🎧 When the Kite Strings Pop

Without getting into too much detail, one of my brothers was diagnosed with severe ADHD during a period when it wasn’t a common diagnosis. One of the prescriptives? Give that young boy coffee. Later in life, my mother would often tell me that after the journey she went on with one of her children, that while she wasn’t a doctor, she was positive that I too suffered from the same level of ADHD but was old enough to have never received a diagnosis.

For Shaun the answer was coffee and medication, for me it was loud, heavy and fast music – even if I didn’t know why. I may not have known, but around 1983 the scientific wife-husband team of Sydney and Thomas Zentall proposed the Optimal Stimulation Theory, built on a homeostatic model: every brain has its own biologically determined optimal arousal level needed to function well, and their hypothesis was that ADHD brains run chronically under-aroused relative to that target.

That’s an awful long way to go to say listening to Acid Bath’s When the Kite String Pops serves as a calming hand in the storm that is often my rapid-fire, ping-pong brain.

Acid Bath arrived on the New Orleans sludge scene to a landscape already occupied by the likes of Crowbar and Eyehategod, while finding a way to push past both. “The Blue,” the album’s opener, sets the chaos in motion with a bluesy swamp-metal riff before winding through a series of tempo changes, leaving one breathless in an effort to keep up. The feedback from the guitar acts as a warning klaxon, emoting the same feel one gets from a fire alarm going off. Riggs’ vocals dance between distorted and clean, a push-pull that keeps you slightly unbalanced, in a message that announces this is an album not to be trifled with.

But it’s the second song on the album, “Tranquilized,” that truly finds me mentally in a lotus pose, my mind finally finding serenity. The circular guitar riff drones like a chant, lingering just long enough to draw you in as Dax Riggs melodically utters the first words of his poetry as the rest of the band joins in.

And then they do that thing I LOVE.

The whole song stops for half-a-heartbeat before exploding back into your ears -- in the nearly 20 years I’ve been listening to this album, I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where that second doesn’t bring a calm smile to my face. And just when you think you’ve got this record figured out, along comes something more analogous in sound to goth luminaries Bauhaus – “Scream of the Butterfly” shares real musical DNA with “The Spy in the Cab,” and it’s worth naming exactly why: both songs open on a restrained, hinted-at riff that builds dread through withholding rather than volume, Bauhaus’s on guitar, Acid Bath’s on bass, and both Dax Riggs and Peter Murphy shape their vocal melody around the line the strings already laid down rather than singing over it. Same architecture, different instrument carrying the weight. Go ahead, try and pin this record down. I dare you, ‘cause up next is “Dr. Suess is Dead.”

I can’t help but think when the term sludge or swamp-rock was invented, this was the song they had in mind. The track opens with a languid, droning guitar as a down-in-the-basement deep, guttural bass drops the same note three times before Riggs’ vocals scream the song’s title in something that calls into existence Baba Yaga and her minions. It’s slow, it’s driving, it’s exactly the sort of brain-shattering heaviness that people inclined this way crave. Slowly the song increases in tempo, reaching a frenetic pace that promises to explode just before dropping back down to its original tempo. This is the kind of track that when I hear it playing on the speakers of a record store, I know I’ve found a keeper.

Released August 8, 1994, on Rotten Records, the debut from this Houma, Louisiana band arrived already wearing its fuck you on its sleeve in the form of a John Wayne Gacy “Pogo the Clown” painting, a provocation daring you to pick it up. Here’s the piece lost on those who’ve never lived inside a mind that never shuts up – this album isn’t extreme to everyone.

While some will hear noise, anxiety, a not-so-thinly veiled threat, other ears, my ears, hear something closer to recognition. See, I’m already operating from a place of private chaos, my own private Idaho to borrow a line from the B-52s, a feverish pitch that quiet music often can’t reach. Calm doesn’t always arrive as silence. Sometimes it arrives as the first sound all day that isn’t asking you to be calmer than you actually are.

The band never got to prove what came next. Bassist Audie Pitre, along with his parents, died in a 1997 car accident, ending Acid Bath after just two albums. What’s left is this one, still doing exactly what it was built to do three decades later — not shocking, not extreme, just accurate, for anyone whose baseline was already running this loud.

One day, Death Cab was just there. I couldn’t tell you exactly when they started appearing in my library, I truly have no recollection, but like a best friend – the minute you meet, you feel like you’ve known them your whole life. And like two old friends sitting at a coffee shop arguing over their origin story, does it matter? Was it Transatlanticism? Was it The Photo Album? Does it matter? Not really, but we can all agree on Plans.

