Barely ten seconds pass after placing a Life Saver [1] in your mouth before the desire to bite it onsets. This is the central issue embedded in the process of eating any sort of hard of hard candy, but with Life Savers it seems almost unavoidable. Because of this, eating a Life Saver is oftentimes a struggle between your most basic desires to consume and to conserve. That is why Life Savers are important.

A typical tube of Life Savers comes with fourteen candies ranging in flavor from cherry and raspberry to Pep O Mint and Wint O Green. But the flavors here aren’t all that important. What’s key is that the structural integrity of a Life Saver is designed as such so that it is nearly impossible to let them dissolve in your mouth [2]. Once the package is opened, and the foil is torn off the first sweet circlet, all bets are off. The consumer becomes ravaged, placing one candy after another on her tongue and crushing them with little deliberation and much impatience. Before long, one Life Saver has become thirteen. And then — they are all gone.

To describe the process of eating a Life Saver, then, is to provide a case study on the nature of indulgence and self-denial. Sure, placing one in your mouth is pleasurable, but biting — biting is where the real enjoyment lies. What is clear is that the process of eating a Life Saver can, if left unchecked, become the candy equivalent to chain smoking. It becomes an addiction, albeit one whose duration lasts only as long as it takes to consume the entire package. After that, a strange sort of satisfaction often takes hold. We’ve done good work.

But consider how different the process would be of we did the complete opposite. Rather than gnash through an entire package of Life Savers, what if we slowed down the whole process of consumption? By resisting the urge to bite the Life Saver, we learn what it means to have exactly we want and take ten steps back from it.

Of course, there is a heart-breaking sort of irony involved in consuming quickly a candy whose name implies salvation. Life Savers are created in order to be destroyed. But it is in those moments when the amylase in your saliva is slowly dissolving the sugary rings into progressively thinner discs that we come to the truth: Life Savers can’t save themselves, but they can save you.

They do this by reminding you that one day you, too, will dissolve into nothingness. Time will be your enzyme, and it will break you down gradually and without spite. By the end you will be thin and brittle, drenched with the saliva of existence and begging to be swallowed into the void of the Beyond.

That sounds bad, but it actually isn’t. Because amidst the slow degradation of your body you’ll come to a few conclusions about how life tends to work. One: it is far better to be a dissolved Life Saver than a crunched one. This should be clear, judging simply by our seemingly innate human desire to want to live as long as possible.

But the second lesson embedded in the Life Saver is more important. In the trademarked and infinitely commercialized name “Life Savers” there exists a not-so-subtle homophone-based reminder of the best way to live: Life, Savored. [3] It’s not exactly an imperative – but it’s close. And it’s by understanding lesson two in tandem with lesson one that we draw near to what I’ll call Crane’s Rule For Living: Life is good when it’s long, but better when it’s savored.

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[1] Life Savers were created in 1912 by Clarence Crane, an Ohio resident whose second greatest gift to mankind was his son, the poet Hart Crane. Thus while the younger Crane practiced his heart-wrenching craft on the page, the older Crane etched his legacy on the bittersweet history of confections.

[2] All of this was changed when Wrigley created Life Savers Gummies, the chewable abominations that forever sullied the ascetic process of consuming Life Savers. Where Life Savers are inflexible, brittle, and loathe to be bitten, Life Savers Gummies are almost the complete opposite, inviting wanton and tactless chewing.

[3] You might not expect a lesson in living to come from a candy whose center is actually a void. But perhaps it is in that center where the lesson actually lies. Assuming this, Life Savers become a small, sugar-based representation of what it feels like to walk around with a big gaping whole in your existence. I guess.

You are, in most reviews of whokill, likely to hear the music of  tUnE-yArDs described in the following fashion: “Using a combination of afrobeat/low-fi/ experimental folk, TUnE-yArDs creates music that is raw, genuine and difficult to pigeonhole.” The reason you will read these words, on NPR or elsewhere, is because they are, on the whole, mostly true. But the truth in this case is almost entirely irrelevant, because amidst all the attempts to describe, compare, and certainly “pigeonhole”  the work of Merrill Garbus it is easy to lose sight of the fact that tUnE-yArDs is one of the most unique musical projects to emerge in recent memory.

