The Song
Title: Keep to Myself (In F Sharp Minor)
Artist: Such a Mess
Album: Greetings From (split EP with Post Season)
Year: 2015
The Story
The ways that I’ve discovered new music have shifted dramatically over the years. There were the songs I heard my parents sing, the ones I heard on the radio, the ones recommended by friends and the ones from sampler discs. Live lineups, back when those were a thing, were an opportunity to check out new bands; the same could be said of well-written reviews. To readers under 30 this will sound like praise for the rotary telephone but I swear it’s true: The iTunes Music Store changed everything.
In addition to being able to buy solo tracks for 99 cents—a truly groundbreaking development in 2003 and also a laughably outdated one in 2021—the Music Store was one of the first places that offered anything like a recommendation algorithm. Beneath whatever song or album you were listening to in 30 second increments (that was a thing, I promise), there would be a list of albums that “You Might Also Like.”
Usually, I didn’t.
But as an iTunes power user, I dug through those recommendations semi-regularly for years. One day, driven by who knows what motivation, I clicked on the link for Greetings From, a 2015 split from Such a Mess and Post Season, two pop punk bands that I don’t care about in the least. Since that day I’ve been listening to “Keep to Myself (in F Sharp Minor)”, a Such a Mess song that doesn’t sound anything like a Such a Mess song.
“Keep to Myself” is dark and depressive, occasionally bare and occasionally thick with power chords. Its rainy-day aesthetic is ably communicated by the dimly lit band sequences of the song’s official video (if not by the blue skies of the outdoor segments). Sneakily jangly guitar riffs set up delightfully mopey vocals in an alternating pattern until the song explodes into the kind of screaming that I thought had gone out of style in 2005 with Paramore’s “My Heart.”
Only about half of that sounds like praise but somehow it all is because, together, it all just works. If things go right, this newsletter might be a little something like that: Disparate pieces coming together, even if they seem at odds, to create a viable whole that will give you something to think about, some new music to love. At least that’s the idea. Together, we’ll see how it goes.
I give “Keep to Myself (in F Sharp Minor")” four out of five stars.