Released in August of 2005, Plans was Death Cab for Cutie’s move to a major label. With four releases on the indie label Barsuk Records, Plans answered the question – could they make the leap. The answer a resounding YES! The album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the charts for nearly a year. Plans would go on to platinum certification and would earn the band their first Grammy nomination.

This is an album obsessed with mortality dressed up as a breakup record. Lead singer Ben Gibbard has always written about love as something delicate and temporary but here that fragility gets manifested. “I Will Follow You into The Dark” imagines death not as an ending, but a promise kept alongside someone you love. The single-take, hushed ballad became the band’s best-selling single despite barely denting the charts upon release. Ultimately the song would go on to obtain double platinum status.

And then there is arguably, one of the saddest, most devastating songs ever recorded – “What Sarah Said.” Gibbard finds himself in a hospital waiting room as people disappear into “a room, and the room begins to slowly get smaller” until we hear Gibbard tell us – “love is watching someone die… So who’s gonna watch you die?” For a generation that came to this album in their twenties and thirties, how much more power does this song carry year-after-year as they live this exact moment? Every time I hear this song, I reflexively catalog a list of those people in my life… not those who are going to watch me die, but those I will, without question be right next to in those final moments. Every time I hear this song, my heart breaks just a little bit more.

This tension is what fuels the entire album. The record’s biggest hit and the song that finally cracked the Hot 100, “Soul Meets Body” deceptively packages itself as a bright, driving pop song, a summer single to play into the wee hours of the morning. And this is perhaps Death Cab’s best trick, their ability to package crushing lyrics into ear-pleasing arrangements as a deeper reading of the lyrics reveals the crushing intent. “Soul Meets Body” is a song about wanting a body and a soul to belong to the same place at the same time, a thought that only makes sense if you already suspect they don’t. Chris Walla’s production on the song is warm and more polished than anything the band had done before but it’s all in service of intimacy, Gibbard’s hushed voice feels earned and not just an affectation.

Pushing nearly 25 years since its release, Plans hold up not because it invented anything, but because Death Cab refused to trade their sound for a major label. Plenty of indie bands making the jump abandon what got them there in the first place or double down so hard their subsequent release feels almost defensive. With Plans, Death Cab simply feels like they were growing up, settling into where they were at that moment in their life. Were they more confident, more expensive sounding? Yes. But were they still writing from that same aching, uncertain place? Again, yes. This is an album proclaiming that love and fear are soulmates, and it never once pretends that growing up means outgrowing that.

Album of the Week: The Afghan Whigs — Gentlemen (1993)

By 1993, the Afghan Whigs had already spent years proving they didn’t fit the Sub Pop mold. Cincinnati rockers who stood out among the grunge roster for their soul influences, splitting the difference between Hüsker Dü and Prince, they’d built a reputation on brooding, off-kilter records before jumping to a major label. Gentlemen was that jump, recorded largely at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Greg Dulli producing, released October 5, 1993 on Elektra.

I hit this record hard in my early twenties, full hormonal force, a young man coming into his own adulthood with all the swagger and sneer that entails — and Gentlemen has swagger and sneer to spare. It took years, and more importantly actual experience, to hear what was really on the record. What I once heard as pure attitude I now hear as something closer to confession.

The title is the album’s first joke, and its cruelest one. Dulli intended it ironically — the record chronicles a bitter breakup, guilt, manipulation, self-righteous anger, and raw, unhinged obsession, all filtered through a narrator playing a character while genuinely seeking catharsis. This isn’t a breakup album in the diaristic, wounded sense so many alt-rock records of the era leaned on. Dulli casts himself as the villain of his own story and dares you to still find him charismatic.

What keeps Gentlemen from collapsing into pure ugliness is the same thing that made the Whigs outsiders on Sub Pop in the first place — the soul. Dulli’s clearly studied Stax and Al Green as closely as he’s studied punk, and that tension between grimy alt-rock guitar and genuine R&B phrasing gives the record a swagger most confessional rock albums don’t have. It sounds seductive even when the lyrics are indefensible, which is the whole, uncomfortable point.

I still love this record, but I see it more clearly now for exactly what it is — the ugly breakup album, dressed up as a strut. Dulli remains, in my book, one of the most underrated songwriters of his generation, and Gentlemen deserves a lot more shelf space in the conversation than it gets.