As epitaph: He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. so said hannah arendt. sonny smith writes microscopic stories. like
cigarettes: myself and dewey had discovered cigarettes and we got ourselves a pack and went up onto the car port. i lived on a hill so the car port was above the house. we could look out from the carport and see the house down below, look at it as if from a lookout tower and then my old man climbed up onto the roof and started sniffing around, we could see him sniffing from 30 or 40 feet away. walking around, peering, but he couldn’t see us. i thought he could though. the anxiousness was horrible – sitting there with a freshly stubbed cigarette – i stood up and waved. he yelled to us happily – “i thought i smelled a fire!” holy shit i thought to myself and sat back down. that bastard is a superman if he could smell this cigarette from inside the house. that was around the time i thought he could read my thoughts and was just playing one giant game with me.
moments is what this record is. amy hempel polaroid abstractions. snapshots of lives real and imagined; people, places, overheard conversations, moods, captured. mosquitoes in amber. impressionist sketches, microcosmic observations, (auto)biographical shards. pages torn from diaries, small town newpapers, xeroxed notes. a pointillist spoken/sung-word assemblage of intimate observations.
reductionally what it is, is singer/songwriter (kinda) . reductionally what it is, is theatre, performance. hard not to think of terry allen’s lubbock on everything microtales. just less sprawl, more concise. less kinky friedman, more mekons (rico bell’s actually involved). like if sam shepard mindmelded with willy vlautin…
it started life as a confusion of play and song. each track one of the titular one act plays. and the album finds itself walking this tightrope, swinging from reality to fantasy, musicians as actors, an enjoyably blurred liminality between the two. something smith’s dabbled in before with his hundred records, hundred (semi(non))existant bands project. indulging myriad observations, characters, narrative, elseworlds but realworlds. honing them into smooth shards. some weird, some funny, some sad. played out over a jonathan richman-ish acoustic shuffle.
bookended by a small town stickup stand-off and in between cannibalism, boxers, families, money, fame, love, death. possibly. yeah everything and nothing. micro and macro. and nothing bad can come of anything john dwyer’s involved with.
tim eriksen’s soul of the january hills is arguably the most punk album i own. fearless. lonely. harsh. indulgent. just him, singing. no instruments (throat excepted). a one take beautiful fuck you. folk music: traditional but transcending / transcendent. like sunno))) did with the chord, eriksen did with the voice. it’s a noise that has as much in common with his drone and minimalist contemporaries as it does with say, sacred harp singing or shirley collins. and in falling liminally betwixt the two, probably doesn’t get the recognition deserving from either camp…
that breathtaking simplicity of january hills is present here too but with (no prizes for guessing) banjo and fiddle. oh and cordelia’s dad comrade peter irvine on occasional percussion.
it’s the quietude i dig. intense. direct. like you can feel his goddam breath on the back of yr neck. a kindof ferocious intimacy. every sound seems amplified, every stringscrape and hit of wood on skin hangs ectoplasmic in the air, the resonance from each pluck and bow creating this bitching psychic hum that exists not so much in the recording process but in yr skullspace.
damn sure this shit ain’t easy to play, but it’s a complexity masked (paradoxically) by the seeming simplicity of the music. stripped back till there’s nothing but the beating, bleeding heart and guts left, exposed. sparse, powerful, pregnant with stories, harmonies, history. the primitive, pastoral creaks of ghosts, centuries dead. lazarus songs. songs of death and fear and love and sin and redemption.
