Review: Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u (2024)

Rock music has ended. The need for rock music is as past as the need for a theory of the world: mossed-over, impossible. Only loose serifs and the soundcheck anymore, gerunds, empty pedalboard. Three private languages at once— each sound engaged in an entirely separate game. And so we see a certain wiseness in becoming a landscape, making our nights resolutely tactile. (Each things throw me around.) Each east is already as abolished as the center and the similar, each resonance resolutely its own. Who in this picture has the right to explode? Sumac and tremendous benefit— the parrot and the constable, each night probably like before. It’s not like there’s no great orchard, either: the sex outside, pale intervals, one more domino on the dining-table. Ah it's in the can.

 


   i wish i was cool
Mikita. like i just want 
  my friends to get me.
  
  

M

There is a constant rattling sound in my dad’s car. Neither of us knows what’s making it. We plant our hands on every surface and it keeps on. He opens his mouth as if to say something, glances at me or the turn lane, puts both hands at the top of the steering wheel. only small piles of dirty snow now on the median. I used to get so sad, imagining what would happen if I screamed out loud. and sometimes, late at night, when the fog curtain…

i look up i stood up my head up i 
look up i stayed i stayed up ahead 
ahead up i look up i stood up i 
hood up i look up i stood i heard i 

M

What is the music that does not make itself the universe? Says, I only like it my way. deeply sensitive, deeply watchful.

M

8:39 notice of obliteration. delay makes us wait for the real: these are our hot nights of a dry, gargantuan honesty.

M

On the patio Chance asks a question about Stan Brakhage. I tell him the bitten parts of his apple have begun to turn yellow. We write.

M

(Soda and pepper from the store.) (Guitar, drums, and voice.)

M

MORE BOY sounds like if you took the steady, triumphantly sad riff from Failure’s ‘95 post-grunge classic “Another Space Song” and ripped it apart from the inside, threw its fibers all across the gravel, called its bluff on having already given up. Ken Andrews, on that song: I’ve got no Houston to whine down to / I’ve got no protocol / Gravity is so far away / Wrapped on that shrinking ball. Jess, here, I think: I know that my body is / Or that my body is. No longer can we stake a claim on hope or resignation; Rock Music’s metrical syntax has been pulled from beneath us. More nothing. More boy. When I walk past the soccer field I almost never turn my eyes away anymore. My voice is yours.

M

10:06 egress of oblivion— something so familiar about what we can’t taste. absolute fracture marks absolute continuity: three private languages for the garage, at the bedframe, in the emergency of gardens, each person thinking the other must be the one having the dream.

M

I didn’t know what she did, but I knew what she meant.

M

Can a rhythm be dissonant? Rhythm and pitch are the same thing; both are exactly at the ballpoint of prophecy. Ann crams The Theatre and its Double in her front right pocket. The headlight speaks to us with a deep and serious water.

i wish i		 was 
cool i	wish iw as	
cool i wish	iw ish i		
just want to	be seen right