‘syllabus’ is a series I, mike, started doing to justify spending a stupid amount of time diving deep into the discographies of record labels that interest me by crafting playlists that feature a single track from each album the label released and drawing more conclusions and strongly worded opinions than I should from them. I, still, am mike
looking back on my high school years I’m pretty sure saddle creek was the first label I ever consciously got into. I think it was even before hs that my friend let me rip his copy of the ugly organ—which was literally the album that got me off the path set before me by black holes and revelations and into cooler music that was less um muse-y—and it couldn’t have been much later that I limewired nearly half of wet from birth, probably after hearing ‘I disappear’ on yahoo! radio (lmao). I think most of the rest of the label’s core artists were on my radar too, but I should probably also mention that at this point in my life conor oberst, to me, was a punchline.
before I ever got into cursive and the faint I remember seeing bright eyes play ‘waste of paint’ on austin city limits, and in retrospect I’m almost certain my instinct to joke about conor’s weird voice and wimpy demeanor was an expression of insecurity due to the fact that I secretly reeeeally wanted hair like that. but the truth is once I aged out of thinking emo was dumb and objectively funny (I still think that it’s often (subjectively) very, very funny to be clear), I still never connected with anything in the bright eyes discog (this sounds like tumblr fanfic but I literally got into an argument with my first gf over which version of ‘lua’ was better, the original or the cover conor did with gillian welch).
but I think the height of my awareness of the label came in 2008, which was both the year I found out you could download an infinite amount of music carefully curated to the personality I very badly wanted to adopt on music blogs (music that wouldn’t wind up being audio of bill clinton saying ‘I did not have sex with that woman’) and also the year saddle creek pivoted from releasing a handful of records from different iterations of the same omaha-based artists to tapping into the zeitgeist and signing established indie groups like tokyo police club, blogged-about buzz bands like rural alberta advantage, and, notably, the actually-pretty-good debut solo LP from the vocalist of my favorite band at the time, the not-not-right-wing dance-punk virgins dfa 1979. they were all artists I loved anyway, but seeing them congeal around this familiar proper noun I’d already begun keeping tabs on, I think, made me realize the appeal of labels-as-artist-collectives.
pretty sure I lost track of what SC was up to shortly after this era, but listening through releases from the past decade now it feels like the label made two more equally-monumental shifts: first, they seemed to embrace that weird early-’10s era of overly-optimistic/colorful/synthy lolla-core with bands like twinsmith, mynabirds, and icky blossoms (even that last SC-released bright eyes album felt a little crowd-of-17-y/os-wearing-neon-tanktops-and-raybans-and-those-dumb-stetsons-at-a-music-fest-minded). meanwhile, like….maria taylor and orenda fink were still cranking out their weird, moody, and fairly-recognizable-as-SC-released albums for what felt like a dwindling fanbase of OG SC subscribers.
the most recent shift feels like a completion of a full theseus’s-shipification of the label, with tim kasher, conor oberst, maria taylor, and the faint all migrating to their own labels (and oberst even more recently moving the BE discography to indie A-listers dead oceans). in their place is what seems to be the first wave of releases that have garnered critical acclaim from like……literally everyone? maybe a decade from now I’ll have a better sense of how to contextualize spirit of the beehive within saddle creek or even music in general circa 2022, but I feel like that quarter-life crisis EP, katie dey remixing tomberlin, and this upcoming pendant album all provide a necessary amount of glue to adhere ‘I SUCK THE DEVIL’S COCK’ to the ‘waste of paint’ guy’s original vision.
that, or the recent sorry about dresden single will take us straight back to 1993.
