Seasonal Affective List-order
Are you experiencing shortness of breath, coughing, bank degeneration, wheezing, gatekeeping, cramping, gas, bloating, condescension, diarrhea, constipation, insommia, sneezing, wallet desiccation, loss of appetite, intrusive thoughts, joint pain, poor taste, dizziness, dry mouth, clammy hands or inflamed alicorns?
If so, you may be suffering from an acute case of List-Seasonitis!
This may seem to be bad news, but know that you are not alone; 5 out of 7 Americans have at least one Seasonitis attack per year and spend an average of $200 for last-minute online remedies, and in some rare cases require extensive in-patient treatment programs.
But here in the Toilet, we have some home-made herbal remedies passed down from the commodes of yore to help take the edge off of your auricular ailment and get you back on your feet in no time and ready to face your day to day existential dread with a spring in your step and a smile on your face!
Please use the guide below to see which treatment* best suits your needs.
Do you have trouble focusing on distorted guitars, find yourself staring blankly during odd-time chromatic riffing, days pass by without listening to any Dark Descent records material, are unmoved by the latest and greatest monolithic slabs of top-notch riffage, and even find pushing play on your Spiritual Healing cassette to be a chore?
Then Neko Case latest album Hell-On may be just what you need.
In her 7th solo studio album, she makes some slight motions to return to a familiar sound of her folk-noir americana, eschewing the strangely beefy approach of 2013s The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, and the more angular wistfulness of 2009s Middle Cyclone. Hell-On seems more musically adjacent to her classic era of Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, yet from a lyrical perspective it is colored a bit more by age, reflection and what may even be a small sense of resignation, rather than the sense of poetic and tragic wonder, and even underlying optimism of her earlier work.
As always the centerpiece of her music is her absolutely unique sense of storytelling and analogy, while the rhythm guitar strums a foundation of intriguing chords over plucked ukulele and swooning pedal steel while the drums steadily embellish the tracks like a distant train shuffling along the mountainside. As a longtime fan who has seen her about a half dozen times, I’m still not sure if this is going to be my go-to album of her entire catalogue but, much like Immolation, even wavering output with an imbalance here or extra ballad there is still miles above what the rest of the pack of imitators and hopefuls can dare to achieve on their best of days.
Recommend administering during commutes to and from work to minimize embarrassment while crooning in the car and just before bedtime for best results.
Do you find that the sound of grunting, screaming, howling, growling, burbling, gargling, yelling and/or James Hetfield cause you to cringe, tremor in the knee, sweat upon the brow, clench in the jaw, furrow of the brain or pucker in the butt?
Then you may be in acute need of Blueprint’s latest LP, Two-Headed Monster.
He has been a sturdy voice in the Columbus hip hop scene since the early 2000s, putting out a wide variety of EPs, collaborations and full lengths. And in this latest offering, his attention to both the warm and evocative production as well as thoughtful content and delivery shines as powerfully as ever. And while Brother Ali’s album from last year felt more like a meditative reflection imbued with spiritual observation, Blueprints’ feels more like a conversation with an earnest friend walking back from a coffee shop, genuine and challenging in its directness, but also friendly and open to disagreement. A whole handful of tracks are highlights, from the surreal piano-laden Be Like Water, the courageous A Hero Dies Once, and a whole slew of insight in songs such as Health is Wealth, All Shock No Value, and Pump Fakin’, all of which seem to be directed equally to the groove-brain in our hindquarters as much as to our intellect.
Should be played on a boombox every other hour, on the community gym stereo, and continuously on headphones until symptoms subside and for at least a week after.
Do you find that blast beats cause your eyes to roll back into your head, gratuitous double bass makes you gag, d-beats make your frown and cymbal chokes give you belly ache?
For such a serious condition there is no remedy besides Sons Of Kemet – Your Queen is a Reptile.
Recently and very much deservedly signed to Impulse! Records (the house that ‘Trane built), Sons of Kemet are one of many energetic groups romping around the London jazz and jazz-adjacent scene, nearly all of which somehow involve saxophone/clarinet extraordinaire Shabaka Hutchins. But this isn’t just another jazz album, as the listener is immediately possessed by a mad West African rhythm before their hand even comes off the play button and it becomes readily apparent to even the most ailing of listeners that this is a musical beast completely in its own realm. The percussion seemingly fills the space of some kind of jazz-inflected conga line, the horns provide bizarrely pop-sensible melodies, with the Tuba specifically lending a sense of marching motion to the entire proceeding, all tied together with a reckless rhythm section perpetually haunting your lower body with the spirits of visceral dance. As a point of academic reference, the genre term ‘fusion’ is frequently used to denote a band that is incorporating multiple disparate influences, usually some type of traditional/world music with a flavor of jazz, though in reality every group I have listened to (and been disappointed by) with that tag simply took the friendliest and easiest elements of those two genres, and fused them into a blend of smooth cataclysmic blandness that even Matchbox 20 couldn’t muster. By contrast, Sons of Kemet do what we always wished the term ‘fusion’ really meant; they take the unpredictable, unruly and unfriendly elements of jazz, and smash those into the primal and nearly vulgar aspects of pop sensibilities, along with tumbling tribal rhythms and spoken word elements that walk the tightrope between slam poetry and political hip-hop and knit them together in a way that shouldn’t work at all and they make it sound like it’s the only way it’s ever been done.
