NO GRIDS CAN CONFINE ME. SCHEDULES TREMBLE AND BOW DOWN BEFORE ME LEST THEY BE BROKEN BENEATH MY FLIP-FLOPPED HEEL LIKE SO MANY BEFORE THEM. Here’s some thoughts on a free debut EP from 2009 that I somehow missed and just discovered a fortnight ago. No build mode. Am I hip and cool with the youths again now?

If The Hallows EP was released at the same price it currently retails for (pay-what-you-want), then it really is a puzzler how this one sneaked by me. Snuck by me. Dealer’s choice. There was a lot of wrock releasing at the time, but I was hungry for it, and was gulping down any nerd music that was easily accessible as a free MP3. The lightly-used Facebook page for The Sorting Hat indicates that yes, the album was originally released on Bandcamp for free, in 2009. This was before you could even do Bandcamp embeds – still very early days. I’m not sure I even heard of Bandcamp until 2010 or so…

Regardless of why, my recent discovery of The Sorting Hat’s only release has reminded me that wizard rock is truly the gift that keeps on giving. I was thinking about this recently – it’s not that it would be impossible to listen to, absorb, and create critical opinions about every piece of wizard rock in existence. It would be eminently possible to listen to every wrock song before you died. But it hasn’t really been feasible for a long time, and delightfully, it’s getting harder every month! There’s constantly something new and interesting releasing, whether it’s exciting new voices like Sara Idani, so-perfect-you’re-annoyed-you-didn’t-think-of-it comp ideas like How Weird Can You Get? and Camp Wrock (ETHICS ALERT: I did some writing for both albums), or old heads spinning out new, even further afield side projects like filch.

That might be what I love most about finding a lost classic from the Good(ish) Ol’ Days. I know there’s some young hearts in the community who probably do listen to just about every wrock song that comes out each year, but even here, 19 years later (HOLY HECK WAIT WHAT IF WE ACCEPT 2004 AS THE START DATE IT’S 19 YEARS LATER FEELS LIKE THAT SHOULD BE A THING OR SOMETHING), there’s more coming out than I’m able to process with my Critic Mind, which I now feel obligated to always do out of a self-enforced fey curse from The Realms Beyond Intention. And I know that’s going to be true for plenty of people of all sorts of ages. Which means there’s always another hidden gem ready to be discovered, just around the corner.

Which would be the perfect time to transition to actually talking about the music, if I didn’t feel a sudden need to mention just how invaluable YWWRRRWRWWWWRRWRWWYYYYYYYWRRYWRWRWRR is to the community as a whole, and without which I probably never would have accidentally stumbled across this band I had never heard of, and you wouldn’t be cursed with these words entering your brain, fundamentally (if minutely) changing you forever. Honestly the most important meta-project undertaken in wizard rock since the dearly departed Wizrocklopedia Wiki. Gone, but never ever forgotten, good buddy.

Death really changes you, huh? I mean, of course, it is The Final Change – but even that isn’t true, is it? You continue to keep changing and having small effects on the world, both physical and metaphysical. Your consciousness just isn’t (guaranteed to be) along for the ride. But what I mean to say is that being party to death changes you, right? And life has become structured in such a way that under ideal conditions, dealing with the number one thing humanity has always struggled with is a challenge that is ramped up to. You begin with a pet, maybe you say goodbye to a shorter-lived pet like a rat, and then later to the family dog your parents got when they were newlyweds. Then you will experience the deaths of relatives, usually from farther away and slowly working inward, but this is of course not always the case.

Such was true of one Harry James Potter, for whom Death was a constant companion. Whether it’s his tragic backstory and the slow whittling away of all the Marauders, the fact that every year he would enter the Underworld in some way, face Death, and emerge through some symbol of rebirth, or him wearing what the wizarding world’s version of Jung would call a universal symbol of Death being and old but just-distant-enough friend. This comes to a head when he unites the symbols of Death’s main 3 verbs – inflict, undo, and escape – and finally truly dies and is truly reborn, simultaneously completing and breaking the cycle of trauma that haunted him his entire childhood.

“I Open At The Close” (840 words in before I actually got to the music, that’s honestly not bad) is a great opener because it gives an accurate – and positive – first impression, but it’s also not the best track on the album, avoiding a feeling of “it’s all downhill from here”. The most essential adjective I can come up with for The Hallows EP is “haunting”, or possibly “haunted”. The eerie, the grim, and the inevitable all make their home in this record, buoyed not just by smart instrumentation working together with an admittedly average voice to create a strong emotional auditory texture, but also the better-than-average lyrics that deserve their own sentence. The lyrics are some of the best in all of wrock in a very specific metric – they really nail a specific line of being deeply, thoroughly about the Harry Potter story, while also being vague and universal enough to not be completely hit over the head with it. It’s closer to the wave of Tolkien-esque fantasy rock in the 70s and their predilection towards capturing vibe and feeling and a couple specific names, versus the filk tradition that influences much of wizard rock and its tendency towards summary and revelry in the specifics. To be clear, this is art, no one approach is objectively superior, but this is a specific style of making an artistic reaction to art that is fun to see done so thoroughly and so well.