SC canon
desaparecidos, read music, speak spanish (2002) insane how much cooler this project is than bright eyes……like how could you make 80 albums that seem like they’re uh fine and only crank out one of these bad boys. conor’s shaky vox in particular feel so much more natural to me here than over anything he did with BE, seems cruel that he withheld them outside of this LP (even the capitalism stuff, which usually feels like too much when addressed head-on in songwriting, feels way on point). highlights have to be the ‘we don’t want that shit’ skit before ‘greater omaha,’ the drummer going ‘one two three ONE TWO THREE’ at the beginning of ‘mañana,’ and just generally the fact that those two perfect songs work so well off each other. can’t remember when exactly this became an annual go-to listen for doing my taxes
cursive, the ugly organ (2003) obviously domestica’s cool, and I totally ride for the preluding burst and bloom EP, the campy pop concept LP happy hollow, and the u-good-bro morosity of mama, I’m swollen, but this one best cuts to the core of the demented hell-rock this band specializes in. so many moments on here are so fucking chilling (especially the instrumental interludes jfc), while the combo of gretta’s cello, the absolute perfect guitar tone (kinda like conor’s vox in desaparecidos, the post-hardcore upside-down guitars this band works with sound waaay better utilized within the unique sonic context of this album imo), and TK’s bruised male psyche stuff turn otherwise cool and innovative heavy rock material into something otherworldly. always wondered if ‘the ugly organ’ was a euphemism for tim’s dangler
criteria, en garde (2003) poss my fav example of the not-quite-cursive/not-quite-bright-eyes artists that filled out the discography at this point, most of which were side projects of cursive or bright eyes (this doesn’t really sound anything like cursive beyond sharing a muscular guitar presence, roots in post-hardcore, and a literal guy from the band cursive). guess it’s like late-’90s emo stuff but kinda fun? generally positive vibes (you hear those wholesome ass lyrics on ‘the life’?), but like……when the guitars drop out on ‘talk in a crowded room’ it’s like weeeeeee. making a playlist of all the songs in the early SC catalog with lyrics about ‘[going] back to omaha’
the faint, wet from birth (2004) the straight-up electroclash stuff was aight but I love the insane direction they took literally all 10 of these songs in, from the boney m disco string section introed on the opener to the very graphic and tonally apocalyptic first-person narrative of hoppin out yr momma’s g*ts that closes the album, not to mention the dead kennedys/beasties-esque ‘drop kick the punks’ and a literal song about accidentally poppin a boney m in public. guess it’s bc everything else on here is so left-field that the still-very-strange ‘I disappear’ managed to achieve mainstream appeal at the peak of fringe indie soundtracking tv and video games. just a bunch of strange songs about sloppy sex and everything that comes before and after. nasty boys
son, ambulance, someone else’s deja vu (2008) wanted to include this as a case in support of the core SC artists’ continued quality output in the midst of the new wave of artists taking over. earlier s,a releases make me sleepy but this LP’s packed with ideas (it’s like an hour long lol) that additionally set it apart from the band’s bright-eyesier early output. admittedly a pretty zzz-y first act but def picks up with the more-interesting-strain-of-mellow ‘horizons,’ ‘juliet’s son,’ title track, etc. get it it’s like ‘somnambulance’
tokyo police club, elephant shell (2008) weird limbo album between their buzzy debut which music blogs almost certainly called ‘scrappy’ and their big-single-toting/acclaimed-producer-produced champ. weird as an SC releases since it’s, y’know, fun—and not in a worked-up-so-sexual type of way. in retrospect it was a pretty jarring shift from their lo-fi early EPs to this, the most aggressively polished pop-rock album I have ever heard…..can’t believe we were having such a hard time accepting auto-tune during this period when literally every aspect of a rock recording was being overly made-up to the point of no longer resembling analog instruments. feels like the nevermind that inspired the 3 doors downs that were bombay bicycle club and two door cinema club, to put it as rudely as I possibly can
