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When I’m Nice, I’m Really Excellent: Natural Born Losers 10th Edition

Released this week in 2015, Nicole Dollanganger’s five record examines Southwestern goth lifestyle, disordered eating, and harsh sex, in colorful storytelling and an energized production that placed her disturbed pop in conversation with a then-nascent punk-shoegaze revival.

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You might think of blockbusters like the Twilight epic and the sixteen Fairly Little Liars books when you think of young women’s poetry. The former produced one of ABC Family’s most enduring 21st-century teenager tragedies. They have some incident to them, but their offenses pale in comparison to V. C. Andrews ’ initial Dollanganger tale, Bouquets in the Attic. Andrews ’ 1979 album tells the story of a home in nosedive, which was described as ”deranged following” in a contemporary Guardian review. Both collection are prosperous scriptures that feature younger ladies who are struggling to understand techniques and individuals who are at best of no help.

Christopher and Corrine Dollanganger are the perfect parents to their four kids ( Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory ) in verdant Pennsylvania until Christopher dies in a car wreck, leaving Corrine and the kids penniless and desperate. It’s a revolting book that uses the now lurid chosen tropes of the Southern Gothic to make way for something that reads like a pulp novel. Corrine visits her former apartment in Virginia to try to regain her family’s favor after he disapproved of her wedding. What turns into a temporary design turns into three years of prison, laced with hunger, killing, and pedophilia between young siblings that may not have been sexual, hairy armpit porn movie first. Corrine’s spiritual crusader mummy hides the children in a spare room with apartment entry because Corinne’s father must not be aware of their existence because the sprawling Foxworth Hall manor’s sprawling mother has no access to them.

It’s a harrowing tale of younger people in changeover who are haunted by the desiccated, harsh technique their mom came from, with the spectre of prohibited lords who essentially implore Chris and Cathy to crack all the rules, which is why it works so well with younger audiences. It’s no coincidence that Nicole Bell, the Toronto singer-songwriter and visual artist who records under the name Nicole Dollanganger, owned two collectible copies of Flowers in the Attic. Their world is one in which teenagers make better caregivers for themselves and their siblings while adults are spiteful sinners. Bell’s inspiration for his work is an appreciation of these tales as fantasies as well as a contrast between them and the grimier and less predictable realities of the world as we have it today. Like Andrews, Bell’s writings are seeped in backwoods figures who embrace each other but aren’t supposed to, inflicting harm upon themselves just as often as they give and receive love. When those who establish the rules are the most craven, transgressive desires don’t look so bad. It’s romantic and grotesque. Cathy and Chris break all the rules for each other and the good of their siblings, and even when the adults break all the rules to destroy them, they remain as resolute as possible.

Natural Born Losers, Nicole Dollangangers ’ first studio album, ranks fifth overall in terms of gross romance. Without Dollanganger’s first film, Slow, Cinematic Pop from the likes of Ethel Cain and Midwife, who have amassed cult followings over the past five years, wouldn’t be as legible to these audiences. At ten years old, Natural Born Losers still feels as immediate and progressive as it did when it was first released. She pondered on the carnal, the gory, and the fringes of the youth experience with particular attention to the literary and cinematic figures she valued dearly. One might have compared KatieJane Garside’s acting in Lalleshwari, Gregory and The Hawk, but Dollanganger’s lyrical ties to Southern gothic culture, disordered eating, and violent sex make those comparisons mostly aesthetic. The previous four Dollanganger albums were homemade, minimalist songwriting exercises designed to support her uncanny soprano. With more compelling storytelling and an electrifying production, Natural Born Losers amplified her voice, which proved to be the perfect vehicle for her innocent yet resounding voice.

However, Nicole Dollanganger’s star started well before Natural Born Losers did. Her antique dolls, decorative guns, and rare editions of Flowers in the Attic are aesthetic statements that should resonate with anyone who spent their teenage years scrolling through the parts of Tumblr less concerned with Doctor Who or Supernatural and more concerned with profound adolescent melancholy. She had the opportunity to mingle with fans of vintage photography, confessional poetry, and horror films who pleaded with one another for a media-oriented community where people had interests that were mutually exclusive. They are located in the Gothic margins of the soft grunge industry, where a predominately girls-and-gays network developed an aesthetic around reviving and updating old fashions from the nineties for the Obama era. From her bedroom in the rural Toronto exurbs, Bell shared her music and visual art with niche communities across several platforms, but Tumblr most of all.

