Utopia Teased
"John Peel said something that I thought was really profound. He said when he gets a record from somebody and he doesn't like it, he assumes that it's his problem and that the band would not have made that record if there wasn't something valuable about it."
- Steve Albini
As this caustic Pitchfork review of a Tool album shows, it’s easy to tear someone down for being different from you. In the review, the author creates a parody of a 16 year old Tool fan who vainly obsesses over the technicality of metal and who listens to Tool while thinking about how much he hates his fucking boss. The review is funny and, honestly, shitting on people often provides a temporary feeling of clever superiority.
But...what if that author truly took his imagined Tool fan/Gadzooks employee seriously? By asking why a song can connect with someone instead of asking if the song is cool, I think we’re able to learn so much about ourselves and the people around us. This is no simple task! Its harder to describe why something is good or interesting than to dismiss it, but in an era defined by troll terrorism, is the answer really trying to troll back in a way that supports our “us” over their “them”?
I’ve found that giving an album a second chance can bring shocking rewards. Ironically, many albums that I’ve spent time to re-assess now mean more to me than the ones I immediately connected with.
Streaming now enables the optimism of re-assessment more than ever before, making it easy to revisit albums that for whatever reason you didn’t get the first time you listened. I ended up re-visiting Stephen Steinbrink’s soft rock masterpiece Utopia Teased because Spotify auto-generated a playlist of artists I had listened to in the past few months. For whatever reason, the algorithm chose to feature Stephen’s photo as the playlist cover art and the man had such a pristine, fabulous mustache that I felt compelled to re-listen to an album that I must have previously heard and forgot.
I was blown away. How could I have missed this?
That’s quite the ‘stache, dude.
On re-listen, it actually made a lot of sense that a soft-spoken album about false-starts and feeling overwhelmed by life’s biggest moments might not have grabbed my attention. Steinbrink stitched his teens and twenties together by gently strumming in the vast DIY scenescapes of the American west: Phoenix's all-ages gallery circuit, the collegiate never-never land of Olympia WA, and Oakland’s unregulated warehouse artist slums. After self-producing two records where he refined his unhurried tenor and tender finger-plucking, tragedy struck.
In 2016, an illegal, semi-improvised warehouse converted into artist squat / studio space caught fire. Residents called it the Ghost Ship, and at the time the blaze was the deadliest building fire in California since San Francisco’s infamous 1906 earthquake. 36 people died. Investigators suspect that bad wiring and neglect in the warehouse-turned-residence caused the fire. Steinbrink said the event made the world feel like “a hideous joke.”
The artist retreated to a shipping container where he would sleep and compose Utopia Teased over many months. Living monastic in a capitalist wasteland where entire scenes go up in flames because it costs $3,700 per month for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. You can never tell how autobiographical song lyrics are, but in a song named “mom,” Stephen sings “I was so desperate / and out of money / my allegiance was pledged to no one.”
If Steinbrink’s press around the album is to be believed, he spent his first two months of work in a mania. He did nothing but try to write as much music as possible while taking acid everyday. In a shipping container. And seriously, if any of you out there are kids wondering if you should take acid after your friends die in fire, let me say in no uncertain terms that it is a terrible idea! This is what happens:
Warning to the kids: this is you on drugs!
After a few too many trips to the astral plane, Steinbrink broke down and decided to take life at a different pace. He said his attempts to move past grief through LSD were unsuccessful, stating “it didn’t work. I didn’t find the portal.” He put down the electric Kool-aid and began piecing together the album and himself.
Utopia Teased is full of character studies that could be autobiographies. They dissect grieving without a rudder through a series of sharp turns of phase. “You’re my keys when they’re lost in the couch,” he sings. Describing life as a series of dirty chevrons and wax receipts on “Empty Vessel” he sighs, “Pour the beer into the sink/ You’re 31 and don’t believe in anything.”
And yet the guitars arpeggiate pensively and throughout the record bright synths provide a therapist’s couch for Steinbrink to lay on. You get the sense that he is working through his sadness rather than wading in it. This results in uplifting songs about feeling down. It’s never easy to see someone go through a hard time, but it can be inspiring to see them working their way out.
I love the stretch on this record that starts with “Maximum Sunlight” and ends in the ethereal “Become Sphere.” Steinbrink’s protagonists throw their car keys at the moon, realize that infatuation is something they can only see in their lover’s eyes but never in their own, and face off with their semi-estranged mother. Paul Thek’s diary is quoted. The guitar figure on “Coming Down” repeats an introspection-ready cascade of gorgeous notes. Short clips of field recordings dot the record, suggesting the moments Steinbrink took between takes to make sense of the world around him.
On “mom,” accompanied by Melina Duterte of Jay Som, he expresses the emptiness of trying to connect with a parent who does not understand your life choices while you are struggling. The gravity of life overwhelms him one everyday detail at a time. “I can’t talk about Christmas plans at Starbucks,” he sings, “just for today I want to feel small.”
The experience of composing Utopia Teased seems to have been genuinely cathartic for Steinbrink, changing the way he writes music. "Now when I write a new song, I feel like I’m gently welcoming it into the room, not pushing it through the door,” he said. Sometimes stumbling through grief is all we can do, and there is real comfort in knowing that a person can grow haphazardly through tragedy.
When I first combed through the details of Steinbrink’s life, it was easy to caricature him as the hipster version of Pitchfork’s teenage Tool fan. A DIY strawman stuffed with insular house shows, naive drug use and oat milk-fueled takes about how the only way to listen to Animal Collective is on tape cassette. But when I moved past my stereotypes and took the time to really listen, I found a real person living with loss and hoping that by sharing the mundane details of his life he could make them profound.
Grab a record that you've skimmed and give it a second chance. Let it catch you right after that break up, or when your flight gets delayed for the fourth time, and turn you around. Even if you've never identified with it before, now might be just the time you need to hear it.
