Daily Archives: August 18, 2023

When singer-songwriter Chloe Drallos first premiered her music project known as Zilched in 2018, she self-ascribed her own genre of doom pop.

While arguably cryptic, it also somehow perfectly fits.

The music of Zilched is a murky mix of brooding guitars and catchy, haunting choruses, while moody minor keys and drapes of distortion envelop lyrics of disenchantment sung in a low, beautifully dusky voice that could soar into higher ranges and still retain its bittersweetness.

The bitter and the sweet, the doom and the pop, the low and the high. You hear the name Zilched and it suggests depletion or perhaps millennial nihilism but what Drallos is after is much more expansive.

Tangentially, the overall sound and production for her dulcet gloom ballads are expanded and refined on her latest album,Earthly Delights, due to her collaboration with producers Ben Collins and Ian Ruhala. Drallos is tapping into styles that are typically associated with angst goth, noise-pop or post-grunge and the angst portrayed on Earthly Delights is the strain of existing within a volatile vortex between those dichotomies.

Watch the music video for Zilched The Flood

There are sentiments strung across the record that admit to a yearning but still acknowledge a certain hopelessness. Drallos is singing from a balancing point between desolation and delight, if not some kind of divine. And maybe thats a way to interpret the zilch of Zilched the zero balance between the muck and the marvelous of living and loving and losing and learning.

Its the plight of the yearning / To build up a wall and then watch it decay / Its all tragedy / But its what you love, Drallos sings on (You Love) The Tragedy.

Oh, the angst. No one does it better than Zilched. Earthly Delights is Drallos best album to date.

Its worth noting that the albums title is a reference to a famous painting by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, which was painted as a triptych the Garden of Earthly Delights is essentially in dimensional balance between heaven and hell.

And while there are some provocative religious references scattered across the record, its all about the balance of that triptych that makes it feel like the perfect allusion for a Zilched album title.

Zilched will celebrate the release of Earthly Delights this Saturday at El Club in Detroit. Tickets are $17 and available at elclubdetroit.com.

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Review: Zilched releases her best work yet in 'Earthly Delights' - WDET

This week on the Q with Tom Power podcast is host Tom's post-Coachella sit down with singer Phoebe Bridgers for a career-spanning interview tracing her early years in Pasadena, CA, to becoming one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of her time.

LISTEN NOW:Q with Tom Power:Phoebe Bridgers

4X-GRAMMY nominee Phoebe Bridgers is known for her sad-girl Alt-anthems both as a solo artist and with her group boygenius, offering extremely specific and relatable songs to a growing fan base as rabid as Beyonc's Bey Hive and Taylor's Swifties.

Phoebe explains her upbringing in the suburbs of Pasadena, where she somehow tapped into a kind of "past-life pain" when she began writing deeply personal songs at the age of ten. "I think I was just trying to make myself happy," she says. "I also remember I thought plagiarism wasn't as big a deal when I was little. I would literally steal verses from other people and put them into my own songs."

Now 29 years old, the "past-life pain" has given way to real-life relationships, experiences, and loss -- all of which she's considered fair game in her songwriting. Though she's known for leaning into the sad side with her songs, Phoebe says that may not always be where her initial inspiration began. "I have disassociative tendencies, so I think I write it and I'm like, 'that was pretty.' Then like a year later I'm like, 'Oh s***, this is actually really heavy.'"

"Believe it or not," she explains, "when I feel down, I'm actually trying to get better... the thing that's been commodified," Phoebe believes in the outward appearance people give off about never being able to find happiness. "Well, I hope that's not true," she adds.

"When people write about it too much, it's like everybody knows everything about you. But I think there's something to be said for -- and I talk about this with my friends all the time -- people just think you're smarter if you're sad," Phoebe says. "Peppy love songs get kind of a bad rap as being dumb, and I think my next challenge in my life is to have a way to write about happiness that doesnt make me cringe.

