Eight Long Goodbyes, part 2

5. "This Dust Makes That Mud" by Liars, which closes their album They Threw Us All In A Trench And Put A Monument On Top

This is a weird one with a few asterisks. "This Dust Makes That Mud," the last track on Liars' debut album, lasts eight minutes and then ends in a locked groove. If you're listening on vinyl, the song finishes and transitions to a loop that only ends when you pick the needle up off the record. I would not consider a locked groove to be the kind of song I'm talking about here.

BUT. The LP version of the album was pretty rare until a full discography reprint campaign 21 years after its initial release. My CD copy of They Threw Us All In A Trench... recreates the LP's effect by looping the locked groove bit for 22 minutes. If you're listening to this album on CD or streaming, its final song is a 30 minute behemoth.

It's a little annoying, a little antagonistic, a little catchy. With a few seconds to go in the track's runtime, the loop begins to slow before suddenly cutting out. "This Dust Makes That Mud" has a sinister bass part I'd gladly listen to for an hour, but the bit that loops is a little synth riff that begins repeating so subtly it becomes difficult to place where the playing ends and the automation begins.

Am I the only person this dumb? I will actively listen to a song, not as background music but as the thing pressed right up to the front of my attention, and I still won't recognize I'm trapped in a loop for a minute. And Liars did not place this song at the end of a trance or house record that otherwise builds songs around loops. All the other tracks here run between 2 and 3 minutes long. I am never, across the record's preceding twentysomething minutes, lulled into accepting loops at face value, as pieces of a track, so when the big one enters, I should instantly recognize it as the brick wall at the end of the album. But I don't.

I'm not saying I forget what "This Dust Makes That Mud" is, and I've probably only listened to it all the way through once, but I have yet to develop the part of my brain that can immediately yell "IT'S A LOOP" at the other parts.

It retains the "long goodbye" effect I wrote about in my last newsletter, though, in that the song only ends after you've had enough time to fully think about everything you've listened to.

Side-note: I've always assumed the first two Liars albums were prescient statements on the band in the very hyped-up early 00s New York. "They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck A Monument on Top," as in "every young, fashionable band playing angular songs were swirled together by the press and taken as a monolith that you were told was cool." And then the follow-up, "They Were Wrong, So We Drowned," as in "we didn't fit into that mold, so The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs took off while we made increasingly messy songs and didn't become the festival headliners you might have expected us to become if we'd made a dozen more things like 'Mr. Your On Fire Mr.'" They're unwieldy album titles, especially compared to "Fever To Tell" or "Young Liars," even compared to "Turn On The Bright Lights." Liars seemed to be narrating their critical standing a few months in advance– They Were Wrong... scored a rare zero stars in Rolling Stone. One way to do that is to make something like "This Dust Makes That Mud," a would-be epic that transforms into an endurance test. It's probably very difficult to make music like this and expect to stay in that trench for long.

6. "Oahu" by The 6ths, which closes the album Hyacinths and Thistles

Here's a loop I can luxuriate in. The gimmick behind The 6ths, the best Magnetic Fields side-project, was that Stephin Merritt was making tribute albums for/to himself. He'd play almost all of the music and write all of the lyrics but pull friends and people he admired in to sing the songs. The conceit allowed Merritt, who clearly enjoys writing with people in mind but doesn't like to cede creative control, to cover a lot of ground. The second and final 6ths record, Hyacinths and Thistles, has him writing a propulsive synth pop song for Gary Numan, a solo piano ballad for Bob Mould, a drunk dial set to thumb piano for Melanie and what still hits me as his most affecting love song, "As You Turn To Go," for Momus.

"Oahu," ends that record similarly to the way Liars ended their first album: It starts as a quirky synth pop song before expanding into something off Music For Airports. Miss Lily Banquette of Combustible Edison sings pitch-shifted ruminations on a lost love she may one day see again and win back if she can ever return to the cliffs and beaches of Oahu. That may sound sad, but Merritt's playing around with torch songs across the record in a way that always feels fun.

Three minutes in, the song drops out and a glissando plays and plays for an additional 25 minutes, getting a little slower with each loop. This is one I listen to in full, frequently. Plenty of times I'll skip the song and start at the ambient bit. It doesn't sound Hawaiian, it doesn't sound like the beach, but it does sound aptly wistful, and that's a feeling most songwriters bungle hard.

