The Different Kinds of Gloom

When I wrote my year-end best-of piece a week ago I went on a tangent (natch) about the different kinds of gloom that my favorite music elicited. And then I got to thinking (all Carrie Bradshaw-like again) about the types of gloom that some of my most favorite doomy songs evoked. (You may be wondering why I'm so devoted to such depressing songs, but I'll never forget that my sophomore English teacher said that the best novels are ones that don't necessarily have happy endings, or even happy subject matter. I tend to agree, in literature and in music.)

Like that old story about how the Inuits have several different words for "snow," I too have several different incarnations of "gloom."

The following is not a comprehensive list, but it comes pretty close...

GLOOM THAT MAKES YOU CATATONIC...
"Hallelujah" by Imogen Heap: This song just makes me want to go crawl in a hole and weep in the fetal position. It's haunting, but in a really beautiful way. It's entirely a cappella, and you wouldn't be wrong to guess that some of its beauty is diminished by the connotations it draws from the scene in which it plays on The OC: when Marissa dies. I wish Mischa Barton didn't look like she was about to vomit as she gasped for her final breaths (or that I started laughing when I just watched this scene again, what is wrong with me?!), but you can't have everything I suppose.

ANGSTY GLOOM...
"Civilian" by Wye Oak: Any time there is vicious percussion accompaniment I get a little screamy in my gloom (a little grungy and plaid, if you will). It's more than just "noise" though. Especially when it's accompanied by lyrics like "I still keep my baby teeth/ In the bedside table with my jewelry." So it's creepy gloom, too, if we're being wholly accurate.

YEARNING, SELFLESS GLOOM...
"Someone Like You" by Adele: If you've never performed a dramatic rendition of an Adele song, you haven't lived. This is the perfect candidate for such a performance; it's simple, subtle, not showy at all. But the lyrics twist my insides in the most delicate ways (is that possible?). Adele is like a puppet master manipulating my heartstrings. Remember, sometimes it hurts instead.

HOPELESS/HOPEFUL GLOOM...
"Vienna" by Billy Joel: When the line between feeling hopeless and hopeful becomes so blurred it may as well not exist at all. I nerd-ily love Billy Joel for a 21-year-old girl. What can I say, I am soulful like that. By the way, isn't this song like the anthem of Marissa Cooper (RIP?)?

KITSCHY GLOOM THAT YOU HATE TO LOVE...
"My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion: Don't hate, y'all. This song is pure gloomy brilliance, and if you can't take it, get outta here. Listening to this song in conjunction with the final minutes of Titanic (she rode a horse with one leg on each side! she went on the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier! she never let go! SHE STILL HAS THE NECKLACE!!!!) never fails to make me sob like Claire Danes, all ugly-like. But it's okay, because I own it.

THIS VIDEO. OH MY GOD.

Plus I have a weakness for circa-mid-90's Celine Dion, because my sister and I used to perform dramatic renditions of "Because You Loved Me," "All By Myself," and most definitely "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" (funny, because those memories are all coming back to me now). You can't fight the cheese when it's this delicious, folks.

NO. I'M SORRY. THIS VIDEO.

RAINY DAY GLOOM...
"Wash" by Bon Iver: I love Justin Vernon something fierce and he is never in finer form than in this song. I don't really know any of the words to this song (except "climb," "bed," "sound," and "hardly"). So whenever I listen to it I'm just singing gibberish in the same melody.

Example (actual lyrics in parentheses):
Ohhhhh      (I....)
I'm going like the quickening you      (I’m growing like the quickening hues)
Ooooh aaahhhh      (I....)
I'm telling darkness from lies on you      (I’m telling darkness from lines on you)
Over head falling from the norris      (Over havens fora full and swollen morass)
You're habitat      (Young habitat)
I'll be livin alone      (All been living alone)
With the air snap and the hole, oooh      (Where the ice snap and the hold clast are known)

I rest my case. 

WORDLESS GLOOM...
"Twenty-Two Fourteen" by The Album Leaf: I have a soft spot for purely instrumental pieces. This one is mostly piano with some xylophone ditties and cymbals mixed in. But it's also magnificently silent at some parts and the longing just echoes. It makes you feel sad in a hard-to-vocalize way, which is fitting since there are of course no words at all.

CATHARTIC GLOOM...
"Bad Dream" by Keane: This song is a bit of a strange choice, because it's not immediately recognizable as gloomy. But the lyrics are pretty depressing. Basically I chose this one because at the climax of the song--"Where do we go?/ I don't even know/ My strange old face/ And I'm thinking about those days"--I feel kind of empowered. Empowered by my gloom, or past it, I can't tell. In that way it's uplifting, I suppose. Superficially, this song is rather upbeat, and therefore probably misinterpreted (kind of like how "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day is preposterously like the universal song for goodbye slideshows).

