mebanedeac
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Great compilation of love ballads from the golden decade of pop music.
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Great compilation of love ballads from the golden decade of pop music.
seventwofour
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Got damn that Frank Ocean bootleg remix is too dope!
seventwofour
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TownieDeac
words are futile devices
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Wow, Cokemachineglow's Christopher Alexander's writeup for their #1 album of the year is epic. Some of the best music journalism I've ever read.
1 :: Swans
The Seer
(Young God)
October 1, 2011. I’m sitting in the back of the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, watching Swans tear the place apart. It’s not much to see. Excepting Thor Harris, the long haired auxiliary drummer stripped to his waist and striking poses appropriate to his Nordic deific namesake, they look almost genteel on stage. There are clues in the band’s movements: leader Michael Gira’s spastic gyrations; the hypnotic head lolling of bassist Christopher Pravdicha; the way Phil Puleo draws back his arms to hit his massive standing bass drum like he’s pulling a sinking man out of quicksand, or about to bring the stake down into some demon’s heart. But there’s little visual complement to the guttural roar shaking the theatre. They just look like some older dudes in a rock band—some of them still too skinny, a couple aging well. They don’t look like they could possibly be making the sound they are, which is like the amplifiers had been filled with their own blood, like they had taken that blood and slathered their strings with it. I’ve been in earthquakes with fewer undulations than this theater. I can barely comprehend it. But I do.
It seems to some like Swans are just mucking about on stage, but they’re actually doing something that’s crazy hard. Once you’ve been acquainted with rudiments of a few instruments, letting a single chord or note ring–and then, as Gira is wont to do at various moments, vibrating on stage like someone possessed, snake charmer and snake simultaneously–is not very difficult. Swans, however, have to pay strict attention to their surroundings and control these completely unstable chords. It’s not merely that they’re blessed with a calibrated sense of cosmic vibrations or whatever. The band often does not follow any meter, preferring visual cues rather than musical ones. It’s as if Gira assembles a band meeting and concocts two hours worth of gestures and their associated fears. “When I wink my eye, we’ll play D flat 6 add nine. The bell player will hit a gong. The pedal steel will channel the supernatural shrieks of children centuries dead from influenza.” It’s a master class in tensile showmanship, the mark of the highest professionalism, and it explains how after some decades the band can call this sound up at will. There’s even a harmonica in the hollowed out crater of its one long, droning middle chord. That they then resolve this tension, such as they do, with a sinuous, resolutely anti-climactic tribal beat shows how finely tuned their counter-intuition is.
*****
Today I know the song to be “The Seer,” the title track to 2012’s best album. It’s thirty-two minutes long and has, as its only lyric, the words “I see it all,” repeated past the point of mantra, past the point of sense, where it ceases to be distinguishable at all from the “indecipherable obscenities” at the piece’s conclusion. It’s so massive it has a prologue in the home taped “The Wolf,” a stalking harbinger that asks to be “splayed upon your silver gate” as a matter of pride. There’s also “The Seer Returns,” which, despite its relative funkiness, features the extremely unsettling wordless vocals of Jarboe while an interstellar answering machine describes, “a jagged, deep crack in the crust of the earth. Put your light in my mouth. Ahh the mountains are crumbling.”
This is a forty minute stretch that is easily the boldest move on 2CDs (or 3LPs) full of them. It begins with ghosts moaning on the helpfully titled “Lunacy,” which features Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker in a chorus that Brecht would certainly approve. They deliver the line “Your childhood…is over” in such a shudder that one reaches past any musical contemporaries and starts flipping through The Tempest to find analogs. The album ends with ramblings about “a ladder to God! Ge ge ge ge ge a ladder to God!” that, in live renditions of this lyric’s song, “The Apostate,” are delivered as if Gira were so severely mentally impaired that he strikes himself for each curse.
Suffice to say The Seer possesses a singular vision. It also represents a cumulative one: the metaphorical soul in the marble Gira has been hacking at for decades. Birthed in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around the time of Sonic Youth and other no wave bands, Swans earned a reputation for making particularly nasty, brutal music even among their peers and competitors (“next to our friends the Swans, who had a percussionist who pounded metal, we were total wimps,” Kim Gordon remembered of a 1982 tour). Over the ensuing decade plus of lineup changes, Gira gradually sanded the barbs off his music without making it the least accessible. When keyboardist and vocalist Jarboe joined in 1985, the band’s sound moved in a more overtly gothic, folk direction, which resulted in records, like 1996’s supreme Soundtracks for the Blind, that may have been more hinged but no less violent. The record was elemental, as artsy as anything from New York but, to borrow a phrase from reviewer Greil Marcus, “as contrived as the weather.”
