[Riff] Swallowing The Sun, Not Complaints.
Consider this one… a different kind of primer for a Gig Review, which will be out likely in the next couple of days.
Before we begin this Riff (a moniker used for the more free-form/non-review nebulous thought-pieces here at ISC), I have but one simple question.
It’s an odd one, but a question nonetheless.
Q: What does a bunch of Finns playing melodic death-doom metal via Swallow The Sun, iconic Porcupine Tree sadboi-prog anthem ‘Trains’, the beach, and knuckling down for some different-but-real gratitude have in common?
Two ways to answer this.
The first likely being more in alignment with your own queries, answered by seminal hero of middle-aged-Dad humour, Peter Griffin.
Answer #1 (Short Answer):
Answer #2 (Whatever This Article Is, Really):
Y’see, as I’m also going to discuss in our Content Roadmap for topic-domains like Gaming in upcoming pieces (I’ve got a lot lined up writing-wise in the near future and beyond, hope you like words) - proud, grateful, humbled and even awed as I am about the evolution of this site/podcast… I’ve got something majorly stuck in my craw. It’s been there for a while, too, and I’m well past the point of being able to suppress it in order to tackle the furious, unyielding and plentiful torrent of emails, tasks and such associated with running a busy operation like this one.
That thing is, well… it’s our tagline itself - ‘Art. Hobbies. Riffs. Mental Health.’
I think we’ve done exceptionally well, might I say so myself, in covering the middle part of that slogan - Riffs, and to a lesser extent, Hobbies (thanks Elodie for some fantastic Tabletop contributions, and our awesome logo!).
And whilst ‘Mental Health’ is inherently baked into part of the overall discourse in our coverage, seeing as I don’t abide to Aussie male-bloke cultural expectations re: emotional suppression, feigning stoicism or the like - it’s been a long time and a lot has happened to me, to you, to us, as a society, since I’ve last made more free-associative written ponderances.
Which brings me to today. Yes, friends and those confused/irritated by what may feel like a titular/algorithmic bait-and-switch (I promise it isn’t, but it’s not just a pre-gig promo puff-piece either), I concede that many of you are probably already peacing out and that’s fine.
Part of directing something creative is the freedom of license associated with it, something I’m utilising right now.
Another part, more important I think, is with any kind of platform and a vision/values in mind, is stepping back from the unstoppable and nigh-unmanageable flood of incoming emails/requests and outgoing applications for coverage and just.. just sitting. Sitting and thinking, and being.
Science indicates this is actually very good for you, with boredom being not just an increasingly culturally shunned mental state, but also an important part of our cognitive routine. Think about it - do mechanics recommend we have our cars in 3rd-gear doing 110km/h down the freeway at all times? No, of course not.
So, why should our brains and the psyche within (defined however you want - identity, soul, etc) be any different?
It shouldn’t and it isn’t different.
Whilst my brain feels triple-dipped in dopamine-deficiency starvation/craving, via AuDHD and just being a modern person with a smartphone… I can feel that overwhelm on an almost daily basis, lately. I’ve turned notifications off for pretty much everything except emails, DMs and the odd system-related thing. I have zero notifications of any kind on my laptop, and relentlessly cut those hydra-heads with each shonky Windows 11 update, cursing their weird and current besottedness with ‘agentic’ AI (bullshit term, BTW).
I’ve curated my digital dietary habits fairly maliciously and judiciously - another science-backed behaviour I’d recommend of pretty much any and all reading this.
And yet? I’m just going to mash the keys a sec to demonstrate how the head feels: sadfhsafdkjhwablfwehbfi4f2ws.
To answer that above question, to correlate seemingly disparate concepts, I’ll need to speak to that sense of overwhelm in order to demonstrate how simple things helped bring me back from the brink yet again. Hopefully, it provokes some thought about engaging simply and directly with some things you enjoy but have been putting off or especially, even complaining about recently.
The draft of this has gone through a lot of revision, but it’s getting out of me finally.
To keep it contextually relevant, though? I will cast you first back to Friday. Friday afternoon, specifically, where I found myself just as stymied and dumbfounded in pooling melancholy and mass-insanity into more cogent thought as right now.
Swallowing The Sun:
Indeed, one of ‘those’ points came to a climactic head the other day.
Trying as hard as all of the rest of you to wear that thinly veiled, readily-primed face of pretend grace and perseverance, there’s nonetheless moments now and again where the sheer overwhelm hits the brick-wall of absolute, astounding, absurdist disbelief about the world around me.
I mean… guys? GUYS?!