GLOOM FOR MOURNERS...
"Candle in the Wind" by Elton John: aka, the greatest eulogy ever written. When I'm in the mood, I can really get into 40-year-old music by the likes of Elton John or Billy Joel or (God, making me cry) Harry Chapin. It's very generic and safe and just so easy to like. But it's sad in a real and true and approachable way. I love that.

WHISPERY GLOOM...
"9 Crimes" by Damien Rice: This is like the quintessential gloomy, doomy song. It's about loaded guns and infidelity and I'm thinking also some kind of murder-suicide situation. Plus it's all in whispers, so it's really very eerie. The Damien Rice brand of Gloom is like feeling this blanket of bleakness and darkness descend over you. And you're just powerless to break through it. Fun, right?!

EMO GLOOM...
"I Will Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie: I suppose it's kind of redundant to call this song "emo gloomy" because, well, isn't all gloom kind of emo by default? But anything that Ben Gibbard sings automatically has a one-up in the emo department. Can we just consider the title of this song--"I Will Follow You Into the Dark"? I mean, really? Subtlety is so not their thing, but at least it's not as stalker-y as "I Will Possess Your Heart." (I forgive everything for the masterpiece that is "Transatlanticism," though. That song is the most perfect.)

SWEEPING GLOOM, WHICH IS KIND OF NAIVE, TOO...
"Terrible Love" by Birdy: Birdy (Jasmine van den Bogaerde) is 16 years old and singing about "terrible love" and oceans and things that I'm not sure 16-year-olds should be singing or feeling. I'm saying now, for the record, that she will be the next Rachael Yamagata (and you're like, who??), because she has that bleak, wounded thing down pat. She is also pretty powerful because she actually makes me like "Skinny Love."

GLOOM THAT OWNS IT (or, GLOOM THAT I OWN)...
"Fix You" by Coldplay: Say what you want about Coldplay and Chris Martin and Moses and Apple and Goop, but this is a masterpiece of a mainstream gloomy song. I obviously associate it with the penultimate episode of The OC when it actually debuted for all the world to hear. There is just absolutely nothing wrong with this song and whenever I hear it I feel transfixed and helpless and motionless, exactly like Sandy Cohen when he tells his alcoholic wife that her father has just died. (I refuse to let Mischa Barton's dead eyes and/or Ryan's awful haircut ruin this moment.) And that fact--that this song can make me feel like a 50-year-old Jewish man from the Bronx with killer eyebrows--somehow makes everything else before not matter (that was a little Homeland/OC mashup and my life has thus come full circle).

HAUNTINGLY RELEVANT GLOOM...
"Imagine" by John Lennon: Lennon wrote this song in 1971 and more than 40 years later this song still resonates with me. I'm not an overtly political or politically active person, but I do believe in a world where children can go to school knowing they are safe, or where people can worship their own god in peace, or where it doesn't even matter which god people worship, or whether they even do at all. I just wish these beliefs didn't make me a "dreamer." And that is why this song, and the world it "imagines," which still has not been realized today, makes me gloomy.

GUT-WRENCHING GLOOM...

"Fog (Again) (Live)" by Radiohead: I do this thing that I believe is my gut being wrenched (wrenching itself? I'm not sure how this phrase originated...). Usually it involves a facepalm and a noise that sort of sounds like "UuuuuuiiiiigggGGGGhhhhHHHH." Contrary to what you may think, this great expression of emotion isn't a negative reaction but a positive one. Like to something so heartbreaking it's incredible. I'm reminded of a line from My So-Called Life when Angela Chase imagines the best thing someone she loved could ever say to her: "You're so beautiful it hurts to look at you." And that is what this song is. It's so beautiful it hurts to listen to it, but I'm a glutton for punishment and all that, so I can't help myself. (I think my next blog post will detail things that are so beautiful in some way that it hurts to look at them. The wheels are already spinning.)

GLOOM THAT ECHOES...
"Everywhere I Go" by Lissie: This song just echoes for me. I think part of that may be because it always seems to play loudly whenever it comes on, but I also think the singer's voice is so beautiful and conveys a dreariness that enthralls me in the gloomiest of ways and echoes in, you know, more figurative ways. She seems to be yearning for something, anything, and as the song goes on this wanting becomes louder both literally and figuratively. I'm so in love with everything about it.

. . . . 

Finally, because it's kind of depressing to start off the year on such a gloomy note, I give you...

ANTI-GLOOM...
"Dreams" by The Cranberries: This song empowers me. It will empower you. Go confidently in the direction of your "Dreams." I have a "Dreams" today! The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their "Dreams." Explore, "Dreams," Discover. I dreamed a "Dreams." If you can "Dreams" it, you can do it.