Kyle Landon - Selfish Animal (2018) Full Album

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0:00 1. Soul Lapse
2:23 2. Bismuth
6:38 3. Sundown
9:43 4. Catch and Release
12:42 5. Alcatraz
16:39 6. Oracle Bones
19:01 7. Promise Shards
22:27 8. Rats and Roaches
25:34 9. Big Moon
28:01 10. Tulpa
30:52 11. Go to Work
34:26 12. The Filth of Oil
37:40 13. Piercing Roots
41:04 14. Don't Worry About Summer
44:54 15. Ancient Aims / Fear of the Future
51:13 16. Cables
53:45 17. Poor Rockets
58:11 18. Selfish Animal
1:02:22 19. Lonely Song
1:05:27 20. Dream Blood
1:07:48 21. Drain
1:12:07 22. Abandon You (A Desperate Prayer)
You're only gonna get what I want.
Made in 2017, except for tracks 1,7, and 21, written party in 2015.
Released January 5, 2018.
All songs written, performed, programmed, produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Kyle Landon.
Recorded in my car 2016-2017.
2024 writeup. So, Selfish Animal.
The album cover is a composite of my hands in prayer (final song reference) behind some glass. I took a picture of a cup or something with a light behind it during a family Easter dinner. I wasn't going for anything in particular, but the colors and shapes tell me its the right image.
Soul Lapse. The main sample here is is the same "Insomnia" sample I used in Dragging Change off Gold Shadows. Me singing "my own". Just a pretty little thing I did one day. Very unlike me, to have one element by itself for a song. The second half was another thing I just wanted to try to see if I could do it. You see, this album was the album where I learned how to actually write vocal lines. I wasn't taught this, I didn't look it up, it just came to me one day. Here's the secret: I realized that I could just use a piano or whatever to write vocals, then sing along to the piano, then mute the piano afterwards. Crazy right? Once I figured this out, 7 albums in, everything kinda fell in place. Because before, I would just kinda loop my songs over and over again, write a bunch of words, and then when it was time to record, I would just hope it all made sense and would fit and come out halfway interesting or catchy. But now, I could actually figure out how to write melodies in key, and plot out which lyrics go where, and REMEMBER any ideas I might have. It might sound silly, and it was silly, but man, what a difference. So now, not only could I write melodies and even rap flows, but I could write multiple parts! I could try harmonies! Choirs! So, that's what I did. I wanted a very grand, emotional, yet understated introduction, if that makes sense. I also wanted to set up the tuning being a little bit lower for the next song. I'm not a 432 truther or anything, again, just experimenting.
Bismuth. This was the first thing I produced in 2017. I remember it clearly. I posted a track, I don't remember which one, onto one of those reddit threads where you post a song of yours and are required to exchange feedback with others. Someone said my vocals were good (they weren't) but that my production was "basic" (anything but) and that got me FIRED UP to make the most elaborate, colorful production possible, even though I knew he was wrong. That's why it's called Bismuth, it just sounds like shiny rainbows and angular gems. So the song is pitched down 50 cents, which wasn't intentional, just a quirk of one of the plugins when I was writing. The drums were a kit I kinda designed myself (and should use more). I just realllly wanted to prove that guy wrong. Lyrically, I found another way to say I'm stuck in the past. Shocker!
Sundown. This song rules. Telling a story here, full of action, intrigue, suspense, worldbuilding. The story's not really a metaphor or anything , its just something I came up with that I thought would be interesting. Getting melted by the moonlight unless you have a special type of flower with you. The drums completely dropping out for the chorus is so cool. I love what wubby synth. I was just starting to get into modulating my synths more, that wubby synth was a big step for me lol. Super moody. Love love love it.
WRITEUP CONTINUED IN PINNED COMMENT

[@KyleTheLandon]

