Read The Haters for Free Online

theatrically limp, above his head. His sticks dangled uselessly from his fingers. He lifted his right knee. And he started thumping his bass drum on Ash’s slow beat.
    On one, I let E ring out again, and then muted it on three.
    That was the beat. It was just me playing long half-note E’s,and Corey thumping quarter notes on the bass drum. That was it. It was incredibly simple and dumb.
    And yet, somehow it didn’t sound bad.
    We kept doing it. And I can’t tell you why. But pretty soon it started to sound good.
    Actually, it was sounding kind of great.
    It was so dumb that it was hypnotic. It was eerie and intense. And Ash was really comfortable letting it grow on all of us. She just stood there, not smiling but nodding a little, while we kept cranking out this beat like we were both possessed or snake-charmed or something.
    Then without warning she pushed her volume up and rang out an E, too. It was huge and jagged-sounding and she let it sit in the air for two bars.
    Someone screamed, “OH.”
    Then we started playing.
    I’m not going to give you the details. I’m not going to do them justice. But we played for three and a half hours, and we sounded incredible.
    I don’t know if you’d call it rock, or blues, or punk, or what. It felt a lot simpler and earthier than those. There was some mid-career Miles Davis in there, some Ramones, John Lee Hooker, AC/DC. Some James Brown and some Talking Heads. Parts were a little bit like Sleater-Kinney, and there were a few moments that sounded like Cat Power. But none of these are really going to give you the right impression at all.
    What it was, honestly, was just about locking in. We were justall completely fused together. We got quiet together, and loud, and quiet again, and rhythmically it was like we weren’t capable of playing outside one another’s beat. And somehow the whole time I knew exactly what to do, like I could hear every note the moment before I played it, and honestly the whole time a part of me was terrified that there was a limit to whatever was happening, and it was going to suddenly run out, but it didn’t.
    After about an hour of just playing, without any song or plan, Ash started giving us little bare-bones sketches of songs she had written. The lyrics were pretty hard to make out but seemed to be a little bit gonzo ’90s fringe lyrics like Ween or King Missile and a little bit not-super-rhymey conversational lyrics like Courtney Barnett. The titles were, too, but more intense.
    God Has No Thoughts
    Suburb of the Abyss
    Everyone at Wendy’s Was Dead or a Robot
    Trees Are Eating My Dad Right Now Pt. 1
    Love Plague
    This Sex Sucks
    Shark Contest
    I Am Such a Mess from Werewolf PMS
    They Told Me You Are What You Eat So I Ate Roger Federer
    and my favorite,
    If You Love Your Dog So Much, Why Don’t You Fuck Him
    Ash plugged a microphone into her guitar amp and did allthe singing, and her singing voice was sort of like she took her speaking voice and gave it fresh batteries. It was a voice that cut. It was the voice of someone who gave zero fucks and rode around on a bear. It was the kind of voice where you didn’t care if you could tell what she was saying, because you knew what she meant.
    The bass and guitar were all thick and distorted and buzzy because we turned our amps up higher than they were supposed to go. Corey ended up mostly thumping things out on his bass drum and toms and used his cymbals only when he absolutely had to. So the effect was this chunky thumpy sound that kind of made you think of the most badass possible rabbit. I know that sounds idiotic. I don’t care. That’s how it sounded. It was like the war music for an elite army unit of giant, bear-riding, eyepatch-wearing rabbits who were riding off to a battle that was actually just a huge party.
    Ash took audio of the whole thing by hanging her phone from the ceiling with a shoelace. We played for three and a half