I’m Spilling My Guts Out Here, Mom

ESG “Six Pack (Original Version)” – Pretty much every ESG song is dominated by a stark bass groove and nimble percussion, but “Six Pack” is one of the few to fill its abundant negative space with a bit of guitar. The track still feels extremely loose, and there’s no mistaking the fact that the rhythm section is the main attraction in the piece, but the tingling, distant notes seem to drizzle down like trebly raindrops, and serve to echo the restlessness and subdued melancholy expressed in the song’s lyrics. (Click here to buy it from Soul Jazz.)

Michael Showalter “The Apartment” – High school poetry is pretty much always good for a laugh, especially when the writer is attempting to make the reader believe that their work is Serious and Mature, largely by way of aping the tone of Important Writing without much understanding of its subtleties, flaws, or its context in either the past or the present. There’s always humor to be found in clueless pomposity, but there’s a special, unmistakable innocence to terrible high school poetry, mainly because its writers are so earnest and eager that they fail to notice that they are totally inept at conning anyone besides themselves. In this clip from his first comedy album, Michael Showalter revisits an extremely pretentious poem that he wrote for his high school literary magazine. The gritty observations in “The Apartment Building” may be laughably inauthentic, but there’s nothing phony about the blend of bemusement, self-deprecation, and outright shame in his voice when he reads the poem’s most cringe-inducing lines. (Click here to pre-order it from JDub.)