"It's self-protective... Culturally, just think about every nihilist ever -- I guess it's not nihilism to be emo -- but I think you associate darkness with being an intellectual or something. I think that's such a narrow lens, and Im guilty of it too.

Listen to the full episodewithPhoebe Bridgers above. Also in this episode, Shane Ghostkeeper talks to guest host Talia Schlanger about his deeply personal song Hunger Strike and more.

Five days a week, acclaimed interviewerTom Powersits down with the artists, writers, actors, and musicians who define pop culture. Whether hes ribbingAdele, singing a boyband classic withSimu Liu, or dissecting faith withU2frontmanBono Tom brings the same curiosity, respect, and meticulous preparation into every conversation. He also has a track record for interviewing artists on the precipice of stardom likeLizzoandBillie Eilish who appeared onQwell before hitting the mainstream. Hear your favorite artists as they truly are, every weekday with Tom Power.

Listen to more of your favorite music on Audacy's Women of Alt, Emo Kids, Alt Now, Rockternative, Drivin' Alt, New Wave Mix Tape, 90s and Chill, Alterna 00s, IndustriALT,Greatest Guitarists, Greatest Drummers, and ALT Roots stations -- plus check out our talent-hosted Kevan Kenney's Music Discovery, and Megan Holiday's My So Called '90s Playlist.

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Phoebe Bridgers thinks we confuse sadness with intelligence: Listen ... - Audacy

Detail from "Portrait of Nietzsche" (1906) by Edvard Munch (Image: Wikipedia)

When I was a young man, I loved Peter Weirs 1989 boarding school drama Dead Poets Society, featuring Robin Williams in one of his most celebrated roles.

Back then, I admired Williamss character, Mr. Keating, a rebel rouser teacher who tries to wake up a group of rich kids, who, without his help, are destined to end up in the same boardrooms and country clubs as their fathers. I liked the rebellious stuff, but I also admired the stuffy establishment setting. That was me, I guess: a kid who felt at home in a conservative aesthetic but did not want to be told what to do. My one complaint with the film was that the boys did not appreciate that they got to push their boundaries amid New England fall foliage and mahogany leather, while I was suffering alongside philistines in flip-flops at my suburban Florida mega-high school.

Anyway, Mr. Keating did not follow the script, prescribing Walt Whitman poems and encouraging the bookish young men in his charge to sound their barbaric yawps. He turned a blind eye when they snuck off at night to perform faux-primitive rituals and read their middling adolescent verses aloud. Again, as a teenager I ate it up. When Mr. Keating got fired after one of the boys committed suicide, I felt bad for him. I imagined I would have stood up on my desk proclaiming O Captain, my Captain along with the other boys who were devastated to see their rascally mentor go.

Through high school and college, I pretended to intellectual superiority by avoiding mainstream American male inanities. I never set foot in a frat house. I majored in French. I sat alone on my dorm balcony smoking cigarettes and listening to Nick Drake. I looked to cinematic icons like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Woody Allen (yes, Woody Allen), and I searched half-heartedly for my own brand of existentialism. I decided to keep God sort of in the picture. Good for me.

Then, in the early 2000s, I had a brief career as a high school teacher, and I styled myself something of a Mr. Keating, spouting off whatever niche political opinions I had from one day to the next, belittling the official curriculum I was given to teach, and looking for any opportunity I could to plant seeds in the minds of young people especially boys to reject the rottenness of bourgeois America and to choose an extraordinary path for themselves in life. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who could help guys feel intellectually strong, to avoid being the figure Mr. Keating ridicules in Dead Poets Society: a 98-pound weakling who gets copies of Byron kicked in his face when he goes to the beach.

