got a bit of writerly block today so i’ll open with a joke.
how do you find will smith in the snow?
just follow the fresh prints…
sorry. come back.
it’s this damned sobriety, this vicious ocular ulcer, the grey grind of existence. it’s getting to me. and whilst the posts of recent yore have been all about the bright, the breezy, the pop and the chorus and the skewed tune, this week has been (mostly) all about the noise and the doom and the wordless mirthlessness of life. y’see the former’s been nothing more than a tatty threadbare blanket to cover up the essential horror of life in the last half of oh nine.
hooom…
well what better soundtrack to yr monthly existential crisis than some folks who dig swans and red house painters and codeine and low. don’t get me wrong i ain’t mersault, killing arabs and wandering around camus’s world of anomie. and this ain’t anywhere as bleak as michael gira’s early nihilistic musings.
but it’s not the kind of shit you play in the park on a sunny day flying kites. it’s not dinner party background twinklings. it’s not gonna be the first dance song at any weddings you go to. billy joel will never close a concert by banging out something from this ep on the piano. though the world would be a better place if these things were true… *sigh*.
it is a rum bugger of an ep. and in the vein of all good ep’s doesn’t want to settle too long in one place. it thrusts it’s fingers bloodily into the dark heart of the eighties, dips it’s toes willingly into the distorto-core of what they used to stupidly call alt-rock, gently licks the earlobe of shoegazerry.
they sprawl with intent like the electric murk of a crazy horse. they bluster with the narcotic grace of a mascis. they scowl with the harrumphing ennui of kozelek and eitzel. you get the overdramatized picture, non?
if you want some kindof namedrop see-all-the-bands-i-know comparison the epic glower of iliketrains or the lush maudlin of tindersticks (particularly on their recent constellation record) springs to mind. and hellfire the swans similitude is twofold reasonable: a) in relation to the later radio friendly burning world era rather than say the filth of filth and b) the jarboe / gira vocal chiaroscuro of dorot / frey.
all of which in a roundabout way says (again!) that i dig swans. and that this is a grumpy little swine of a grey swaddled record.
