Psychedelic tinkerer’s latest single faces the horror of the job application process.
I moved to Pittsburgh in 2018–one year after I graduated college–because, out of the seventy-odd applications I’d submitted for entry level job openings, the only one that accepted me was located in the Steel City, a place I’d visited exactly twice. Now that I’ve become accustomed to the drudgery of having a job, I sometimes forget about the drudgery of looking for a job–the task descriptions rendered meaningless by managerial jargon, the endless stream of forms that only partially auto-populate from an uploaded resume, the boilerplate surveys about strengths and weaknesses, the number of required references dwarfing the number of people you actually know. I relived some of my past terror while listening to Chameleon Treat’s latest single, “we hope you re-apply,” whose lyrics shift in perspective between a a corporate hivemind and a discouraged applicant. The hivemind offers anodyne rejection (“40,000 applied / To the thing you had in mind / By the time we got to yours / Our computer brains were fried”, “We decided that we / Had a better you in mind”), while the applicant sighs, “I’m done waiting around just to see if anybody / Wants to believe in what I could be.” Luckily, the serenity of the music balances the stress of the subject matter; gentle guitar arpeggios, sea anemone synths, tick-tock percussion, and muted harmonies create an immersive sound bath, a necessity after a long day of “We’re sorry, but…”
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Bored In Pittsburgh 