Heartbeats

(from the album Deep Cuts: Rabid Records, 2003).

While we’re on the topic of college radio, it must be said: CMJ is happening this week, and I’m incredibly sad that I’m not there. The CMJ Marathon is an annual, five day convention where hordes of college radio folk descend upon New York to attend panels, promo parties and tons and tons of shows. Ostensibly, it is about sharing ideas with managers from other stations, meeting contacts from promo companies face to face, and learning in general how to better your station. But, above all else, it is the only way I know about to get your university to pay for you to skip a week of class and go to about 20 shows in 5 days. I attended CMJ with my station in 2006 and 2008. These two trips remain some of my fondest memories of college.

Being 21+ at CMJ means getting wined and dined (or, more accurately, beered) by promo companies. Naturally, it rules. I saw some amazing shows last year (Women, Mirah and Marnie Stern were the stand-outs for me), but most of my lasting memories of CMJ ’08 are decidedly alcohol-tinged: brown-bagging in a Manhattan park in the middle of a thunder storm, drinking smuggled Sparks in the Bowery Ballroom’s handicapped bathroom stall with two other staffers, and, most fondly, seeing our mild-mannered and beloved station librarian pour an entire cup of beer down the pants of Monotonix’s lead singer. (We always seemed to be mindful of the fact that the C in CMJ does in fact stand for college.)

CMJ ’06 was something else, though. I was 19 and had never been to New York without my parents, and the prospect of spending a week there on my own –when I was supposed to be in school, no less — was just about the most liberating thing imaginable. The familiar skyline looked much different from the backseat of my mom’s minivan than it did from the window of my first Chinatown bus. (I should mention that the bus I took to CMJ arrived in Manhattan an hour early. I still don’t know quite how that happens; we were in the process of running a red light when I briefly woke from my nap and I decided, wisely, not to look out the window again). I stayed with three other DJs in a hostel in Harlem, sharing a small, bunk-bedded room that smelt strongly of fish food. We laughed and talked and played pranks on each other and ate really good ice cream and saw a bunch of awesome bands. If a six-year old music snob had been given some crayons and asked to draw their ideal vision of adulthood, it would have looked like my first CMJ, gratuitous promo swag and all. It felt too good to be true.

Perhaps the most anticipated event of CMJ ’06 was The Knife’s show at Webster Hall. To be sure that we’d get in, my fellow DJs and I waited outside the venue for what must have been two hours, and in this time flashes of rumors rippled through the anxious crowd. Was this tour really the first time in the band’s seven year career that they’d performed live? (Indeed.) And this was one of four dates in the U.S.? (True story.) Had Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer ever appeared in public not wearing those creepy bird masks? (Unconfirmed.) Once we all filed into the gorgeous Webster Hall, anticipation reached a fever pitch. One of the drunkest men I have ever seen in my life told us with all the conviction (and spittle) in the world, “This is gonna be like John Fucking Lennon. This is gonna be like seeing Pink Floyd on the Dark Side of the Moon tour, 1972.

Drunken hyperbole aside, this guy was right about one thing: the hype surrounding the Silent Shout tour was something completely rooted in a particular cultural moment, as both the mystique and ubiquity of a band like The Knife is hard to imagine without the Internet. The Knife formed in Sweden in 1999, and released three full-lengths over the past decade: The Knife (2001), Deep Cuts (2003) and Silent Shout (2006). Though these records were successful in Sweden, they were still unreleased in the States when Jose Gonzalez released his acoustic cover of the Deep Cuts track “Heartbeats” in late 2003. Gonzalez’s record received its fair share of acclaim, and his “Heartbeats” was featured in a TV commercial. As his song became something of an underground hit, mp3 bloggers and download fiends unearthed the original version — an anthematic but haunting synth-pop gem — and began to pass it around, accompanied with the prevailing sentiment that the understated whisper of a cover didn’t come close to the original. By the time Silent Shout was released stateside in July 2006, The Knife’s “Heartbeats” was a cross-cultural hit, and the narrative arc of their cult fame read like a fable of the widespread power of the blogosphere; when Pitchfork crowned Silent Shout the best album of 2006 a month later, it was the only fitting conclusion.

