where to start with a record that claims the pet shop boys west end girls and mike watt / kirra roessler’s all bass team-up dos as influences?
musically this ain’t anywhere near psb’s arch electropop or the occasionally/frequently wordless eight string curiosities from ex-minuteman watt and ex-black flagger roessler. maybe lyrically, over-intellectualising, stretching, fingertips grasping for connection, west end girls and black grass share a sense of ennui, of location, an existentialist thread. maybe it’s just a little in-joke on kyle fields part. as for dos? christ knows.
blahblahblah…
anyway back to the subject at hand. to quote the man hisself: black grass to me is simultaneously a pirate name, the ground at night, the ground when you are face down on it in a state of debilitation, depression, submission, humility. or, it is the past.
a sense of betweenness then. intertwined allegory’s. legion. it’s a record that seems to be about the transitionary, the limal. about inner fella and environmental exterior; the man, kyle field; the season, autumn. so yeah seems rather hushed and intimate. personal as much as abstract. using the landscape, the natural world as metaphors for the self. too clever to be mere navel gazing. and while it’s not particularly new conceptually, damn does it work.
reductionally, buncha neat words across simple skewed melodies. y’know that sparse, pared to the bone, distilled to the essence thang. like hemingway on faulkner:
poor faulkner. does he really think big emotions come from big words? he thinks i don’t know the ten-dollar words. i know them all right. but there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones i use.
dig?
musically, deceptive in it’s unfussiness. buncha folks from the k records (who’ve been releasing little wings records for a while now) family appear. not in a big brassy band type scenario, just to add some fuzzy colour, some delicate shading to the otherwise understated palette. yeah it’s folky. in a will oldham (as opposed to say, bert jansch) kinda way. voice and guitar. but quietly experimental. like phil elverum’s microphones / mount eerie projects. yet spry and playful. a la david berman’s jaunty narratives.
sad and funny, goofy and honest. songs like tiny postcards from another person, another place. half-remembered scraps of diary atop semi-sketched harmonies. lovely stuff.
