It’s quite challenging to listen to and interpret the lyrics of an album that you are simultaneously trying to write about. I’ve discovered over the past eight months that things work best if I ignore lyrics for portions of the daily record, bang out a couple of paragraphs, then put the writing to the side for a track or two and really focus on the music as a whole. If a band is capable in the lyric department, I’ll usually pick up on a couple of good lines during one of these writing breaks. The opposite is true for the band with garbage lyrics.
What do I do when I flat-out cannot understand the lyrics, though? Look them up online? You think I have time for that? I’m a busy man. But what if I listen to a record praised for its extremely personal lyrics? That’s a tough one.
Yeah, I’m still not going to bother looking these up. It’s the artist’s responsibility to make what they are saying understandable. Perhaps Trevor Powers (the man behind Youth Lagoon) doesn’t want to be understood. The truth is, his reverb heavy and often high-pitched vocals fit in perfectly with the dreamy aura created by The Year of Hibernation. Not quite chillwave, this record has a bit more substance and second-listen potential than I’ve heard out of that genre.
After a couple of days filled with high-intensity, bone crushing, heavy hitting dance music, Hibernation made its way to my ears at just the right time. This is a calm, relaxing record, but still has the complexity that I love in my music. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll even figure out what Powers is singing.
Swole Ear 
Day 236 song: “Canon”, Day 237 song: “Cannons”. What trickery is this?
Lyrics can also be aesthetic. The New Pornographers’ frontman Carl Newman acknowledges that he has no idea what he’s writing about most of the time, as long as the words sound good together, and do they ever. A band worth checking out if you want to talk about lyrics without having to look them up – great fun, too.
Also, loving these guys.