But back to the show — which was unlike anything I’ve seen before or since.

The band stood behind a translucent screen that spanned the entire width and height of the stage, and as they performed, animated images were projected onto the screen. Andersson and Dreijer stood side by side and wore pink gloves that glowed vibrantly as they banged drums and fiddled with synths. My favorite visual occured when they performed “Marble House” and a giant, illuminated moon face came to life out of the darkness of the stage and sang the song’s male vocal. It was all spectacular, but, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the room who got goosebumps at the opening notes of “Heartbeats.”

The performance of that song was particularly memorable, and not only because of the animated snowflakes that cascaded down the screen in time with the chorus’s arpeggiated synth notes. As everyone in the hall sang along to the chorus, the audience’s love for this song was glorious and palpable, but also a bit strange, since the album on which it appeared, Deep Cuts, had been released for the first time in the U.S. literally the day before the Webster Hall show. This wonderful song, unreleased and without any commercial radio play, had found us all in some way or another, unobstructed by things like geography and record contracts — things that used to matter so much in the music industry but that were now becoming more negligible with each passing moment.

Here is an indisputably goosebump-inducing video of The Knife performing “Heartbeats” from the concert film, Silent Shout: An Audio-Visual Experience:

Gemini (Birthday Song)

Why? – “Gemini (Birthday Song)”

(from the album Elephant Eyelash, Anticon Records 2005).

“It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown… life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”
-Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

“You know my build, you know my size, the degree to which my eyes are astigmatic.”
-Yoni Wolf, “Gemini (Birthday Song)”

Words are trouble, words are subtle, words are tiny harbingers of death and original sin and the unscalable Aggro Crag that separates my sadness from your sadness. So, staring down at a freshly paved sidewalk the other day, I felt sort of disappointed to live in a world where most people, when confronted with a wet slab of concrete, can think of nothing more interesting or evocative to write than their own name. (Really, ‘Robyn’? Really?) Why?’s Yoni Wolf is one of the few contemporary musicians who treats words with the respect, anxiety, humor, and complexity they deserve; tugging at their most elastic parts, caressing their limitations like a lover’s goosebumped skin. For four albums now (Why? began as a solo project but now backed by his brother Josiah along with Austin Brown and Doug McDiarmid), Yoni has written lyrics with the sort of candid intimacy that puts the most perverse and worry-worn pieces of his nerve endings on display. He is an imagist poet swiping lines from a morgue trashcan. He is, I think, one of the most talented and expressive lyricists to emerge this decade.

“Gemini (Birthday Song)” appears on his second proper album, Elephant Eyelash — an ode to loneliness and suicide notes crumbled in the bottom of wastebaskets and the kind of bleak, urban wintertime coldness that spits in the face of your thickest scarf. My first winter spent with this album was the one that began in ’05 and ended in ’06. I was a freshman in college and, as the East Coast cold ushered in the start of my second semester, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay there. I’ve always been bad with transitions and especially sentimental about goodbyes, and those that I’d had to say a few months before still rattled through me that winter with a dismal — and, in retrospect, totally false — sense of finality. I listened to Elephant Eyelash over those few months more than probably any other record, and “Gemini (Birthday Song)” was always the clincher for me, the one song that understood what I was feeling much better than I did. Though it’s sung with the sort of candor that makes you think it’s got to be at least a little bit autobiographical, “Gemini” encapsulates something universal too: that horribly commonplace feeling of missing somebody a few moments before they are even gone.

