Ever since I read somewhere that most people do not get into new music past the age of 34 or thereabouts, I have been stubbornly trying to make sure I get into at least one new artist annually, if for no other reason than to keep my brain from calcifying into old age (besides, we are to “become as little children” anyways, are we not?).

However, such is easier said than done, for a wide variety of reason: our brains purportedly finish developing at 24 and hence become far less susceptible to the tumultuous hormones of adolescence that drove us into the primal and percussive rhythms of pop music in the first place; like a long-term drug-addict, we need a much stronger fix to feel the same exhilarating high of new music than was required at 16 or 22, which become increasingly rarer to achieve the older we get; most new music is made by and for teens and 20-somethings, and hence no longer resonates on a personal level once we move beyond that stage of life; and most frustratingly of all, we simply become older and crotchety and set in our ways, whether we want to or not.

Hence, although I was initially pleased with myself to have both discovered and enjoyed Dry Cleaning’s debut album New Long Leg last year, I also swiftly recognized that I liked them so much precisely because they were such an obvious throwback to the sorts of art-rock I listened to in my youth. (It’s kinda like when my wife got excited by all the new Fall fashions at Forever 21 last year–Overalls! Velvet tops! Scrunchies!–only to realize she only loved them cause these were all the same fashions she was wearing as a middle-schooler in the late-’90s).

Even Pitchfork‘s rave review of the album, for example, explicitly situates them as a species of “guitar revivalism”–because guitar-based bands are now officially an antiquated genre to be revived on occasion, like Jazz or Swing or Bluegrass (it turns out that when Decca passed on the Beatles in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out,” they were merely 50 years ahead of the curve). Likewise, Dry Cleaning’s guitar-work obviously hearkens back to Joy Division and other post-punk standbys of the early-’80s. Impeccable influences all! But not exactly novel.

For that matter, frontwoman Florence Shaw’s deadpan lyrical delivery–in lines like “Do everything and feel nothing” from the opener “Scratchcard Lanyard,” or the very ironically-entitled third track “Strong Feelings,” or her tribute to fellow deadpanner Keanu Reeves on “John Wick,” or the sheer fact that the band is named Dry Cleaning in the first place–owes a clear debt to the late Lou Reed, who simultaneously elevated deadpan to an art-form and devolved it into a shtick over the course of his long and spotty career. Seriously, Reed’s deadpan delivery was frequently bland (e.g. his inexplicably best-selling 1989 album New York, whom even his friend and admirer John Cougar Mellencamp said sounded like it was produced by an 8th grader), ridiculous (e.g. his head-scratching 2011 collaboration with Metallica Lulu), and unintentionally hilarious (his 1972 live album Rock ‘n Roll Animal is basically the Velvet Underground as performed by Journey–and I mean that as a compliment, even if Reed certainly never would have taken it as one).

But to also be clear, when Lou Reed’s deadpan was good, it was really good: e.g. the Velvet Undergrounds’ “Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” and “The Murder Mystery;” his sole Top-40 hit “Walk on the Wild Side;” and especially his acclaimed 1973 album Berlin, whose story-cycle of a bohemian couple’s marriage that descends into sado-masochism, addiction, their kids being taken by CPS, and the wife’s ensuing suicide (that lack track especially is harrowing), is so heart-breakingly sad that Reed appears to be deadpanning simply because he would break down crying if he sang it otherwise.

Which in turn gets into why Dry Cleaning has revived not only guitar-rock, but also Lou Reedian deadpan delivery, in our present moment: because so many things are just so devastatingly atrocious right now–and fueled by a raw emotionalism run unchecked by either compassion or reason–that sometimes a deadpan detachment feels like the only sane response.

Not to mention the only non-manipulative one. Let me try and illustrate what I mean via an anecdote my wife once told me: she had attended EFY as a youth, and excitedly told her Mom when she got home about all the inspiring things she saw and heard–the motivational speakers, the music, the dances, the firesides. What was her surprise then, when her mother–a convert who usually spoke with a convert’s zeal for the Church–was cool to her experience. “Just be careful not to confuse emotionalism with the Spirit,” she said warily.

In this, I suspect her Mom was teaching true doctrine: “The Holy Ghost has no other effect than pure intelligence,” Joseph Smith once declared–that is, the Spirit is not a hot emotional surge, but a much more serene feeling of knowledge and intellect, “distil[ling] upon thy soul like the dews of heaven.” Now, I need to be careful here: one may certainly still have an emotional response to this feeling of pure intelligence flowing into you–which is a perfectly valid reaction!–but it is paramount to not confuse the response for the stimulus. The Holy Spirit can incite these feelings, but are not the feelings themselves.

Besides, the danger is that if one conflates emotionalism with the Spirit, then one runs the risk of losing all religious feeling once those emotions turn sour. We often tell missionaries not to reason people into the gospel, because anyone who can be reasoned in can just as easily be reasoned out of it; the exact same can also be said of emotionalism–people who convert out of some emotional experience can just as easily be emotioned out of it, since emotion is not the same as Spirit. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that spirituality is an escape from emotion and personality, not an expression of it.

Certainly TS Eliot claimed the same of poetry: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” he wrote in his hyper-influential 1922 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (whose centennial we are also observing this year). Similarly, the Holy Ghost is not in itself a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from the same. When you are genuinely feeling the Spirit, you are not wallowing in your emotions–your anxieties, your fears, doubts, etc.–but transcending them, escaping them. (This I believe is also the function of art, but that is an argument to make another day). Again, you may have an emotional response to Spirit–just as you can have an emotional response to poetry–but its actual effect is to transport you away from where your emotions control you, to where your intelligence does instead.

Perhaps that is why so many Bishops, missionaries, General Authorities, EQ and RS Presidents, so on and so forth, seem to have such a deadpan delivery of their own talks and testimonies, almost to the point of apparent boredom (much like late-period Lou Reed, incidentally): it is not in the torrid emotionalism wherein the Spirit lies, anymore than it lies in the fire, or the strong wind, or in the earthquake, but in a still small voice. A deadpan delivery, in other words, is not just a strategy for emotional detachment in response to massive trauma, but a way to make space for this still small voice to speak independent of us.

Maybe that’s why we should have a touch more patience for a boring talk, or a boring testimony–the Spirit never resided in either to begin with. Not to excuse them for being boring, mind you (I will maintain till my dying day that being boring is a selfish act), but simply to exercise a tad more Christ-like charity, and find the Holy even in the ordinary.