I should say outright that I love this album. From beginning to end, who kill stands as testament to the unrelenting creativity of the mind behind it. But what whokill really does well is epitomize why I listen to music in the first place. Garbus’s music is bold and shameless and unique, mercurial and deftly laced with influences. Hints of reggae, dub, and even Michael Jackson are sprinkled throughout the album, making the process of listening to whokill constantly surprising and rarely disappointing.

Garbus is also one the rare sorts of musicians whose work skirts the line between art and political statement. There is a faintly, sometimes overtly, political nature to her songs. From Powa, which describes the humiliation of sex (“My man likes me from behind/ Tell the truth I never mind/ Cause you bomb with life’s humiliations every day”), to Doorstep, which was born out of the wrongful killing of an unarmed black man by police in 2009 – the politics of power plays a major role in whokill.

Slightly more clear is the subversion embedded in typography of the band’s name, which Garbus is fully aware frustrates those forced to write it. “It’s funny how some people are really rubbed the wrong way by it, like I’ve ruined their day by making them use that Shift key,” Garbus said back in 2009. “It’s a pain in the ass to write it that way, and that’s what I wanted from other people,” she said more recently. In most cases, this intentional subversion would come across as overly abstruse – see Sunn O))) – but thats somehow not the case with tUnE-yArDs.

But perhaps the most significant thing about tUnE-yArDs is that Garbus possesses more talent, enthusiasm, and, to put it simply, power, than the vast majority of indie rock acts playing today. This, above all else, cements her importance, because at a time where musicians perpetually seek refuge behind walls of reverb and fuzz Garbus’s voice rings true and strong without them. “I’m a new kind of woman,” she says on “Killa”, the albums closer. And after listening to whokill I can only hope Merrill Garbus is a new kind of artist as well.

Like many people who at one point said something profound, Marshall McLuhan’s posthumous existence nowadays rarely ventures beyond the singular nature of one quotation: “The medium is the message.”

McLuhan was mostly referring to how the basic nature of a medium is more important than the what the medium is saying: The way a news report functions tells us much more than the actual news report itself – if we pay attention to it.

McLuhan published his famous phrase in 1964, four years after another seminal event in history: the introduction of Opal Fruits, the fruit-flavored confections known stateside as Starburst.

McLuhan wasn’t at all thinking about Starburst when he was writing about how television and newspapers shape our consciouness. Still, his medium = message hypothesis has direct and potentially edifying applications to not only the internal structure of modern confectionaries, but to modern life as well.

The gist: similar to the way a medium organizes its message, the manner in which a package of Starburst is organized has profound effects on how it is experienced, and it is only by altering the formula that those effects become apparent.

A pack of 2.07 OZ Starburst Original Fruit Chews features four naturally-and-artifically-flavored varieties: Cherry, orange, strawberry and lemon. The package’s twelve pieces are arranged in identical clusters of four, the first of which changes depending on which side you start eating from. From the right, the first color is orange, followed by yellow, pink and red. Red begins the package from the left side, inverting the series.

For most consumers of Starburst there exists a hierarchy of flavor preference. Red and pink tend to vie for the top position, with yellow and orange sharing similar places towards the bottom. Thus, eating a pack of Starburst is also an experience in anticipation and disappointment. Though the package does have a definite organizing principle, it is not one consciously considered by most consumers as they reach for the next candy embedded in the tube,

Mamba, a German-made candy, shares a significant number of similarities with Starburst – general taste, texture, etc – with one main exception: the two candies are organized in entirely disparate fashions. Whereas Starbust candies are organized in DNA-like series, the candies in a package of Mamba are grouped by placing each individual flavor within its own, self-enclosed package. Three packages of six, each representing one of a possible four flavors (lemon, strawberry, raspberry, orange) are placed side by side, giving each package of Mamba eighteen individual candies, six more than Starburst.

