In a year that saw the troubling rise of AI-generated slop music, there is something endlessly comforting about a song that can only have been written by a messy, complicated human. The first lines of Al Olender’s delightfully specific track “The Cyclone”, draw on a memory of driving to Queens to “try to get laid”, and from there the song takes our unwinding narrator to a Baltimore freeway, Planet Fitness bathroom, and, yes, the titular Coney Island attraction. It’s a well-trodden theme, though usually sung by classic dude troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt or Merle Haggard: no matter where she runs, she’s herself, and it’s a problem.
But the song’s crescendo is one of the prettiest, and lasting, that I have heard in a while. After losing love (or maybe it was just some guy), the singer resolves to replace all of her glass with paper plates – “things I cannot break”
“The Cyclone” off Al Olender’s sophomore record, ‘The Worrier’.
The Fat Angel Sings 