In Alex G’s “Blessing” we hear this mantra three times, six times if you count the vocal equivalent of a shadow after each phrase, in sotto voce: “Every day is a blessing as I walk through the mud / if I live like the fishes I will rise from the flood.” Cheesy, but his treatment is a lot more ‘90s like Pixies (“Where Is My Mind?”) so it’s worn down and high-strung, warping the inspirational into an existential, always-on kind of dread. Bookending each stanza is a deafening drone not unlike the blare of a train that’s about to hit you, and together with the repetitions (the stanza and the almost-echo) they amplify a specific feeling: that brand of sarcasm that is much needed in these strange times, that sarcasm borne out of despair, when hopes are dashed over and over again. Play this next to Black Country, New Road’s “Science Fair” and you have songs that act like mirrors facing each other, reverberating, illuminating each other, truth upon truth wrapped up in anguish and noise.