“A man made of construction paper / flips and tumbles on the breeze.” That’s Aviv Rubinstien’s self-portrait halfway through “Tympanis,” and it’s the line that makes the song more interesting than a standard cheating narrative. The narrator isn’t looking for absolution. He’s just watching himself from the outside and finding exactly what he expected.
The setup is a domestic confrontation delivered as a Queens of the Stone Age-inflected punk track, four-on-the-floor drums hitting like accusations while the guitars grind underneath. Jack Shirley’s production at The Atomic Garden keeps the energy live and physical, which suits a song about a body caught doing what bodies do when they’re being dishonest. The chorus arrives as the partner’s voice replaying in the narrator’s head: “your hair smells like the ocean, baby / where did you go yesterday?” It’s not accusatory in tone so much as precise, the kind of question that already has its answer.
The verse where the narrator explicitly refuses the sympathy play is where the song gets genuinely uncomfortable: “I deserve no sympathy / won’t delude myself into feeling / any wrong’s been done to me / that I am more than just a villain.” Rubinstien doesn’t soften what follows, and the construction paper image lands as a clinical self-assessment rather than anything resembling remorse.
The tympani metaphor that opens and closes the song belongs to the wronged party, thunder rolling across a foreign shore. She’s the one with the weather behind her. He’s the one writing apologies with perfect timing and hoping they land like a fear of flying: a confession that he knows they won’t.
B-Side Guys 
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