Catch and Release. Another track I adore. Inspired by my first and only fishing trip I took with some friends and family a while back where the only thing I caught was a baby scorpionfish, which is poisonous and possibly illegal. I threw it back. At some point afterwards, I started reading about how fish get all jacked up when you're deep sea fishing thanks to the sudden change in pressure from suddenly getting pulled up like that. Real interesting sounding track, I dunno what genre this is, but I could say that for most things I make. On a personal note, this is the song I "came out" to my friends with, and I think I picked it because of its super long dramatic intro. What do I mean by come out? Well, vocally. At the time, everyone knew I made music and was trying to "make it" but nobody knew that I was doing vocals too. I dunno, I get nervous! I still don't really talk about it to anyone else other than those I'm closest with. Would rather just already be blown up or whatever. Funny how it's easier to tell strangers things than your own family, huh? Alcatraz. Brutal to mix, I still don't like how it turned out all the way (I bet I could do it right now tho!!) Anyways, the lyrics are a bit... interesting... maybe outdated is the correct term? The lyrics about looking into the camera with shame in your eyes, I'm sure you can figure out what this means. People gotta make money, people change, people grow up, people can do whatever they wanna do. Song's still great though. The rising and falling tension is cool, and I love my guitar work on it. Oracle Bones. This one had a low effort music video that's sitting around here somewhere. It's just me sitting around tearing pages out of my yearbook. Yeah. Compelling stuff. I sure was stuck in the past, alright. This song originally used the M1 piano, and then HUMBLE. came out and I found that this sounded too similar and changed it. Yes, I'm claiming I wrote HUMBLE. before Kendrick lol. Seriously though, I have another song from these sessions I never released that sounds similar to Sicko Mode, before Sicko Mode. I'm only exaggerating a little bit. It happens, a lil too much for my tastes though. I'll catch the radio eventually. Anyways, back to the song. The whole oracle bone concept came from a wikipedia rabbit hole, I'm pretty sure, you know how it goes. Lyrically I'm just complaining about myself lol. Love the sound of it and I stick to the beat super hard. Promise Shards. This instrumental actually originates from 2015, I just didn't realize the potential at the time. Just a hard weird beat and aggressive rapping, total Death Grips worship I suppose. I love how the guitars become more and more prevalent as the song goes on. Just a song about money. Me trash talking money this much and in this much granular detail probably has contributed to me not having any smh Rats and Roaches. Another story, this one about a mad scientist who tortures various critters in order to harvest their negative pain energy so he can fuel a rocket that will fly to the Sun so he can communicate with the demons that live on there and convince them to take over the Earth. Maybe I shoulda been a novelist instead of a musician. Again, not a metaphor or anything, just something I thought would sound cool, which, I realize now, describes 90% of my music and lyrics. I love the buildup of the song, and how freakish it sounds. It's a meme to say it, but there's something steampunkish about it. Okay maybe not steampunk, but I can hear valves turning, steam shooting out, I can see heat waves and condensation and beakers and and gears and just a deep metallic red color. Wonderous, in a way. My flow on "I do not care for the matter of humankind issues" is nutty. Big Moon. The Majora's Mask song. I wanted to write a song about the moon crashing into the earth but also see if I could try to not evoke images of that game in any way. Only you can tell me if I succeeded. What a spooky, freakish instrumental. I love how the open hi hat teetertotters back and forth in the ears. Descending pads always sound cool. I remember recording the "I'll just sleep through all my sentence" laying down. Towards the end, my voice made a weird noise when I said "it will come true" and If you listen closely I added it to the beat during the final part of the song. I put way too much into these songs for them to be sitting at 0 plays, sorry but it's true! Tulpa. The production is super spooky, I was just messing with delays while playing guitar and then it happened. I didn't get into Twin Peaks until 2022 or 2023 so it's not about that. Just a weird thing I was reading about. A story about a crazy guy with an imaginary friend. The text to speech rapping was a super inspired moment, I'm not sure how I thought of it. And that last line? Disgusting. If its