The record would have a big influence on the post-rock bands of the coming decade, but Gira broke up the band, focusing on his creepy folk project Angels of Light. They reunited in 2010, abjuring almost all of their previously recorded music and roaring out of the gate with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. A sample song title from this album: “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” (I imagine Gira birthing this particularly bilious piece into the world, smiling, and saying to himself “the old uniform still fits.”) In any iteration, Gira’s interests lie in the thin tripwires between lunacy and divine inspiration–or perhaps smashing the differences, if there are to be had, between divine and demonic “touching.” As Swans, he borrows the fortitude necessary to pick at the scabbing of these ideas–uses the blood and the pus of them, in fact, as his primary colors. My Father, the band’s first in sixteen years, is among their finest, and they followed it with a tour where they used the stage to dig even deeper. But not even this year’s stunning live-album-slash-fundraiser We Rose From Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head could fully let on how deep The Seer would go.
*****
May 29, 2012. Three blocks from the ocean sits Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, NJ, and the view from my father’s hospital window is astonishing. At 7 PM you can see the buildings’ shadows grow long over Bath Ave. The daylight turns yellowish, the brick façade dulls. My father has a bandage on his chest where a tumor the size of a quarter used to be. He’s sleeping under the influence of morphine, something he’s never had use for but his son has experience abusing. 1% of North American breast cancer patients are men, and, as the joke goes in my family, my father has “won the booby prize.” I chuckle along with my mother, wondering, silently, that jokes are great and all but why can’t my old man just pull that tumor out with his teeth?
It will be months before I hear Karen Orzolek’s gentle voice over the shapely acoustic waltz of “Song for a Warrior.” To say it’s the most beautiful song on the album and then walk away is irresponsible, and yet I don’t know how to even mention it while doing it justice. There is something simultaneously comforting and terrifying, strange and yet understated, in the song that I’ve been unable to shake since August. I like Orzolek’s other band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, just fine, but there’s something about this performance, something about how audible her breath is. She sounds like a child at the beginning of a Kung Fu movie, narrating a Shogun’s bloodlusty revenge in terms that are more elegiac and comforting than vengeful. This is no fight song, this is no reckoning, but it is instead a statement of support for the weight that the world’s destroyer must bear. This is a matter-of-fact reading at the metaphysical weigh station. She seems to say that this is what must be done, and it may be impossible; and we love you.
The song always transports me to my father’s hospital room. I’d like to think it owes more to the music–impossibly lugubrious even when utterly haunted, like the limpid late afternoon light on the day of his surgery. My father is no one’s warrior–not even mine, as hard as he tried teaching me the finer points of stereo equalization and engine maintenance. If thereifixedit.com had been around when I was in grammar school, we would’ve run riot all over it. But the lyrics suggest some things about masculinity, something about fatherhood, and duty—all things that will forever, naturally, remind me of him—that I’ve been unable to parse, if not process. And I always lose it at the line where Orzolek says, “Some people say that God is long dead…but I heard something inside you with my head to your chest.”
*****
My father believes in God, and I used to as well, but lately, I’m not too sure. I’m scared to death of admitting this to myself or others. So many of the twelve step meetings I attend talk about the Higher Power Which I Choose to Call God it’s become something of a secret shame. Mostly, they forget to even give the idea of “one’s own conception of a higher power” any lip service whatsoever. “Solution based meetings,” they’re called. “God is either is nothing or he is everything. What was our choice to be?” they intone.
And when God is everything, he is EVERY thing: the hand that hides your keys when you’re about to innocently drive to the neighborhood bar; the eyeglass case that obscures the phone when you’re about to call your dealer; the five dollar bill in your pocket on laundry day; the rambling drunk in the back of the clubhouse that manages to say something of substance the one day they attend these meetings. God has these people in the palm of His hand, and he accordingly acts as everything from an ambulance to a headhunter to a dayplanner to a post-it note. As for the tumor in your father’s chest, the structures of your childhood washed away into the Atlantic ocean by Hurricane Sandy, the widows and orphans you see roaming the funeral parlors of your friends, well…God has a plan that’s better than yours.