But consider what happens when we take the organizing principle of Mamba and apply it to Starburst. If we simply reorder each of the candies so that the four flavors are grouped together (pictured) we more or less have the same product – at least on one level. In reality, however, once we alter the organizing formula of the package, we subvert the design of how the candy was meant to be consumed. Suddenly, instead of a package built on unconscious anticipation and disappointment, we have a package that offers the certain regularity of knowing exactly which flavor comes next.

The organizing principles of Starburst share significant congruitity with how we (would like to) live. Embedded in Starburst is regularity, though of a slightly subdued kind. It’s not completely unsystematic, like a package of Skittles, but rather fainltly structured within its own kingdom of rules. It’s sustained without being boring, and variable without disrupting its own natural internal organization. A pack of Starburst is, at its very core, the well-lived life: Sweet, simple, and, above all, something best experienced with friends. 

By my cursory and inaccurate count, Michael Bay has killed me 109 times. In basements, on street corners, on park benches and in swimming pools,Michael Bay has been there, slashing and stabbing with the sort of abandon only a well-misunderstood artist is capable of. His body of work gives clear insight into the content of his soul: What you see is not a man of sanity, but a man of explosions and massive casualties. As a director, Michael Bay is a man overwhelmingly concerned with making loud, violent, and overt filmic statements. Which is why he horrifies me.

Michael Bay has become for me the corporeal manifestation of my persistent, irrational, and narcissistic fear of my own death. When I watch his films, I’m reminded how easily I could be in them, one body among the countless decimated objects in Armageddon, for example, or one of the passengers of the bus Bonecrusher destroys in Transformers.

In reality, of course, Bay is only one of many directors who orchestrate death. But he has come to represent for me the the larger body of cinematic death tropes, some of which I have been the victim of. Here are some examples.

Every Time I Take A Shower

Within the sacred realm of the home, few places leave us as vulnerable as the bathroom. Michael Bay clearly realized this the time he killed me last December. After getting shampoo in my eyes, and blindly reaching for my towel,  I was met with the blurry figure of a man clutching a knife. He killed me, much in the way Janet Leigh’s character is killed in Psycho. (In case you are curious, my blood smelled of Herbal Essences, which means to say, marigold flowers, angelica, and thyme.)

When I Stare Into The Bathroom Mirror

In Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers, Tim Strode is clearing the fog off the bathroom mirror when Michael Myers comes up behind him and cuts his throat. Much like the Psycho shower scene, Strode’s death is awful because it alerts us, again, to the very obvious vulnerability of being naked, blind, and alone. The bathroom mirror plays a big role here as well because it allows us to see straight into the eyes of our killer. Does he smile? Cry? In many of my cases, it was both.

All Those Times That I Sit In A Car as Someone Turns on The Ignition

Cars belong to a special class of modern machines that are as helpful as they are dangerous. Nowhere is this more obvious than in every filmic scene where characters are killed by their vehicles. Cars hurtle into walls, fly into rivers and slam into people, reigning a very modern and democratic sort of destruction. But cars are also a common tool for a very maniacal sort of killing: the car assassination. Using this method, an assassin rigs up a car to explode once the driver activates a certain part of a car’s functionality – turning on the ignition, activating the radio, etc.  Notable victims of this killing method are the Godfather’s Apollonia Vitelli-Corleone, Judge Sorillo from The Dark Knight, and me on November 1st  of last year. None of us saw it coming.

Every Time I Tell Someone I’ll “Be Right Back”

There is important scene in Scream where Randy, played by Jamie Kennedy, goes on a particularly insightful metafictional tirade about how characters can go about surviving horror films. Rule number one, he says, is you can never have sex. “Sex equals death, okay?” Rule number, two, Randy goes on, is you can never drink or do drugs. (He calls these things the “sin factor”). But rule number three is the most important: Never say “I’ll be right back.” For Randy, declaring your safe return in a horror film is the filmic equivalent to standing on a rooftop during a thunderstorm and daring god to strike you down. Within the context of a film, saying “I’ll be back” is very clearly an affront to the screenwriter/director, who hold the narrative keys to your survival. What they create they can just as easily destroy. Randy realized this.