not clear, at the end the guy offs himself, or maybe is killed, and the Tulpa he generated in his mind sorta manifests as a maggot eating his leftover brain, eating around the bullet lodged in there. Yeah I shoulda been an author fuck all this music shit Go to Work. Ahh yes, the song that's about to become my reality. This is my immature "I'm too good to work a regular job" anthem directed towards my parents and others who I felt "didn't believe in me." If you can't tell, I feel the complete opposite nowadays and am currently seeking employment at Costco or something. Regardless, I make some good points in this, and the instrumental is indescribable. I don't know how to describe it but I love it. I built the tension perfectly, its weird and hard to understand but the energy is there. Maybe that's why it works so well with these lyrics, I felt nobody understood me at this point in time. Funny how that works. The Filth of Oil. One of my favorite guitar riffs I've ever done. Its got a swag to it. It's one of my only riffs I actually remember how to play. I just played it right now, even. It didn't get dissolve into the ether as soon as I finished recording it like so many of them do... Anyways, the song is about barons, moguls, executives, all that. The "upper class", the rulers, and the pollution they bless us with. Maybe it's even a little conspiratorial. I wanted the song to be 70's-ish. There's something krautrock about it, and I hope that doesn't come off as pretentious lol. Piercing Roots. Why this album so long?? Anyways, this is a rare show of positivity from me. Of course, this predated any sort of virus or mass socio-political schizophrenia or anything like that. The distorted guitar at the beginning originally turned into a metal breakdown, which didn't fit at all. I still have that version around here somewhere. A good old rock song. The kids still play outside. Don't Worry About Summer. Yep guess what? Another song about the same girl from Tunnel and Ghost of You, from Gold Shadows. I had begun talking to her again off and on in 2017. There's a passage here, about seeing me on the camera, that's a true story. I went to the Jo-Ann's crafts store one day and asked her what her favorite color was, cuz I wanted to make her a little trinket. I must have been walking in circles in that store for 45 minutes before she got back to me. And I already knew the answer, I just doubted myself for some reason. I never got that trinket to her. Man the album took a big turn around here lol. The "do you remember me" section still breaks my heart. It isn't about this girl, it just sort of appeals to more of a motherly figure, which is weird cuz I have no issue with my mom. More storycraft I suppose. This song feels folky to me. I love it. I love every song I've ever released by the way, I just say that here in the writeup when I don't know what else to say. Ancient Aims / Fear of the Future. Ancient Aims doesn't mean anything, it's just a lil experimental piece I put together one day. I made Fear of the Future right after it, and figured, you know what, these go good together, and combined them. As for Fear of the Future... goodness me this song is nutty. The whole thing is tuned down to 425 hz, not for any purpose in particular, just wanted to see how it sounded. The whole song is like a shotgun, just a litany of bullets peppered in a ton of different, rarely related directions. Just writing on top of writing. It makes for a very compelling piece. I dunno what the lyrics are about. Just a bunch of ideas. Same as the production. It works, in that way. Cables. One of my absolute favorites. Devastating in its loneliness. I didn't want to admit it for a long time but honestly, it's about my first ex. Not the one discussed in Washed Out. It's like a , "I miss you but also I don't, it is what it is, we had good times, no hate towards you, goodbye" type song, if I were to sum it up in one word lol. The vocal samples are from shortwave radio. Shoutouts to ReviewBrah. He's always talking about shortwave and one day I decided to see what the fuss was. There's a site online, websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ that lets you listen to shortwave online, and it also has a record button. So lots of the sounds in this song are from that. Changing frequencies gives you some freaky sounds! I found a channel of what I believe to be two french women talking about I dunno what. One lady was talking and talking and the other lady was just going "mhm. mhm. mhm. mhm" so i chopped them all out and used them. I wonder what they were talking about. I still have the recordings, maybe I'll commission someone to see one day. If you ever hear me do two different vocals doing different things at once, just know its 100% because of Dreaming by System of a Down.

