999,830: Wild Light — California on My Mind

Everybody has days when they want to bury their "head in the shit at the bottom" of a lake. The urge is universal, a vestige of the reptile brain, meaning that basically anything with a spine has experienced the sensation: you say something hurtful to your turtle friend, or you get embarrassed in front of the stegosaurus you've been crushing on, or your garter snake buddy sits you down and lays some hard truth on you; then the pit forms in your stomach and you want to go find a damned lake already.

What lake? Any lake! A lake you can dive into, so you can start burying your head in the shit at the bottom. Sure, there's a name for that shit, but you're not Percy Bysshe fucking Shelley over here. Your brain-stem is in charge now, and it doesn't give a crap about whether the metaphor speaks to the sublime, or what shit happen to be called, only whether can be used as a burrowing place for your stupid skull.

This raw expression of life's occasional, simple lousiness forms the basic thrust of Wild Light's catchy first single, and smartly the band leans so heavily on their sing-along "shit at the bottom" chorus that you've already heard it twice before you stumble upon the first verse. By the time they start to get specific about which pile of regrets is responsible for the moment's anguish, we're already on board, caught up in the feeling of collective remorse, while jangly guitars strum enjoyably and a mournful, Petty-esque harmonica answers the lead vocal.

What makes the chorus really special, though, is that there's a second universal urge embedded in the back half of it, namely the ancient, evolutionarily-tested need to tell the State of California to go fuck itself. "Fuck today, fuck San Francisco/Fuck California," sings Jordan Alexander, whose warbled yearning recalls Phantom Planet's Alex Greenwald. "California on My Mind", in fact, could just be the other side of the coin for "California", brutal reality setting in for those same Phantom Planet-eers who'd so hopefully driven down the 101 on their way to The OC's Teen Choice Awards party a few years back. Now the show's canceled, those idiots from The Hills are famous, the state's bankrupt...you know what? Give me a lake.