Reshaping the Self with Ought’s “More Than Any Other Day”
Despite my best attempts at personal maintenance, I gently unraveled during my first year of college in New York City; the parts of my internal machinery that once fired more or less on all cylinders seemed to be replaced with junkyard parts that creaked and groaned upon the execution of even the most basic tasks: having a polite conversation; stumbling my way through a subway turnstile; clumsily fumbling for my wallet and tripping over my words while ordering breakfast; looking down at dismay to see that I have no cash in the aforementioned wallet (the breakfast joint is cash-only). I was a blank slate, a dry white page in an empty notebook, an old sedan whose AC you have to kill right before you start scaling a large hill because whatever makes the air cold and whatever pushes the air out at you eats up too much of the car battery, and without the battery the transmission won’t work, and without a working transmission you have no shot of driving up that hill. You might as well just roll backwards. I was almost rolling backwards. I boasted 200,000 miles.
Right before my new self was about to turn one year old, I had just settled into the habit of hopping on the Metro North from Grand Central into White Plains about once a week to pay visits to a group of friends who had made it out of the city with their respective machineries intact. In tandem with this habit, I also made it a point to write in a journal as often as I could (however briefly, and often on the train). More often than not these notes would be a simple recounting of what I was up to on any given day, or documentations of unexciting events happening in my periphery that I thought were worth writing about as an attempt to analyze the mundane in order to gain a better understanding of it: a frustrated conductor who doesn’t understand a passenger’s broken English, an old man coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing while maskless during the throes of NYC Covid, a conversation with a seatmate about school and where home was and what I want to do with the rest of my life, if anything.
Another habit I incorporated into this journaling was to write down what song I was listening to at the time of writing; this led to specific songs being intrinsically tied to events and periods of time in my life that could otherwise be seen as uneventful. In an entry from November of 2020, I detailed my frustration at the train because of a multi-hour delay due to a freak snowstorm. I was trapped in the cold, lacking essential layers to keep warm, and desperate to get back home to the city. Not much more was documented in that particular entry besides a shaky note regarding the song I was listening to that simply read: “Ought – ‘Habit’. Wow.”
I was introduced to the nervous and spastic Montreal art-punk quartet Ought while I was waiting for that train via a playlist one of my friends from White Plains made for me. The standout track of their 2014 record More Than Any Other Day, a six-minute slow-burn called “Habit”, was the first song on this playlist, and it ended up being the only song that I listened to from that mix that day. It felt like nothing I had ever listened to before – equal parts Marquee Moon and Lift Yr Skinny Fists, though somehow resembling neither at the same time – and it felt immediately essential. Frontman Tim Darcy’s shaky delivery spanned from apathetic talk-singing to desperate pleading in the track’s chorus; he asks the “you” in the song: “Is there something you were trying to express? Is there a weight that you are trying to unload here?” Upon hearing this line for the first time atop a flurry of upper-neck guitar voicings, sprawling and melodic bass, and droning keys, Darcy’s manner of communication somehow had the power to transform the “you” in the track, which was once rhetorical, into a direct message to the listener, a direct message to me. I wanted more than anything to respond to him immediately with the same desperation that he employed on this chorus; I wanted to say, “Yes, there is something I’m trying to express, and I can’t get on without it.” The nuances of the newfound confusion about the world that I just couldn’t shake and the desire for reshaping the old self I once had was, it seemed, heard in all its detail by Darcy and responded to in “Habit”. I can’t recall any other time where a track evoked the feeling of directly speaking to me in that way; I’m not sure another song quite like “Habit”, in all its anxious catharsis, will be written again. To me, in those pivotal weeks of rebuilding my understanding of the world, it was a perfect song. I wanted more than anything to have it be the only song in the world, a song that only I would ever know about.
