Notes on Cameron Winter’s “Heavy Metal”
Just yesterday, post-Japanese Breakfast concert, I was barreling through my Hinge prospects when I stumbled upon a young man with the visage of a Victorian Irish orphan – in a hot way, of course.
I found myself browsing his profile. Misleading profile picture: check. Cigarette and whisky bottle props: check. Unhinged display of self-incrimination: check. Seemingly ticking off all of my boxes, I was ready to match. We could have chatted for around two, three days in a dick measuring competition of who’s cooler before one of us got bored.
But before I could hit him with a witty message, I saw it. There, under the Hinge prompt, “My guilty pleasure is,” I saw the wretched name. Cameron Winter.
I immediately hit the little ‘X’ at the bottom corner.
Listen, I’m not a Cameron Winter hater. In fact, I’m a fan. However, if you’re out on Hinge of all places proclaiming your love for this 22-year-old emotional terrorist, I, personally, want nothing to do with you.
Because, if we’re being honest, Cameron Winter isn’t one of those artists you listen to to enjoy yourself. He’s like a gurgling Fiona Apple, a modern Tom Waits — string me up for making that comparison, see if I care – a male Mitski. What do all these artists have in common? Unconventional, at times simply unbearable vocals with wretching, raw lyrics that make our stomachs churn in agony and delight.
They’re also artists who took me forever to love.
I first listened to Heavy Metal, Winter’s debut album, last December — a recommendation from someone much cooler than me. When I saw the red-rimmed eyes and sunken face, I knew that this album was going to be one of two things.
A poetic masterpiece, blending folk with older indie/alt, and telling tales of heartbreak, joy, and growing pains.
Elliot Smith poser whining for around forty-five minutes.
Thankfully, it was both.
Kicking off with “The Rolling Stones,” I remember feeling all warm and cozy listening to the first seconds of acoustics. Then comes his voice. Winter drags himself through the song, voice strained and wobbly like he’s just figured out how to form words, but the notes of his guitar skip beside him, quiet but mature.
I couldn’t begin to decipher what Winter’s lyrics mean, but I felt a sense of disillusionment and impatience. There’s also the reference to the Rolling Stones’ late guitarist Brian Jones, co-president of the 27 Club – a martyrized group of musicians who all died, mostly from drug overdoses, at age 27. There’s something liberating and selfish about wanting to be a martyr, of leaving behind a legacy where yisou’re mistakes are bleached white by the glory of dying young.
“Naucisaä,” the second track, has become one of my favorites off Heavy Metal. “Nausicaä” is also when I realized that Winter is a fantastic producer, a demonstration of his ability to genre-blend with the song’s jazzy horns and moody synth.
My first time listening, I recognized the song’s name from The Odyssey, which I was (insanely) forced to read in ninth grade by my creepy English teacher, but learned to love. In the epic, Nausicaa offers Odysseus hospitality and comfort following a nearly decade-long imprisonment and violent war that left him weathered, weak, and shipwrecked. She ends up wanting to marry him, but his heart is set on Ithaca, where Penelope waits for him.
To me, Nausicaa and Odysseus’ story is one of a man who needs love, and a woman who desperately wants to give it. So as Winter moans out, “I am blind/ And you are ugly/ It’s so easy to want you,” he has my literature-loving self wrapped around his finger.
“Love Takes Miles” is a fan favorite from Heavy Metal, a symphony of longing. Throughout the song, there’s a deep, groaning vibration – an obo, maybe, or Winter’s voice – that inches its way into my ears intermittently, adding a hallucinatory effect that nauseates me (in a good way?).
“Drinking Age,” up next, is a self-deprecating ballad of soulful piano and dejection. We all have those things about ourselves we detest, but can’t change. Winter explores that feeling in a boiling pot of distress threatening to spill over and burn, and it does. The song closes with a blubbering “mah, mah, mah,” like a baby’s cry. This was my favorite on my first listen.
Heavy Metal’s fifth track, “Cancer of the Skull,” is where my Elliot Smith comparison originates. The unintelligible lyrics and double-tracked vocals are practically ghostly. It’s a song that says get away from me, I’m no good, reflecting the album’s themes of desiring love, while simultaneously pushing it away.
There was a lull for me in the next three songs, “Try as I May,” “We’re Thinking the Same Thing,” and “Nina + Field of Crops.” But I do want to talk about “Nina” because I can’t help but think he’s referring to icon, legend Nina Simone. There were a lot of points throughout the album where Cameron Winter came very close to making me feel the way Nina Simone does. He sings, “Nina knows the reason, and she's seen into the mouth of what it is to be a mountain,” and it’s a praise, but also an acknowledgement of how she dwarfs him and everyone else. But maybe I just idolize her, and Nina is just a placeholder for someone else.
The pen-ultimate track, “$0,” is a nightmare and panic attack I’ve had a million times all wrapped up in one song. It’s a crazed amalgamation of crazy, rambling thoughts, a reflection that sends us (or at least me) fucking reeling.
“God is real/ God is real,” he blurts out, “I’m not kidding/ God is actually real…/I wouldn’t joke about this.” And then the instrumentals, an untuned guitar and the same soulful piano, keep on playing. This is the song I keep coming back to – typical of me, a born Catholic whose pessimism led them to atheism, then back again.
In the final track, “Can’t Keep Anything,” I thought Winter wanted us to die with him, but he breaks free at the last second. I thought, after the forty or so minutes we just spent together, Heavy Metal would end with a crash and a scream. I thought we would all end up sinking into the same pit of sand — eyes, ears, and mouths full of rocks. But I was wrong because Cameron Winter is a genius, and I’m a silly pleb.
“Can’t Keep Anything” is a tender ending to a painful work of art. It’s a refusal to let the journey end, and a promise that “I’m going, baby/ You’re going too.”
So, my Pitchfork rating of Heavy Metal is a 9.2/10. My Letterboxd rating is 4.5 stars. My Uber Eats rating is a thumbs up, with a teary eyed note of “what the fuck, dude?”