I love that many of these songs are clearly about the world of Harry Potter, the darkness on its edges and hiding at its center, but whose specific POV is harder to suss out. In the opening track, which character the singer is voicing changes seemingly at random. The structure of this song is non-traditional, but not chaotic. There is a kind of regimented order to it, even if that order is more sensual than mathematical. The first verse (which is also kind of the chorus) and chorus (which is also kind of a verse) are from the point of view of the Resurrection Stone itself. We then transition to Wormtail’s resurrection chant in the graveyard (the end of Harry’s fourth year being the middle and inflection point of the whole series, it contains the most literal of Harry’s annual May Forays Into A Realm Of Death until the final forest confrontation, and is just set in a freakin’ graveyard and there’s ghosts and everything). Then back to the Stone and then the next chunk is possibly the Stone but also quite possibly one of the Force Ghosts Harry summons before walking through the forest again? And then the next verse-ish is seemingly from Petunia’s point of view?? And then who even knows on the final lyrics (Dumbledore? The Stone? One of the Marauder Force Ghosts? Harry himself? Who knows)! It rules!

Me from 10-12 years ago would probably hate this aspect of “I Open At The Close” and the song’s defiance of my instincts to Solve The Puzzle and Unlock The True Meaning Of An Art. Now I love how it flits around to various failures and disappointments and traumas in Harry’s life while keeping that precious warm-in-defiance-of-the-cold moment of Harry literally kissing his childhood accomplishments goodbye and preparing to take a hero’s ultimate step as the center rock the meanderings whirl around. The song itself feels like a mind aware of its impending end reflexively casting back to seemingly random moments as the brain tries to suddenly pack as much awareness of Life as possible into every second fleeting second.

“The randomness of death is merely a reflection of the unexpected joys we find in life.” – Captain Hikaru Sulu

“Get Your Hallows Up” is the lightest, most danceable, and for lack of a better expression, most “traditionally wizard rock” of The Hallows EP’s offerings. While on the darker, grungier side of 2000’s basement techno, it’s still an electronic pump-up-the-jams dance hit about drinking butterbeers with your romantic interest and shout-chanting some Harry Potter words on the chorus. In that way it’s similar to other songs of the time, both wrock songs in specific and made-for-the-internet fandom music of the era in general.

…it’s also about Death. Again! Man, I love this album. And increasingly, as I write this, I’m falling in love with the realization that I probably would not like this album very much at all if I found it within the first few years of its release. But we’ve all been through Some Things in the last 10 years, to say nothing of the last 14. And now I am just tickled pink by the most Misuse Of Muggle Artifacts Office-sounding song on a record being fairly fun and mosh-worthy but also actually being about Death, dancing and singing and expressing in the face of Life’s cruel punchline, but also metaphorically gearing up and mentally steeling yourself for the many handshakes with Death to come. Now on the other side of the Pandemicene’s starting gun and it becoming increasingly obvious that we are on a rapid collision course with an avoidable apocalypse we refuse to avoid, the themes of “Get Your Hallows Up” are more relevant than ever.

Which is a very amusing thing to say about a song titled “Get Your Hallows Up”! I love a tasty dissonant dichotomy. You know, when I was a youngin, I ate four dozen dissonant dichotomies every morning to help me get large. But now that I’m grown? Five dozen. Barge-sized. You understand.

The previous song was at times explicitly from the point of view of The Resurrection Stone, and this song is occasionally explicitly from the point of view of The Elder Wand. This implies a Cloak POV song that never transpired, though the Cloak is also name-checked in the chorus.This is another thing that probably would have annoyed me, but now I just enjoy the messy nature of making art being exposed for all to see. Some times plans don’t come to fruition the way you expected. But I am so glad to have this incomplete trio, this accidental diptych, instead of getting nothing because the original plan couldn’t be achieved.

…so here’s the thing. Snobby Sundays were always supposed to be distinct from my usual articles by dint of featuring a more restrained use of language – not just in terms of family-appropriate word choices, but also in terms of volume. Snobby Sundays are not supposed to be exhaustive polemics, but a summation and exhortation to go experience the music yourself. And we are getting dangerously close to two thousand words right now.

“The Riddle That Is Tom” is perhaps the hauntingest track on an EP filled with tunes all some various flavour of haunted. It can be quite annoying as a writer of words about art (about art) when one finds the perfect word to describe a dominant tone that resonates throughout an entire work. I will sometimes go to silly lengths to avoid using the same word too often, it just makes my brain happy to use as many non-identical words as possible. Like, I had to stop myself from changing that last “words” there to “single unit collection of phonemes”. It’s a problem. And then The Hallows EP comes along and just ruins me with consistency. Ugh I hate this album!

That’s not true. I think it’s really neat and should forevermore be cemented as an autumnal wizard rock classic. I didn’t even get to my favorite song on the record, and I barely scratched the surface of my second favorite. Yes, I am wrapping up things now, rather abruptly, but I like to think of it as good ol’ TnP – a tease and pitch. I have teased a great album to give you that “I’m feeling slightly put-off and unnerved but it’s okay because I purposefully chose media that would put me in this situation” headspace we love in the coming months (in the Northern Hemisphere), and I am pitching you on the idea that you should head on over to your local Bandcamp and give it a download. I would recommend such a course of action to anyone reading this, but I especially recommend it if you happen to be someone who has seemingly developed a pattern of releasing seasonal holiday-themed wizard rock remixes that are ostensibly vaporwave but really can only be described as “weirdcore” (or possibly “weirdwave”?) – just in case such a person exists and happens to be reading these words.

And hey, if you’d like my more in-depth thoughts on the rest of the album, lemme know and maybe I’ll pop something up over on the usual bat-channel. Seriously, if you haven’t heard The Hallows EP before, do something nice for yourself and go check it out. Well, I can’t promise it will be nice for you, but I can promise that if you undertake that action, then an action will have been undertaken by you. And that’s a guarantee you can take the wizarding bank, which kills people and traps wild creatures in chains and yet is still somehow more ethical than real banks!

I don’t remember if I used the usual sign-off here or a bespoke Snobby Sundays sign-off and I’m to scared to check, out.

Oh, and thanks for reading!

 

I should probably say that more often.