We’re what, not even four weeks into the year. Four weeks, and yet…
Yet, the man facing his last gasps of narcissistic defence, of dying relevance, attention and healthily-back Yes-Man-ery in his employ, is having a fucking meltdown and the world’s paying the price for it. [Note: this whole thing’s not going to be a political screed, but you also can’t get around it given where we are to some degree].
Yes, in just four measly weeks we’ve seen The Worlds’ Most Annoying Orange With Bonus Toupee DLC completely break off from reason. From the numerous heinous, out-of-employment-scope and downright inhumane acts by ICE, the bizarre and out-of-touch attempts to walk back ‘I want to buy Greenland’, swiftly alienating his own voter-base, withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (one I’d like to point out all other countries including despotic regimes like North Korea are still party to), the burden of tariffs etc, etc.
I’ll give the fucker no credence except for the fact the emperor not only has no clothes but stripped ‘em off bare and butt-naked of his own accord, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t seriously concerned for the everyday wellbeing of my already-embattled friends and family members in the US.
What else is on in the headlines, huh? Headlines I’ve chosen to duck and weave with the desperate clobbered efficiency of a cornered UFC fighter?
Well, we’ve got mass-media unsure how to resolve cognitive dissonance, equally pumping the middle-management-executive shilling of apparent Tech God Sam Altman and OpenAI, Nvidia and the like… as they are to join the public outcry of denigration as fiscal numbers demonstrate what we all knew about this industry. It’s a resource-burning machine not many of us asked for, not in its’ current inefficient and money-grubbing format at least, but it’s also one quickly headed towards bubble or indeed collapse.
This wreathes a whole new labyrinth of individual flow-on concerns for both US and Australian, indeed international economic policy. At a time where the labour markets are this oversaturated, confused, fake-job-ad-filled landscape of chaos for applicants - and stress-filled hells for those still in skeleton-crews famished for boots on ground across many industries.
More and more, the lie we told ourselves once the gates were unfurled post-pandemic become glaringly clear: we cannot and should not just sit back and pretend the Rot Economy (to quote Ed Zitron), enshittification (to quote Cory Doctorow) or indeed this pervasive pretend-game of society as business-as-usual, is working.
The term ‘we live in unprecedented times’ makes me immediately want to commit seppuku and lacerate its’ sayings’ orators with my own intestines, going down in a brief and final blaze of blood-soaked glory. It really rubs me up the wrong way, much the same as many other tepid, tired, clearly out-of-touch corporate wellness maxims in this time have been.
And that’s a tension I know exists within you, too. It might not be salient in your conscious mind as your tummy rumbles a little bit too much for the liking en-route to pick up milk and bread. Increasingly overpriced, are-we-heading-towards-a-Weimar-Republic-hyperinflation-or-not priced milk and bread. The tension might be avoidable for a while, sifting through mountainous reams of emails and notes from meetings themselves could’ve been emails. It might be less potent in your mind in the immediate face of the bill at the servo (‘gas station’ for those US folks reading at home), and rightfully so.
We’ve spent the past few years primarily just trying to survive, in a game that’s always been rigged but now has the rigging fully and clearly on display.
Oh, that’s just those of us fortunate enough to be writing articles like this or indeed reading them.
Let’s not forget that there is an unprecedented level of genocide happening in South Sudan right now, a level of barbarism I need to slap a Content Warning on just in case you do pique your own interest and look into it.
Let’s also not forget out our Ukrainian kin - just because Putin has decided to devastate his own population by turning modern warfare into a grossly inefficient meat-grinder like WWI’s Passchendale, doesn’t mean we should conveniently forget there are masses of civilians huddled under rubble, searching for loved ones through scrap.
It’s… a lot. It’s so much, and it’s all happening right here and now.
And aside from maybe pointing a few of my sparse remaining dollars towards some causes, or bleat-venting about it in public domain just for the catharsis alone, let alone my bystander-effect incredulity… there’s not much that can be done.
Oh, there’s one thing - I can complain.
I feel like I’m complaining here and now. I am. But that’s okay. It is perfectly valid, reasonable, rational and even healthy to get some of this shit off our chests. It’s all such a constant swarm of information, and a lot of it ain’t good.
And that swarm of information has also infested and obscured the realms in which we seek moments of solace, reprieve and kinship from all that higher-order external scariness.
Logging on to Facebook or Instagram used to be a bit of a self-meme. You knew you were going to be hoovered in by the deliberately-engineered forces of background dopamine lever-pulls. Doom-scrolling. Having a laugh at the mirthfully non-self-aware proclamations by the mildly tech-illiterate, like a politician caught out searching porn terms via a status update later trying to backpedal and blame ‘muh Chinese hackers’. Ah yes, the sinophobe angle, nice one Boomer.