I sat with “Habit” for almost a month before diving into the entire record, start to finish. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the rest of the record delivered this exact feeling of direct connection — of being sung to rather than sung at — that “Habit” did. Part of this effect was due to the admirably consistent sonic landscape the record boasts; More Than Any Other Day sounds like it was recorded from beginning to end in one take, directly in front of the listener. The atmosphere is roomy while somehow remaining intimate and close, and the performances on the record are incredibly honest. Darcy’s guitar playing is unsure, subtly dissonant, and fairly untraditional (I don’t think there’s a single chord voicing on the record below the fifth fret, maybe even higher), and bassist Ben Stidworthy’s detailed melodic playing paired with this guitar work crafts a surreal and dizzying airspace of harmonic re-contextualization. Tim Keen’s jerky grooves (always putting a fresh spin on the classic post-punk backbeat) and Matt May’s extended voicings and signature distorted Nord keyboard parts make for a sound that feels like it’s being dangled by a thread off the edge of a skyscraper. It concocts the feeling of the listener being in a well-lit, tiled room with the band playing for an audience consisting of only the listener and every self the listener has been before. The airiness of this record sometimes makes it feel almost naked, and the group’s contentedness in diverting from a “full” sound is a surefire sign of serious musical chemistry that infects whoever is on the receiving end and, somehow, makes them feel naked, as if the listener’s life is on display for the band in front of them.
There’s also something essential to be said about the energy and message of Darcy’s lyrics throughout More Than Any Other Day, and that is that a lot of the text feels improvised, but is incredibly intentional and declarative; while he’s often slurring words into others, saying things incoherently, or just unapologetically speaking nonsense (which can be seen post-drone-break in opener “Pleasant Heart” as well as on some lyric sheets with words simply denoted as “?”; the cues taken from Dadaism are not surprising given Ought’s art-school background), the lyrics miraculously still retain an incredible amount of palpable emotional weight. In “Pleasant Heart”, Darcy seems to be speaking directly from his gut on top of guitars squealing like spring-reverb alarm clocks in an attempt to untie the knots in his stomach and get something real across, but he never quite gets there in this track – the lyrics maintain a magical and surreal artery that compliments the skeptical nature of the uneasy musical arrangement perfectly: imagery of something crawling inside of someone’s heart, being trapped in a shell, and, as stated before, the complete breakdown of language in the section of nonsense. Similarly to how I was feeling regarding my bafflement at the newfound surrealist nature of the world around me, “Pleasant Heart” spoke to the realization I was having regarding my need to relearn almost everything; Darcy’s verbal disintegration was exactly what I heard when I tried to speak.
When the almost-title-track “Today More Than Any Other Day” came around with its droning, mantra-esque intro of “we’re sinking deeper”, I was sinking with it. After the album’s distressed and dreamlike opening, I felt suspended in mid-air; with “Today More Than Any Other Day”, I was slowly being brought back down to the ground. When the tempo rose and exploded, I was back on earth and completely bug-eyed, as if all colors were incredibly saturated, people around me were full of love and waves, and the flowers donned smiling human faces. In this track, Darcy, more sure of himself and almost on the brink of mania, analyzes and celebrates the mundane in order to embrace his life and its extraordinary ordinary. He professes at the beginning like a buzzing prophet; he names the song directly, instructs the listener to open up their textbooks to specific page numbers, gives us a quick count-off, and declares proudly: “Today, more than any other day, I am excited to feel the milk of human kindness.”
He goes on to list off the routine tasks of the everyday that he is now implored to be grateful and ecstatic about: grocery shopping, choosing what kind of milk to buy, interacting with a stranger on the train. Despite the use of the pronoun “I”, the song seems to function more like a set of affirmations for the listener rather than something personal, a “say it with me!” kind of energy to uplift and inspire the listener to welcome the ordinary, the subtle, and give it as much love and energy as the most exciting things that have ever happened to you. Keeping these lyrics safe inside my head, I actually practiced my own versions of these same affirmations daily: “Today, more than any other day, I am excited to get breakfast, to stumble over my words, to walk down the street, to engage in polite small talk, even if it doesn’t make much sense to me right now.”