“Gemini” is something of a story song. Yoni (“you mean, the narrator,” grates the inescapable nag of my English degree) and his girl sit in her parents’ bedroom on what appears to be the night before he is leaving to go somewhere very far away. In the beginning, some of the lyrics focus on the minutiae of the things in the room around them — There was a moth caught in the soap dish laminated in lye — the sort of inconsequential things your eyes settle on in a time like that, when looking directly at the other person would be a too-painful corroboration of the awful truth that fills every inch of the room. And then, he musters the courage to look that truth straight in the face and capture it in a verse — maybe my favorite one Yoni’s ever written — a verse that sputtered through my head so ceaselessly that winter that it would feel wrong not to quote it in full here:

When we’re on different sides of the globe
I thought we’d keep our veins tangled like a pair of mic cables
And if there ain’t enough slack to reach
That we’d solder them together, ‘cross oceans they’d stretch.
Our faces reflected in separate windshields
And all our body hair pricked up in elephant eyelash.
Should we be tempted, by thief or by saint,
It seems I leave and you say to crowd the cage and curse.
But don’t regret the done dirt, there is no lifeplan set
You just swallow the cold and follow your breath until death.
Now even if the will to sleep persists
I can’t, ’cause a harsh cloth, it grazes my blisters.

Later in the song, when the narrator is alone, these images that seemed so inconsequential come back to him with searing clarity (“Your legs are two skinny dolphins swimming/Between the mattress and the layers of bedding/Turning in your drug dry sleep“). These images, in all their pettiness and opacity, are what we cling on to when the shadows are gone. We use words to trap the tiniest, most tangible things. This is how we know each other. You know my build, you know my size, the degree to which my eyes are astigmatic. This is what we remember.

After I graduated college last spring, I happened to listen to this song again as I was packing all of my things into boxes and getting ready to move out of a house that I’d lived in for a year and a half. And though I was preparing to say goodbye to a whole different group of people this time, “Gemini” hit me on the exact same gut level that it did on the other side of college. Listening back to it in that moment, I felt a pang similar to the one I felt when I saw Robyn written in the sidewalk, a personal embarrassment at how being human sometimes means being really unimaginative by design. I felt disappointed that the chemistry of missing somebody is so familiar and uncomplicated that it feels the same no matter who the person is. It feels similar enough to be defined by exactly the same song.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“How can I possibly describe how we looked back then?
Falling in love, whether or not it lasts, there’s truth in that.”
-The Anniversary, “Emma Discovery”

I came of age in the aughts. I was 13 when they began and I will be 23 when they are over. Some things about my life have changed drastically over this decade, and some have stayed stubbornly put. I still have problems, but they are not the same problems; How can I get that guy in my pre-algebra class to know I like the Deftones too without being really obvious about it? has turned into the rather banal but equally pressing Fuck, how am I going to pay my rent? I hate to speak for the other writers here in matters that concern something as intimate and lascivious as adolescence, but I think we write most of our pieces with a slight streak of sentimentality because we’re writing about a time in our lives when nothing was constant and changes of tectonic, Judy Blume proportions were occurring with nagging persistence. The things we liked — in this case, a song that could be played over and over and over again and bring with it the comfort that it would always sound the same — were constants that we clung to in that particular, white-knuckled way that one clings to something good and solid when chaos is swirling vertiginously beneath your every step. There’s something inherently sentimental about that particular quality of liking something, because even when listened to back on solid ground, that song still bears the grubby fingerprints from the times when you clung to it so hard. Sometimes later inspection of these fingerprints induces an overwhelming nostalgia, coupled with the delightful discovery that, after all these years, the song still “holds up.” But then of course, just as easily, these fingerprints can also induce an embarrassment of the most brambly and personal sort — the sort of feeling I get as I tell you that, although second wave K Records stuff was a pretty huge chunk of what I listened to the last couple years of high school, the year The Glow Pt. 2 was actually released I bought a pair of skate sneakers in honor of Mark Hoppus’s birthday; true story. For most of us, I think, the most interesting and nagging questions we’ve had to grapple with when choosing what songs we write about and compiling our top 100 albums lists is this: how do I reconcile the things I used to like with the things I like now? And, for goodess’ sake, how am I supposed to rank them numerically without totally denying the person I used to be?

