| 1 | flor | "guarded" | come out. you're hiding | Thank you for your time. I know you are a busy man, far from home. And I promise I'll give you this phone back as soon as I'm done. |
| 2 | Wild Cub | "Somewhere" | single | Here is the thing: Darkness gives us control of the light. |
| 3 | Ivory Hours | "Shadow Kids" | single | Torches, spotlights, detonations. |
| 4 | DWNTWN | "Bloodshot Eyes" | single | Subsistence civilization means safety in daylight: |
| 5 | Wonders of Nature | "Aurora Borealis" | At The Turn Of Last Winter | water (or cheese) without poison, |
| 6 | The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart | "Anymore" | single | no lions in the streets, |
| 7 | Tancred | "Birthday Candles" | single | streets, |
| 8 | Land Of Talk | "Yes You Were" | Life After Youth | a system for how we walk on them together. |
| 9 | Daddy Issues | "Mosquito Bite" | Deep Dream | Modernity in civilization is the extension of safety into darkness, into cold, |
| 10 | Secret Sphere | "Courage" | single | and we still huddle here on this ball, surrounded by all this beautiful empty space we can't use. |
| 11 | Orden Ogan | "Gunman" | single | Our risk of doom now is that our power to influence climate has advanced faster than our power to tolerate it, |
| 12 | Jorn | "Life on Death Road" | single | and we can argue about blame, but Mal A Lago would also have sunk if this had happened without us. |
| 13 | Dream Evil | "Creature of the Night" | single | We mock the dinosaurs. |
| 14 | Iced Earth | "Great Heathen Army" | single | Everybody says they were tremendous, but they were wiped out by a meteor. Sad. |
| 15 | Kaledon | "The Beginning of the Night" | Carnagus: Emperor of the Darkness | Drain a swamp and you'll find fossils of them at the bottom, |
| 16 | DragonForce | "Ashes of the Dawn" | single | not us. |
| 17 | Mastercastle | "Space of Variations" | Wine of Heaven | But here is the thing: the dinosaurs' way worked for more than 100 million years, |
| 18 | Astrid S | "Party's Over" | single | and so far our plan for making it that long is exactly the same as theirs: |
| 19 | HEALTH | "EUPHORIA" | DISCO3 | hope things never change. |
| 20 | Danny L Harle | "Heavy Eyelids" | 1UL EP 4 | Except they had wide, flat teeth for chewing tough vegetation, |
| 21 | GIRLI | "Feel OK" | Feel OK - EP 3 | and we have coal plants. |
| 22 | Nemesea | "Dance In The Fire" | single | Do you know how many coal-fired deep-space meteor deflectors America had back when it was great? |
| 23 | Minniva | "I Want Out" | single | Well, no, but that was pretty close. |
| 24 | Orestea | "Alive or Just Existing" | single | Keep ourselves from being wiped out by a random chuck of stray space rock? |
| 25 | Our Hollow, Our Home | "Hartsick" | single | Dude, we can't even keep ourselves from being killed by each other on perfect-weather days. |
| 26 | Dagoba | "Inner Sun" | single | I'm in charge of a religion bigger than your country, and people freak when I talk about science. |
| 27 | Our Vices | "Ethereal" | single | They freak when you talk about science, too, so we have that in common. |
| 28 | Bloodywood | "In Da Club" | single | Ironically, I'm a theocrat and they freak because I sound like I understand science, |
| 29 | Max Richter | "The Haunted Ocean 4 - From "Waltz With Bashir"" | Out of the Dark Room | and you own skyscrapers and they freak because you sound like you barely understand why your own ass sags instead of billowing. |
| 30 | Hidden Orchestra | "Still" | Still +2 | But here is the thing: Darkness gives us the responsibility to take control of the light. |
| 31 | Integrity | "I Am the Spell" | single | People complain that you don't read books, |
| 32 | Broadside | "Hidden Colors" | single | but short attention spans and believing stupid shit you see on TV got you elected President. |
| 33 | Hundredth | "Suffer" | single | You don't hear anybody complaining about how there's no Trump Library. |
| 34 | McCafferty | "Trailer Trash" | single | Literally nobody complains about that. |
| 35 | Coldfront | "Everything You Want Me to Be" | single | But as a result, you are not a creator of light. |
| 36 | Gold Route | "Happier" | single | I realize other people have lots of other theories for why you are not a creator of light, |
| 37 | Dan Bull | "Injustice" | Injustice +1 | and why you've been given every privilege available in an inequitable society and still produced nothing anyone will cherish for a second after you die unless that's their name, too, printed on it. |
| 38 | Perc | "Look What Your Love Has Done To Me" | Bitter Music | But in confidence, between you and me and never mind those monks with laptops, it's not that you're a bad person, or that your father was a bad person, or that you cheated on your taxes, or that you're dishonest. |
| 39 | Public Service Broadcasting | "They Gave Me a Lamp" | single | Plenty of other bad dishonest tax-cheating people with bad fathers have lived productive lives. |
| 40 | The Mountain Goats | "For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands" | Goths | It's that you don't read books. Those people are right. |
| 41 | Omnimar | "I Go On on My Own" | Poison | Because you don't read books, you don't understand how to interpret or communicate ideas. |
| 42 | 3TEETH | "Divine Weapon" | Shutdown.ɘxe | TV is full of crap in any case, of course, but when people who read books watch TV, it doesn't affect them the way it affects you, |
| 43 | Sie Gubba | "Arven" | Arven | and this allows them a certain flexibility to choose whether to believe stupid shit or not. |
| 44 | The Mirraz | "raison d'etre of raison d'etre" | single | Whereas you, without this option, are left to believe whatever people tell you. |
| 45 | Head Phones President | "Alive" | Realize | And when people who read books hear contradicting ideas, they can think about different things they've read, and imagine that these seemingly contradictory things might also have books worth of explanation behind them. |
| 46 | Rise Against | "House On Fire" | single | This only sometimes helps them make better choices about what to believe, but it always helps them understand how contradictory ideas could arise. |