I’d be lying if I said I’ve never felt this way. This autumn, however, I’m mentally turning these church basements into the cover of a Cannibal Corpse album. My brain flashes images of scenes so violent, so sudden and sword-unsheathing sharp, that I even now hesitate to slow them down to write them down here, in the comfort of my own bedroom. There are absolutely black, raging thoughts against other human beings that I don’t remember ever having, not when there were all kinds of consciousness blotting things coursing through my brain not even after a previous break up where I literally set that woman’s gifts and t-shirts on fire. This is God’s plan? A life of crushing anxiety and ineptitude? A father with no chest? The Jersey Shore house still stood but the roller coaster was in the Atlantic. To the extent that I could see God’s plan in any of this, it felt cruel. I felt like Michael Dawson being brought back to the island on LOST, only to keep a bomb from blowing up long enough to let Jin escape from the island. And now Christian Shepherd was standing before me, telling me “You can go now, Christopher.”
But if my embittered ranting is true, and God is nothing, and spirituality without religion is a sham, and life is some meaningless cipher, what is this thing, then? What is that heartbeat I remember feeling in my father’s chest at the age of four, and why does that come back to me the nanosecond Karen O sings about it? If all of this is muscle and blood and sinews and gray brain matter and marking time til astral collisions, if all that my Father really is to me is a provider whose affections are borne from gross sentimentality, then what is that? Why does memory have the pull that it does? Why does this music speak to me in the way that it does? Why is the past year of my life and all of its petty, middle class, white problems–stuck in the wrong job, pining for the wrong woman, eating the wrong food, trying to subside that pain in the wrong bedrooms–more bearable, even ecstatic, in the strains of music like this?
*****
There’s a scene at the end of Take Shelter where we learn that Michael Shannon’s apocalyptic dreams are real. Yellow, unctuous rain falls on his wife’s hands, shaking in disbelief as dozens of funnel clouds burst from a previously serene day over the ocean. Her mind can’t process it, but her senses are not lying to her. She knows what she’s seeing is true, but she also knows that it can’t be. But while her defense mechanisms are shaken, maybe irrevocably, she can handle her improbable but certain doom.
Swans make music that is aimed precisely for that moment, and the last moments of “Song for a Warrior” may be the band’s finest execution. The music shifts to a dark, unstable chord at the end of the last verse, a choir joining behind Orzolek as she begs her warrior to “Send them home! Send them home! Use your sword, and your voice, and destroy…” Swans stay on this chord for far longer than they do on any other in the song– armonically, in sequence, but atmospherically jarring as all hell, which is precisely what it sounds like, even as there are no usual mountains of dissonance or bells and percussion. It feels like the ground is going to rupture, you can practically see the red light shooting out of the cracks in the ground: “And destrooooooooooooooooooooooy…”
But there the music hangs aloft. In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon takes his wife’s oily hand in his. Throughout the film he has been an unbearable nervous wreck, almost certainly insane, never sure if every cloud or winged creature is the signal moment of the End. The worst of his fears are confirmed, yet now he is a source of strength for his wife and young daughter. I can see this scene in my mind’s eye while “Song for a Warrior” ends at its pulchritudinous tonic chord, all whispers and tenderness: “Then, begin again.” The couple walk into the house. The screen goes to black. The credits roll. The world ends. They die. So do we.
*****
October 28th 2012: Sandy makes landfall around 6 PM today, a Monday. There were a lot of sights and sounds from that storm and its aftermath, that I will never understand, whose visual or auditory evidence was literally unfathomable, but whose reality I must nevertheless accept. The size of the storm as it moved up the coast. The Seaside Heights roller coaster in the Atlantic Ocean. The picture of the yellow house in Union Beach that was half destroyed. Sea Bright and Sandy Hook underwater. Ocean Avenue on the ocean. How my neighbors lights looked through my own powerless window for three nights as my mother and I sat staring at them through our window, dark and cold. The sound of elation when we got our power back after seven days. The sound of her voice when she told me she’d been sleeping at my friend’s house all week.