I might not have been listening to the Microphones in 2000, but I certainly was listening to the Anniversary’s debut album, Designing a Nervous Breakdown. And unlike the tortured, angsty warble of Conor Oberst or Dashboard Confessional’s, uh, tortured, angsty warble, this record still sounds good to me ten years later. Really good. Perhaps part of my love for this album comes from how I’ve constantly had to extol it to people who haven’t heard it because today The Anniversary remain all but forgotten, except in circles where people still argue about whether Hey Mercedes are better than Braid (they’re not; duh) and still pump those Vagrant Records comps in their cars from time to time. So, a brief crash course: The Anniversary played an earnest-but-never-excessively-earnest brand of synth-pop that specialized in boy/girl vocal harmonies and wore its literary references on its most prominent sleeve (sample song titles: “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter;” “Hart Crane”). They released two albums and then broke up in 2004; one of them married a Get Up Kid. With its only rival being the anthematic and gorgeous “The D in Detroit,” “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” is the best song they ever wrote. It’s a synth-pop relic from a recent but much simpler past, a reminder that a band one could comfortably call “emo” did not always have to wear eyeliner and could, occasionally, contain vocalists who were capable of singing in a way that one could comfortably call “pretty.” “To know what’s fair is not always fair/But what proves true will never flee,” Justin Roelofs hollers over a buzzing keyboard line. The Anniversary found a way to sing about huge, AP-English concepts like “truth” and “beauty” with an earnestness so uncommonly tempered that it’s a little disarming.

Quite a few of my friends were big fans of The Anniversary, and I always think of the band in connection with a story about my friend Will. He went to see them in Philly shortly after Her Majesty was released. Conning a press pass out of some sap who believed that he was a “reporter” with my high school’s newspaper (in reality, he didn’t even write for them), Will was able to go backstage and interview the band. Since he was not actually a reporter, Will didn’t have a tape recorder, a camera, or even anything for the band members to sign. He just wanted to ask them, which he did, if they were working on a new record and when it would be coming out.

I’ve never heard this story directly from Will, and I was going to ask him about some of the details in preparation for this post. I decided, though, that I didn’t want to. I like thinking of it — as I like thinking of Designing A Nervous Breakdown — trapped in the amber of a slighted innocence, a memory too pure to ever be remembered true. Maybe I am unfair to this album, maybe I am too nostalgiac about it, maybe I make this band stand for something way bigger than they ever were meant to be, maybe the sort of memories I ascribe to this song never even happened. But, like Will’s refreshingly pre-WordPress anecdote, that’s how I choose to remember it.

Outro With Bees

(from the album Blacklisted: Anti-, 2002).

How’s hope feeling today?
Tired and sick of this place
Red wine is fast at the lip of your glass
And I’m gonna ruin everything.

In this decade, I’ve heard a lot of female voices make a lot of declarations that kind of sound like empowerment, in the fist-pumping pop song way that we like to define that word. Since you’ve been gone, I can breathe for the first time. To the left, to the left/Everything you own in a box to the left. So what/I’m still a rock star/I’ve got my rock moves/And I don’t need you. As wonderful and cathartic as these declarations are, the truth is that life grants so few genuine fist-pump moments; most of the time even the empowered person’s fist lies inert and sort of awkwardly in his or her lap. It is this stingingly unglamorous truth that informs Neko Case’s haunting brand of songwriting.

