petty, on the road. I was raised that way. Sure, Talking Heads or The Police soundtracked dinner and family game night, but when my Deadhead of a dad ushered me into the car, it was Tom Petty who’d serenade us all the way to soccer practice. 

“Damn the Torpedoes,” “Full Moon Fever” and especially “Echo”—I knew those records inside and out. They were the type of album I always heard all the way through, as I stared out the window at the golden shade of streetlamps zipping by on the way home from New York City. My mother and sisters usually drifted off into their own golden slumbers, so it was just us boys: me, my dad and the Heartbreakers.

The experience of listening to music on a car stereo—whether from the tape deck or radio—has an immediacy that’s lost in the iPod age. I had no idea what the names of the songs were (ok, they weren’t hard to guess, this is don’t-bore-us-skip-to-the-chorus Petty after all), giving them an economy of ignorance, a preciousness out of fleetingness. Every now and then, I hear a song that instantly transports me back to 2:00 a.m. in the backseat of the old Goodrich-mobile on an anonymous interstate. 

Funnily enough, this year has brought a return of the long drive anthem. Two o’ clock in the morning on an anonymous interstate is exactly how one should listen to the new album from the War on Drugs, “Lost in the Dream."

It’s more than the profound pleasantness of heyday FM radio that the War on Drugs capture and make their own. It’s the yearning for a distant past that we think we’ll reach if we just take the road far enough in pursuit of a long-lost lover who alone holds the power of our rejuvenation. Sometimes I think that every radio hit released in the 1980s riffed on the nostalgia of heartbreak—“Love Is a Long Road,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “The Boys of Summer”—and I can only imagine listening to them with the window rolled down and the horizon calling my name.

This is the legacy that the War on Drugs have inherited. The road is the medium on which life’s journey plays out, whether lost on back streets looking for the address your new girlfriend gave you, or speeding down the highway away from the wreckage of a crash-and-burn relationship. The sound that Adam Granduciel and company have cultivated over the years is so drenched in gauzy guitar reverb and “Born in the USA”-era Springsteen that they’ve pioneered a new genre, dubbed “bossgaze” by a puckish Pitchfork staffer.

“Lost in the Dream,” their third album, continues this tradition of updating Springsteen and Petty. It begins with an out-of-place ticking that quickly builds into hazy rumble, like the sound an old clunker makes when you put keys in the ignition for the first time after a long winter. Listening to the War on Drugs after their three year hiatus is similarly panic inducing. Their 2011 record “Slave Ambient” sounded so good, ran so well, that I wondered if they might need an oil check after so long of a break. I needn’t have worried. Thirty seconds in, the struggling mass of sound suddenly resolves into the memorable piano riff that drives the opener, “Under the Pressure.” Thirty seconds in, and “Lost in the Dream” is running beautifully.

Granduciel has gained the reputation of a perfectionist, which explains the delay between albums. He hasn’t been wasting his time, however. This record, despite its lo-fi pretensions, might be the best-produced album since Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories.” The length of each song—seven clock in at over five minutes—allows the band to sprawl out on the open highway, giving them room to both maneuver U-turns and build chilling crescendos. The piano in “Under the Pressure” inconspicuously drops out three minutes in, replaced by a horn section that gives the song enough soul to ride out the remaining five minutes in a happy groove. As Granduciel alters the melody slightly, singing “lying on a hill / dancing in the rain / hiding in the back / loosening my grip,” you can feel your hips move in the driver’s seat before the refrain bursts out of him. The same goes for “Red Eyes,” which, inspired by the euphoric build-up of “Dancing in the Dark,” feels like a car merging onto a highway right as Granduciel gives a life-affirming exclamation and the guitars explode into an instantly classic riff.

These moments of brilliance, though sprinkled throughout the album, do run the risk of getting lost in the dream themselves. They sound so natural, so utterly essential, that they slide into the background, biding their time until the alert listener stumbles on them. Such is Granduciel’s craft, taking an era of rock radio not known for its subtlety and drawing out the complex world of human relationships and emotions on an ethereal, druggy highway.

Last summer, as my dad and I were driving back from a late-night concert, we discussed the various tatters that had become our lives. He moved to grab a comforting CD—presumably Petty—but I suggested we give my music a chance. As we forged forward, awash in streetlamp amber, I put on the War on Drugs. We sat silently, moving endlessly, nowhere behind us, nowhere ahead. The road is life, and this is its soundtrack.

I decided to leave Bowdoin sometime during winter break last year. By itself, that isn’t unusual—many Bowdoin students (more than half of the Class of 2015 according to the Orient) choose to study abroad their junior year. A semester abroad is a break from the rigors and routine of the liberal arts life, a chance to escape from Bowdoin’s smallness to the planet’s vastness. And if we tick off the “expanded horizons” box on our list of life experiences (or is that our resume?) in a country where we can legally purchase alcohol, it’s happy accident!

These benefits of going abroad were certainly on my mind last January, but I admit that my main reason for leaving Bowdoin was just that: leaving Bowdoin. 

It’s no secret that I feel out of place on campus. The kid who spent his entire sophomore year haranguing against lax investment policies and getting into scuffles with the administration doesn’t exactly scream “typical Polar Bear.” Don’t rock the boat, dude.

 I first put on “Gun,” a single from the band Chvrches’ new LP “The Bones of What You Believe,” over breakfast on a bright August morning some weeks ago. This was the first time I’d heard the oft-hyped electro-pop outfit of bright-eyed Glaswegians. They had released their debut EP, “Recover,” to modest fanfare back in March after a string of appearances at Austin’s South by Southwest music and arts festival. Although I was there, Vampire Weekend and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s had kept me from catching a performance. 