7. "On Ships of Gold" by The Black Heart Procession, which closes their album Three

Three, like most Black Heart Procession albums, is about ends, to the point that I don't know how this band has been able to tour on and off since 1997. I do not know how you play a song like "Guess I'll Forget You" every night for months. The band was prolific in its initial period of activity, but their discography didn't allow many chances to spice up a setlist with some reprieve.

"On Ships of Gold" ends Three with a 7.5 minute dirge, which is considerably shorter than the other songs on this list but also considerably slower and more of a downer than those other pieces of music. It opens with its speaker watching a storm pass but accepting that when the ship they're on comes in to port, the person they're missing will be gone. "I'll be coming home on these ships of gold" sounds like it could be a line from a Styx rock opera, but the image gets so bleak: the ship is full of holes, it's going to sink, "the lies you said were true," and "I didn't know I'd ever get this far."

It helps the song's eeriness that Pall A. Jenkins is singing most of this as a duet with a monotoned, muffled woman's voice. It sounds like he's singing with the memory of a person (which means it sounds the way people's voiceover memories sound in old movies). The two of them repeat "I didn't know" and what sounds like a building crescendo never actually achieves lift-off. The album ends without a catharsis, and I don't think catharsis is necessarily a shortcut, but maybe a catharsis would do your thinking for you. Maybe you'd know how you were supposed to feel. "On Ships of Gold" presents quietly looming disaster, trepidation and possible contrition and then it fades out.

8. "Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly of a Mountain" by Sparklehorse, which closes the album of the same name

This was the last song on the last solo Sparklehorse album Mark Linkous released in his lifetime. When I saw him touring behind Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, I did not expect him to play it live, and he didn't, because it wouldn't have made sense to play a 10.5 minute dirge in the middle of the kind of show he was putting on, but I would have loved to have heard it performed in whatever context would have held it. I'd love to have seen Linkous do anything else.

Linkous did not seem to be in a good place when he made that last record. From the outside, it seemed like he couldn't write a full album's worth of songs. This track was originally named "Maxine" and closed Sparklehorse's Gold Day EP five years before Dreamt...'s 2006 release, another song came from a 2002 film soundtrack, the Tom Waits-featuring instrumental "Morning Hollow" was a hidden track on the previous Sparklehorse LP and single "Ghost in the Sky" was a Japan-only bonus track on the vinyl edition of that same album. Linkous' last solo record (he would also complete an In the Fishtank collaboration with Fennesz and the Dark Night of the Soul project with Danger Mouse, David Lynch and a bunch of different vocalists before his death) feels cohesive, but it was more a collection of everything he'd made in the past five years than it was a studio LP.

"Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain" is a beautifully evocative title, even if "light years" are measures of distance and not time, sending my pedantic ass into a "well, actually..." spiral. There are no lyrics, but that's what the song sounds like: time passing. It sounds like rain. For over ten minutes, a piano meanders around a somber guitar and a wall of static. I found it comforting when Linkous was alive. I don't really know what it is now, besides art from a person who used it to close both a 2001 EP and a 2006 LP.

Dreamt the album doesn't make me sad like "Dreamt" the song does. "Mountains" could have blown up if synced into the right TV show or movie and brought into a context besides "this sad guy who makes lo-fi experimental pop has had increasingly long waits between albums since he temporarily died of a drug overdose and his major label, surely expecting bigger things when they signed him in the early 90s, mostly pretends those records don't exist." Anything to disrupt a narrative that got to Linkous so badly he named his third album "It's A Wonderful Life" as a kiss-off to people who thought his stuff was too much of a bummer.

But anyway, on "Mountains," he sings a pretty straightforward chorus:
"Cheer up, my brother,
it's going to be all right,
I know your hearts are heavy as mountains
but we're gonna be back home one day."

He quotes "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in "Mountains." Before his death, "Dreamt" didn't make me sad because it seemed like Linkous believed "Mountains." He probably did. Now I don't hear it in the context of that record, though, I hear it in the context of a life that ended in suicide. It is hard to take encouragement from a person who has killed themselves. "Dreamt" is still an incredible piece of music, as good as anything his friends Fennesz or Stars of the Lid created, but it really is a goodbye. That shit isn't fun.