Desultory's "Tears" and how life is bad

It looks like I finally learned how embedding works. Sure, I'll miss the inappropriate stand-ins for actual content - we all will - and of course the skinny teenage play-alongs, but this is a bright new dawn, and here's a video without a torso holding a chapman stick:

When I was a teenager I was sorta bullied out of liking stuff I actually liked. See, I wasn't always the archivist sleeping pill we enjoy today, chatting up the honeys about 4MenWithBeards reissues and near-mint acetates. I sorta hated music. I mean, not aggressively - I wasn't burning 2 Live Crew albums with my church group - I just felt incapable of enjoying it. 

When I found myself in Catholic school in 2002, my peers were baffled by this disengagement.

Peer: What kinda stuff do you listen to?
Me: uh
Peer: Do you have a favorite band?

Me: I like the song "Clint Eastwood" and that band that did the soundtrack to Fooly Cooly

Thus spawned a focus group, dedicated to making me a regular person. Sadly, 13 year olds at the turn of the century aren't really calibrated to market trends, so somehow I ended up an asshole who likes Korn. I dunno how old you are, or if this was a thing you paid attention to, but Nu-Metal wasn't exactly fresh in 2003. Sure, I got Slipknot's new album and it was the bee's fucking knees - the charts agreed - but it was all downhill from here. Emo was redefining the youth aesthetic, and elsewhere, Gothenberg-style Metalcore was muscling out the aging chinbraid factions. If you were 15 and wanted "heavy", you went towards screaming dudes who liked Zao and At The Gates, not greasy Lynyrd Skynrd fans who worked at gas stations. 

When I suddenly found myself surrounded by hundreds of public school kids, all worldly and guiltlessly masturbating, it quickly hit me that XXL Mushroomhead tees weren't considered a deft practice. I mustered up as much integrity as possible amidst my new friends, but no individual should have to defend careering-era Disturbed alone. So I caved. Suddenly I was ALL ABOUT FUCKIN' REAL-ASS METAL™. I started with some foreplay classics - Immolation, Cannibal Corpse, Dark Angel, and the like - but before I knew it, I was chained to the wall in a makeshift sex dungeon, bidding on Gut and Meatshits 7"s on Ebay. I mean, sure, I enjoyed that shit okay, but the real benefit was the incoherence of the whole. While Nu-Metal was digestible radio rock, never drawn too far from Grunge Rock and Pantera, the seedy underbelly of tr00 metal was an almost un-critique-able in it's obliqueness. 

Me: *plays Rompeprop's "I Am The Dolphin Sprayhole Fucker"*

Peer: lol wtf this is terrible

Me: kek u just dont get it go listen to some lamb of god, nerd xD

Ultimately I stopped giving a shit, cut off my three foot ponytail, and dedicated my life to stenography for Katie Crutchfield's musical career. Today I put on Desultory for the first time in close to a decade. If you read my last thing on Joyce Manor, this won't surprise you, but I'm not feeling excellent. But you know what they say: when life hands you suicide and homelessness, make lemonade you can sip on while you stave off a panic attack. Also, listen to death metal, even though it's overwhelmingly negative,

Desultory were an early example of Melodic Death Metal, and popped up in Sweden sometime in the late 80's. They have a couple good albums, this one (Into Eternity), and '94's Bitterness, but it's specifically this song I wanna highlight. As I sat on the gazebo steps this morning, embittered by how shitty and rainy this Spring has remained, I contemplated what's next: do I keep looking for another house? Do I hold out for a friend's room? Or do I just scream "eat shit" at all my relationships, burn my possessions in the Whole Foods parking lot and catch the southbound to Tucson? 

Then that riff at 2:03 came on. In a song as contextually appropriate as "Tears", that melodic build suddenly blasted me into a magisterial whimsy, battling wendigos and shit, mournful but PROUD and UNFLINCHING. For the first time in 24 hours, I felt something, and in the most dorky way achievable. "Yeah, the sky's still a bald pallet of hopelessness, but MY WORD the atmosphere of it all!" 

And there in the distance sat the Elysian majesty of a New Seasons cafeteria, where I slipped away to slap a few hundred words down with no clear trajectory. 

THE POINT:
1.) uh

2.) high school is hard

3.) that song is a good song

4.) 

5.) I'll write something better soon

It's a good thing I was bullied into being a sexless "metal maniac" sometimes, buried beneath cascading layers of incomprehensible "otherness" and irony. Because now that my taste is earnest, I'm often surprised by how good a lot of the music I crammed down my throat was.