I also began lifting weights, and despite my skinny frame, I put on muscle quickly, with my personal best lifts increasing for years. I suddenly excelled in physical pursuits with the same rebellious perfectionism that had made me an excellent, even intimidating student in school. I often saw my students at the gym and we would spot each other. In my classroom, I challenged football players to push-up contests, and I never lost. My lifelong prejudice against mediocrity intensified for myself, of course, but increasingly as contempt for weakness in the world too, even though I still proudly voted Blue and was more-or-less comfortable with liberal Protestantism as the best place for a huge snob to opine about what Christianity, and everything else, should be.

It was all pretty fun; but remembering those years makes me cringe a bit now. Like Mr. Keating, I was reckless, and selfish. I was something of a Nietzschean blond beast.

But then God began to save me from myself first by giving me a wife, and then by sending me out to study theology. Suddenly I had one person on earth whose feelings had to come before mine, and whose love for me humbled me, despite my ongoing immaturity. And then I acquired a whole library of Father-figure teachers, intellectual giants that far outweighed my heroes Montaigne and Goethe and Truffaut. I kept lifting weights, certainly. But I looked into the mirror less often and I felt less inclined to enjoy hating the growing cultural void in society around me.

Ive recently discovered these words from Pascals Penses that pulled me back in time to the moment of my spiritual coming-of-age:

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

At twenty-seven years old, I was finally ready to be a man, and a man in Christ. Not a superman.

And this brings us to the aforementioned Friedrich Nietzsche. The sincerity of my Christian upbringing had stuck to me too closely to go all the way dark during my Wanderungsjahren. Even though I was enamored with existentialism, I preferred the humane Camus to the misanthropic Sartre. Hence I mostly avoided Nietzsche; but I can imagine an alternate reality where the right Nietzschean got hold of me at the right moment, and I came out (at least for a while) an utterly cynical, narcissistic creep. And this brings us to a most disturbing latter-day Mr. Keating called the Bronze Age Pervert, a highly-influential Romanian-American man named Costin Alamariu, who was recently profiled in a fascinating piece by Graeme Wood.

I wont rehearse all the details of BAP here again, I highly recommend Woods article for that but heres the gist: A self-described aspiring nudist bodybuilder with a Ph.D. from Yale has captivated a portion of young people on the political Right with the false gospel of Nietzsches beyond good and evil and will-to-power. Learning of the BAP phenomenon immediately reminded me of an idea attributed to Ross Douthat, related here by Rod Dreher: the post-religious Right is really bad news.

But criticizing BAPs immoralism is too easy, and perhaps too self-congratulatory. (Right Wingers love to police our fringes to find real bad guys to point to when progressives smear us.) A more serious intellectual engagement is required.

Now, it is possible that some BAPist aims could overlap with those of faithful Catholics. But the fundamental moral visions are polar opposite. And Woods article asserts that there is a sleeper cell of BAPists who have infiltrated the U.S. government and other influential institutions, and they are biding their time before coming out in the open and seizing the reins. In my mind, there is no chance these guys will ever pull off a coup, but I do have some concerns that the movement will enlarge the space of anti-Christ in our society at the very moment when the veil over the fiction of a neutral public square increasingly falls. And I worry that the Church of our day is in no position to offer astute young seekers, exhausted by mediocrity, a superior lifestyle choice rooted in the philosophical depth BAP presumes to offer.

On this point, Woods otherwise excellent article offers a nave conclusion namely, that BAPs movement may serve to renew the defenses of a liberalism that has grown lazy by taking its dominance for granted for too long. The antibodies are stirring, he writes.

I dont think so.

In fact, I find it hard to believe that great numbers of people under 30 (or 60?) would care to come to the defense of the Enlightenment or find the ideals of liberalism compelling anymore. Nietzsche thought all of this was passing away, and he may have been right. Now the Dictatorship of Relativism has been conquered by the even crueler consumerist, post-human technocracy. To resist it requireswellquite a triumph of the will.

But if Christians must reject BAPs chauvinism and we must and if there is no way to re-implement the ideals of modern liberalism and I dont see how there is we have to propose a different philosophical project of Christian humanism and the resurrection of Christian society.