I however, did not, and Michael Bay was always there to remind me of my transgressions. This has happened twenty-five times.

When I Am Drinking A Glass Of Orange Juice

When Disaster strikes it does so with little regard for its victims The meteor that crashed through my bedroom window last May was meant to strike at the very moment that I was taking my first sip of orange juice. It was both cruel and ironic for me because I had just finished a very healthy and balanced breakfast that was meant to prolong my life. Instead the meteor that rendered my room a burning wreckage cut the whole deal short, similar, in a way, to the jet engine that kills Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Donnie Darko. I was pretty upset about it.

The man in the olive trench coat didn’t get enough sleep last night.

He has a face puffy and pale, with eyes cast downward and eyelids drooping. His shoulders sag, and when he looks up and orders a large coffee, his spine stiffens and he tilts his head back, breathing out a plume of air and squeezing his eyes tightly twice. Then he is handed his coffee and walks off.
The woman in line after him stands phone to ear and orders something exotic sounding, flashing four fingers to note how many sugars she wants. Her conversation is about dog sitters.

Behind her stands a police officer, thumbs tucked in his waistband as he slowly taps his hands against his legs. His walkee-talkee makes a noise. When he orders, he orders four medium coffees, two creams in three, and three sugars in one. He makes sure to say thank you.

This is the most important part of the day.

Like alcohol, coffee straddles the line between luxury and crutch, crossing briefly into the realms of fetish and political statement. What kind of coffee you drink – and how you drink it –  says as much about you as what kind of car you drive. Black coffee drinkers, for example, can be described as either purists, masochists, or unimaginative bores, depending on who’s talking.

For most, coffee stands as a defense against the early morning or mid-day stupor, a magic tonic that can turn the tide of the day from miserable to slightly tolerable. This is the one thing that is shared by essentially everyone standing in line at Starbucks. It’s not the coffee at all, but rather the caffeine brings people back, bleary-eyed, to stand in line each morning and pay $2.00 to save themselves from one of their most natural urges.

It is in this sense that the three people you meet in line for coffee are all one in the same: They’re tired, but also hopeful that the daily ritual of sipping and drinking will once again restore them to the state of themselves that is most conducive to happiness. The coffee only acts a vessel on which the tired of version of themselves sails away, replaced by another self brimming with excitement and buzzing with hope.

Human beings, almost as a rule, secretly enjoy complaining about their jobs. Though voluntary and oftentimes rewarding, working falls under that unfortunate subset of obligations that, while necessary, rarely ceases to make us miserable. And that, I think, is exactly why we do it.

For the average person working for the average company in the average office building, there are eight hours a day where the prime directive is to earn a living. That’s forty hours for week roughly fifty weeks a year doing work that may not actually signify much beyond the eventual paycheck.

But it just that reality that makes work so beneficial. In an era where personal choice and freedom are cherished above most else, having stretches of time where our choices are made for us is, in its own way, immensely therapeutic. Our dull 9-5 widget-making and spreadsheet-filing, then, is actually a vacation from the pressures of What To Do Next. We are liberated by our cubicle prisons.

That should comfort you, and if not lift your spirits at work, at least make your non-work time that much more compelling and enjoyable. Consider your free time a canvas, and how your spend it the brush and paints you’ll use to adorn it. Van Gogh would be proud.

Though Chikita Violenta is a band from Mexico and Tre3s is an album recorded in Canada, there is very little on this release that feels particularly foreign. In fact, listening to Tre3s is like plunging headfirst in to the indie rock biography of the past fifteen years. There are many moments on the album, for instance, where it ’s difficult to not think of Los Campesinos!. Tracks like “All I Need ’s A Little More” are so overwhelmingly reminiscent of much of the output from Architecture in Helsinki that is hard getting over the feeling that the band’s songwriting process consists of an earnest pause/rewind/write cycle of “Finger’s Crossed.”

