"The frogs are leaping off my brainstem"
Sean
Apr 12, 2026
Happy Sunday! I got fired this week. Then hired again the next day. Allow me to explain. A few months before my life turned upside down in August 2024, I started working for a geodesy lab at Scripps Institute of Oceanography called Scripps Orbital and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC). Geodesy, broadly, is the science of measuring the earth’s shape and gravitational field. I’ve been fascinated with this niche field for a long time, so I was very grateful to find work in a lab as a computer science major. When I had to leave school, I assumed I would have to leave the lab behind, but a few months later, my PI sent me an incredibly sincere email asking how I was doing and if I felt OK to return to work. Since my work is entirely writing code, I was able to resume my position remotely and with very flexible hours. As such, I had inexplicably managed to stay employed during this whole debacle thanks to having the sweetest PI of all time.
However, being hired in a student position I guess means that you have to remain a student. After skirting university policy for a year, they finally caught on this past week and terminated my position, effective immediately. But thanks to the aforementioned sweetest PI ever, they are doing more complex paperwork to get me hired again. I can’t express how awesome they are.
Physically, I’ve been OK this week. I’ve mainly been engaged in the hellacious process of gathering all of my images to send off to the neurosurgeons I am consulting with. As anyone who has dealt with the American medical system knows, everything is designed to be as complex and awful as possible. I have to track down the obscure records department for each hospital I’ve been imaged at, fight with them to make an official records request, fill out mounds of paperwork, wait weeks for the physical CDs to arrive, then finally download them myself. God forbid they just electronically send me the files of my own body when I request them!!!!
Also, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I was choosing a new show to delve into after finishing Northern Exposure. I decided to go with Twin Peaks, and so far, I’m loving it. It’s a bit spooky which was hard at first on my shot nervous system, but I’ve acclimated and look forward to the little reprieve from health bullshit that it gives me each day. The soundtrack is great too. I think it’ll end up being reviewed here sometime.
(Emoviolence - Old Glory - 2000)
This is one of the most frustrating records I’ve heard in awhile. After Jeff Smith (bassist and vocalist) totally won me over with his compassion and honesty in an interview on the First Ever Podcast, I had to check out Jerome’s Dream. Aggressive DIY screamo made by kind people? Sign me up.
Let’s start with the good. The instrumentals are amazingly unhinged. It’s like Unwound’s self-titled, but faster, louder, and with more dissonance. I also really like the lo-fi radio excerpts that are interspersed between song.
Now, the bad. Unfortunately, the vocals are dismal. I’m no purist who demands any semblance of good singing/screaming or even intelligible lyrics. However, just because I won’t impose any singular criteria for good vocals doesn’t mean I won’t call them out when they suck. And these suck. The closest comparison I can make to Jeff’s vocals is high-pitched squawking from an annoying bird. Fortunately, the engineer, Kurt Ballou of Converge, put the vocals deep enough in the mix that you can still mostly enjoy the guitar-work, but then I’m still left wondering the whole time why there’s a shrieking seagull in the background of my amazing Unwound song.
Yes, it’s screamo. Yes, the vocals are supposed to be unhinged. But there’s a line, and Jerome’s Dream crosses it. Sigh. 2.5/5 - best song: it’s more like a message to you
(Sophisti-pop, New Wave - Linn - 1989)
The metropolitan imagery evoked by Sophisti-pop music has never felt all that topical to me. Until these last couple years, I had spent most of my sentient life wandering the dusty backroads of the American West in search of big mountains, wide open spaces, and solitude. These pursuits had shaped my interest in Americana, scrappy DIY punk/indie, and anything dealing with the messy, hypocritical bag of thoughts that accompany the open road and big skies1. However, the longer my health situation persists and I remain trapped at home in my own personal COVID-esque lockdown, the more removed I feel from that version of my self, and the less I have a musical/cultural home. Instead of accompanying my life, music has turned into a vessel to escape my current reality and visit another time/place for a little while.
All that to say, the urban longing of synthesizer-driven 80s pop seems like a more palatable trip these days. And what a trip it is! Hats is about as sophisticated as sophisti-pop gets. It plays like a sonic movie; a lush, romantic, melancholic, hopeful, hopeless, and nostalgic one. The set consists of city skylines, neon bar lights, empty cafes, flickering streetlights, and wandering home heartbroken (but not distraught about it) with a fading buzz after a party slightly outside your comfort zone. Some songs slowly build up the rich atmosphere and explode into nostalgia at the end, while others simply fade away into the night. While I love where Hats takes me, having only experienced the big city life in short bursts of tourism locks away some deeper emotional connection I imagine I could create with this album. It makes the temporal nature of the album feel even more fleeting. That being said, this is still a wonderful document of an era. 3.5/5 - best song: downtown lights
(Garage Rock, Power Pop - MUP - 2026)
While I love ambitious, culturally significant albums, music is about connection and emotion for me. If I believe in the artist’s sincerity, I don’t need them to release Dark Side of the Moon; I’ll listen simply for the humanity. King Tuff is a great example of that. I latched on to his work with Smalltown Stardust in 2023 which was a lovely collection of sunshine folk ballads about plants and other nature shit. I continued my exploration of his after realizing he was in the doom-metal band Witch with J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr. frontman), so I’ve been looking forward to his next offering.
His first album since returning to his native Vermont, MOO is what I was hoping for! A dorky, weird, and fuzzed-out power pop album about goofy little critters, smoking weed, and badly needing an oil change. This doesn’t reinvent the wheel at all. Hell, it doesn’t even make a very capable wheel. But it’s a wheel with a goofball personality, and that’s enough for me. This is like cruising the backroads with the windows down on a sunny day while forming a surprisingly deep connection with an eccentric hitchhiker you just picked up a few minutes ago. That’s only happened to me once, but dammit I wish it happened more. 3/5 - best song: crosseyed critters
(Grunge, Post-Hardcore - Slash - 1994)
Hearing Hum for the the first time last year was a revelation for me, and I’ve been searching for something similar ever since. While I traced their metal influences out to the likes of Kyuss and the Melvins, their grunge influences marked another path I could go down. Failure’s Magnified was my first stop on that journey. While it forgoes some of the explosiveness that Hum’s shoegaze influences bring to it, it maintains the absolutely orgasmic guitar tones. The baselines on some of these songs are heavenly, and the rest of the guitar work is really trippy. I’ve read some people say this is generic grunge, but listen to “Frogs” or “Bernie” and try to tell me you’ve ever heard such a slippery and angular lead guitar over a bassline that sounds like a tractor. It’s like pop music for a funeral. Also, given that my brainstem is so implicated by my health struggles, the chorus of “Frogs” cracks me up: “The frogs are leaping off my brainstem.” Maybe I should ask my doctor to check my next MRI for invasive frogs in my brainstem!! 4/5 - best song: frogs
OK, that’s all I got for this week. I’m feeling a bit more mentally clear than usual, so I’m happy with how these reviews turned out. I think they reflect this past week pretty well. Till next time, my dear 2 readers :)
1 This is exactly why The Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse is my favorite album of all time. Review coming sometime in the future to a Substack near you.