It is an empirical fact: Neko Case has one of the most powerful voices in music. Doubters, go listen to the chorus of “Deep Red Bells” or the first 30 seconds of “Favorite,” then come back and try to act like this isn’t true. Given the inclination and perhaps a bouffant and a sequined catsuit, Neko Case could easily hold her own on the VH1 Divas Live stage. Here’s another empirical fact: Neko Case’s voice has a more powerful and violent effect on me than other female voice in music. Neko Case’s voice burrows, it stays there real deep, it hatches eggs. Plenty of other singers have powerful voices — in the “I can huff and puff and blow your little house down with a single, prolonged note” sense. Plenty of other singers out there are blessed with what a record executive might call “pipes.” See also: Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” and its soaring, declarative chorus, Because I’m your lady/And you are my man, which, despite the power it packs even when transmitted through the tinny omniscience of a dentist office’s soundsystem where you have no doubt heard it, is not powerful in an unsettling way that warrants the use of an admittedly pretty disgusting parasite/egg metaphor. So it cannot be sheer power alone that accounts for the sort of violence that Neko Case’s voice is able to wreak on me. The difference, I think, is a matter of content. The difference is that Neko Case chooses to use her power to sing not about the power of love, but something vague and receding, something not wholly good, something that makes you itchy somewhere just below your skin.

Earlier this year, Neko Case released a terrific album called Middle Cyclone; on the opening track she sings in the first-person as a tornado. As you can imagine, the number of album reviews that compared Neko’s voice to a “force of nature” or some variation on the phrase was overwhelming. These sort of comparisons don’t paint the full picture, though. Because what Middle Cyclone — and, to some extent, all of Neko’s songs — concerns is not scenes of cataclysmic, Michael Bay-caliber destruction (though some certainly have their fair share of gore) but meditations on the tiny, subtle things that empowerment, in all its immensity and blusteriness, razes to the ground. On Middle Cyclone‘s title track, she sings, I lie across the path waiting just for a chance to be a spiderweb trapped in your lashes, and then, here’s the kicker: For that, I would trade you my empire for ashes. The modern love song is not conducive to gray areas; the modern “empowering break-up song” is not much better. A Neko Case song, though, is all about grey areas — capturing tiny, prickly moments of the human experience that otherwise go all too often unsung.

So why “Outro With Bees”? It’s not her best song. In fact, it’s almost what one would call an interlude. It contains neither a verse nor a chorus and it lasts just a minute and a half. It is a spiderweb of a song. It is sandwiched between much more impressive, muscular songs like “Deep Red Bells” and “Stinging Velvet” on my favorite album of hers, Blacklisted. “Outro With Bees” has all the makings of a good but wholly unremarkable song. But it’s actually quite the opposite; it is, for me, a revelation of the most deeply unsettling sort. Over the sparse landscape of a few plinking piano notes, a gently strummed guitar and a quiet murmur of strings, Neko sings just six haunting lines. This is how it ends –

So it’s better, my sweet, that we hover like bees
‘Cause there’s no sure footing; no love I believe.

– everything you need to know about Neko Case, the violence and the spiderwebs, distilled into two simple lines. These two lyrics — and the assurance with which she utters them — perform a feat of immeasurable destruction on me. They unravel the things I have taught myself from more familiar love songs. They make me question the simple truths taught to me via radio transmissions in every dentists’ office and chain restaurant and Gap dressing room I have ever stepped foot in. Because I’m your lady/And you are my man. Neko unravels the grammar of pop music love, that’s what she does with her power. She pulls the rug out from under me, and beneath it shows me, chillingly, no sure footing. No love that I can believe.

Chris Michaels

(From the album Blueberry Boat: Rough Trade, 2004)

When the Fiery Furnaces released Blueberry Boat in 2004, you cannot blame some critics for instinctively crying “prog!” — for what else can one think to say of a sprawling, nautical-themed rock opera that hopscotches through countless time signatures and historical seaport settings? “Ambitious,” perhaps. “Pretentious,” too. Still, both of these words feel too close to the familiar definition of prog rock, a term that, here in the aughts, comes to us heavy with over thirty years’ worth of associational detritus: the laser light show, the tour t-shirt featuring a mythical and many-headed beast, and a humble entreaty to take it very, very seriously. The Fiery Furnaces, though, exist in a world apart from these well-worn stereotypes. So if we must consider everything “sprawling” and “compositionally unconventional” and “nautical-themed” to be somehow related or indebted to prog rock, then I like to think of the Fiery Furnaces as 00s prog rock’s enfants terribles, a pair of rascally kid siblings holding crayons in their fists and mischievously scribbling across the planetarium sky.

