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The Depressing Music Thunderdome - You're in Too Deep, There's No Way Out

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
Elliott Smith and Lucy Dacus

I feel like no Depressing Music Thunderdome would be complete without some Elliott Smith in it somewhere. There are literally dozens of his songs that would be real contenders here, but I decided to go with my personal favorite. The song is about trying to escape the pressure that both others’ expectations and your own put on you, and (I think) it’s sung from the perspective of the person or thing you go to for escape. Ultimately, though, a habit like that can be just as painful and destructive as the pressure you’re trying to escape from, and can leave you just as trapped. The lyrics suggest that alcohol is the particular kind of false escape Smith is talking about—hence the double meaning in the title “Between the Bars”—but I think it works more generally, too.
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
Round 1
Match 29

@SpoonyBard 's Prisoners of Fate from Chrono Cross and @4-So 's So We Won't Forget by Khruangbin meet
VS

Match 30
@Pajaro Pete 's Can't Get out of Bed by Crimson Apple faces @q 3 's I Believe ~From the Bottom of the Sea by Kokia
VS

Thoughts and feelings?
 

q 3

here to eat fish and erase the universe
(they/them)
We'll see if I manage to vote in time this round, but for now I can at least make the embarrassing confession that I first discovered Kokia via this Madoka Magica fan video which helpfully includes translated lyrics (and contains spoilers for the Madoka Magica anime, naturally). She's a very talented singer-songwriter, and while most of her work actually tends to be lighter, something about "I Believe" still hits me right in the melancholies where the only thing that keeps you going is the vague and irrational hope that it can't be this awful forever.
 

4-So

Spicy
So We Won't Forget (which I will admit is a melancholy song as is but is far more effective in the context of the video.)

and

pass. (Don't understand Japanese so any meaning for the second song is right over my head, and the first song doesn't strike me as depressing or sad at all.)
 

SpoonyBard

Threat Rhyme
(He/Him)
Prisoners of Fate (or 'People Seized With Life' if you went by the old jankier OST titles that were common way back when) is a track that hits hard for a few reasons. It plays during a really somber moment of the story, in a ruined facimile of one of Chrono Trigger's more memorable and joyful setpieces, it sounds almost oppressively mournful, and to top it all off it keeps playing as you're thrust into a boss battle against the most harmless seeming dork of a fisherman who will nevertheless wreck your shit if you're not ready, and even if you are. But you can't stop at this point, having come so far in the story so you throw yourself against this brick wall of a boss over and over becoming a different sort of prisoner yourself as the title of the track becomes more meta.

Or maybe that's just my experience

Crimson Chrono
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
Gloomy Beings

Joy Division is one of the classic Sad Bands, and it’s hard to vote against them and the great Ian Curtis, especially in the first round. Still, I have to give it to Lady Day, whose magnificence is on full display in this song.
 
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