| Death and Doubt | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Album by Ann Xiety | |
| Released |
November 29, 2016 (YouTube) January 3, 2017 (Bandcamp) |
| Recorded | Massachusetts and Connecticut, November 2012 - November 2016 |
| Genre | Experimental, Folk, Noise pop, Pre-shoegaze, Outsider |
| Length | 18:17 |
| Label | Independent, YouTube |
Death and Doubt is the debut album by American poet Matthew Little under the name Ann Xiety. It was released November 29, 2016.
Background[]
Recording an album had been something Little wanted to do for years. In high school he had tried to start a band with his friend Kevin called The Blue Marilyn, even though he had no experience musically other than singing in a chorus in elementary school. Nothing ever came from the band, but Little did first attempt to write lyrics during that time.
Years later, in 2012, after meeting his ex-boyfriend who would influence Little to start writing more serious poetry, he had a resurgence to try and create original music. While his boyfriend was at work, Little would spend his time messing around with different sounds using his boyfriend's guitar. Although his boyfriend, who knew how to play various instruments, didn't care much for what Little played, Little liked them enough to record them.
Recording[]
Interest in recording an album came back to Little in 2015; while listening to the instrumental for what would be "Coming Back", Little harmonized with it and quickly wrote down lyrics, then recorded himself singing. The song went through a series of demos with different added effects, some of which Little released on Tumblr, and was planned to be the original opening track. About a year later, while at work on Death and Doubt, Little reedited the song one last time after accidentally slowing down the guitar, which gave it a strange effect that he hadn't expected.
The idea for the route Little wanted to take for the album hadn't yet been realized. Early on, Little wanted it to be grunge sounding, music akin to that of Sonic Youth or Hole. Before Little had begun to use his old recordings, he toyed with the idea of recording a rap album that used only samples, but only a few songs were created. He also experimented with just using either household items or humming, but nothing he got sounded like anything he wanted to use. He then decided to go back and sift through what he already had, as he still had multiple instrumentals saved from previous jams.
Most of the songs' instrumentals were recorded during his time in Connecticut between 2012 and 2014. Little doesn't know how to properly play guitar, so instead of focusing on bars and chords, Little relied on repetitive notes and having the amp set on various distortion modes. Then, while putting the tracks together, he altered them further using his music editor, Audacity, adding echo and gverb effects. Little also used these tricks over his vocals in an attempt to hide any flaws in his singing voice. Little recorded the lyrics using his iPhone 5S; as for the instrumentals, two were recorded using his old 2008 series Flip Cam and a Kodak digital camera, which both in their own ways added a grainy texture to the sound. Most of the music appears on Little's compilation album, Matt's Lost Instrumentals, which was released in 2014.
Although at the time he had wished he could have recorded using professional microphones, Little enjoyed the graininess using cameras gave off, likening the sound to that of a tape player. It added to the grungy aesthetic he had originally went for, as well as the outsider feel he worked with.
Two of the songs are heavily sampled; "(Are You) Coming Home Today" features two instrumental parts of the song "Flipside" by Lana Del Rey, and "Dah Dah Dah" uses the opening guitar rift from the 1989 song "Just Talk" by A.C. Marias. Little resorted to sampling because at the time of the album's conception he didn't have his guitar to create original tracks after using what he had left over from previous sessions.
Structure and Lyrics[]
My music isn't music you'd want to hear in your car and it isn't music you'd share on Facebook or whatever. My music is designed really to be those songs you listen to at 3AM by yourself because they're private, they're confessions. The tracks are products of isolation, you listen to them alone because it's a time when you just want to be alone.
Little was influenced by several artists while recording Death and Doubt; he sites The Velvet Underground, Kurt Cobain, Daniel Johnston and Lana Del Rey as the album's biggest musicians that impacted its flow, and also has sited the album Melanchole by Daniel Johann under his side-project Salvia Palth as a key contributor.
Most of the songs end with a prolonged stretch effect that somewhat mimics traditional shoegaze closings. Most, if not all of the tracks contain errors either within the production or Little's vocal delivery; a few of the songs start well only to have their time signatures fail to match the flow. While it frustrated Little initially, after it was released Little like that it truly had "that outsider-y sound I wanted. It's really music that says something but as it does you have to fight the fact that it's not professional. It's very juvenile."