Blueberry Boat itself is not a single, cohesive rock opera but a collection of 13 smaller, self-contained rock operas — each of which contain their own narrative universe complete with different characters and settings and plot arcs; all of which relate around a central (if really ambiguous) unifying theme. Matthew Friedberger (multi-instrumentalist and brother of lead vocalist Eleanor) has cited The Who’s “Rael” and “A Quick One While He’s Away” as sources of inspiration for the album. The Friedbergers’ songs certainly recall the structure of The Who’s 60s mini-epics with their quick shifts in melody and soaring crescendos. But they also echo the brash spirit of early British Invasion-era Who songs — the sass of a smashed guitar, the brazen grandeur of a fuzzed-out power chord, the assertion that teenage melodrama is the only thing in the world operatic enough to be the subject of an 8-minute pop opus. Nowhere are these things more gleefully apparent than on the album’s — and perhaps the band’s — crown jewel, “Chris Michaels.”

Lyrically, “Chris Michaels” is a charmingly convoluted one-act about popular girls, hockey players, high school adultery and credit card fraud — an absurdist Mean Girls whose final scene is sung in an obscure foreign dialect and partially takes place in Columbia. But you do not need to follow a word of it to recognize that “Chris Michaels” is a great song. I had no idea what was going on in this or most other songs on Blueberry Boat when I first heard it in 2004, but I was nonetheless completely enchanted by the album and this song in particular. I was 17 and listening to a lot of early Guided By Voices. I liked music that spoke to the most hyperactive corners of my brain, the voice that said, “Give me the hook, give it to me now, and then let’s be done with it.” And to this day, even for all that I’ve said about its operatic structure, I hear more Bee Thousand than “Bat Out of Hell” in “Chris Michaels.” The song has no verses or chorus; it has only hooks, glorious hooks that — like Mom’s oversized high heels — Matthew and Eleanor slip on, strut around in for a minute or so, and then kick off with an air of delightful, childlike restlessness. Both lyrically and structurally it is an overwhelmingly complex song, but at no moment do these complexities weigh it down and make it unable to be enjoyed as an immaculately crafted pop gem.

Five years later, Blueberry Boat represents the single moment in the Fiery Furnaces’ career when they have found a perfect harmony between accessability and ambition. At one end of the spectrum stands the saccharine avant-pop of songs like “Tropical-Iceland” and “Ex-Guru,” at the other stands the notoriously unlistenable “grandmother album.” Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find another band who both inspired a Nabokov-quoting person to make a very impressive website devoted to a scholarly explication of their latest album and, around the same time in their career, performed on a children’s show called “Pancake Mountain.” Blueberry Boat is a perfect union of these two dueling elements, cerebral proginess tempered with shameless fun. It is a rare album that does not shy away from sprawling ambition but harnesses it into something deliciously palatable; it is, in my opinion at least, one of the decade’s bona fide masterpieces.

“Soft Pyramids”

Q and Not U – “Soft Pyramids”

(from the album Different Damage: Dischord Records, 2002)

The Q and Not U album Different Damage is braided into the most microscopic fibers of my adolescence. And although in the context of their discography one would be tempted to call it their most “mature” record (the opening track, “Soft Pyramids,” is a mid-tempo groove with a prominently featured melodica solo), there is something deliciously teenage about every one of the memories I associate with it. My best friend and I listening to it on the way to the junior prom, taking off our seatbelts and putting the car in park at a red light so we could dance like a pair of smasmodic doofuses — me raccoon-eyed and wearing, of all things, a vintage wedding dress — and, when the light changed, abruptly buckling up and heading in the direction of the Cherry Hill Hilton. My best friend — with whom, I should mention, I had the kind of monstrously tempestuous relationship that often results when a seventeen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy try to be best friends — having the gall to see Q and Not U without me, a decision that resulted in me declaring a Livejournal war of embarrassingly personal proportions. (I should also mention that the whole episode, incidentally, stemmed from residual anger about my decision to ask somebody else to the senior prom.) And in the background of this pageant of teenage calamity, the tracks off Different Damage played on loop, like twelve furious little thunderstorms, shifting from moments of delicate calm to spurts immaculately controlled violence, which, I think, was a little bit how my life felt at that time.

