As we come into an atypical holiday season for this atypical year, some of the DoD staff took a look back at the album that got them through it. Enjoy!
Shannon Demny – The Midnight: Monsters
Monsters was an album released by my favorite group The Midnight in the summer of 2020, months after the SARS-COV-2 virus began to circulate in the United States of America. By the time I flipped to July in my wall calendar, I had been subject to a stay at home order and was largely tuned out to what was coming over the FM dial. I found myself in need of something new, something fresh. Enter The Midnight with Monsters, their third studio album. If poppy synthwave and dollops of dopamine delivered to your brain via smooth vocal chords and electronic instruments is up your alley, The Midnight may interest you. I spent many days in my garage after loading up the album on Spotify, looking out upon a world I wished would return to normal while listening to “America Online” and “Helvetica.” Fully encapsulating my life post-divorce, the lyrics of Monsters provided a moment of unexpected clarity. Much of 2019 was spent ruminating and it was all I could do to keep from sinking back into the heavy, mental haze that defined all of last year. I listened to the lyrics over and over: “It could have been paradise We could have had diamond eyes I held so tight that I lost her We could have been fireflies But that fire died, dead and gone I was wrong love’s a con.” One day, I decided I would close the chapter on my old life. I embraced the verse “Hope lingers on/After the one you love is gone” and began to live a new life in the rapidly changing new normal. The album cover art for ‘Monsters’ is a good representation of what many of us experienced: stuck between four walls, whether that be one’s house or one’s place of employment, with little else to do but look at a screen to hopefully distract you from the rounds of the SARS-COV-2 virus outside. The blueish and purple hues perfectly summed up the mood I was in for a good part of 2020. Splashes of yellow are now covering the canvas of my life and I owe a debt of gratitude to The Midnight for seeing me through 2020.
Bex Meanie – Dan Deacon: Mystic Familiar
My album of the year is not your typical dance album, but more of a furious electronic meditative romp.
I got laid off from my job of 19 years in August 2019. As someone that took immense pride in that role and consistently worked 50+ hour weeks, it was a gut punch to my entire reality. Somewhere in February, I had zero bites, despite loads of networking, resume revisions, and job applications. I started to slip into a pretty gnarly depression that I had spent the remainder of 2019 avoiding. When I got notice that Dan Deacon was coming to town, I went ahead and bought tickets to go solo (which I HATE doing). I had not heard anything from the album and started listening to the album the week before the show. I was floored. This was a heartfelt album of discovery, of hope, and some just plain silliness and weirdness, a far cry from Spiderman of the Rings.
As the weeks crept by, COVID started peppering the news, and events started canceling. I’d booked a networking trip for mid-March with a naive sense of optimism that New York would be able to contain the virus. I had made a last pitch to my friends for some company at the show, and a friend finally bit, and we met up at the show. As I was hanging out with him on the patio in between the opener and Dan Deacon, I got a call begging me not to go to my networking trip (we had no clue it was about to be a hotspot). I went back into the concert hall, buzzing from strange feelings and conflict.
The show was everything I’d hoped for. Led by Deacon, wearing an elven hat, he looked like a furious, giant ginger gnome. We were led through group dances, dance battles, tunnels of the audience holding hands, which were smeared in shared hand sanitizer. Deacon was our master of ceremonies, our sweaty gnome overlord that whipped us into a feeling of frenzied togetherness. And the next day, the networking event canceled.
This was not my last show of 2020 (looking at you, Carl Cox), but it held a strange and deep meaning. I keep circling back to this album every time I feel disassociated, lost, or just plain alone. Who knew that strange gnome musings would keep me grounded in the strangest of times, that the weirdest would continue to inspire off of that dance floor. I’m glad I went, and am glad to have found something to help me through it all.
“I rose up
Tired in my flesh
Getting old now
I’m so lucky
Yet I forget I’m still hungry
For the future
On this day before me
Will I seize it or scroll
Is right here
Is right now
Almost all of the time
I’ve got this feeling
Like this feeling ain’t mine
Mystic familiar
It already knows
I see it waiting for me to explode”
Journalist/blogger since 2009 and music lover since 1980. Bex now travels the world and writes and takes photos of dance events, creates art in various media, sings quietly to her cat in the shower, and occasionally builds something that tends to involve a blowtorch. She can usually be seen hiding behind some sort of camera rig.
