reminds me of the mountain goats. perhaps it's perfect the way it is. The guitar has flourish and restraint. The lyrics are smart and the vocals play with vulnerability, though perhaps expanding on the emotion shown by the singer could give the whole song more of the depth you are looking for by adding instruments.

city steve!

Solid singing, and I like the lyrics. You can tell there was thought put into them.

This song makes me happy...though I couldn’t catch all the lyrics. Maybe it’s just the limitations of my earxtremities...

@fudgetusk Sort of -- I imagine we got to the weirdness similar ways (i.e. naturally by being weird people).

I listened to this with invisible glassine closed-ear headphones that were connected via IBM 3270 terminal adapter to my OpenBSD 6.2 Thinkpad 42p.

Did you record this with a cylindrical glassine entity worn over your middle finger or what.

I think I left a dishonorable discharge on the back of her Fleet uniform last time we hung out, but she hasn't sent me a dry cleaning bill yet, so at least I've got that going for me.

I especially liked the title, but one thing I noticed was that you may want to try it in a different key, to make the male vox a little more fluid.

Recalibrate...the mass spectrometer? The perforator? What

Better than expctd

Spooky, like a zombie bookie coming back for his money.

thanks for the kind words!

It's funny you should say that; I realized during recording that I subconsciously ripped the main motif from "In Limbo". Most of the melodies are based on 12-tone contrapuntal transformations of the first 4 notes, and I think that's also how most of the melodies in "In Limbo" were developed, so a bunch of fragments in this song end up matching fragments in that one...

this is incredible. so early seventies heavy metal.

cool song. would love to hear radiohead give this one a go.

dig it! great song.

Do you like hard rock and metal songs? Hit me up.

Very pretty.

LIAL like it a lot

The unison vocal parts at the end of lines are just perfect. I just wonder where it's going, and it holds off telling me as long as possible. One of the most arresting moments I've ever heard in music.

Sure, use it however you'd like! If I owned a skirt I'd have worn it for the recording to get in the right frame of mind. So I had to go with the bright yellow racing shorts.

On a technical level, I'm not sure the problem is purely overpopulation. Maybe it's something like that a lot of the ways we increase the carrying capacity of the earth have great potential to destroy it. Oh, great, now I'm overanalyzing song lyrics (I just wrote a whole album of speculative fiction, and I'm pretty sure I disagree with half of it). It's a good tune, 'eh?

I really like your vocal harmonies and lyrics, and you're playing is really tight. Especially on this song -- I think I need an off switch too.

The fact that the song starts out with just vocals and guitar is a remnant of the narrative that I originally planned for the album and was mostly dropped. I actually recorded a bass part covering just the second half of the song -- it worked well in the second-to-last verse but I couldn't come up with a part that didn't totally mess up the last verse/solo-coda section so I canned it. I never even thought about drums. They might work... because I wrote this song on dulcimer and play it on acoustic all the time, I never really think of it as a full-out rocker personally.

The ending keyboard part against the bass sounds especially cool. Nice soothing sounds on the album overall from what I've heard. Really hits the spot.

This is pretty cool. You're really going with lots of different styles on this album. At least so far, three songs, three totally different styles. Is there a story behind this song? I googled Kringlebach and he seems to be doing some interesting research... but I can't find anything about dog faces... or human faces :).

Great tune!

Whoa, then this track is like something from an early Flaming Lips album. Awesome.

love the dissonance.

Jess and I really like your album!

The sound and the tune and the vocals really work great together on this song! This is my favorite from this album so far.

This track makes me miss Chicago. Specifically the stretch of LSD from the river north to the S curve. Every time I make the mistake of driving it I fear for my life. That horrible Grand Ave. interchange especially (the lower level for local traffic is actually just as bad).

This song is the most beautiful thing I've heard this year on RPM I think.

I like the overall idea but I have a couple suggestions for the lyrics. First, it's a little clumsy; I've never heard "401k" sound poetic. Second, you sing about a character who's lost his future, but you don't show how this happened. Especially in light of the "401k" and "faceless concerns" lines, the picture that I'm getting is of a guy who's been trapped by his own choices, both productive (career) and consumptive -- while this absolutely can be a compelling story, it has to told, and with some introspection. Jess used to tell me, "Show it, don't say it". I think the key album to listen to for songs of this sort is Bruce Springsteen's The River, especially the title track. For all his characters that have lost there futures, there's a story. Sorry if I'm being a lyrics snob, it's just what I am. Thanks for writing about these ideas, it needs to be done.

This is your only singing on the album, no? It sounds good! You could sing more if you wanted! (Sorry if you prefer instrumentals; I am biased towards wordy songs...)

Love the singing.