I fought for this stuff. Bell herself was posting from a perspective that was frequently more edgier than soft grunge writ large, but Nicole Dollanganger’s music and her visuals made sense in this world. What I remember from soft grunge’s early 2010s era was listening to Lana Del Rey and the 1975 while emulating Sky Ferreira’s fashion sense. Because we felt ugly and oriented that energy all around, but not in a more offensive way than toward ourselves, it could get ugly. We searched for alternative viewpoints of ourselves and confronted taboos like body horror, violence against ourselves, sex, and drug use just as much as we watched the newest releases from the nascent indie-pop world. As a catch-all for alternative femininities that borrowed from imagery associated with a grimier, more authentic past, it could go all over the place. Sylvia Plath readings and Courtney Love worship were required.

When Natural Born Losers first came to mind, I was just entering college and had just come out of the closet. I was living full-time as a young gay man. However, I was also desperately afraid of men. Even when I came out, men scared me. Keeping my differences under wraps was an existential mission. Gender-based violence became a daily talking point even before# MeToo as a result of the growing feminist consciousness of the time, and it also had a role in self-reflexive homophobia of the garden variety. Even before I knew why I was different, I could sense that my male peers could already tell. I was terrified of dying at the hands of a hateful straight man and a queer man who allegedly claimed to be my lover.

I couldn’t stop my desires because I was so preoccupied with fear. I wanted men, and I wanted my safety, but I was ready to put myself in harm’s way to be with a man. The lyrics to” Mean” seem to be the most accurate representation of my situation:” I like it when it hurts like hell/ There’s nothing you can do to me/ I wouldn’t do to myself.” In” American Tradition,” Bell exclaims,” We play the knife game on the table / I bleed to death, it doesn’t matter /” Because my baby, he’s still the winner.” If this is what it took to be with men, I was going to make myself ready for it. With Natural Born Losers, I had a framework to comprehend my co-constitutive reluctances and desires. I had a desire to endure pain to satisfy my needs, and I may have even craved it. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want to be with men, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want a man who’d break all the rules for me, even if that meant putting myself at risk of grave bodily harm.

Beyond the lyrics ’ obsceneness, Natural Born Losers ’ sound was what attracted me to the album. When the punk and shoegaze crossover was becoming a defining movement ( think Nothing, Cloakroom, and Whirr ), Tomasi himself participated in and co-wrote songs for a number of Ontario hardcore and shoegaze bands. Hardcore is a genre, but it’s also a posture. Are you willing to use violence to achieve its purest form in resolving taboos? On Natural Born Losers, you’ll find all of these, but they’ll have a different sound than your typical fast-paced hardcore show. In hardcore, your willingness to brush up against norms matters: Are you willing to deliver aggressive lyrics? The album’s limited personnel had social connections to hardcore, which would eventually lead Dollanganger to collaborate with Code Orange and 100 gecs, and the attitude and atmosphere are compatible. Are you using the guitar in unconventional ways? Nicole Dollanganger’s prior albums had a stark beauty all their own, but the minimalist, grime-y slowcore of Natural Born Losers supercharges Bell’s spectral vocals with haunting guitar howls and undulations that have become signature to Bell’s production with Ryan Goodman and, on” Angels of Porn II\

Bell and her coworker have a acknowledgement that diehard is a applicable stylistic activity. Every song has the sense of being delivered by a soul stranded in a gloomy, damp floor, using just what resources she is summon to offer her unsettling melodies despite its relative sparseness. The guitars on” American Convention” scream out, but the music is monotonous, and disappears when it’s period for Bell to take the lead. Their touch is thrilling but minimum. Bell is undoubtedly the star of the show, just like with her home recordings, but introducing heavier output gives each word a silver gravitas that makes each word feel more heartfelt. White Trashing mostly adheres to the sound melody as its foundation, but its flourishes of electronic chords are sliced like a knife. The violins on ”You’re So Cool” either roar bandwidth or breath beneath Bell, and the drum largely follow the overcome. Every term goes deeper.

