Welcome to another edition of Rich Karski’s A SONG I HEARD TODAY: the only online music review column that one time killed a guy with undercooked chicken.
Okay it’s this thing again. Good times, writing a damn music column while there is A VERY IMPORTANT FOOTBALL THING for me to have an opinion on. It’s probably good that I’m not writing about it because nobody wants a reasonable and moderate take on the situation when people could either be calling for blood or crying conspiracy. JUST KIDDING I WOULD BE DOING BOTH OF THOSE AT THE SAME TIME.
Enough about that though. We’re here for music, or as it was known in Ancient Greece “the forbidden whimper.” I was listening to a lot of sad music this week, not because I was particularly sad, but because I decided to be because I don’t deserve happiness.
Usually when I’m looking for sad music my go-to is The National, because they’re one of the greatest bands ever and they are the perfect soundtrack to drinking by yourself. Unfortunately, if I go to The National radio, I get a lot of songs that are supposed to sound like them but end up being unbearably whiny and garbage and I want to push the singer into an open man-hole so they fall and hurt themselves but also get dirty with sewage.
This week I chose one of those songs. In the course of my radio listening I encountered one of my least favorite songs by one of my least favorite bands and instead of changing it I decided to listen to the whole thing because I need my wisdom teeth out and instead of paying for the surgery I figured maybe I could make myself throw up until they dissolve. NO SUCH LUCK. Thanks a lot dry-heaves.
This terrible, awful, war crime of a song is “Soul Meets Body” by Death Cab for Cutie. Time to dive into this inside-out cat’s asshole of a song.
Ahhh… Deathcab for Cutie. They’re like Morrissey if Morrissey was a college freshman who carried a copy of “The Fault In Our Stars” everywhere they went. They are the creepy, unwanted back massage of popular music. If Hamlet started a band that band would be Deathcab for Cutie because the woe-is-me crying mixed with pretentious entitlement hasn’t been this viscous and infuriating since Denmark was actually important. This is the kind of band that you want to put in a trash can and roll down a very steep hill. They are goths who are too cowardly to commit to the cause. Fucking yuck puke gross.
When you first listen to the song you will most likely think “wow this is really awful stink garbage and I’m mad now and I will always be mad so I might as well start voting Republican.” If you don’t think that then you’re an asshole. If you like this song I know two things about you: you have never thrown any type of ball, and you have used “pedestrian” as an adjective at least once this week. Fuck you. Fuck you with rock salt if you like this song. Enjoying this music is why your parents are disappointed in you. This is music for people who hang out in bookstores giving unsolicited recommendations. This is a fucking dry handjob of a song. BUT MAYBE THE LYRICS ARE GOOD??
I want to live where soul meets body
NOPE! This sentence couldn’t be any more meaningless. This is the “purple monkey dishwasher” of song lyrics. Where does soul meet body? Ben Gibbard was probably really fucking proud of himself when he came up with this one. There is nothing worse than somebody saying something transparently idiotic and considering it profound. This is something the girl from your high school who dropped out because she got pregnant would post on her Facebook. This is not something a grown man who allegedly has a penis and has read a book should ever say in a public setting. You might as well say you want to live in Narnia you fucking flaccid cock.
And let the sun wrap its arms around me/And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing/And feel, feel what it’s like to be new
Ohhh so you want to keep being an asshole, but on the beach. I want to do the jerkoff motion so hard that my soul and body separate and you get evicted and have to live in your fucking Subaru. At this point the song is just a rewrite of “Surfing USA” from the point of view of someone who views fun as “trite.” The best way to “feel what it’s like to be new” is to drown yourself and cross your fingers that the Hindus are right. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Cause in my head there’s a Greyhound station/Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
Good. Fucking leave them there.
So they may have a chance of finding a place/Where they’re far more suited than here
Yeah like in the toilet. BOOSH.
And I cannot guess what we’ll discover
OH OH OH CAN I GUESS?!!! You’ll discover that all of this time you’ve spent trying to suck your own dick damaged the nerves in your spine that once you finally get your mouth around it you’re impotent.
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels/But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s/And not one speck will remain
Is this even a metaphor? “Hey babe, let’s dig some holes in the backyard like a couple of dogs and then when we’re done we can wash each other’s filthy hands IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.” Nobody knows what you mean! This is not a fucking thing! You’re just telling a girl that you want to make mud pies with her ARE YOU FOUR YEARS OLD WHAT THE FUCK IS ROMANTIC ABOUT THIS?! This is by far the worst metaphor for sex I’ve ever heard and I listen to a lot of ’80s hair metal where they mostly compare sex to driving a fast car or eating a messy dessert. If there are two things that are going to get a woman hot in the downstairs it’s gotta be small-scale farming and OCD. The only way I would dig a hole with Ben Gibbard is if I got to bury him in it.
And I do believe it’s true/That there are roads left in both our shoes
Good I hope it’s a gravel road and it’s real fucking uncomfortable. “OH NO NOT MY HOLE DIGGING SEX SHOES” you’ll say with an affectation that let’s everyone in a ten mile radius know you read The New Yorker at your dentist’s office.
But if the silence takes you/Then it takes me too
Oh please please please let the silence take him. I will even pay extra if it roughs him up a little along the way.
So brown eyes I hold you near/Cause you’re the only song I want to hear/A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
This man fucked Zooey Deschanel for like five years so I can only assume she has the IQ of a fucking grapefruit. “Babe, you’re like a song. A song floating through the air. And you’re the only song I ever want to hear again.” No joke in one of my creative writing classes we had a contest to see who could write the worst poem and I won with a poem comparing a woman to a song. This guy makes millions of dollars by doing the same thing with one hundred percent sincerity and putting it to some music that sounds like Depeche Mode got trapped in a well. There is no such thing as fairness when this comp lit-assed buttermilk-skinned-assed Will-Forte-with-type-2-diabetes-looking-assed motherfucker gets to be famous.