But nothing was crazier than that Monday night into Tuesday morning, when the worst of the storm had passed but the wind gusts were still terrifying. There could have not have been a working lightbulb within miles of Monmouth County. I was frightened and mind-boggled in a way I had never known (in fact I had joked to someone that I would never listen to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Swans so blithely again—certainly not the Zorn-esque freak out of “93 Ave B Blues,” which literally sounds like metal structures ripped apart). I was awake at 1 AM, reading by candlelight, when I noticed the house had gotten…brighter. I looked outside my window, and the clouds had parted just enough for the full moon to shine through. In the middle of the worst thing nature had ever thrown at me, among eviscerated trees, mass flooding, and suburban sprawl plunged into darkness: there was the motherfucking moon.
It vanished again moments later. The next light I’d see was my neighboring town’s lights four days later.
*****
In 2012 I finally buckled down and finished The Idiot. Dostoevsky was, famously, an Orthodox Christian, but his ideas of the divine nature of Christ and God are so far removed from even the judgmental, quarterly confessional Catholicism of my youth that I found it boggling. Dostoevsky suggested–or his characters did, anyway—that Christ had indeed died for our sins, but it had nothing to do with our salvation. Rather, Christ’s death was to hold up this awful mirror to mankind and its socializing, cliquish, and duplicitous instincts. Prince Myshkin, the novel’s stand-in for Christ (if not Dostoevsky, or both) is the victim of intense manipulations by a wealthy maniac, who, though he succeeds, only murders the prize he spends the entire novel coveting. Not only does the world think nothing of this turn of events, but Myshkin is the fool, openly mocked for cleaving so desperately to something—to ideals—that is killing him, because they cannot be traded for people or material or prestige.
The Idiot, like The Seer, like the antiseptic smell of hospitals and church basements, like power outages, like the ruins of the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, like sleeping in an empty bed, will forever remind me of 2012. Finished 150 years apart, these two artworks posed the only questions worth asking in the year of our supposed apocalypse, questions beyond merely “why do bad things happen to good people?” “Why are bad things happening to me?” “Does anyone notice or care if I am kind to my neighbor?” Questions that are impossible to pose in any known language—it would sound something like, “why is it that when God is nothing I cannot stand the way I feel, and when God is everything I cannot the stand the way I act?”
Gira isn’t so much bothered with the question of God’s existence as he is fascinated by his seeming prophets. That would explain “The Apostate,” the album’s ultimate song and, at 23:01, only the second longest. It’s another jam born out of the band’s trademark primordial ooze of drone that evolves into the rantings of the divinely touched, deadly in both its earnestness and its irony. “It’s not in my mind,” shrieks Gira, convincing himself as much as the crowd of agape onlookers. “We’re on an infinite line! Get out of my mind! Ge ge ge ge,” he says, repeating the plosive like a Tommy Gun, like the repetitive nonsense was an incantation against the sick world, against unpleasant reality. “God, I can fly! WE’RE ON A LADDER TO GOD!” Perhaps it’s coming out of the ground, from that jagged, deep crack spreading south to north. At least, until the ladder starts to fall apart: “Ge ge ge space cunt! Brain wash! Star dust! Space fuck! Cunt! Cunt!” he shouts, spastically. “We are blessed!” he screams, although the music is suggesting a different way to look at the same unwanted, supernatural presence. “We are blessed! Fuck! Bliss! Fuck! Bliss!”
If I had to summarize The Seer, I could say only that it’s music that needs to be heard to be believed, and even then defying disbelief. It lives for disbelief, maps out the territory of the mind-boggle and then digs deeper, unraveling all of mankind if that’s what it takes to for another addictive moment of transcendence, of unreality made manifest, of comfort irrevocably shattered and something new birthed, bloodily, into the psychic world. The seer sees what cannot be unseen, after all, and its maelstrom accepts no glad tidings. It forces upon us the one lesson the band learned in its earliest stages, the sound Gira has been chasing for thirty years, the one we can hear him shrieking in “The Apostate,” as if he himself didn’t want to learn it, much less admit it, much less be the voice for it. That the crazed are right: transcendence may, indeed, be real, but it is also fleeting, common, and, perhaps in the final analysis, unrewarding. We are blessed, indeed. Fuck bliss. Your childhood is over. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all.
