EQUINOX
released SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
ALBUM 22, RELEASE 51
First album from my sophomore year of college. I'd spent my summer vacation working at Shoprite and falling into my second/final relationship. This album is the sound of me quickly realizing my roommate and his friends (also all my friends) were much more social than my previous primary peer group, and I was spending time with people in person at a frequency I really hadn't before. The realization ruined my relationship, or at least it ruined me when I texted them to tell them it was over. A horrible month followed, but that's for another album or two. "Memory Lane Bombing" is one of maybe 3 songs on here I regularly consider to be "good". I'm proud of the stop-start riff most of all. I'm less proud of my recording setup, which was computer-based again (see: my terrible early 2018 albums). I switched from Mixcraft to Cakewalk but it didn't really sound better. I was still singing into a Rock Band 2 USB mic, or sometimes my laptop's built-in mic. Funny thing is, that actually doesn't apply to the whole album. I know for a fact I recorded "Police Dogs" back in NJ right after the breakup, so I had my Tascam 8-track around. I think I did the vocals on my laptop though. I dig the ghostly effect the vocals have, but I can also hear audible lossy compression that I really hate. I'm not an audiophile at all, but there's still a bar to clear. If I can hear the loss, it's bad. I have to wonder if "String Lights" started as just drums, because they're way tighter than almost anything else from this era of HW. I can identify every other instrument as something recorded on laptop, but I don't remember the actual order of events with this one. I think "Winter Parasol" was the last song I recorded. I needed one more song, and this is what fell out. This, and a song on Halos For Scars called "Happening", were the only times I can recall using musical typing in Cakewalk for any of these late 2018 albums. It definitely works better on that song than this song. It's hitting me now that I must have worked on this album like a demon after my breakup, because I broke up with my last ex on September 5 (it was a Wednesday, and I had a class to go to, and I remember one of my friends hanging out in my room beforehand telling me I looked awful) and this came out on September 9. I wonder if "Our Own Black Hole" is better than I remember. I've always been quite happy with the chorus that opens the song, and the fuzzy electric guitars on top of an acoustic guitar is potentially a result of this album I listened to a lot that semester called The Glow Pt 2. I loved that album for 3 years before I listened to any other Microphones or Mount Eerie...and THAT revelation had lasting effects on HW. I think I'd been scared off by the album Mount Eerie opening with a 17-minute song. There's no way I would have enjoyed that album in 2018. Even when I was making this album, I'd just had my mind blown by Stereolab (a major paradigm shift in my musical discovery journey whatever), but I was also still on the fence about them. Their influence came later. I know "Guided Mediation" was an instrumental I had kicking around for a bit. Maybe I'd recorded it for a previous album, but I usually think I had recorded it for this, scrapped it, then revived it when another song fell through. The music sounds pretty good but the vocals sound awful. Oddly enough, I've always liked the "Word Bar" riff. The vocal melody in parts of "Her Flaming Corpse" sounds like SOMETHING but I forget what song I might have stolen that from. Even at the time I wasn't sure. "August Is Sleeping Now" is the hit. It's oddly sweet in a way. The gloomy closer, "Week of Rain", had lyrics first written for a side project that never went anywhere. Actually, those lyrics might have predated that project. I forget the exact order of events. There's a good song in there somewhere, just not here.