One person to look to for inspiration is the 20th-century German soldier and polymath Ernst Jnger, a one-time Nietzschean. Ive written before about the early Jnger and his most famous work, Storm of Steel, a World War I memoir with the opposite perspective of Erich Maria Remarques famous All Quiet on the Western Front. Jnger was wounded several times and decorated for valor in the Great War, and afterward he was highly critical of the Weimar government, and of liberal democracy. Hitler admired him, but Jnger never joined the Nazis. He did, however, don the uniform of the Third Reich during World War II, where he was posted to Paris and hobnobbed with French intellectuals. Ultimately, he was peripherally involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler an event fictionalized in Bryan Singers great 2008 film Valkyrie. Hitler knew of Jngers involvement and let him off the hook. Make of that whatever you like.

Jnger is not well known in the United States. His status as a major man of letters in Europe, and particularly Germany, is too enormous to relate here, but this Swedish documentary is a fascinating introduction. Jnger lived to the ripe-old-age of 102, and was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died in 1998. He has become a cult figure for English-speaking Right Wingers, including BAP; but most of them fail to acknowledge Jngers turn away from Nietzscheanism and towards Christian humanism during World War II, when he read through the entire Bible closely. The result was a little treatise called The Peace.

Although Jnger did not refer to himself as a Christian at the time when the book was released, The Peace is entirely grounded in Christian metaphysics. Jnger advocated for dispassionate justice to be meted out to the aggressors, and he wanted a solution that would bring about immediate victory and long-term flourishing for the entire European continent (totally unlike the Treaty of Versailles); but without Christ at the center of society, they may just as well have annihilated each other.

Jnger envisioned a new Christian imperium to stand between the emerging materialist superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. His project was an utter rejection of nihilism, and he wrote Spiritual salvation must come first, and only that peace can bring a blessing which has been preceded by the taming of the passions in these hearts and minds of men. Likewise, If the struggle against nihilism is to succeed, it must be fought out in the heart of each one of us.

And most significantly, Jnger argues that the incautiousness of the Mr. Keatings and the cruelty of the BAPs of the world can only lead us to destruction:

The leadership of men cannot be granted to the nihilists, to the pure technicians or to those who despise all moral obligations. Whoever places his trust in man and human wisdom alone cannot speak as judge, nor can he expound as teacher, heal as doctor or serve the state as official. These are modes of life that end with hangmen in the seats of the mighty.

Jnger rejected the idea that a return to a liberal state was the answer. The failure of Weimarism was final. And while he insisted that the churches were central to the peaceful future of Europe, he also saw that the churches, too, stand in need of a revival.

Eighty years after World War II, Christians must stare down todays nihilism, both in the wacky but worrisome BAP variety, and in the de facto atheism in the hearts of most modern people, including churchgoers. But the Church can only succeed in this task by refocusing on the deep mysteries of reality the God beyond the death of God, as Paul Tillich said. Another much greater German than Jnger, our late Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, pursued this project to the very end of his life.

The Church needs to carry forward Benedicts ideas and teach the world that our faith is a comprehensive, lived philosophical proposal that puts the Bronze Age Perverts antiquated will-to-power Nietzscheanism to shame. And so, we give the late Pope Emeritus the final word here from his essay Monotheism and Tolerance, from Ignatius Press newly published collection What is Christianity? The Last Writings:

The thought of Socrates, who was pious and critical at the same time, had in its own way the effect of unveiling the illusory character of the gods. Today we face the opposite movement of the human mind. Modern thought wants to acknowledge the truth of being, but wants to acquire power over being. It wants to reshape the world according to its own needs and desires. With this orientation not to the truth but to power we no doubt touch on the true problem of the present time.

Todays Christian thinkers task is to expose the lie of powers promises with counter-cultural zeal a task, by the way, that requires manliness (virtus). Is anyone up to the challenge?