1 :: Swans
The Seer
(Young God)
October 1, 2011. I’m sitting in the back of the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, watching Swans tear the place apart. It’s not much to see. Excepting Thor Harris, the long haired auxiliary drummer stripped to his waist and striking poses appropriate to his Nordic deific namesake, they look almost genteel on stage. There are clues in the band’s movements: leader Michael Gira’s spastic gyrations; the hypnotic head lolling of bassist Christopher Pravdicha; the way Phil Puleo draws back his arms to hit his massive standing bass drum like he’s pulling a sinking man out of quicksand, or about to bring the stake down into some demon’s heart. But there’s little visual complement to the guttural roar shaking the theatre. They just look like some older dudes in a rock band—some of them still too skinny, a couple aging well. They don’t look like they could possibly be making the sound they are, which is like the amplifiers had been filled with their own blood, like they had taken that blood and slathered their strings with it. I’ve been in earthquakes with fewer undulations than this theater. I can barely comprehend it. But I do.
It seems to some like Swans are just mucking about on stage, but they’re actually doing something that’s crazy hard. Once you’ve been acquainted with rudiments of a few instruments, letting a single chord or note ring–and then, as Gira is wont to do at various moments, vibrating on stage like someone possessed, snake charmer and snake simultaneously–is not very difficult. Swans, however, have to pay strict attention to their surroundings and control these completely unstable chords. It’s not merely that they’re blessed with a calibrated sense of cosmic vibrations or whatever. The band often does not follow any meter, preferring visual cues rather than musical ones. It’s as if Gira assembles a band meeting and concocts two hours worth of gestures and their associated fears. “When I wink my eye, we’ll play D flat 6 add nine. The bell player will hit a gong. The pedal steel will channel the supernatural shrieks of children centuries dead from influenza.” It’s a master class in tensile showmanship, the mark of the highest professionalism, and it explains how after some decades the band can call this sound up at will. There’s even a harmonica in the hollowed out crater of its one long, droning middle chord. That they then resolve this tension, such as they do, with a sinuous, resolutely anti-climactic tribal beat shows how finely tuned their counter-intuition is.
*****
Today I know the song to be “The Seer,” the title track to 2012’s best album. It’s thirty-two minutes long and has, as its only lyric, the words “I see it all,” repeated past the point of mantra, past the point of sense, where it ceases to be distinguishable at all from the “indecipherable obscenities” at the piece’s conclusion. It’s so massive it has a prologue in the home taped “The Wolf,” a stalking harbinger that asks to be “splayed upon your silver gate” as a matter of pride. There’s also “The Seer Returns,” which, despite its relative funkiness, features the extremely unsettling wordless vocals of Jarboe while an interstellar answering machine describes, “a jagged, deep crack in the crust of the earth. Put your light in my mouth. Ahh the mountains are crumbling.”
This is a forty minute stretch that is easily the boldest move on 2CDs (or 3LPs) full of them. It begins with ghosts moaning on the helpfully titled “Lunacy,” which features Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker in a chorus that Brecht would certainly approve. They deliver the line “Your childhood…is over” in such a shudder that one reaches past any musical contemporaries and starts flipping through The Tempest to find analogs. The album ends with ramblings about “a ladder to God! Ge ge ge ge ge a ladder to God!” that, in live renditions of this lyric’s song, “The Apostate,” are delivered as if Gira were so severely mentally impaired that he strikes himself for each curse.
Suffice to say The Seer possesses a singular vision. It also represents a cumulative one: the metaphorical soul in the marble Gira has been hacking at for decades. Birthed in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around the time of Sonic Youth and other no wave bands, Swans earned a reputation for making particularly nasty, brutal music even among their peers and competitors (“next to our friends the Swans, who had a percussionist who pounded metal, we were total wimps,” Kim Gordon remembered of a 1982 tour). Over the ensuing decade plus of lineup changes, Gira gradually sanded the barbs off his music without making it the least accessible. When keyboardist and vocalist Jarboe joined in 1985, the band’s sound moved in a more overtly gothic, folk direction, which resulted in records, like 1996’s supreme Soundtracks for the Blind, that may have been more hinged but no less violent. The record was elemental, as artsy as anything from New York but, to borrow a phrase from reviewer Greil Marcus, “as contrived as the weather.”
