lost weekend album review
This is exactly what the title says it is. No tricks here. You might be thinking Hana I’m Not Sure This Really Belongs On Your Website and you’re probably right but it’s also the first proper thing I’ve written in months, so. I am working on coming back to myself. It is happening, but progress is quite slow.
Track 1 — The Outside
You should see the other guy. This song is exactly how it feels to have your lungs pulled out through your mouth at a funeral. This song wants to be dead and never quite gets there, only fades in and out of consciousness like sunlight through trees. It is never happy to wake up. It does not want to reach the shore. It is the ghost in the corner. It is the echoes of breath you only feel when your friend dies and there’s nothing left in your body to hurt. Your bones are broken. A killing, a haunting. The final verse, the string instruments, made me cry.
Track 2 — Lost Boys
Another life where they make you cut your hair. Weightless, but not scared. This song is the flashbacks and it is very beautiful. It is a dancing song which is strange because more often than not the flashbacks make you suicidal and suicidal people don’t dance. But here they do. This song is screaming out for help and running through the rain and it is dying, it is gasping for air, it is endless and very fun. I am wondering with too much seriousness whether my dead neighbour got to be one of the lost boys. I hope when I find him he is 12 again. I hate songs that make me think about his blonde hair and his forever laughter and his hand around a pool cue. I hate this song for all the wrong reasons. It is so good and it is cracking open my ribs. I have a feeling that most of the songs on this album will be in the business of breaking my chalkdust bones.
Track 3 — Kill Me
Turning 21. I’m not, but I was once. This is a song on the precipice. Between birthdays, between mornings, between life and death. Isn’t everything? Or maybe everything is endings, or maybe all endings are just precipices waiting to be defined, this is going to kill me. Wait. The melody feels very olden days, by which I mean lockdown, watching him fly home down the driveway when we both crossed that line which meant travel by stream was beneath us suddenly. It feels like goodbye. Everything is a precipice. I just didn’t know it then. Phoebe Bridgers knows it, now. My stomach hurts and my eyes are wet. I am so in my body. I am feeling so much of everything. This instrumental is stringing me out completely. Veins strung like washing line from here to the window. I should be on the run right now. I am shaking with hunger. Unfortunately, also, I am still alive.
Track 4 — The Governor’s Waltz
Two kids in a trench coat living alone. I am guilty of everything the new critics accused me of, I am making every song about me and mine and it is probably a disservice to this stunning album about things that are not my neighbour but all I have done for three years now is take the things I love and wrangle them into the shape of a dead boy. So, there. It’s what I know. The backing murmur of someone else’s New Year’s Eve is stunning, I am arrested, I forget how to move. The key has changed, changes, it is so solemn now, a choir of voices that are not hers and not mine. Maybe that’s permission. Do what you want, take what you want from me, the words will never be anyone’s anyway. Maybe I am making it permission because I need not to be breaking the rules when I fall asleep with my fists clenched. I woke up this morning sad and salty. Do it for me.
Track 5 — Bobby
The synth and the screaming. I really love Phoebe Bridgers. This song sounds like an echo. Pair of shoes sounds like parachute the way she sings it, and everything is deliberate so maybe we are all, always, just falling to our feet. This is a song about heartbreak and it is so upbeat you can really feel it. I am right here bleeding. There is never an end to wanting. I exist only if you’re watching. Nothing is ever the end. Every instrument she has chosen sounds like crying in different tones, lighter tones, tones that bounce and deflect and make light of even the misery. This song is like opposite tenebrosity. By which I mean it is really sad in ways I don’t think I understand.
Track 6 — Lost Weekend
This one is an organ. Beating, singing. Wailing. I had the thought you would outlive me. I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that. This is a song you would sing in church and realise during the very last verse that it was written for you, and then you would be holy. Lying awake, you were glow in the dark. The rest of my ribs are burning up. The ones that don’t end, the ones that loop around and find me again at my spinal cord, them too. I don’t think there will be much left of me. I am so sad. My friend is so dead. This instrumental is the exact feeling of when I lie in bed at night and behind my eyes flood one million ordered images of the days we had, the life we shared. He is climbing the rungs to the treehouse and cycling too fast down the hill. He is scraping his knees on the gravel and diving over the sprinkler again. He is so fast. I can never catch him. I can never try.
Track 7 — Haunted
It is not this house that’s haunted, but I don’t want it either way. So much of what Phoebe Bridgers does is force the sadness deep into the cracks of melodies that don’t want it. And so in the end it sounds better, and more stressed, and sadder than anything written without a banjo strumming in the background. Like grief is backing the rhythm into a corner and forcing it to sing. Or — no. Like joy is slamming you into the ground to the beat of the jive and using the blood from your broken nose to write out the eulogy you never gave. Nobody is dancing. The lights are still on.
