ZAVALA

Shit been suckin' ass all over the place lately, yea? From the international to the national to the state to the community in front of my fucking face, ASS IS BEING SUCKED EVERYWHERE. 

Where the fuck do I start? Terrorist attacks overseas. Terrorist attacks here. Rich racist white men running for president on the platform of being rich and racist and white men. Anti-Muslim fucking everything. Physically and politically violent attacks on Planned Parenthood. The fight against using common sense climate change. Cops in America killing people. People in America killing cops. Cops in America committing suicide after we've already crowned them hero. 

Fuck.

It's hard to write about the music you love when you're too fucking sad to get the fuck out bed. It's hard to WORLD PREMIERE something when a bunch of fellow music heads were just murdered in their favorite place on earth.

It's impossible to not feel so fucking vulnerable that the only way to combat the anxiety of not being at home with the door locked is to accept the paranoia and just BE another fucking paranoid American. The last month has been incredibly difficult to find anything to be happy about, let alone write about, but as much as music is therapeutic to me, writing about music seems to make me feel momentarily better than just listening to the music itself. 

Then I randomly see a Facebook post from Zavala announcing a free EP up on bandcamp and all of a sudden the universe is slipping me the mickey I so desperately fucking needed.

Zavala's Memory Traps EP is four songs. Four fucking songs. All instrumental, no words. 

Maybe I'm different, but this was the best news I had heard all November. Zavala's music doesn't just inspire me to move, it inspires me to move to tell other people about it so they can move too. Zavala has somehow consistently crafted some of the most beautifully soul enriching music of the last decade, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say all his shit, whether solo or with Dark Time Sunshine, was made just for me bro. Fuck all ya'llz. 

Memory Traps is, succinctly stated, exactly what the universe needs right now.

When the world is crashing down and fucking burning around us, and all we're trying to do is live our fucking lives, love our fucking loves, laugh our fucking laughs; maybe it's important that we let the music move us chest up towards the sky as opposed to the fucking terror of living life in 2015 causing us to cower in fucking fear. Memory Traps feels reverent towards the issues impacting us, but respectful of the reality that without a soundtrack to lift us, the weight of the world will literally quiet our screams of defiance into a meow of a fucking whimper. 

Sure, it's dancey, and I never knew Zavala to be this type of animated, but maybe we need to fucking dance right the fuck now? Maybe we need to look past the appearance of the situation as being terrifying and potentially life threatening, and just fucking dance the fuck out. Zavala's Memory Traps feels like we're all behind this rusty chain link fence that stretches all the way to the fucking heavens, and just on the other side there's fires burning, bombs being dropped, black flags with white script waving, gun battles, children crying, and death, and sorrow, and famine, and fucking pain, and here we are dancing.

We're dancing because if we don't fucking dance that fence comes down and that's our fucking reality. 

We're dancing because if we don't fucking close our eyes and enjoy the senses we were given, if we don't revel in our sources of joy, if we don't fucking FORCE ourselves to happy, we die. 

Maybe Zavala's Memory Traps is pay what you want because Zavala realized that through tears we can still dance, through pain we can still heal, we just have to turn away from the fires and let their fucking warmth somehow keep us going, because this ain't the fuckin' way I'm going out man. I ain't succumbing to no Footloose mentality motherfucker. I'm not dancing to ignore the world's fucking problems, I'm dancing because of them.