Friday Q&A: 6/20/2014

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Welcome to Friday Q&A. Every week, we’ll put up a question for the staff, friends, bands, and you, the reader, to answer.

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This Week’s Q

You wake up and you’re brutally hungover. You go out to scrounge up a ginger ale and some cheesy food item, and you pop on your headphones. What metal could possible soothe this savage beast? Who is tolerable in this state?

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Mentally, I imagine my hangovers as great black slicks of poisonous sentient liquid that cover my skull or build in bulging pockets behind my eyes or in my guts (imagine Hexxus from Ferngully and you’ve got my hangovers). So in general, I go with slow, atmospheric metal that packs a decent amount of doom — not Sleep-style stoner doom, but world-ending, crushing doom, heavy on the shadow. The albums that come to mind are Malachi’s Wither To Cover The Tread, Young Hunter’s Stone Tools, Rwake’s If You Walk Before You Crawl, You Crawl Before You Die, and Desecresy’s The Doom Skeptron. These records lumber and crawl but never run or bounce; they seem to match my horrible toxic mood, and therefore offer a sort of commiseration. All of those plus tons of soda and weed keep me from killing myself every Sunday morning.

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A Small Turn of Human Kindness by Harvey Milk. It’s not so much a pick-me-up as it is a wallow-me-down.

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David Allan Coe.

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I listen to noise any time my head hurts, whether it be hangover or migraine. Not white noise so I guess it’s black noise? Ha. Less mild pain – Locrian (particularly the split with Horseback, for some reason). Can barely move – Mogwai (most often Mr. Beast).

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I lead a relatively dull life, and so I’m not hungover often enough to have designated ‘hangover’ music. Whenever I go to a show, however, I typically drive, and I always listen to the exact same thing on the drive home afterwards: the Emerson String Quartet’s recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. Sure, a lot of that is simply that I’m a maddeningly routine-focused person, but I think it’s mostly down to the fact that after the (hopefully) wild, chaotic experience of live heavy metal, the meticulous, mathematical construction of Bach feels like a necessary reset for my brain. Live music aims to overwhelm; this music feels like it is willing to wait for your recovery. Point, counterpoint; in, out; peace, in a way.

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Back when I did that sort of thing, The Velvet Underground & Nico almost by default or occasionally Mayhem’s De Mysteriis.

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I don’t drink very much. I’ve been hungover once, and once was enough for me. I had a splitting headache that I’m told is characteristic of hangovers, and all I wanted was silence.

For a general pick-me-up, metal doesn’t work well. There’s a US power metal band, Onward, who are the only band that can lift my mood, especially their debut album, Evermoving. Otherwise, if I’m trying to feel better, I’ll listen to more punk and hardcore oriented stuff: Amebix, NOFX, ALL, Pennywise, Operation Ivy, Agent Orange, Hatebreed.

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I have varying degrees of hangover:

Mild hangover (drank one beer too many and not enough water, feeling a little woozy on waking up): Nails/Black Breath/Trap Them/APMD/some other Entombedcore variant.

Solid hangover (drank a lot more than usual but was still able to make it to bed, woke up feeling like I was in a fight): Eyehategod.

Massive hangover (blacked out, passed out, feeling like death): New Found Glory.

Once it gets to that final stage, metal just hurts more than it helps and only something posi can get me out of the blackened hangover rabbit hole.

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For a variety of reasons — age, parenthood, alcohol intolerance — I rarely drink to excess, but it takes an embarrassingly small amount of booze to give me a mild hangover the next day. On those days, I wake up feeling like I’m wearing one of those lead aprons you wear for x-rays, and everything hurts slightly more than it should. I need something rough around the edges, but catchy and relatively easy to listen to, as well as something that’s familiar and comfy. Two perfect albums I can think of, for me, are In Solitude’s Sister and Witchcraft’s Legend, which have that ideal balance of hooks and grit. On the rare occasions that I’m nursing a more serious hangover, I don’t want anything loud at all. I tend to turn to 1960s pop-folk, things like Joni Mitchell and CSNY, or total silence if I can manage it. But, since I have a young child who’s loud and enthusiastic in the mornings, I usually can’t manage silence — so quiet acoustic guitars is a good stand-in.

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You’ve read ours, now what’s yours? Let us know below and enjoy your weekend.

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