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Called to be a man in Christ, not a Nietzschean superman - Catholic World Report

Grand Theft Auto 6, GTA 5, and a Red Dead Redemption remaster are more than enough for Rockstar to focus on right now. But as we approach the 20th anniversary of the first game, and as I come to the end of replaying it, yet again, Im craving the return of Manhunt. One of the greatest horror games ever made, its not just scary, but shocking, smart, and legitimately squalid. Theres something to be said for the current tide of triple-A games, which compared to perhaps two or three decades ago represent a culture that has seriously broadened its appeal. But Manhunt takes me back to a time when gaming was a counter-culture, and it felt like a willingness to experiment and plumb the depths of poor taste still existed among big-name developers.

Im a bit cynical, a bit jaded, and a bit older now than I was, and it takes a lot to really get to me. But I still think Manhunt is genuinely nasty. Ignoring some of the old hysteria and hyperbole, and the reputation that Manhunt has gained as one of the most controversial games ever, this is still more brutal and nihilistic than any other mainstream release Ive seen in my lifetime.

Its a horrible cliche, and often untrue, but I think it genuinely applies with Manhunt you couldnt make this game now, or at least, it seems very unlikely that Rockstar, or any other big developer, would allocate a budget and attempt to market a game like this now.

Its not just the violence. Its the sexualization of the violence. Its the director, Lionel Starkweather,groaning into your earpiece when you open a hunters face with a hammer. Its the old mock-up website for the in-game snuff ring business Valiant Video, a place where you can buy latex gloves and gimp masks.

This is a journey to the center of depravity, a horrible adventure through some of the darkest psychosexual impulses. Your enemies are white supremacists. Your weapons are hand axes, shards of glass, and plastic bags. Stripped to their underwear and tied to a stake, you rescue your family one level, only to watch them butchered, on a VHS tape you find in an abandoned shopping mall, one level later. Its real dirt.

Its the levels with the family that really bring the power of Manhunt home, in fact. In other games, rescuing them would represent something redemptive, an optimistic kind of uptick in the story where were allowed to feel that perhaps the world isnt all bad.

Similarly, when they die, itd be a dramatic turning point, the momentour protagonist, James Earl Cash, resolves to do something topursuesomemorally cleansingvengeance. But Manhunt offers neither of these things. When he rescues them, apart from barking orders like run away or get out of here, Cash doesnt speak to his family its as if they dont love each other, dont care about each other, dont know each other. Likewise, when theyre killed, the game just continues like nothing happened. Cash keeps following Starkweathers orders. The executions roll in. None of it matters.

And that, I think, is Manhunts greatest achievement. When I see writers or game-makers or whoever it may be talking about nihilism, and how they want to explore hopelessness, immorality,or how everything is pain or something it often feels like a cop out, like theres something easier in making art about how everythings terrible.

But while its certainly nihilistic, Manhunt has a forceful conviction. It takes perhaps the first four levels before it hits the absolute rock bottom of the soul, and then it just keeps digging and digging and digging. Its committed to squalor, sleaze, and spiritual oblivion. For a game about hollowness, and the absence of even the basest humanity, its gotseriousvoice and substance.

Which is why I want it back. By broadening their appeal and softening their approach, videogames, as a commercial prospect and arguably as an artform as well, have done well in the last 20 years. Games have proven to the world to the mainstream cultural vanguard that theyve got some expressive and certainly some industrial worth.

But in doing that, theyve stopped being dangerous. Stopped being iconoclastic. Stopped being appalling. AndI missthat particular creative urge, that urge to be grungy, challenge taste, and rebel against accepted standards of artistic cleanliness. I think that urge once gave to gaming a distinctive cultural identity. And if it did, Manhunt was its apex. Id love to have it back. But Im almost certain it wont happen.

Manhunt 3 might not be coming, but the GTA 6 release date is definitely on its way. In the meantime, if youre still causing chaos in Los Santos, check out the best GTA 5 mods for 2023.

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Forget GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption, I want Manhunt 3 - PCGamesN