But… social media alone, now? It’s this swirling maelstrom of mostly-irrelevant noise and chaos. Subjectively, it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. Maybe you let out a brief ‘ugh’ or exhale a bit more sharply as you grapple, straight wrangle past an ever-increasing cluster of sponsored ads, AI-generated slop and other irrelevancy on the feed meant to ‘bring us closer together’ and ‘create community’.
‘Third space’ is a topic oft discussed lately, and I think it’s exemplary of us being a little more keenly desperate to escape the lockdown-induced nest of doing much of our day online. There’s a growing yearning for just simple, civic, open space.
And sorry to make this even more depressing, but what chance can we feel safe in doing that? How, when there’s a real and direct threat of being pulled up by the latest Rent-A-Cop over-exercising powers they weren’t formally given, in the US?
What about here, in Australia? My favourite thing on this Earth, the closest I have with some sort of ancestral druidic connection to land and kin like my First Nations land-stewards in the iconic beach? We had our Christmas festive season brutally interrupted by a violent bloodbath, fiercely directed in its’ othered out-group hate on one of our most globally iconic beaches, Bondi?
God. It’s all so fucking much, and talking about it really doesn’t feel like it’s helpful or productive - but I just need to draw on just some of so, so many threads entangled in our daily-life unconscious today.
‘Cause whether you like it or not, neuropsychology and cognitive science are pretty firmly rooted in fact. Lots of strong positive correlations at least. And those sciences demonstrate that even if you’re living a semi-hermetic informational existence right now, studiously avoidant of the news et al - you’re going to hear about it. Incidentally, from friends, coworkers, support workers, overheard in cafe’s and other public places. Some of this does get absorbed and, unlike you’re truly psychopathic in your underlying psychobiology, absorption of that is conducive to at least some measure of ongoing, underlying but chronic stress and dysphoria.
My whole life, I’ve felt like my mind was the place that Devin Townsend shouts about towards the end of a certain track on ‘Infinity’. (I’m not Devin’s psychiatrist but side note, bro is very neurodivergent-coded lol).
“Quiet! Quiet! Please!” our Canuck musical mad-scientist yells over bright atonal synth-screeches, “will somebody just turn down the noise for once! Please!”
God, but do I ever feel that shit in my bones. It’s a plea I’ll wordlessly exclaim to myself on a good day, my mind just so constantly infested with interrupting tangential thought-loops and the like.
But increasingly, I feel this about my surroundings. The state of things. I’ve always felt that way to a degree - growing up in a single-parent family below the poverty line slants your view on it all a bit - but it’s just.
Oh god shut up, SHUT UP.
GRRR.
Like you, I’ve got myriad reasons to complain about well, fuck All That.
And I felt that urge on Friday. The urge to just hit this blog or my feed or a poor unsuspecting friend in DM’s with a monumental wall of aaaaaaaaaaargh.
It’s all fucked, I think, hopping in the car and just completely, utterly over it.
So I key the ignition. Up pops Swallow The Sun, and in particular their latest album Shining.
Great, I smirk to myself with that eternal, perennial sneer of pseudo-intellectual indifference us metalheads are known for, that album.
It’s actually a great album, despite some contradictory reviews and overall polarising takes online which might imply otherwise.
My point is, I was just too steeped in dysphoria, in chaos, in finally letting all the above thoughts in, subsequently experiencing overwhelm, and just straight needing to extract myself Escape From Tarkov style to Ocean Grove main beach some 20 minutes down the road.
I’m fuming. I’m bristling. I’m raging, even. I start complaining to myself about each of the above, the injustice, my lack of control or perceived contribution to their resolution.
I’m driving to the beach reluctantly, too, and complaining to myself as I go.
‘It’s going to be shit’, that wonderful generalised-anxiety deacon of forecasting proclaims from somewhere in my busted frontal lobe, ‘it’s been on-shore for like a month, dude.’
And it has - for reference, ‘on-shore’ in non-coastie-bogan-bum-speak means the wind is, amazingly enough, blowing in the same direction as the shore. This usually results in a billowy and less pleasant beach experience, but if you’re not as mired in the Need To Complain And GET IT OUT as I was, you ignored that simple side-note.
It’s been on-shore for almost all of January. With billions of blistering blue barnacles, Tintin minute, glassy particles of sand and ocean materia, these relentless winds pounding the Bellarine Peninsula have swept aside my motivation to get back into something I’ve waited through a cold winter for - surfing. Something special to me, and these winds ‘weren’t letting me’ re-engage in it. Or so my personal excuses driven by broader mental health would have you believe.
