Wednesday - Just Mustard
With Wednesday, Just Mustard presents a gloriously noisy debut album that sets the mood for eerie nighttime driving in rural America.
In May, in the midst of post-Swarthmore laziness, I was both relishing and despising my newfound free time by staying up late listening to new music on Bandcamp. My searches usually consisted of finding album covers that looked gripping in a genre that fit my mood, avoiding bands with pretentious names. Quite the rigorous criteria. It was on one of these humid, stagnant nights when I stumbled upon an album that saved me from the musical monotony that I had been stuck in for the past month.
A mysterious Irish band emerged from the depths of Dundalk in May of 2018 with an LP that makes your guts twist in both bliss and fear. Just Mustard’s coverslip for Wednesday features a picture of the disorientingly blurred faces of its members, setting the mood for the dissonant trip you are soon to take. Just Mustard dabbles in various genres: noise rock, trip hop, lofi shoegaze, alternative, post-punk, and any number of tags that a music junkie would be happy to conjure up. Regardless of which of these tags entices you the most, Just Mustard presents a gloriously noisy debut album that sets the mood for eerie nighttime driving in rural America. Rather than thinking about this album conventionally however, try this. Think of each song as a tool of evocation, and immerse yourself in these experiences.
I listened to this album incessantly after that very lucky night. My boyfriend and I took turns driving 16000 miles, from the swampy heat in southern Georgia across the South to the scorch of Texas deserts, west to the balmy beaches of SoCal, north to the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest. This album followed and tainted each of the landscapes....
“BOO”- Imagine driving up a mountain at night, hairpin turns and vertigo-inducing cliffs abound. There are three cars behind you and each one looks like it would be eager to shove you off the side. They’re locals and could effortlessly drift around these crazy fucking curves given the opportunity and the sudden teenage-like impulsivity. A sign in the dark forest says “Watch for elk.” You scoff and look over at your co-driver, but not a minute later you slam the brakes as three elk (the first you’ve ever seen) emerge from the darkness on the shoulder of the road, lifting their enormous heads to scrutinize your unwanted presence. Pine trees pierce the inky sky. Tense, distorted guitars open this first track, later accompanied by haunting, wordless vocals that sound like what you would expect to hear if you put your ear to a keyhole in your creepy aunt’s old house. This track sets the scene for the lofi, semi-shoegaze-ish journey that Just Mustard is about to take you on.
Inna Kimbrough, 2018
“Curtain”- You’re scraping by in a night of West Texas dust. The GPS told you three hours ago that your next right would be in 204 miles. You haven’t seen a single car since. The sun set a little while back, and the black of night encroaches over the tops of bare mountains. You’re driving towards the mysterious Marfa lights, rumored to appear blinking over the isolated plane of the horizon. Your high beams watch the dust kicked up by something ahead of you but you know there are no people around for many miles. The lights watch you as you watch them, your small being perched on a stony wall looking out over the desert. This track scrapes across the eardrum like the best-sounding nails on the god of lofi’s divine chalkboard. The screams of the vocals echo out over the horizon and warn you that those distant lights are not benign.
“Feeded” - Gentle raindrops of guitar accompany the rich blue green of the ocean on your left like it was smeared on by a palette knife. Your childhood on the murky, suspect gray-green brown of the East coast couldn’t have prepared you for the pure cobalts and bottle greens of the Pacific. The glowing-ember orange of cliffs in the sunlight and the gun-barrel gray of monolithic stand-alone islands 30 feet from the cold shore fill your eyes like a Cezanne. A lullaby-like voice accompanies these colors like a peach smear of paint on your brain, warming the landscape around you.
“Pigs” - The night bites into you both as the dissonant sounds of bass creep into your brains. You lean back in your seat as your co-pilot eases off the gas for fear of the elk again. Arizona canyons rise and dip into and blend into the Scream-red sunset. This energetic piece grabs you by the back of your collar and dangles you over those edges, then whips you back to safety. “Pigs” rhythmic spirit matches the sky and gives you a mini shot of 6-minute energy to sustain your drive into the dusk.
It Follows, Northern Lights Films, 2014
“Tainted”- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski leers at you from your own hands, that hideous book, a nightmare-inducing masterpiece. Your fear is magnified by the pitch-black trees outside, pressing in on both sides and looming in the distance like the creature from It Follows, always there, the roads cavelike and infinite and there is no escape from this sound. This intoxicating track pulls you into its whirlpool of sound and spins you dizzy with its fuzzy bridge. “Tainted” is the song that would play if you were underwater and watching moonlight play in the waves above you.
“Deaf” - Sweet harmonies pervade this track, playing as you drive in the faint morning light around the cliffs of Big Sur, the Cezanne wedges of color again permeating the landscape. After a night of pitch-black terror in the dense woods, the light of this song tinkles out of a tinny radio in a tiny tourist shack surrounded by labyrinthine gardens. Baby-pink peonies blossom to the chorus. The Pacific coast is deeper blue and more beautiful than you could even have imagined and there is no cell signal to distract you from everything that is, from all of the little tide pools at the bottom of this very tall cliff and the whitecaps washing over the rocks at the bottom like a silk veil. Gritty guitars rake the eardrum like the wind through the trees.
The Sea at l’Estaque, Cezanne, 1878
“Tennis” - This song walks down a very long hallway towards a dark, dark door. You’re driving home now, reading scary stories to each other as you twist down the corridors of county roads in the coastal plains of Georgia. The pickup that has been following you for the last half hour since the lonely two-pump gas station finally turns onto a dirt road and leaves the trees to press in tighter around you. This song is a ticking clock at midnight, knowing that something is coming but not knowing from what direction. Its heavy distortions bend like shadows in the dark, while hypnotic and echoing vocals call out like a siren trapped in a well.
“Pictures” - This song opens with the sound that your brain makes when you open the door to a 21-year-old’s apartment: the buzzing of flies, decay, heaviness, hopelessness. Grungy, dirty sound accompanies your worn tires as you drive through the tunnels in the middle of the Rockies and wait for the sunlight to come back. One minute elapses into five, into ten, and suddenly you don’t remember if it was daylight when you entered this mountain. This song lights a cigarette while watching the world burn and blinking through soot. It slashes your tires and leaves you desperately wishing the album were longer than eight songs.
I first discovered this gem of an album by myself at 3 in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and was horrifically bored and anxious and unhappy and agitated and it was the breath of fresh air that I had not tasted in the music world for a terribly long time. Special thanks to you, Just Mustard, please keep it coming.