But those aren’t really insults. In fact, Chikita Violenta would likely take the comparisons as complements, especially considering that their third album was produced by Dave Newfeld, a guy who produced albums for both Los Campesinos!and Broken Social Scene.

Either way, Tre3s stands on its own. Chikita Violenta creates music that is both scrappy and lush—a combination of qualities that makes Tre3s an album both familiar and unusual. Wistful tracks, like “Holiday,” are juxtaposed with slightly more raw and unfettered tracks, like “The Pause.” The band even ventures into a different direction altogether with “The Monster (Was Last Seen Approaching The Power Plant)” opting for glitch and ethereal vocals instead of the more usual fuzzed out guitar.

As Chikita Violenta’s first international release, this album does everything it needs to. Not only does it cement the band’s seemingly infinite capacity to reinvent itself from track to track, but it also offers a constant reminder of its own rise into existence: It feels like something you’ve heard before, but never quite to the extent where listening to it is grating or otherwise unbearable. This makes it special, and an album likely to make these four young men from Mexico City lots of earnest American fans.

To create Shugo Tokumaru, you must envision a world stripped of its pessimism. Since his 2004 debut, Night Piece, Tokumaru’s work has been the stuff of playpens and daydreams—a feat, certainly, considering that the Tokyo-native is at least three decades old. But that naiveté-despite-age is one of the single most important components of Tokumaru’s appeal. It’s why people listen to him. Similar to contemporaries like Lullatone and, perhaps, Sufjan Stevens, Shugo Tokumaru shines because he makes you forget how much of a bitter person you’ve become.

But that doesn’t mean his music hasn’t changed. Over the course of Tokumaru’s young career, each of his albums has evinced, to no small degree, the progression of two main tendencies. Where Night Piece was an album whose charm derived largely from the sincerity and novelty of Tokukaru’s bedroom recording, with each successive albums, Tokumaru’s work has become larger, more ambitious, and, certainly, more polished.

That shift away from his lo-fi aesthetic was, in many respects, an expected one. But was perhaps not as expected was the wholesale shift in tone that Tokumaru has taken. Tokumaru’s work has always been accurately described as “sweet,” “innocent” and “fun”—but tracks on Port Entropy take what were already fairly safe characterizations and cement them beyond reconsideration.

Consider “Lahaha,” by far the album’s standout track. Without a doubt one of Tokumaru’s most masterful songs, “Lahaha” is driving, catchy, and, most significantly, instantly recognizable. Unlike the vast majority of Tokumaru’s previous output, it doesn’t drift or whisper. It is that sense most similar to “Parachute,” the track that somewhat single-handedly set the tone for Tokumaru’s previous album, Exit.

But the standout remarkable nature of “Lahaha” also reveals Port Entropy’s unfortunate truth: there’s so little else to remark upon. A large part of Tokumaru’s appeal and success derives from his evocation of a mood—in this case, the informal meandering that one might expect from a guy making music in his bedroom. Predictably, and with the clear exception of “Lahaha,” Port Entropy doesn’t fight against this seemingly innate tendency. This creates problems because, in the end, the album doesnt feel like it has moved: Tokumaru both begins and ends Port Entropy in his bedroom.

That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t especially ruin the experience of listening to the album. In fact, Tokumaru’s tendency to eschew movement ultimately makes the whole thing feel more ordinary and more along the lines of what fans might expect from him. Tame, familiar, and rarely electrifying, Port Entropy is simple without being dull, and inconspicuous enough that it’s comforting. Port Entropy is, in short, your bedroom put to song.

It’s been five years since the last album from The Books.

For most bands, that span of inactivity would be enough to enter them to the vat of obscurity. However, for The Books, and certainly other bands whose unique talents render them indispensable—five years is slightly more forgivable. Think of it as an extended period of artistic breath-catching. Certain bands need that time.