On and on and on. Sure, I throw in a promissory ‘it’s okay to not be okay!’ as a meek counteract to this unceasing torrent of ingratitude. That works about as well as self-directed truisms do, and I just get more and more pissed off.
And then… something shifts.
Now, I’m not entirely sure if the chicken-egg was the music providing it’s eternal sensory-dampening/better-feeling effect and therefore a better day was first, or indeed a conscious decision to stop this nonsense for once then provided space to enjoy said music happened first.
It’s largely irrelevant, but poignant to my ultimate point.
At some point, somewhere on this ‘pfft, yeah, this will be fuckin’ greeeeat’ cynical drive to the beach, I make a decision. A decision to leave this album on, as once again I found myself briefly enjoying Shining despite its’ clear departure from say, The Morning Never Came, and my subsequent play-your-old-stuff type metalhead whinging on the beach-drive.
By the time I pull up at the indeed windswept, seaweed-smelling, washed-the-fuck-out front beach, though - something tangible has shifted in me.
Quelling another urge of complaint, this time one of many incessant daily barbs self-directed by executive dysfunctioning (I left my wetsuit and towel at home), I just.. I just brute-force this, now. I’m semi in disbelief that everything in me is complaining about being here, my spiritual home, and so I press against what feels like physical ache and plonk my barefeet on hot bitumen.
I turn the engine off and, following me like come-hither smoke-trails of a freshly-cooked pie in a Looney Tunes skit, I invite along some of the melodic lead refrains and catchy-riffage. The same mechanical compartment responsible for me doing accents and impressions and filling my day with echolalia-quotes-as-communication, is arguably also the austistic/ADHD perpetual radio station that’ll play songs sometimes at volumes so loud they border on hallucination, distracting enough that I physically cannot hear something else going on.
I attribute this less to a psychotic episode in full swing (I’ve had one before, this was certainly not it - haha nervous breakdowns amirite fellas?). It’s… easier and simpler than that.
Yeah. Turns out, despite my internal posturing and soapboxing about what constitutes a death-doom band, despite all these complaints, despite having hidden for weeks from my favourite season in terms of accessing one of two Brady-Temples (the Beach, the other is Gigs)… I step forward, amble through piles of sea-debris and stick my toes into the cool water.
Ahh. There. It. Fucking. IS.
There’s an immediacy and an urgency to which things like the strong briny smell of the air, the cool saltiness of the water, the beating heart of a spheroid nuclear-reactor above me some 160 million km’s away, all just reorient me. The thought-train doesn’t stop - it never did before we had a PC at home, nor smartphones, but by gum it got worse after that - but it… it feels doable.
I don’t in fact go for a surf as I kind of can’t. By rights I could’ve jumped in with the clothes I have there and then - I often do, to the chagrin of the less fish-person Victorians nearby (what is WITH you guys wearing hoodies and sneakers on the beach in summer? Y’all mad lmao).
But I don’t give in to the complaints, the invitations to think about how shit everything is, how much I’ve royally and completely fucked my own life in multiple domains/as a result of circumstance. They’re there, but I don’t accept the invitation as readily.
All this literary buildup to here, you’d think I swam to the Antarctica and back, hey?
Nah, man.
Funnily enough, it’s just simple dude. I wade aimlessly about in ankle-to-knee-height water for a solid 15 minutes. A mere pittance compared to the time I’d usually invest from sunk-cost fallacy alone, being it 40 mins return and ergo fuel/money to get here.
I just wade, and I semi-dissociatively and informally practice a bit of that good old Acceptance and Commitment Therapy stuff. Just let this incessant, roiling tide of complaining to/from/about myself and the world wash right over. Not trying to CBT-style actively intercede and replace with a more balanced/positive thought. Not dropping straight into the water and inhaling seawater until I’m no longer breathing.
No, I just go for a simple little walk.
I’m not there for long, but what stays with me is the reminder.
It’s the reminder that places, spaces and experiences like this are so precious to me, so dear, treated with the closest a secular atheist has to religious reverence, for reasons that are thankfully dumbfoundingly simple in the day and age of ‘will everything and everyone just SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR FIVE MINUTES?!’.
I didn’t achieve anything, except perhaps this post. I didn’t strive, didn’t make a performative post on social media. I was just there. I was there wrapped in as much sticky ADHD cognitive residue as damn near every other moment in my life but… I made it.
I made it past complaints, past the state of things, and I did something reasonably nice if brief for myself.