Track 8 — Panorama
Sometimes I feel like I am trapped underwater and this song sounds like it is trapped under the water with me. Trains rumble overhead, we’re beneath the tracks, it’s a killing floor. I am reaching towards a corpse and he is opening his eyes to look at my face. He doesn’t say anything. There’s blood in the water. I’m coming to find him. He knows what I’ve done.
Track 9 — Still Standing
Some songs feel like winter and this is one of them. December 2020 in the passenger seat of Jake’s car. I don’t remember why he took me on the drive that day but I remember thinking I would never forget it, those moments, my brother. I recall snow but I think that might be embellishment. Maybe only frost. I know it was cold, I know that. This song is stunning. Sometimes I want you back. The gaps between Phoebe Bridgers albums are all interminably filled with people trying to do this the way she does it, and failing. It is so uniquely hollow. So much ache. I am every memory and every sadness and walking back down every path I’ve ever followed, tracing my footsteps, getting it wrong. But I am still standing. I am still alive and my friend’s body is dust in a box and my brother will never again be who he was to me then. Your back to the ocean, burning red. I can’t imagine you dead. She gets it but I wish she didn’t. I miss it all so much, I miss my life then, I miss when these things didn’t all just sound in my head like the echoing loneliness that ends this song.
Track 10 — Liberty Tree
I can’t whistle but he almost could. I didn’t come back from London but he would have. To me, for me. He would have come home. I didn’t listen to the guilt until it metastasised. Time was always running out and I was faced the other way, this song is facing the wrong way with me. If I had known I would have turned around. I can hear the seconds slipping by with the skipping beat, the racing pulse. Grief doesn’t cover it and regret doesn’t either, but there’s not really a softer word for how many times I’ve been woken in the night by the screech of tyres, the crunch of bone.
Track 11 — Never Going Back!
This about sums it up. I can never again be that automaton; I’ll never want to. This song starts out rollercoaster and then softens, which is apt, and then reverts to banjo, which makes sense too. It is dead dad voicemail. It is heartbreaking and deadly real. It guts you on purpose, spills you out onto the countertop, butchers you with the good knife. It is a homecoming but also a home-leaving, and you are in the car, and your sins are in the rearview. You are coming back to life and you should feel terrible, and you will. You do. You got out of here and for your whole life you will pay the price: fade to silence; cut to black.
Track 12 — Other Plans
We start in outer space, I think. Where there is no sound but noises anyway. Strange monotone. So lonely. I got blood on my favourite shirt, it is just me and the stars out here. Her voice does not leave the note. It is faintly devastating. In which faintness is only distance, but still you register it, and still deep down by the base of your spine you feel that sorry ache. Our love had other plans. I am hollow again; I can feel the wind murmuring through the spaces between bones. The song is only monotone to a certain point, which is to say, you will always have to go. Tone and note are anagrams. Love and leave are not.
Track 13 — Lost Parade
Graceland Too, through smoke. And mirrors. And a veil of isolation so thick you might never get to touch another person again. Phoebe Bridgers has in fifty-five seconds reminded the entire universe — because some radio waves will go on forever — that you can always be the body alone in a crowd. They call this a funeral, if the shoe fits.
Track 14 — I Can’t Wait
If you leave me, can you take me with you? The pulse is back, that tremor, sadness with its beaten running shoes racing full pelt to catch a long-gone train. The synth picks up and you’re dancing, wanting, waiting for the thing that never comes. We slip like ghosts back to the haunted country and the beat finds a kind place to die. It resurrects, which never happens, which this album ensures will never happen, and then the drums are back and your heart breaks because you know it is a dream, because it is always a dream. You’re right back where you started, except now you’re covered in ash and your feet hurt. He was supposed to grow up and I was supposed to watch from a distance. For want of a better word, this song is arresting. I am arrested, I cannot move. I am walking past his house and holding my breath. In sleep he wakes and comes to find me. In life we die trying, and the dead do not rise, and the dead do not answer phone calls. This might be my favourite song so far. Its final swell is the dream ending. You will wake up in the thieving silence and then you will start to cry.
Track 15 — As Above
On purpose I think her voice is different in this one. She sounds maybe fifteen. The lyrics start to sound fifteen too until you realise that nobody ever really gets old, and we’re all feeling like this actually, all the time. All the time. Walking down the street and dodging people like projectiles. Things are all sped up these days; I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to die. At fifteen you are very desperate to be seen, which she is, so badly she is, you can hear the pain when she starts to shout, you can feel the years of scrubbed-out words in notebooks, red ink. Biro so it feels like more, and deeper. You can feel the kid at the funeral, lost in the crowd. You can hear the start of a promising career in music. You are very sad, and you sing very well. More of this. If we’re lucky you’ll stay sad forever.
Track 16 — Lost Weekend (Reprise)
He’s not coming back.