The record would have a big influence on the post-rock bands of the coming decade, but Gira broke up the band, focusing on his creepy folk project Angels of Light. They reunited in 2010, abjuring almost all of their previously recorded music and roaring out of the gate with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. A sample song title from this album: “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” (I imagine Gira birthing this particularly bilious piece into the world, smiling, and saying to himself “the old uniform still fits.”) In any iteration, Gira’s interests lie in the thin tripwires between lunacy and divine inspiration–or perhaps smashing the differences, if there are to be had, between divine and demonic “touching.” As Swans, he borrows the fortitude necessary to pick at the scabbing of these ideas–uses the blood and the pus of them, in fact, as his primary colors. My Father, the band’s first in sixteen years, is among their finest, and they followed it with a tour where they used the stage to dig even deeper. But not even this year’s stunning live-album-slash-fundraiser We Rose From Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head could fully let on how deep The Seer would go.
*****
May 29, 2012. Three blocks from the ocean sits Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, NJ, and the view from my father’s hospital window is astonishing. At 7 PM you can see the buildings’ shadows grow long over Bath Ave. The daylight turns yellowish, the brick façade dulls. My father has a bandage on his chest where a tumor the size of a quarter used to be. He’s sleeping under the influence of morphine, something he’s never had use for but his son has experience abusing. 1% of North American breast cancer patients are men, and, as the joke goes in my family, my father has “won the booby prize.” I chuckle along with my mother, wondering, silently, that jokes are great and all but why can’t my old man just pull that tumor out with his teeth?
It will be months before I hear Karen Orzolek’s gentle voice over the shapely acoustic waltz of “Song for a Warrior.” To say it’s the most beautiful song on the album and then walk away is irresponsible, and yet I don’t know how to even mention it while doing it justice. There is something simultaneously comforting and terrifying, strange and yet understated, in the song that I’ve been unable to shake since August. I like Orzolek’s other band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, just fine, but there’s something about this performance, something about how audible her breath is. She sounds like a child at the beginning of a Kung Fu movie, narrating a Shogun’s bloodlusty revenge in terms that are more elegiac and comforting than vengeful. This is no fight song, this is no reckoning, but it is instead a statement of support for the weight that the world’s destroyer must bear. This is a matter-of-fact reading at the metaphysical weigh station. She seems to say that this is what must be done, and it may be impossible; and we love you.
The song always transports me to my father’s hospital room. I’d like to think it owes more to the music–impossibly lugubrious even when utterly haunted, like the limpid late afternoon light on the day of his surgery. My father is no one’s warrior–not even mine, as hard as he tried teaching me the finer points of stereo equalization and engine maintenance. If thereifixedit.com had been around when I was in grammar school, we would’ve run riot all over it. But the lyrics suggest some things about masculinity, something about fatherhood, and duty—all things that will forever, naturally, remind me of him—that I’ve been unable to parse, if not process. And I always lose it at the line where Orzolek says, “Some people say that God is long dead…but I heard something inside you with my head to your chest.”
*****
My father believes in God, and I used to as well, but lately, I’m not too sure. I’m scared to death of admitting this to myself or others. So many of the twelve step meetings I attend talk about the Higher Power Which I Choose to Call God it’s become something of a secret shame. Mostly, they forget to even give the idea of “one’s own conception of a higher power” any lip service whatsoever. “Solution based meetings,” they’re called. “God is either is nothing or he is everything. What was our choice to be?” they intone.
And when God is everything, he is EVERY thing: the hand that hides your keys when you’re about to innocently drive to the neighborhood bar; the eyeglass case that obscures the phone when you’re about to call your dealer; the five dollar bill in your pocket on laundry day; the rambling drunk in the back of the clubhouse that manages to say something of substance the one day they attend these meetings. God has these people in the palm of His hand, and he accordingly acts as everything from an ambulance to a headhunter to a dayplanner to a post-it note. As for the tumor in your father’s chest, the structures of your childhood washed away into the Atlantic ocean by Hurricane Sandy, the widows and orphans you see roaming the funeral parlors of your friends, well…God has a plan that’s better than yours.
I’d be lying if I said I’ve never felt this way. This autumn, however, I’m mentally turning these church basements into the cover of a Cannibal Corpse album. My brain flashes images of scenes so violent, so sudden and sword-unsheathing sharp, that I even now hesitate to slow them down to write them down here, in the comfort of my own bedroom. There are absolutely black, raging thoughts against other human beings that I don’t remember ever having, not when there were all kinds of consciousness blotting things coursing through my brain not even after a previous break up where I literally set that woman’s gifts and t-shirts on fire. This is God’s plan? A life of crushing anxiety and ineptitude? A father with no chest? The Jersey Shore house still stood but the roller coaster was in the Atlantic. To the extent that I could see God’s plan in any of this, it felt cruel. I felt like Michael Dawson being brought back to the island on LOST, only to keep a bomb from blowing up long enough to let Jin escape from the island. And now Christian Shepherd was standing before me, telling me “You can go now, Christopher.”