[@KyleTheLandon]

Poor Rockets. Banger. Open B tuning, I remember. I came up with the intro riff, realized it would work great as a metal song, and then deliberately decided to not distort the guitars. I wanted to see if a heavy metal song was possible without them. I think I succeeded. Those screams in the beginning are ripped out of older songs I did in 2013-2014, I just thought they'd fit there. Great song to headbang to. The lyrics are just some interesting sounding gobbledygook... or are they? I come from the System of a Down lineage of "it means whatever you think it means." The ending passage with the arpeggio guitars are total Devin Townsend worship, like the arp shapes are what I learned while learning Ki and Ziltoid back in high school. It adds a sophistication I feel like my music rarely has lol Selfish Animal. The title track. This is the 2nd and last song I ever came up with in the shower. I knew exactly how it would sound and which instruments I would use and where. You know, the whole DUN-DUN-DIDIDI DUN-DUN-DIDIDI DUN-DIDIDI. I feel like I could call most of my music a cross between Death Grips and Swans, but I feel like this one realllyyy is just that. Money Store x Children of God. And then the ending is total Cop worship. Ew. "Cop worship". That's the name of that album though!!! I remember punching my guitar's wood a lot while recording. It's good for making noise lol. Lyrically, I wanted the song to kinda sum up the album. I always knew the album would be called "Selfish Animal" before I even made this song. That "die of old age at 30 in perfect health" line still kinda shakes me up a little and I will be celebrating my 31st with more gratitude than ever. It takes a lot to undo the things you speak into the universe sometimes. "I was playing a character!" I scream to the cosmos. Lonely Song. I wanted this song to just represent me by myself in my room. Just one voice, one guitar, and a drum machine. I had a DR-Rhythm 660 for a long time, and thought I wasn't using it once I started using FL (i use the sounds in FL constantly though) I still identified as a person with just a guitar and a drum machine. The strings at the end were added because I didn't have total confidence in my vocals. There's power in it, though. I purposefully chose the mellotron strings and the synth because those are like, my favorite sounds, especially at that time. Me me me the song. what do you do when you're lonely for long enough? You turn inward... Dream Blood. This song was inspired by a horrific dream I had that involved me euthanizing my kid brother because his parents didn't feel like raising him anymore, and they were too lazy to even give him the shot themselves (this is a world where this is legal to do). I had some thoughts about their parenting at the time... The image of him coming into my room at night and asking me to tuck him into bed, and the shot hasn't kicked in yet, and he has no idea what's coming, is so sickening and distressing to me, and it makes me feel like "yeah, maybe its a good thing all my music's unknown, what good am I contributing to anybody by projecting these feelings and images into people's heads?" The ending of static is based on my own constant sleep paralysis and exploding head syndrome (which I have cured by sleeping on my side rather than my back.) The music is sampled from a song I made where I was trying to make a radio trap banger. "Do you like being home?" is a message to myself. A question I asked in 2017. And I'm still here, in 2024. Drain. This song is from 2015, I just rerecorded the lyrics and added a bit more. Literally 4 straight minutes of trauma dumping. The structure and production and general vibe of this song are suspiciously similar to "Opposite Lanes" by Lil Ugly Mane, but I made this like 2 weeks before that came out. I always felt like a kindred spirit with him cuz of that. You would never know if I didn't tell you, but I simultaneously recorded this with both my microphone and also my phone with a microphone app. You can't really hear it but its there. I did it as tribute to the original song, which was recorded on my phone. The "see breathing" vocals in the background towards the end of the song are straight out of the original 2015 song. That ending lyric is insanity. I feel like that SZA song has the same idea, you know, 5 years after me!!! Abandon You (A Desperate Prayer). This is the only song of mine to make me cry, like full on breakdown sobbing, and it was weird because my lil episode happened like 2 years after this album came out. I'm a weirdo lol. Anyways, yeah this song stings a ton. I sent it to my first ex, the one I mention in Cables, and she liked it a lot but also had to make sure I was okay afterwards. I have no idea why I didn't realize that sending her this would cause concern lol. I remember wanting to write a Tool song, and that's how this song started. There's a lot of Toolish things going on with the drums and bass sometimes. It's absolutely one of my best ever and it's a great way to end an album but man, it sucks being brutally honest like this. I don't even feel good about it afterwards, it's just gross and depressing. I had a lot of friends in high school, friends I cared for deeply, and after graduation I had some stuff going on and I just moved and deleted all my socials and lost contact with everybody, on purpose, for whatever sick in the head emotional artist reason. Probably as punishment to myself. And that part. That fuckin part. "When does it end? I'm so tired. Why am I doing this to me?" That part still blows me away, and I'm the one that made it. That's the part that made me break down a couple of years ago. I have a lotttt of abstract, cryptic, artistic lyrics, but I wish I realized sooner that sometimes, you just gotta cut to the chase. "When does it end? I'm so tired. Why am I doing this to me?"

[@HowslyOfficial]

It's always easier to be honest with strangers, you do still have the anonimity that comes with being online. There is also fewer expectations. Personally I don't take negative comments online to heart. We all know damn well that at least 8/10 times, people say mean things online just to get a reaction out of you. The vocals sound pretty damn good btw.