One of the worst parts of going through a breakup with someone who likes music as much as you do—but not the worst part, because that’s undoubtedly the losing-your-best-friend-in-the-entire-world part—is that there isn’t just one song that needs to be scrubbed from your synapses. You have to write off whole albums, bands, even genres. Rebuilding your music library doesn’t happen overnight. It happens one day at a time, with each new album replacing each 40-minute-long ugly cry.
In each ‘episode’ of I Bruise Easily, I write about one album that defined my relationship and one I discovered after it ended, exploring how the two records relate to my life and each other. (The full preamble can be found in Episode One.)
Erase: Wakin on a Pretty Daze by Kurt Vile
I’d love for Kurt Vile to give me a makeover. Not aesthetically, necessarily—I kinda like my hair and corduroy trousers/woolly jumper combo. I mean the full package. Like being Queer Eyed, but Vile Eyed (it kinda works). Speaking about the inspiration behind his 2013 album Wakin on a Pretty Daze, Vile said it was “just about my life without thinking too much about it… It’s nothing too literal but just living my life.” Wouldn’t it be nice to live this intentionally, fully, without overthinking myself into cardiac arrest? But I fail miserably and have been for as long as I can remember. It’s no wonder the Philadelphia musician’s fifth record resonated with me. Teach me! Teach me! It’s like exposure therapy or a guidebook for manifesting his insouciant cool instead of my 24/7 disquietude.
I was introduced to Vile’s sun-drenched ‘prog-pop’ by my ex. I’ll call her Alex because a song on the album is called “Girl Called Alex” and it’s definitely weird to use her real name. One balmy August afternoon, a few weeks before we got together, Girl Called Alex and I were walking the South Downs Way, a 100-mile footpath that meanders from Winchester to the chalky cliffs of the East Sussex coast. I moved back to my hometown during The Event, and with my future hazier than a NEIPA, I concluded that a 100-mile walk was just the thing to get my thoughts in order. However, life happens when you’re making other plans or whatever, and the hike ended up being the impetus to my first ever proper real intimate exciting safe scary fun confusing joyous romantic relationship, which spanned the next two-and-a-half years and veered my life off in a beautiful, though eventually devastating, direction.
Girl Called Alex joined me for hike day two. We took turns sharing songs from our phones, the sensical way to someone’s heart. I remember her smile, the sun bathing my skin, the breeze sneaking under my T-shirt, and the first time I was greeted by the watery, noodling guitar that opens “Wakin on a Pretty Day,” the first song from Vile’s album of (almost) the same name. Everything made sense right then, and it remains among the happiest nine minutes and 30 seconds of my life (that’s how long the song is). This was also the moment I knew GCA had to be more than a casual hiking buddy who would retreat back to the fringes of my life until some mutual friends threw a party or I bumped into her in a pub. She was always more than that, but it was later that day that I actually told her. This sounds rose-tinted as fuck. But that’s where I’m at. And it’s my newsletter.
Two years after Wakin on a Pretty Daze, in 2015, Vile released the ominously titled B’lieve I’m Goin Down…, a collection of less carefree tunes with names like “Bad Omens” and “Lost My Head There,” which he recorded sporadically across ten different studios, always during the dead of night. If the man who gave us Wakin on a Pretty Daze—a man too cool for Gs or even apostrophes—had some non-pretty daze a couple years after some pretty ones, does that mean the guy who at nine years old cried because his parents got new carpets fitted throughout the house might be okay someday? That guy is me, by the way.
Enter: Floating Features by La Luz
Floating Features is only the second album to really grab me since B-Day (Breakup Day; no relation to a bidet, though they are a feat of engineering). Sonically, it’s a suitable mirror to Wakin on a Pretty Daze: distorted, surfy guitars and dreamy production create a euphonic equivalent of “Walking into the Sun.” And as December rolls in with all its sickening ho-ho-ho shit rubbed all up in my face, an album as exceptional as this one by the Los Angeles quartet is keeping me from going on an anti-Yuletide rampage through Brighton shopping centre, kicking over trees and ripping off fake Santa beards.
La Luz was formed in 2012 by Shana Cleveland, Marian Li Pino, Alice Sandahl, and Abbey Blackwell, four friends who were inspired by doo-wop girl groups such as The Shirelles and the surf-guitar sounds popularised by Dick Dale (who was, as we know, inspired by the Black Eyed Peas). You’ll also hear plenty of neo-psychedelia, garage, funk, and even spaghetti western thrown in the mix, resulting in an era-defying amalgam united by impeccable vocal harmonies, an electric sitar(!), and Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys’ production. La Luz’s closest contemporary might be a band like Best Coast. The track “My Golden One” sounds as if BC were commissioned for the Peaky Blinders theme music instead of Nick Cave. Still, no offence to BC, but there’s a lot more going on with La Luz—the arrangements are much richer, denser, and less predictable; and the lyrics are better than this.
I found Floating Features through my editor at Bandcamp Daily, who is unknowingly my de facto mentor in writing and discovering new music. She writes on Substack as The Weird Girls Post, delivering apercus so good they make you pause and reread and rinse and repeat: “If only life were a record and everything that happens to you a song upon it. Maybe then you’d understand the things that happen to you.” In one newsletter, she recounts a walk around the neighbourhood of Huntington, West Virginia, while on vacation, Floating Features beaming into her brain as she admired the Halloween decorations festooning wealthy suburban homes.
When I lived in Oxford a few years back, most of my income went straight on rent for my spare room in a rando family’s house. They were lovely, but their pre-teen son would scream expletives at his PlayStation all fucking day and night. So I spent every waking moment out of the house, exploring the city. Saturdays and Sundays, I’d queue up whatever overearnest indie rock I was mapping my anxieties onto at the time, and set off for Park Town, where the rich authors and Richard Branson have mansions, or the vibrant student mecca of Cowley, or traipse around the covered market hoping to meet the love of my life. Walking, looking at houses, and listening to music.
“Will we ever have our own house?
Will we ever be in one place long?”
Floating Features is the kind of album I really could have used back then—“Feels so good walking down the street,” goes one line from “California Finally”—but I’m glad I didn’t find it until now. Because it’s the rare kind of album on which you can lean all of your weight; no matter how heavy your baggage, no matter how hard you push, there’s still some give—a guitar counterpoint you didn’t hear during your first ten listens or a reassuring lyric that suddenly rises out of the reverb-soaked underbelly. My favourite track is “Lonely Dozer” (a good pen name, incidentally). It makes me feel like I’m doing battle with my dark thoughts; I ride on the back of the song’s galloping rhythms and slapback guitars, traversing the landscape of my psyche, swapping grayscale for polychrome. Or something like that.
It’s appropriate for my current state of uncertain stasis, too. Two songs reference being alone in your room, but rather than accepting their fate, they bristle with impermanence, an energy that could take you anywhere. In other words, Floating Features is giving me hope for my floating future. And it’s not only hope. When asked what feeling she wanted her music to elicit, Shana Cleveland said, “I guess I just always want people to feel—I don’t know if there’s any other word for it than love. I want them to feel love.”
I may not have been Vile Eyed. But I’m on my way to being Luz Eyed. And that’s a shit analogy but I wanted to tie this back to the start of the essay.