But if my embittered ranting is true, and God is nothing, and spirituality without religion is a sham, and life is some meaningless cipher, what is this thing, then? What is that heartbeat I remember feeling in my father’s chest at the age of four, and why does that come back to me the nanosecond Karen O sings about it? If all of this is muscle and blood and sinews and gray brain matter and marking time til astral collisions, if all that my Father really is to me is a provider whose affections are borne from gross sentimentality, then what is that? Why does memory have the pull that it does? Why does this music speak to me in the way that it does? Why is the past year of my life and all of its petty, middle class, white problems–stuck in the wrong job, pining for the wrong woman, eating the wrong food, trying to subside that pain in the wrong bedrooms–more bearable, even ecstatic, in the strains of music like this?
*****
There’s a scene at the end of Take Shelter where we learn that Michael Shannon’s apocalyptic dreams are real. Yellow, unctuous rain falls on his wife’s hands, shaking in disbelief as dozens of funnel clouds burst from a previously serene day over the ocean. Her mind can’t process it, but her senses are not lying to her. She knows what she’s seeing is true, but she also knows that it can’t be. But while her defense mechanisms are shaken, maybe irrevocably, she can handle her improbable but certain doom.
Swans make music that is aimed precisely for that moment, and the last moments of “Song for a Warrior” may be the band’s finest execution. The music shifts to a dark, unstable chord at the end of the last verse, a choir joining behind Orzolek as she begs her warrior to “Send them home! Send them home! Use your sword, and your voice, and destroy…” Swans stay on this chord for far longer than they do on any other in the song– armonically, in sequence, but atmospherically jarring as all hell, which is precisely what it sounds like, even as there are no usual mountains of dissonance or bells and percussion. It feels like the ground is going to rupture, you can practically see the red light shooting out of the cracks in the ground: “And destrooooooooooooooooooooooy…”
But there the music hangs aloft. In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon takes his wife’s oily hand in his. Throughout the film he has been an unbearable nervous wreck, almost certainly insane, never sure if every cloud or winged creature is the signal moment of the End. The worst of his fears are confirmed, yet now he is a source of strength for his wife and young daughter. I can see this scene in my mind’s eye while “Song for a Warrior” ends at its pulchritudinous tonic chord, all whispers and tenderness: “Then, begin again.” The couple walk into the house. The screen goes to black. The credits roll. The world ends. They die. So do we.
*****
October 28th 2012: Sandy makes landfall around 6 PM today, a Monday. There were a lot of sights and sounds from that storm and its aftermath, that I will never understand, whose visual or auditory evidence was literally unfathomable, but whose reality I must nevertheless accept. The size of the storm as it moved up the coast. The Seaside Heights roller coaster in the Atlantic Ocean. The picture of the yellow house in Union Beach that was half destroyed. Sea Bright and Sandy Hook underwater. Ocean Avenue on the ocean. How my neighbors lights looked through my own powerless window for three nights as my mother and I sat staring at them through our window, dark and cold. The sound of elation when we got our power back after seven days. The sound of her voice when she told me she’d been sleeping at my friend’s house all week.
But nothing was crazier than that Monday night into Tuesday morning, when the worst of the storm had passed but the wind gusts were still terrifying. There could have not have been a working lightbulb within miles of Monmouth County. I was frightened and mind-boggled in a way I had never known (in fact I had joked to someone that I would never listen to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Swans so blithely again—certainly not the Zorn-esque freak out of “93 Ave B Blues,” which literally sounds like metal structures ripped apart). I was awake at 1 AM, reading by candlelight, when I noticed the house had gotten…brighter. I looked outside my window, and the clouds had parted just enough for the full moon to shine through. In the middle of the worst thing nature had ever thrown at me, among eviscerated trees, mass flooding, and suburban sprawl plunged into darkness: there was the motherfucking moon.
It vanished again moments later. The next light I’d see was my neighboring town’s lights four days later.