The rest of the record continues down this path – suspension to release, surreal to grounded, content to desperate. The one-two punch of “Weather Song”, a track only describable as a musical mood-swing, and “Forgiveness”, a droning and crooning cut debating the logic behind its title subject (comparing it to a drug taken apathetically; the song begs: what is the use of forgiving, or being forgiven, if it’s done without specific intention?) is perhaps the most exaggerated instance of these ideas. “Weather Song” spoke to me directly with its switch-flip verses and choruses. The lyrics dart back and forth between laments of debilitating anxiety (“Tell me what the weather’s like, so I don’t have to go outside”) and wide-eyed proclamations against that same anxiety (“You believe in more than keeping time with life,” and later switching the pronoun “you” with “I” in the second chorus). While complete opposites on paper, the unrest of “Weather Song” paired immediately afterward with the balladry of “Forgiveness” and its lyrical and structural nuances serve the exact same purpose in communicating not only discomfort, but an intense desire to overcome that discomfort, and only almost getting there; the latter track ends with Darcy’s cry of, “While I wait, while I wait”, and the listener is next to him, waiting too for some semblance of an explanation and held above ground only by the single-note drone of a violin. Like “More Than Any Other Day”, “Forgiveness” functions both as a piece personal to Darcy, but also as a set of questions posed to the listener. It asks the purpose of forgiveness not only for others, but for the individual as well, and the only answer that’s given is that you have to lie in waiting for one, and become complacent in that waiting.
I stopped listening to More Than Any Other Day after this track for another couple of months; for some reason, I couldn’t bear to digest the record’s final three tracks. I felt so seen by this record — exposed by it, even — and I decided that I’d had enough for now. Part of it was that I didn’t want this parasocial recognition of my mental state to end. I didn’t want my imaginary relationship with the seeming prophet Tim Darcy to exhaust its 40-minute runtime. I still needed to feel seen, and if I saved this last piece of the record, I could unbox it when I needed it most. When I cracked it open again, I was a little more desperate; I reached a point of diminishing return in trying to polish up my internal mechanics; I obsessed compulsively over the fact that I just wasn’t there yet, that I was now at the point of growing up (I was about one and a half by this point) where I held a consistent sense of aphasia. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I knew that I had something to say of great importance, but I couldn’t say it. I was seemingly inches away from a complete rebuilding. I was a wind-up toy waiting patiently to be released, to spin around freely, yelling at the top of my lungs: “I understand.”
“Around Again” documents that kind of near-manic obsession and highlights its extremely subtle details and aftereffects in a way that most songs about those subjects fail to communicate— turning a light on and off again, wasting your time by wallowing in feeling like you’re consistently wasting your time, magically stumbling upon rhyming words in your everyday speech and declaring yourself a poet — and through doing this, transcends yet again into surreal and confused territory. A few verses into the song, Darcy proclaims, “What about this is natural? What’s wrong with being wrong? What the hell would right even look like?” before falling back on a mantra that ties the chorus together in a mindful little bow: “Go slow, go slow.” The song fluctuates between near-out-of-body mania and short-lived groundedness for nearly half its runtime.
In most of the tracks on this record, Darcy is looking for “something” — the word itself is used more times than you can count on both hands throughout the album’s 46-minute runtime, and “Around Again” is no exception to this motif; that “something” is being searched for (similarly to “Habit”, though in this song it has an almost personified implication), it’s just within earshot, that “something” is “up ahead”. When that something comes, it takes the form of Darcy’s menacingly apathetic acapella declaration:
“Why is it you can’t stand under the sun, but you can stick your head into a bucket of water and breathe in deep?”
This moment was incredibly jarring to hear when I came back to listen to it, to finally finish what I started. I expected the inviting and vulnerable relatability of “Habit”, or to receive a new set of affirmations like “Today More Than Any Other Day”. Instead, this question was, to me, a necessarily abrasive moment of being spoken to directly on the record, and a sort of tough love. I was asked unflinchingly and unapologetically, “How are you unable to feel what is directly in front of you, while at the same time being content with keeping your head in the sand?” It was, in that moment, the exact thing I needed to hear. The song’s outro let me ponder the question that was just asked to me; the arrangement walked in circles for minutes and gently faded out with Darcy’s half-hearted, matter-of-fact speaking: “We’ve reached the intermission, and the Lord is in attendance. We can ask him all our questions, I know I will: are we halfway there yet? Is it the same distance forward and back again, or are we there already?” I also wasn’t sure if I was halfway there yet, or if I was there already.
