Good evening everyone!

I have been listening to a lot of music lately -- the kinds of which I don't usually listen to. If it isn't abundantly clear by the background music on my profile (Glenn Gould performing Bach's BWV988 (yes I am THAT much of a snob)) I am a huge lover of classical music. However, Spring has Sprung and thus I found myself in the mood to listen to something more young and refreshing! So I spent a few days listening to many songs of many genres looking for the type of song that feels like a cool homemade lemonade on a hot summer evening with the sun still throwing its glow over the horizon - or like riding a longboard down an irresponsibly steep hill with your high school friends on a weekend, and riding the high from the thrill of risking your life for the rest of the night. Then, I discovered the Gizmodgery album by sElf.

Well, discovered is a lie. More like rediscovered. This album was actually introduced to me by one Vietnamese girl I used to date long ago, but I only ever listened to one track on it: Dead Man. The gimmick of this album is that it was recorded entirely using toy instruments. And with that in mind, I decided to give it another shot and it gave me almost exactly what I was looking for! The electronic toy instruments were sampled and looped in such fun and catchy ways, that I must be looping the whole album over for the seventh or eighth time now, I've still not grown bored of it. Have you ever watched FLCL, or played Jet Set Radio? This album feels like if the soundtracks to those two were in English. It's crazy to me that I'd like pop-rock this much, especially when it's made with cheap children's toys but here we are!

Gizmodgery is - to me, at least - an album about refusing (or otherwise failing) to grow up, and instead, clinging onto your childhood. It's an album about being unable to adjust to the cataclysmic upheaval of comfort and simplicity that comes to those who are unprepared for adulthood when it reaches them.
"Obviously, duh, the whole thing is made with toys"
Well, duh, but the lyrics do it too. I'm not going to go into a literary analysis about it right now (frankly because I'm too lazy to do so at the moment) but for example, the song 5 Alive appears to me to be all about those kinds of people that say "I'm just a kid!" way past the age of 18, the kinds that will bring up their high school accomplishments when asked about what they've done with their lives, because their adulthoods are rich with hedonism and irresponsibility, because they've never grown out of their childish impulsivity. Or Pattycake, which is a little more on the nose with how it uses the rhythms and melodies of old childhood playground song-games - or with how it keeps referencing late 70s and early 80s culture, or with how it literally says "let's pretend it's 1978, we're playing pattycake -- the popsicles we ate gave us stomachaches on our neighbors lawn." It may not be a subtle song but it still demonstrates its message plenty clearly. Another good example is the track Ordinaire, which I believe is all about refusing to accept the fact that - though you may have once been popular and great while you were young - you are now just an ordinary person. You've peaked, you're washed out, and you have to let go of your past greatness and live in the present, with all its (and your) mundanity and aches and tiredness.

This album popped into my life at the perfect time. I've recently been made woefully aware of the bad childhood and teenage habits I've carried into my adult life, that have damaged a lot of relationships and opportunities for me. Things like running away from my issues, being lazy and lethargic more often than I'd like to admit, some poor coping mechanisms, and other such destructive habits. This album really shed some light on a lot of those for me. Obviously the album itself can't do that for me on its own, that's probably why I never gave it a go before - it just didn't mean anything for me. But now that I'm aware that the album talks in many ways about men like me, it kinda feels like a harsh but much appreciated reflection of my thoughts and actions. There's a lot I've yet to learn!

But, oh well. I'm only 19 years old. That isn't to say I shan't learn my lesson, but moreso that I don't have to rush it so much. That is to say, I'm glad I recognized these things about myself now and not later. I'm only freshly an adult, so getting over these bad habits and ways of thinking will still be easy for me. Had I kept on this way until I was 25 for example, things would be much harder to change. I can't tell what the hardest part of this is though. It's something between admitting I was wrong (a lot); accepting that many issues I've had in my life are more my fault that I had thought and that I am a victim of my own actions and not others' malice; or perhaps simply finding the resolve to rewire the way my brain has worked my whole life. But I'd rather suffer through this bullshit than continue to be the way I am now.

PS for K.P.:

From the track Miracle Worker:

She once had a
Boy who loved her
In every way
He told his friends he scored and she beat him to death

She said "don't trust a worthless stranger
Unashamed of what he's done
I'll learn the secret handshake
When all the decoding's done"