o+s, o+s (2009) very eerie downtempo project from orenda fink (no relation to barton). exists in the musical equivalent to that guillermo del toro space of ‘who is this for?’ where instead of it being a fairy tale that’s way too graphic for kids it’s like…..adult contempo/pop music that’s way too dark for ppl who like adult contempo/pop music—even the most gentle, conventional love song here has a lyric about blood and gore lol. best at its darkest (‘haunts,’ ‘knowing animals’), worst at its casual presentation of crippling abandonment issues. has anyone ever seen orenda and patricia arquette in the same room by the way
the rural alberta advantage, hometowns (2009) my music journalism joker origin story involves pretending I wasn’t interested in this band for a long time only bc my friend found out about them before me. I think it also involves me ultimately embracing this album as a fav and widely/wrongly insisting on neutral milk hotel comparisons bc I’d only ever heard, like, 3 albums at that point in my life and had no sense of the impending folk-rock explosion (upon revisit, the horns on ‘luciana’ feel pretty aeroplane-y). seem to remember the vocals being the distinct feature here but honestly think the insane/unpredictable drumming on each track is what most sets them apart from the lumineers or whatever. think I can also credit RAA for introducing me to the godsend that is ‘the beat back but slower’ on ‘stamp’ from their next album which, honestly, I think might have held up better. check out their IP lawyer drummer’s website lmao
big thief, capacity (2017) I s2g of all the phoebes and mitskis and other songwriters that seem to be objectively ‘good’ and of which everyone tweets about how emotionally ruined they become while listening, big thief is the only one I even remotely get. it is absolutely idiotic how affecting this album is in a way that feels extremely personal to me and apparently to everyone else who’s ever listened to it…..no song sounds more like the inexplicable simultaneous beauty??/ugliness?? of the rural midwest in the dead of winter as ‘mythological beauty,’ while ‘shark smile,’ obviously, just, jesus. kind of feels like a culmination of almost everything else I’ve written here about folky SC releases being good despite not being anything I’m remotely interested in. NOT the album on here I’d expect to hear the word ‘cum’ sung on
to be canonized?
bright eyes lmao yeah sure they prob deserve it. ‘perfect sonnet’ was the coolest song I heard while sampling each album, and I imagine I’m gonna become the type of guy who complains that the project loses steam with each successive release when I finally sit down and listen to a BE album. not sure if I’d follow them over to dead oceans tbh
the good life for as much as I love the demented shit tim’s done with cursive, there’s this whole other side to him that probably came out most unfiltered in the tedious-looking feature film he directed a few years back, which seems pretty analogous to the divorced-guy-thinking-about-all-his-exes-dating-back-to-high-school ballads of his solo albums (if this feels overly critical please understand that I’ve thought about getting divorced just so I can access this portion of tim’s catalog). the good life’s stuff all def feels much closer to this pole, but I’m consistently impressed every time I hear it again after I’ve sort of sworn them off. again, for being too divorce-y
beep beep lol. tf was this. scuttly ass seafarer ass punks. love it ahah
land of talk I know I probably need to see a doctor about this but nothing sounds more boring to me than when a song is just like…..a song. there’s just this massive category of ‘songwriter’ that makes absolutely no impression on me, which I always feel like land of talk falls under—but I guess it’s kinda the same thing as big thief where it always winds up being an exception, even tho—especially in this case—I can never really identify what makes it special. not nearly as boring as a ‘land of talk’ sounds
miles benjamin anthony robinson think this is the only release miles put out thru SC but I loved his debut and am sorta intrigued by the less-noisy, more saddle-creek-singer-songwriter energy of this one. ‘the sound’ is like if arcade fire decided to become dylan instead of springsteen that one time. it’s not really, I just thought that would be cool to say
indigo de souza 2021 was an insane level up year……the label went from releasing a couple of ‘best albums you may have missed’ releases per year to somehow dropping ‘best albums’ releases by artists that still seem to have fanbases way too small to be allowed on there per the dictates of big Best Albums. haven’t heard this one yet but it’s utterly moronic how good ‘kill me’ is
pendant bold move sampling that delia track (objectively cool) that was also sampled on a high-profile danny brown single (even cooler, actually). new most beastiesest track in the SC discography