That Porcupine Tree song comes fiercely back into view, certain lyrics that in the past few weeks prior only inducing guilt now making a little more sense, a little more resolution.
“Always the summers are slipping away/Find me a way for making it stay”
I’m now writing this on Sunday, and I’m about to head to another gig thanks to the kindness of Your Mate Bookings. Like, literally about to get in the car and go soon, it’s not a quick drive.
And I’d be a liar if I said the excitement and sense of pre-emptive relief in being allowed a few hours within the hallowed halls of that special place away from [gestures to everything] wasn’t mixed in with a healthy dose of complaint.
But it’s a cherished space, and fortunately for me a reasonably accessible one. I’m thankful for that.
You see, like being out the back of the waves and immersed in saltwater, I can’t (other than some feverish note-taking into UpNote that is my ‘journalistic’ MO) be distracted too long or too hard by feeds, by shit news, by invitations to complain. There’s a special environment filled with special people and a special thing happening - it is too sacrosanct and frankly, so much better, than whatever’s going on via the thing burning a hole in my attentional pocket.
This is how Swallow the Sun and the beach are related. Seeing melodic death-doom played live will briefly transport me both more mindfully to within that very room inside the venue, but paradoxically also away via some tenuous whimsical connection to something beyond me. Nature and music have that power over us as humans because we evolved in exactly that fashion.
There might be a cost of living crisis and I might sure as hell be broke. But there’s spaces within my reach that provide bulwarks of sanity, of deeper and ACTUAL engagement (no, not metrics of engagement, engaging in A Thing directly). Try as my depressed/anxious/burnt-out spicy brain may, they also prove themselves very resilient against complaint.
Of course they do! They’re interests, passions, cool experiences. They’re experiences which in the beach’s case I’ve had more difficulty accessing/showing up to lately than I’d like to admit, but they’re there.
So yeah. Consider all of this lengthy tangential waffle an exercise in gratitude, but gratitude as defined by me and not pop-psychology schema.
We’re two months into summer now, and at some stage it will be slipping away. I’ve found a way for me to make it stay though, and that’s to (with some grit and fortitude) push pack all this extraneous to noise to reach out and connect with an environment, a space, an interest, a passion that holds little gatekeeping aside from showing up.
And what about you, Dear Reader? Is there a hobby you’ve been long neglecting because you too feel this inordinate amount of melancholia-soup within your gut? Your eyes feeling heavy even after three coffees because Mutant Christ on A Fucking Carousel, Shit’s Hard right now?
It’s my hope that by showing you that sticking to it and just giving myself a little bit of leeway, heading out if very briefly and superficially to enjoy a space away from all the rest, was meaningful. Oh and it reiterated my appreciation for the new material from the guys who are headlining tonight’s show, despite whatever contrasting opinions may exist around the new LP in particular.
I’m sure you have your version of the beach or a gig tucked away in a fairly accessible spot to you. Maybe it’s online, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s deciding to pick up an instrument, maybe you honestly just want a few hours of your teen years back and just sit listening to music lying down. Maybe it’s a video game or a TV show or a podcast or whatever.
There’s no judgement from me about what it is you feel has been missing in your life a little lately, nor if you find it difficult right now to past past this solid wall of invitations to instead complain. You’re alive and reading this in 2026 unironically, you earnt it by default.
But I do hope that in 2026, you get some opportunities for moments like this, and hopefully provide yourself from breaks, some buttressing of roots against the digital windswept storm that is our frantic lives.
Above all, I hope you and yours are and stay/keep well in 2026. I’m just here to dither on about things I like, but also demonstrate that we should never underestimate the small pockets of joy/escape/relief in our lives - they’re also potent pockets of hope that will see us through the year and beyond.
As Always,
Peace, Love and Grindcore - Brady.
I Mentioned Swallow The Sun - And You Know I Hyperfixate on Promoting Stuff:
Melbourne! You’re last cab off the rank. It’s a few hours away, but you’ve got time to secure tickets. If you see a homeless-looking scruffy guy looking down at his phone a lot, rapidly stabbing at the screen - that could be me perhaps.
Let’s forget the conceptual irony of seeing a Finnish melodic death-doom band called Swallow The Sun, and have ourselves a nice experience together. Who cares what cultural archetypes persist about heavy metal - we know it feels us with more warm-and-fuzzies than any self-respecting metalhead would deign to admit openly.
Despite that, have a private moment of acknowledging you do enjoy warm and fuzzies even if in doom-metal form, and see below for tour info, ticket links etc.
Gig Review out soon, stay tuned. Less waffling about the beach and our various social ills, more straight-talk about the show itself. Promise.