Death and Doubt opens with a wordless looped guitar strum that gradually gets more and more distorted as it plays, and it abruptly introduces the next song "Coming Back", which underwent several cuts until it was finished in 2016; it references Little's previous relationship and how he had to go back home after being with him. The third track, "(Are You) Coming Home Today", is the only song to have percussion, which consists of Little banging on his television with a lighter. Little describes it as a "love song for junkies", and wrote it using his mother and step-dad's toxic relationship as inspiration. The song's breakdown features an audio clip of his step-dad verbally berating his mother, taken New Years Eve 2014. While the song is much more upbeat than most of the tracks, it has been described as "depressing" by people he has shown it to, which was the angle he was initially going for.
The fourth track, "Cope" uses an instrumental recorded at his father's home sometime in 2016. Lyrically, Little suggests without going too far into it that he isn't coping well about a person in his life who isn't sober. "Death and Doubt" consists of guitar warped from being recorded by a camera and heavily laced with gain; Little sings a very monotonous chorus that talks about not being accepted for being gay, complaining out loud about the hatred, eventually stating that he doesn't know what he would do if nothing "is done about all this death and doubt" referencing the suicides of LGBT people and even those shot and killed unjustly.
"Sequence", the fifth track, is an instrumental recorded in March of 2014. Little wanted lyrics to go with it, but thought that it sounded good enough to be a filler track. The final track, "Dah Dah Dah", was the final song recorded for the album; it was finished November 23, 2016. Of the other tracks, it's atmosphere is the least dreary; the song is about Little in love while being annoying and stoned. It was Little's most edited song in one file; while most of the tracks were only edited using just one or two vocals and the music, "Dah Dah Dah" utilized around three voices layered twice each, along with a stretched version of the guitar softly playing under everything else.
Album cover[]
The original cover designed by Little, showing his original project name, Matty, with the then album title "About Me". The same photo would later be heavily edited and used for Death and Doubt.
Originally, Little's project name was Matty, after his nickname most people refer to him as, and the album's title was "About Me", but midway through production he started to refer to himself as Ann Xiety, which was his proposed drag name had he ever gone into drag. It fit the persona he gave off in the album's dreary, damp music.
The cover for Death and Doubt features a selfie from Little's Instagram taken October 1, 2015 superimposed over a photo taken of trees in passing on the highway that Little had forgotten about. The cover originally had typography but was edited out.
Release[]
As the songs were being finished, Little distributed them freely on his personal Tumblr account. Originally Death and Doubt was going to be released December 1, 2016, but Little was impatient and decided to release it November 29 as a video on YouTube instead.[2] When he shared the album on his Tumblr, he wrote,"It’s terrible. I’m sorry. It came from periods of depression and marijuana."[3] Before this, Little released a YouTube video as his first EP containing three songs from the album, "Coming Back", "Cope", and "Death and Doubt", and used a different cover, which featured a heavily edited photo of himself taken in 2011. The EP features a song that doesn't appear on Death and Doubt, an instrumental of very dark industrial music that samples the songs "Forsaken" by Korn, and "Linger" by The Cranberries.[4]
Death and Doubt was then released a month later, January 3, 2017, on Bandcamp for anyone who heard it to download for free; Little didn't want to make any revenue from it, as some of the songs used other people's music, as well as the fact that he doesn't consider himself a professional musician, and didn't want to have people pay for his "half-assed" music.[5]
The album is due to being converted over to cassette tapes courtesy of his cousin Eric, whom himself is a musician that plays for the band Ella Vader in Virginia. Little has given him permission to freely hand out the tapes to people at the shows he plays at, for exposure as well as entertainment.
Track list[]
Ann Xiety - Coming Back
All songs were written and mixed by Little except where noted.
- Opening (1:35)
- Coming Back (2:13)
- (Are You) Coming Home Today (3:36)*
- Cope (2:12)
- Death and Doubt (2:31)
- Dream Sequence (2:08)
- Dah Dah Dah (4:02)*
*Track 3 contains portions of the song "Flipside" by Lana Del Rey.
- Track 7 contains portions of the song "Just Talk" by A.C. Marias.
References[]
- ↑ http://skittle-happy-matt.tumblr.com/post/156096426022/whenever-i-do-make-music
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGTtUELXFE
- ↑ http://skittle-happy-matt.tumblr.com/post/153845006903/here-it-is-my-debut-album-of-outsider
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsgGamVxCME
- ↑ https://annxiety.bandcamp.com/album/death-and-doubt-2
External links[]
- Death and Doubt (full album) at YouTube
| Original Penny's Poetry Pages article, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0. |