The penultimate track “Clarity!” (featuring a dainty exclamation point in its title) comes back to “something” and takes it in the exact opposite direction of “Around Again”, replacing the latter’s looking-over-your-shoulder paranoia with a feeling that is much more celebratory. The punctuation in its title is without a doubt deserved; in this song, Darcy’s profound “clarity” is that the “something” — crawling into your heart, yearning to be expressed, creeping up on you, and, in “Clarity!”, looming over you that you want desperately — was “all there already”, that the exact “something” that was urging to be expressed in “Habit” was already released into the world, that it’s okay to not understand that the things you are often looking for are often directly in front of you. The importance of learning to “stand under the sun” and getting out of that bucket of water mentioned just one track before is Darcy’s “A-ha!” moment, and it functions as the listener’s as well.
By the time the closing track “Gemini” comes around with its menacing groove and absolutely explosive noise-rock chorus of, “One of a kind! One of a kind!”, the listener is, at this point, well prepared for the final set of affirmations Darcy is giving us, listing them off in bullet points like a drill sergeant spitting out orders at a wide-eyed platoon of fresh soldiers. He begs, almost sounding as if he’s attempting to convince himself, “I retain the right to be disgusted by life. I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight,” and later on, “I retain the right to have an end in sight. I retain the right to be absolutely mystified.” The song, like most on the record, toes the fine line between joyous mania and a complete breakdown. Again, the “something” comes back one last time; rather than asking “Is there something” like in “Habit”, Darcy, foaming at the mouth, declares, “I know there’s something on your mind, I know there’s something in your life, that you’re one of a kind.” His delivery is somewhere in between terror and amazement, love and obsession, admiration and cult-like idolization. He asked me if I was a Gemini, and I said no; the album ended. With this last three-song suite, it was as if Darcy was aware that I took a break from digesting this record, and instead of saying, “I see you” like he was saying before, he was now presented with a newfound sense of urgency and directness and saying, “I see right through you.”
The absolute power of More Than Any Other Day lies not just in its performances, its atmosphere, or its lyrics, but most importantly and fascinatingly in the way that it communicates itself to the listener. The record and all of its contents are incredibly vulnerable, so vulnerable in fact that it makes the listener feel just as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable — if you relate even adjacently to any of its eight tracks, you will find yourself completely immersed in them, and you can stay in the world of the album for as long as you want. I stayed in “Habit” for months because I was desperate to understand myself but simply couldn’t; I stayed in “Today More Than Any Other Day” for weeks when I was finally ready to find contentedness in the mundane and my inability to understand it; I stayed with “Gemini” until right now, four years later, because I, like Darcy, affirm myself daily that I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight. I truly believe that, nearly ten years ago, Ought captured something one of a kind with More Than Any Other Day, and that the record has the power to impact any listener in any headspace, not just an anxious one, or a disoriented one, or one that is rebuilding itself; it just so happened to find me at the right time (music has an incredible way of finding the listener at the exact moment when they need it most, but this could be a whole other essay). While this record is certainly not the only album that has ever “spoken” to me, it is most definitely the only record out of thousands I’ve listened to that saw right through me for what I was at my core, through several stages of me re-entering the world. The “something” that I couldn’t express in my personal rebuilding was that I didn’t understand what it meant to be a person, or what it meant to be singular in this world, or how to handle the terror of the fine line between absolute freedom and being completely alone. “Gemini” ends with a final, single-word chant that helped me come to terms with those things, a call to make sure I’d never fall into the terror of the latter again and to remember to keep the record’s laundry list of affirmations by my side daily: “Wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted.”