| 47 | Arvinger | "Rast" | Rast +3 | Whereas you, without this skill, are only able to classify ideas as tremendous or the worst ever based on instinct, |
| 48 | Cold Creek County | "Homemade" | single | and since your only meaningful instinct is that you are tremendous and everything else is the worst ever, |
| 49 | SikTh | "Golden Cufflinks" | single | you naturally and inevitably retain only the shittiest ideas. |
| 50 | Scale The Summit | "Mass" | In a World of Fear | You can't help that, so don't beat yourself up about it. |
| 51 | Lowercase Noises | "A Course of Strengthening Medicines" | The Swiss Illness | Yes, I know. I'm joking. I realize self-criticism isn't one of your things. |
| 52 | Klamydia | "Kingi ja kuusipuu" | single | But here is the thing: Darkness gives us control of the light. And then it sits down and waits to see what we will do with it. |
| 53 | FM2000 | "Äiti" | single | Have you ever been to a midnight mass? Oh, too bad. We do them at night, obviously, and the darkness changes everything. It seems very simple, but it's incredibly powerful. |
| 54 | Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | "La Mitrailleuse" | single | What about concerts, do you go to concerts? |
| 55 | Sparks | "What The Hell Is It This Time?" | single | No, that's right, you don't really listen to music, either. |
| 56 | Shinova | "Para cambiar el mundo (feat. Sean Frutos y Second)" | Sesiones Frente a Frente 4 | Not reading books makes you have bad effects on other people, which is half of why everybody always seems to be against you. |
| 57 | Modelo de Respuesta Polar | "Todo Lo Que Fui" | Cara B 2 | Not listening to music is the other half, because it leaves you disconnected from joy. |
| 58 | ITCHY | "Keep It Real" | single | So not reading books is why you can only win by cheating, and not listening to music is why you can't enjoy winning even when you win by cheating. You see how they go together? |
| 59 | The Preatures | "Girlhood" | single | But anyway, the thing about concerts is the same: they have them at night, so that they can control the lighting. |
| 60 | Kilter | "Waste Time" | single | The darkness creates an emotional space where normal rules are suspended, and then the lights and the music can create new shared feelings of awe. |
| 61 | Kiss Daniel | "Sofa" | single | It's like your campaign rallies, but the emotional opposite: eliciting dreams instead of feeding resentments. |
| 62 | Avatarium | "The Starless Sleep" | single | And between you and me and never mind those monks, although we're going to go out there and tell everybody that we discussed our shared commitment to peace, |
| 63 | Red Moon Architect | "Return of the Black Butterflies" | Return of the Black Butterflies | you should leave here knowing that I know, and people who read books and listen to music know, that you are not on their side. |
| 64 | Sabbath Assembly | "Shadows Revenge" | Rites of Passage | You are on only your own side, and this never becomes less true even when you hit upon phrases that make people cheer for you. |
| 65 | Trad.Attack! | "Nüüdispolka" | Kullakarva | We will both condemn the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians. Of children. |
| 66 | Shakira | "Nada" | single | But neither you nor I can step into the soul of this particular horror. We have each made life choices that render us unqualified to comment on the dreams of girls, or more particularly on girlish dreams, or really on dreams in this sense at all. |
| 67 | Second to Sun | "Вирго митт" | single | We've had two thousand years of Catholicism, and yet humanity is really probably more precarious instead of less, and we're still fighting over imaginary monsters and for fuck's sake you stood there and said "one of the world's great faiths" like you think nobody remembers anything you've ever said before, and now we all kind of think you don't remember the things you say. |
| 68 | Ultima Thule | "Spegelbild" | Spegelbild +1 | But here is the thing: if a meteor hits us tomorrow, people will say "Well, that sucks, but we just weren't at the point of technological development yet where we could prevent that." |
| 69 | June 1974 | "Violent Days" | single | But if Mal A Lago slowly sinks, an inch at a time while you defend polluters and denialists, and you leave a dying planet to your children and grandchildren, they aren't just going to shrug, they're going to point to the water lapping at whatever letters are still there from your name, and say "That narcissistic fucker who didn't read books used people's fears against them." |
| 70 | Völur | "Breaker of Oaths" | single | They're going to say "Once he realized he couldn't save his golf courses, he didn't bother trying to save anything else." |
| 71 | Bad Channels | "Exo" | single | They're going to say "He condemned a random terrorist for blowing up kids coming out of their first concert, but if they were American girls he would happily take away their health care, and their public safety, and their votes, and he would never understand the joy in these songs, and he would never be here himself tonight to dance, and if it were his kids he'd send a car service to pick them up. And so, at the worst moment just as at the best, he would not be there." And they know this about you, and no amount of bluster about freedom will make them forget that you're an abuser and a bad human who would pose with Sauron's glowing orb if you thought it would make Sauron like you. I don't even have kids and yet somehow I figured this out. If I could get kids to leave a midnight mass feeling like those kids leaving that concert felt, religion would be a totally different force in the world. |
| 72 | Smidley | "No One Likes You" | single | But that's my problem. You have your own. Thank you again for your time. My priests will show you the fastest way out. It's a small city, but I wouldn't want you to stay here any longer than necessary. [Emilio, do you know where I've left my headphones this time? Ah, thanks. Emilio, that may be the saddest boy I've ever met. Oh and Emilio? Can I trouble you to take this phone back to them?] |