Take five per day during the loading period of two weeks, and then twice a day or as needed for another two weeks. Make sure to stretch prior to administration and to schedule a follow-up appointment with your local chiropractor to ensure you are not putting excessive strain on your posterior or your gluteus maximus shimmius.
Is your funny bone no longer tickled by Ghoul, your pizza bone no longer tickled by Axeslasher, your party organ not primed for Municipal Waste, upbeat energy brings you down, melody causes your britches to soil, and that even anti-comic satanic art orthodox philosophy wolf-music doesn’t pump you up like it used to?
Then you are probably in desperate need of an urgent Halestorm transfusion.
I realize that if you are in such a dire state, you are probably experiencing severe anxiety and may even feel that your carefully cultivated scene credibility is being threatened, but I assure you that everything will be okay and that these feelings are normal. It’s easy to get wrapped up in our reflexive coping mechanisms of rejecting anything that doesn’t acknowledge that extreme metal is the Final Form and Peak Condition of rock n’roll, but if we just settle down, take a phat rip of our Mayhem-flavored vape pen and kick around our Glen Benton hacky sack for a minute or two, we would be able to calm down and clear our mind enough to realize that the first two Halestorm albums are fantastic and sorely needed rock and roll albums that expertly walk the line between pop and 80s metal worship, while avoiding the many pitfalls of both. And while I’m not sure that Lizzy Hale and co. very latest is exactly what I was expecting, it is still an extremely fun and unique offering in that it somehow is leaning even more heavily into the pop diva territory while also refusing to let go of their roots and love of all things Dio.
Take one per day in the morning with breakfast in order to allow the body to acclimate to the new diet. Antacids can be taken to mediate the gassy side effects and metamucil may be taken as needed to combat irregular stool consistency. Take multiple times daily as needed once irritable bowel and keyboard flatulence have subsided.
If none of the above have offered relief to your condition, then you most likely are experiencing irregular heartbeat at the mere mention of music, extreme anaphylaxis when hearing acoustic intros, blackouts and fainting when exposed to nuanced recommendations and irritability when hearing sounds other than tinnitus.
Fortunately, we have one last remedy for such a severe case, and that comes in the form of two EPs released this year to form a single combined LP; Midst – Humilation/Midst.
Our guacamole friend has thoughtfully included some extremely tasteful blast beats and other blistering rhythms in the first EP from earlier in the year, in order to provide a convenient reference point and ease the palatability of the medicine, in much the same way cough syrup comes in such delectable flavors as Cherry (“Made of 100% real cherry dish soap!”) and Purple (“At least it’s not cherry!”).
And when the relentless rhythmic pummeling subsides, we are treated to the smooth sounds of carefully crafted eardrum blistering noise to scramble any and all unnecessary brainwaves or functions and force upon us the realization that we are simply a sensory chemical meat sack lumbering around a space rock in a universe of infinitely desolate collapse.
I feel compelled to dwell on the sound though; noise is a genre that is hypothetically as easy to make as it is to spew uninformed opinions online since there is essentially no barrier to entry nor editorial review. But in practice, due to the extremely harsh nature of the medium, it is actually much more delicate in being able to create something that is not only palatable to listen to, but also can maintain the paradoxical state of feeling musical, whilst also rejecting every normal musical convention possible. And it is in that paradox that Midst excels massively, possibly even moreso than the Gnaw Their Tongues/Crowhurst collobaration, in that they somehow make it uniquely enjoyable, engaging and nearly pleasant to listen what can only be described as ‘a bunch of noise and weird frequencies and sometimes drums’.
Recommend immediate hospitalization and intravenous application of the remedy, the strength level to be determined and dispensed only by licensed nursing staff under the direct supervision of musico-medical professionals.
*Please consult your primary physician before administration. Use caution if you are pregnant, using prescription acne medicine or operating heavy machinery. Do not use if you are a chronic mansplainer, allergic to shellfish, or have been cucked within the last 6 to 8 weeks. Side effects may include nausea, enjoyment, itchy foot, depression, homicidal fistula, smiling, amoebic dysentery, hair loss, no nothing about wave music, increased blood pressure, hairy palms, lumbar herniation, brittle bones, neck ache, relaxation and/or swag. If you experience liver inversion, intestinal torsion, reflexive try-hardism or a sudden disbelief in the scientific method, dial 911 immediately, flush eyes with cool water for 10 minutes and listen to Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’.