In the times following” Angels of Porn II,” Tomasi has evolved from the obscurity of Ontario DIY to a prominent artist, producing Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter and co-hosting her indicates with his own shoegaze circle, 9Million. Preacher’s Daughter, in my opinion, could not have come to be a symbolic ethnic object without Natural Born Losers coming after it, not just because Tomasi gave one of the superstar tracks a lot of flair. The substance that came before it is less jargon-filled than that of Natural Born Losers. The recordings of Curbed Dairy, Blossoms of Flesh and Blood, Ode to Dawn Wiener, and Observatory Mansions were made at home during and immediately following a lengthy phase of bedrest, required as part of a prolonged recuperation from eating disorders, which are the basis for songs as aggressive and destructive as” Choose Eat.” One of the most terrible melodies I’ve ever heard,” Dog Teeth,” which concentrates on Bell’s experience of being raped,” Angels of Porn II,” which was originally released on 2014’s Observatory Mansions, combines anorexia, online penetration, and Satan with three and a half days of punishing harp and ballads. However, Natural Born Losers only has a select few confessional songs.

Preacher’s Daughter is the most extreme confessional film ever made; it’s a concept album about a fictional character breaking the laws of her time and paying the ultimate price for it. One thing is that one person writes and performs about their own experiences with these issues; another is that they intensify those experiences into fantastical representations, continuing the V. C. Andrews tradition. With 2023’s Married in Mount Airy, which lessens but does not eschew graphic lyricism in favor of more reflection on the rotten vision of the American Dream, as exemplified by the now-dilapidated honeymoon resorts of the Poconos, Dollanganger has carried this through to this day. Dollanganger and Cain’s works, which are draped in stark, pensive production that ranges from dark folk to doom, shine light on the depraved underbelly that undergirds our social mores while recapturing non-metropolitan stories and soundscapes for purposes with more liberating potential. A fixation on religion, sexuality, and transgression is woven throughout both Cain’s breakthrough debut and Natural Born Losers, with imagery drawn from films and books, from Natural Born Killers to Gummo. Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, is Ethel Cain’s follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter, a similarly over-the-top, slow-paced examination of teenage romance under cloudy skies.

Natural Born Losers might have been better understood as the seedy alt-pop variant that made the major-label transgressors like Halsey or Melanie Martinez appear more digestible in its day. Cain’s album is much longer than Dollanganger’s, in all fairness, but if you’re willing to pay attention, the songs have a lot of variety. Both songwriters who write in the narrative genre have produced an electrifying production that doesn’t outshine. Even Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter was not as sympathetic as Pitchfork was. Dollanganger’s obvious departure from big-name dark pop was greeted with a skepticism from Pitchfork to Spin critics, who were unsure if the project had more to offer than shaky lyrics and minimal rock production.

Natural Born Losers ’ extended ruminating on the possibility of loving the bad, truly evil boy feel so drawn to teenage fantasies of love against all odds, of retribution, and of transcending embodiment that they believe were intended to disturb the point of emotional regression. For perfectly valid reasons, both albums are wanton with their genre influences, and this gives the songwriters more room to go on, whose willingness to go for it with violent and emotional lyrics demonstrates a stark interest in getting their point across at all costs. I’d contend that these neutral-to-negative critical responses are the result of a combination of the emotional sexiness and the peculiarities of their production, which was intended more to awe and stun than to fit into a mold. Similar feelings are displayed in Preacher’s Daughter, which is spread across even longer time-stamps of concept albums.

Natural Born Losers attracted a lot of attention as a result of Claire Boucher’s massive co-sign, which she and Bell shared a stage with Lana Del Rey. It didn’t hurt that one of the world’s buzziest alternative pop artists put her name behind Bell’s project because she and her then-partner Jaime Brooks co-founded a label called Eerie Organization to give Natural Born Losers a proper release. After Natural Born Losers, the label offered Canada-specific visuals for Grimes ’ Art Angels and the release of Bell’s 2018 Nicole Dollanganger album, Heart Shaped Bed, before becoming a somnambulant operation.

What made Natural Born Losers stand out and become a cult favorite was only well understood by those who had followed her for years, but its impact has become more evident in the decade since, as Dollanganger herself became a hit at Roadburn, the Coachella of the alternative heavy music scene, and her fans have since sold out of their tours. Traditional pop success is not achieved by provocative lyrics, rural settings, or cascading guitar, but they speak to the intensity of the internal contradictions we must overcome every day to keep ourselves unified in a violent, fragmented world. You can give yourself over to those contradictions when you listen to Natural Born Losers, follow them to their extremes, and center both the pleasure and the pain that modern desire brings with it. It’s never simple, but it always pays off.