But after listening to “Gun” while munching my Wheaties, I was furious at myself: I had chosen to see established stalwarts instead of taking a chance on an up-and-comer. Now, Chvrches are making good on the initial promise of that EP—and it sounds fantastic.

Not that Chvrches are the making of a generation-defining band. No, their rise to fame is as curious as it is unlikely. How many bands toting synthesizers has this post-LCD Soundsystem decade spawned—and how many more of them are actually any good? Contemporary pop music is drenched in sounds leftover from ’80s pioneers like Eurythmics; Stereogum recently posted an article heralding the decline of guitar-based rock (citing Chrvches, no less, and of course Thom Yorke’s gloomy statement in 1993, “pop is dead”). 

New summer music is like a crisp beer on the beach—a welcome break from the Bubble. We may, now again, be facing the tribulations that another year at Bowdoin brings—Moulton or Thorne, Mac or Quinby, writing that paper or getting drunk—which is all the more reason to remain awash in nostalgia for summer 2013 through the tones of Pharrell’s velvety voice.

It was an everyman’s type of summer, wasn’t it? For the frat boys, Robin Thicke supplied “Blurred Lines,” laced with the lyrical equivalent of roofies, as much hackneyed as it was rape-y. For the fans of Miley Cyrus (alas, I cannot pinpoint which demographic that is anymore), “We Can’t Stop” galumphed its way to the top of the radio charts. Even that key constituency housed in the overlapping Venn diagram of Miley fans and errant pedants was appeased when the Oxford English Dictionary snuggled “twerk” between “‘twere” and “twerp” on its hallowed one-thousand-and-eighty-sixth page.

But for us—we purveyors of fine taste—this summer was especially fruitful. With the one-two punch of Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” and the National’s “Trouble Will Find Me” dropping in the midst of finals in May (my grades sank while my spirit soared), this knock-out of a summer began. Here’s what was blasting through my speakers.

Now here’s a hard one. Though, as I kept having to remind myself while wading through this album’s murky depths, if it had been easy, Thom Yorke—notably of Radiohead—wouldn’t have made it.

The record in question is “AMOK,” the debut record of Atoms for Peace, one of those supergroups that refuses to call itself a supergroup. The band takes its name both from a 1953 speech by President Eisenhower and a song title on Yorke’s 2006 album, “The Eraser.” The musicians that comprise the band were even commissioned to play Yorke’s solo material live, for which Atoms for Peace were originally billed as “Thom Yorke???” during Coachella in 2010.

This naming makes sense: “AMOK” sounds like a vanity project of Yorke, his ethereal whisper the cohesive element to the album’s otherwise frenetic electronic jumble. Normally, vanity projects represent the worst work of an artist looking for vindication outside a certain genre. In the hands of anyone but music’s greatest living crotchety-bastard legend, “AMOK” would be an album of pathetic excess. Instead, we get an impenetrable piece filled with jumbled beeps on a time signature even Battles would have a hard time keeping up with. My first bit of advice: listen to this with headphones in. The second bit: don’t expect a Radiohead album.

It’s not Smile, it’s not Detox, and it’s not Half-Life 3. It’s better. And it’s real. After 21 years of false starts, broken promises, and nervous breakdowns, Kevin Shields has emerged from his reclusive lair, no longer hamstrung by crippling perfectionism: My Bloody Valentine’s third album in as many decades has seen the light of day. And rather than enjoying the sun, the band, true to form, continues to gaze down at their shoes. I am not a hardcore MBV fan by any measure. I was not one of the 13,491 people to like the band’s Facebook status update last Saturday announcing their return with a simple sentence: “We are preparing to go live with the new album/website this evening.”

Fade, Yo La Tengo’s thirteenth full-length album, opens with a repeating, clicking rhythm that immediately invites foot-tapping. This beat is shortly joined by an otherworldly sound, like the croon of some mystical beast. The tension rises as the drum and shaker come in. This beat is contrasted with the floating harmony, which together evoke separate inclinations in the mind and body, one to the dance floor and the other to the skies. Supported by a classic Yo La Tengo guitar jangle melody and fuzzy bass line, the opener creates a sense of tantric bliss reminiscent of the track’s name, “Ohm.”

Take a look at the cover art to “The Haunted Man,” the new album by Natasha Khan, alias Bat for Lashes, who is proving to be the indie music industry’s answer to Adele. You don’t have to scrutinize the album art too long for the word “stripped” to come to mind. The first thing you notice when listening to the record is what’s missing. Just like Khan’s (lack of) clothes in the artwork, there is no lead single that propels the album, like the song “Daniel” from her 2009 yearning, witch-pop gem “Two Suns.” Does “The Haunted Man” suffer because of it? Probably, but what album would not suffer from the absence of an immediately affecting lead single? The album is most impressive because, even without something as catchy as “Daniel,” it succeeds as a well-balanced album filled with grace and beauty.

Exclamation points! Impossibly long thematic gestures! Deliberately obscure-sounding faux words posing as real words! No, it’s not the next presidential debate, but “Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!” the fascinating new album from everybody’s favorite peculiarly punctuated band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. This album, quietly released at a show in Boston three weeks ago, marks the triumphant return of some of the music industry’s most confounding artists. In 2003, GY!BE declared an indefinite hiatus to allow band members to pursue other musical endeavors.

The Office of Planning and Development saw a decrease in the value of gifts to Bowdoin this year, as many of the remaining pledges from the College's 2009 capital campaign were paid off last year. In fiscal year (FY) 2011, the College took in gifts worth $35.9 million, a 25 percent decrease from FY 2010 in which it received gifts totaling just over $48 million.