In the fall of 2005, I moved to Washington DC to go to college. I’d never been there before, but like every high school kid who knew her way around a safety pin, the DC scene loomed large in my own personal mythology. DC was not just a scene, but the scene — in a single, fabled word: Dischord. And although the truly exciting shit was ancient history a few years after I was born, the early-to-mid-2000s represented a moment when the ghosts of Dischord past commingled with something new and exhiliratingly alive. In 2003, Black Eyes put out their spazzy, anthematic self-titled debut, which remains one of my favorite punk records of the decade. That same year, Q and Not U released the blistering “X-Polynation” single, which gave us hope that their third record just might be the best thing they’d ever done. But suddenly, and exactly when I was getting ready to start at American University — its campus just blocks from the Dischord House! –, this mythical scene crumbled in a way so sudden and unexpected that it felt suspiciously similar to the teenage melodrama all around me. First, Black Eyes broke up, leaving the world with just one brilliant LP and a posthumous release that — despite moments of glory, like the vicious intensity of “False Positive” — feels unfinished and stands as a rather depressing monument to thwarted potential. And then as if that weren’t bad enough, in the summer of 2005 the truly unthinkable happened: Q and Not U announced they were splitting up too.

The final Q and Not U show happened in DC on September 23, 2005. Tickets sold out before I moved to the city; I was inconsolable. I hated the fact that their final show would be taking place a few miles from where I was living, but I wouldn’t be there. And even worse, the cardinal virtue of teen angst was clanging undeniably true: there was no one with whom I could share my misery. The people I’d spent the first month of college hanging out with were nice, but we had very little in common. (I cannot help think of cousin Jasper’s collegiate advice to Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited: “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.”) So, the night of the show I went down to the Black Cat by myself, less anticipating scoring a scalped ticket than desiring to be around people who genuinely loved something that I loved too.

I got there too late. The opener was about to go on and even all the scalpers had done their business and gone inside. The whole block was lonely and empty, not what I’d expected at all. Then, milling around the ticket window, I heard a man say something that I have never again heard at a box office the night of a show: “Can I return this ticket?” It was like that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when little Charlie Bucket sees the glimmer of the gold, the moment right before he can believe it’s true. Before the woman even said, “No,” I was fumbling for my wallet and asking the man how much he wanted for it. “These tickets are totally sold out,” the woman at the box office said rather brusquely. “You’d better give him at least double the list price. At least.” I had $10. The man eagerly took it and gave me the ticket. Before I was even through the door, my shaky fingers were dialing my best friend back home in New Jersey, the only person in the world I knew who would understand the scope of this tiny miracle.

“Soft Pyramids” was the last song Q and Not U ever played. It was never my favorite Different Damage track, but by the time Chris Richards hit the “please pick a color for your checklist” line in the bridge — and for a number of reasons bigger than the song itself — I decided it was the single best live performance of a song I’d ever seen in my life. Though I love all three of their records, a quick Youtube search confirms the objective truth that Q and Not U was a dish best served live, and sweaty. After they had walked off the stage, this guy in front of me turned around and, with a look of exasperation and exhaustion, said loudly to no one in particular, “I loved that band.” Then he walked away. Everyone else soon began to file out of the Black Cat, and I stood there, drenched in sweat, alone in a new city where I knew no one and — if one believes something so large and stormy can meet such a conclusive finale — at the end of my adolescence. I can think of very few moments in my life when I have been happier.

Here is a terrific and inexplicably sepia-toned video of Q and Not U performing “Soft Pyramids” in Halifax in 2003.