With The Books, this should not be debated. Their 2005 full-length effort, Lost and Safe, wasn’t simply the product of off-the-cuff musicianship. The Books creative process begins far before a single string is plucked or sample snipped. A shameless collector,  the band’s Paul de Jong has curated a vast library of audio, video tapes, cassettes and LPs gleaned from Salvation Army Thrift Stores. This makes his job hard. Sifting through so many sounds and snippets requires a working pair of ears and lots of time, time that there is never enough of.

Then, both band members (de Jong and Nick Zammuto) had kids.

With The Books, it’s easy to imagine that having kids was a part of the creative process as well for this album. The Way Out’s third track, the jarring and enticing “A Cold Freezin’ Night” focuses on the sampled dialogue of two feuding children, one an overly aggressive but clearly harmless boy, and the other a defensive and potty-mouthed little girl. There is antagonism here, for sure, but there is also a tacit celebration like the pure and sincere conversation only children can have. “I wish I was a boy,” the little girl admits as the strange pulsing rhythm beats behind her. These kids are having fun, and so are The Books.

But that youthful exuberance is perhaps undercut by the album’s seemingly more central message, one clearly alluded to in its title.

The Way Out is an album about escape through unconventional means. Besides being the title, it’s also embedded in the album’s voices. In the opener, “Group Autogenics 1” New Age sages lead their followers “deeper and deeper,” their messages snipped and reconfigured to the point of inanity. “Beautiful People” is a hymn to the glory that is mathematics, a strange mix of the rationality of shape and the irrational faith people can have in it. “I Am Who I Am” features the frenzied voice of a preacher so wrapped up with the semantics of identity, that, with the help of The Books, his message is completely lost. Religion and new age spiritualism become wrapped up together, leading the listener to conclude that the way out might just be in.

If their previous albums placed The Books within a category all their own, The Way Out cements that position. But, The Books’ latest release also offers something new. It’s bolder, the sonic result of a band knowing and understanding its place in an often-entrenched music world. An anonymous voice on Group “Autogenics 1” calls it a new beginning. And this may just be true.

Listening to the album for the fourth time now, I’m still not sure if I agree with him or not. In my younger days The Decemberists were an inextricable member of my indie-rock parthenon. Not so much anymore. It’s not they’ve stopped being “good” – rather they’ve stopped being relevant. And interesting.

And maybe they’ve cottoned onto that. After all, their primary error with The Hazards of Love was equating musical evolution with a linear (or perhaps exponential) growth in production value. It didn’t work. That’s a major part of the reason why reviewers were unhappy with their 2009 record. It felt hollow, large and busy and filled with chords far more electric than most were prepared for.

But that album wasn’t terrible, and for that reason it’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Colin Meloy. He and his band basically took to heart the large body of Hazard’snegative criticism and injected into the heart of The King is Dead. The album is light, filled less with driving and overbearing rock opera and more with the band’s bread and butter – the folky, the fiddle-filled.

I’m still not sure whether this makes The King is Dead “better” than Hazards – but it sure does make it easier to swallow. Colin Meloy has jettisoned the electric guitar, dropped the volume, and created something slightly more in keeping with what peopled liked about The Decemberists in the first place. And, before long, he’s likely to regret it.

observations without context:

1) Is “The King is Dead” a transparent reference to Elvis or a not-so-subtle admission that the Decemberists are putting to bed their unrelenting lust for British sea shanties?

2) Meloy is still clearly doing that thing he does where he (intellectually) injects the letter “Y” into words invariably devoid of it. Child becomes chiyuld. Here becomes “he-yure” You get the idea. This is not necessarily an irritating practice – it’s just strange. Maybe it’s a Portland thing?

3) At first I thought it was just me, but the “a-woooo” thing Meloy sings in “A Calamity Song” sounds an awful like the “a-woooo” thing Coldplay’s Chris Martin does in “The Scientist.” Not that I listen to Coldplay or anything – it’s just an observation.

4) Is the Decemberist’s transition to Bob Boilen’s overflowing bosom proof that the band has reached its middle age – or did that happen before, when they recruited R.E.M’s Peter Buck to play music with them?

5) Why are you thinking about Bob Boilen’s bosom, anyhow?