*****
In 2012 I finally buckled down and finished The Idiot. Dostoevsky was, famously, an Orthodox Christian, but his ideas of the divine nature of Christ and God are so far removed from even the judgmental, quarterly confessional Catholicism of my youth that I found it boggling. Dostoevsky suggested–or his characters did, anyway—that Christ had indeed died for our sins, but it had nothing to do with our salvation. Rather, Christ’s death was to hold up this awful mirror to mankind and its socializing, cliquish, and duplicitous instincts. Prince Myshkin, the novel’s stand-in for Christ (if not Dostoevsky, or both) is the victim of intense manipulations by a wealthy maniac, who, though he succeeds, only murders the prize he spends the entire novel coveting. Not only does the world think nothing of this turn of events, but Myshkin is the fool, openly mocked for cleaving so desperately to something—to ideals—that is killing him, because they cannot be traded for people or material or prestige.
The Idiot, like The Seer, like the antiseptic smell of hospitals and church basements, like power outages, like the ruins of the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, like sleeping in an empty bed, will forever remind me of 2012. Finished 150 years apart, these two artworks posed the only questions worth asking in the year of our supposed apocalypse, questions beyond merely “why do bad things happen to good people?” “Why are bad things happening to me?” “Does anyone notice or care if I am kind to my neighbor?” Questions that are impossible to pose in any known language—it would sound something like, “why is it that when God is nothing I cannot stand the way I feel, and when God is everything I cannot the stand the way I act?”
Gira isn’t so much bothered with the question of God’s existence as he is fascinated by his seeming prophets. That would explain “The Apostate,” the album’s ultimate song and, at 23:01, only the second longest. It’s another jam born out of the band’s trademark primordial ooze of drone that evolves into the rantings of the divinely touched, deadly in both its earnestness and its irony. “It’s not in my mind,” shrieks Gira, convincing himself as much as the crowd of agape onlookers. “We’re on an infinite line! Get out of my mind! Ge ge ge ge,” he says, repeating the plosive like a Tommy Gun, like the repetitive nonsense was an incantation against the sick world, against unpleasant reality. “God, I can fly! WE’RE ON A LADDER TO GOD!” Perhaps it’s coming out of the ground, from that jagged, deep crack spreading south to north. At least, until the ladder starts to fall apart: “Ge ge ge space cunt! Brain wash! Star dust! Space fuck! Cunt! Cunt!” he shouts, spastically. “We are blessed!” he screams, although the music is suggesting a different way to look at the same unwanted, supernatural presence. “We are blessed! Fuck! Bliss! Fuck! Bliss!”
If I had to summarize The Seer, I could say only that it’s music that needs to be heard to be believed, and even then defying disbelief. It lives for disbelief, maps out the territory of the mind-boggle and then digs deeper, unraveling all of mankind if that’s what it takes to for another addictive moment of transcendence, of unreality made manifest, of comfort irrevocably shattered and something new birthed, bloodily, into the psychic world. The seer sees what cannot be unseen, after all, and its maelstrom accepts no glad tidings. It forces upon us the one lesson the band learned in its earliest stages, the sound Gira has been chasing for thirty years, the one we can hear him shrieking in “The Apostate,” as if he himself didn’t want to learn it, much less admit it, much less be the voice for it. That the crazed are right: transcendence may, indeed, be real, but it is also fleeting, common, and, perhaps in the final analysis, unrewarding. We are blessed, indeed. Fuck bliss. Your childhood is over. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all. I see it all.
HeavyPetter
Carnal Decadence
Diamond Rugs from Letterman this summer. Similar to Deer Tick, with whom they collaborate.
CHillDeac
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Slightly more than a collaboration considering John McCauley is the front man/songwriter for both bands. But I agree, good stuff.
TownieDeac
words are futile devices
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my february is looking more stacked than any month last year. got jeff mangum, lumineers, django django, and furthur all lined up.
CheesePritchard
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Where do you live again?
TownieDeac
words are futile devices
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Hershey, PA. Doing lots of traveling that month for shows though.
CheesePritchard
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Oh okay. I was thinking Brooklyn. There is a Strange Design show there in February that I was thinking about using as an excuse to get back to NY for a few days.
CheesePritchard
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I was very fortunate to weasel my way in to a few Kennedy Center Honors tickets last night.
Is further playing in pa?
seventwofour
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Probably belongs in the best of 2012 music thread, but I really dug this song this year
TownieDeac
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Nope. Well not til the Spring at least. Hoping for another Tower run. I was mistaken about them in my concert calendar.
El Chupacabra
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