Hello, if you're new to old filters / new light, welcome.

My name is Ned and I write about indie music and urbanism, politics, climate, and day-to-day stuff.

Here's what I've been jammin' to lately:

old filters / new light / Ja... If You Only Could • Donna Th... PREVIEW   ​

Donna the Buffalo - "If Only You Could" (Live in Monroe, UT)

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Every illness has its false summit. The moment when you finally feel better, but you're not actually out of the woods. You're just no longer at rock bottom, so any feeling that isn't rock bottom feels like normalcy. That's when the false summit hits. Energy returns, congestion recedes. The suns always shining. It's a January thaw. You've been forcing work from home and now you shut the laptop and stroll the neighborhood; your first exercise in five days.

But you return defeated, fatigued, nostrils crusted from snot rocket volleys. You're not better. In fact, you're worse. There's a dip in elevation that takes you on the true path to the peak.

Take Lone Survivor for example (or how I refer to it, Operation Enduring Artistic Freedom): Mark Whalberg thinks he's reached the high ground as he runs for life away from some angry Kalishnikov-carrying bad guys. Extract is steps away, but no, it turns out to be a trick of the eyes. The summit was false. It's no summit at all. He needs to descend to the start of a whole new ridge-line.

My own false summit was today; I've been engaged in my own sort of Lone Survivor affair, but instead of marooned deep in Taliban territory, I was sick with a sinus infection in my apartment. Between the fatigue, face pressure, and general lack of will, I did not do much besides transfer myself from bed to couch and back.

But on my feet I was today. Euphoria surged through my revitalized limbs, which I stretched and reached like a tree blowing in early spring. I put my airpods in and Donna the Buffalo came on, a remnant of my time at my parents' house in Maine over Christmas.

Did I dance? Maybe. Was I panting for breath, my raw lungs screaming "we're not ready." Certainly. I tumbled with glee down the backside of the false summit to "If Only You Could." It's reggae-tinged roots jam going on for over seven minutes, and yet I've restarted it countless times today. Music for the climb.

Hudson Freeman - "If You Know Me" (Acoustic / in the Corn version)

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Social media is bad, but it's not all bad. Sure, it's responsible for the fraying of our social fabric, spikes in adolescent depression and anxiety, and the polarization of politics, but sometimes I find dope music on it. Scrolling to Hudson Freeman playing the most run-it-back riff of 2025 in a cornfield in flyover country, while the peepers provide backup vocals, may have been worth all that negative stuff.

The studio version of "If You Know Me" adds a Gen-Z take on Crazy Horse (think "Cowgirl in the Sand" if it was California sober and talked openly about their relationship with their therapist), adding a pinch of distortion, a smidge of violin, and little chorus while keeping the viral bones of the cornfield session intact.

If you know me like you think you do
You'd just tell me I'm off
You'd just read me the news

The Whitest Boy Alive - "Gravity" (Live in Sicily)

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I count The Whitest Boy Alive's 2006 Dreams as a major sleeper college soundtrack album for me (ahem, though I went to uni in the 2010s), with certified indie bangers like "Burning," "Golden Cage," and "Figures" defining how one can relax every muscle in your body while slouching on a futon in a hazy room, looking very serious and bopping your head with yeah I know this one intent.

The follow-up Rules came on the other side of the Great Recession, and is forever tied to its piano-driven dance-rock single "1517," plus the supporting slow jam "Rollercoaster Ride." Though I've listened to Rules front-to-back many times, I couldn't name you many more tracks besides those. So when I was in Portland over Christmas, meeting up with friends at Arcadia (an arcade bar in Maine, go figure), I was torn from my game of boomerang air hockey (look it up) and flew myself into that unique sort of rage when you know the band but not the song (I shazam'd it and got scored on).

The Whitest Boy Alive only put out those two albums, but was able to cement a unique sound. They moved in the different direction than 2000s sentimental indie rock which dominated rom coms and buddy flicks for years, but not far from sentimentality in general.

Their songs usually involve a lover's quarrel or conundrum. You might see yourself in the protagonist, but you never feel too bad for him. Sort of like a friend who's always complaining about minor love life travails. Call me when you're at rock bottom, not the false summit--eh?

Skinshape and The Horus All-Stars - "Interstellar"

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Dem not mountains, dem waves.

Big Thief - "Not" (Live in the Bunker Studio)

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Big Thief is the music I turn to if I need the perfect blender for angst, anger, and apathy. Sitting around sick these past few days, doomscrolling the murder of a mother of three in Minneapolis by an ICE agent left me feeling all three of the A's. It's pretty easy to get depressed or want to turn away as this stuff is coming in every day now. Of course, I have that sort of luxury. A lot of people in the country don't.

There's no silver lining here, but there is an imperative not give up hope or leap into compliance with authoritarianism. Renee Nicole Good died for her country. She died so that we can see the reality of the ICE raids, the militarization of the police, the subjugation, fear, and violence that immigrants (and non-white citizens) face every day under Stephen Miller's ethno-nationalist vision of America.

Her death shows that the notion of "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" is false, and that complying with a law enforcement officers orders is not enough to prevent you from being murdered on the street in your Honda Pilot, while your kids' stuffed animals get soaked in blood.

It's clear that people don't join ICE to protect our country or to enforce its laws. They join ICE so they can bully, abuse, kill with impunity. And they're using tactics honed by the military and US intelligence over dozens of anti-insurgency campaigns overseas. The war, it seems, has come home.

...and the rest of 'em... Sven Wunder might have crafted the 8th with their jungle jazz, mallet-percussion versus wood flute track "Take a Seat".... enjoy some light, straight-forward indie-surf bop from Twin Fin... a mesmerizing jam from Alice Phoebe Lou... and Cola hits us with a ticking time bomb of psych-indie-surf sweetness...

Blowback

S6 Episode 4 - "Zulu & Foxba... Jan 5 · Blowback 75:32   ​

If you're looking for some context to the US foreign policy as of late beyond AI-generated images of Maduro in different outfits, I can't recommend Blowback enough. Each season, they focus on a different country where the US has waged imperial campaigns, whether hot wars in Vietnam and Iraq, cold war in Cuba, or supporting apartheid regimes in Angola.

It's the sort of American history you wished you learned in high school, although my (flex incoming) AP US History teacher did stop teaching us the test material for a month, and had us do deep dives on CIA-backed coups in Latin America. And yeah, I don't remember a thing from that test but I can tell you a lot about Pinochet and the Chicago Boys.

Volts

Another pod rec, for my energy wonks out there. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii breaks down messaging around climate and clean energy, and how the focus is now on the cheapness of clean energy, like solar, rather than its environmental benefits. "Clean is cheap and cheap is clean.," Sen. Schatz emphasizes, while noting that he's been a climate champion before it was cool, and admitting that trying to instill in voters they should care about ~externalities~ and global climate patterns can be a hard sell. But now that renewable energy is rapidly becoming the cheaper option (thanks O'China), Dems have an ace up their sleeve, if they can play it right (not holding my breath).

He also eviscerates the Trump Admin energy policy, which includes banning offshore wind and halting solar projects on federal lands:

He wants shortages. Indeed he does. Abundant clean energy, whether delivered by the free market, the government, or a coordination of both, means freedom from fossil fuels, freedom from DrillBabyDrill, freedom from foreign conquests to seize oil reserves. It would mean the end of American foreign policy as we know it. It'd be a newly sober America, shell-shocked from her century-long bender to secure oil supplies and dominate the petrodollar. But remember, solar is lib-coded, so it must be bad.

​Substack link here.

Hang ten and usher in the green revolution.

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Thanks for listening.
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--Ned

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