Your Lilting Effects

You talked to me about how david bazan was never really the same after pedro the lion and how wilco at the greek had ruined concerts for you. We invented combinations of mcdonald’s sandwiches, we had picnics on top of parking garages and baked without measuring cups. I’d come to your backyard fence late at night and you’d sneak out and we’d get high at the park. You made so much noise climbing over that goddamn fence. I teased you about it all night and I loved you the whole time.

We had a trail in the woods where we would go walking sometimes, and once you stole a bottle of wine from your parents to bring along; they wouldn’t notice. One of us sneaked glances up and down the path as the other took swigs of steadily-warming zinfandel. One sunday you hid a dozen haiku in my backpack and notebooks. On monday, the class period I spent searching for all of them got me through the day. 

Then one day I left, moved across the country, where we couldn’t drive two hours to the beach for cheap pizza and liquor stores that didn’t card. We couldn’t sing the smiths together on shitty days, and we couldn’t even be bored together. So we stopped talking. Not immediately, but not gradually either. One day we just ran out of things to talk about over the internet or the phone and that was it.

So when we ran into each other the other day, me, you, and your newborn, I didn’t know how to react. I panicked. I must have seemed to you so awkward, abrupt, all clipped sentences and vague answers. I wanted to tell you about my life, not like I tell it to other people but like I tell it to myself. I wanted you to get excited by what excited me, and to see through my bullshit when it got too thick. I wanted to hear about all the things you think of at the weirdest times. 
But then I realized I couldn’t do any of that anymore, that I had been replaced by what had then been a mutual acquaintance, and you had been replaced by nobody well.

I’m not pining for the past here. What I’m trying to say is that when I ran into you both the other day I wasn’t uncomfortable because things had changed in such a permanent way. I looked at you and for a flash I wondered if I had done the right thing after all. Sitting on wire chairs outside of starbucks on thursday afternoon, we were two and one. But just for a moment I wondered if we could have been three.

The Notary is present in every room, sitting quietly in a wooden desk chair in the corner. Walking from one store into another along the main street, you’d invariably see him glance up as you enter, then return to his notebook. It’s a sober, leather-bound thing, with black elastic straps caging a pad of thick white legal paper. The townsfolk pay him little mind. He’s always been there, ageless. They’ve grown up with his presence, his silence save for the scratching of his pen at times impossible to predict. A few words here and there; a greeting to a shop owner entering in the morning, a good night as he closes. Always low, murmured almost, but courteous.

The Notary told me about himself one night, in a dream. It was a year into my stay in town. He said he remembers everything, back to the start, long before he was alive. He says the problem with remembering everything he’s ever seen, and most things he hasn’t, is that one’s own story tends to get lost in the ocean. He doesn’t know exactly how he came to town for the first time, but he remembers its founding, the storefront facades being raised in that dusty morning past. He remembers the railroad gangs as they crawled their way to the country’s middle. The skirmishes with the first palefaces pushing west, meteor impacts on an airless plain of volcanic glass, darkness… 
And he remembers things that haven’t happened yet and things that will never happen. He sees all this and remembers. This is how it was, over and over. 

Another time, in the last hours before dawn I’m sure I saw him twice.

I always hate when I hear someone complaining about the length of a book or movie’s ending. After they’ve reached the climax people never let stories spend the night.

She may not be the girl of my dreams, but she occupies them just the same.

PRISONER by The Jezebels

For a debut album, Prisoner is a surprisingly mature one. The Jezabels have been active since 2007, and with three EPs preceding this first full length LP, their sound has developed immensely. Starting with catchy vocal parts and solid guitar work in 2009 on The Man is Dead EP, they developed more complex melodies and some frankly badass tracks by Dark Storm, their third. Now Prisoner combines all the things that have made this band great and improves upon them.

It has a much darker sound than earlier releases, made possible by sweeping, contemplative guitar work and some of the most poignant and innovative vocal melodies yet by singer Hayley Mary. The eponymous first track sets this tone, which is followed by a more conventional-yet-totally-rad track, Endless Summer. It’s single material, reminiscent of their previous releases. But it’s all new territory from there, with haunting tones on Trycolour and very adept rhythms on Horsehead.

Warning: there is a ton of reverb. Many tracks hover just short of shoegazey, which is one of the best possible evolutions of their sound so far. However, an unfortunate side effect of this seems to be that tracks tend to drift into one another, and it takes a few listenings to start really identifying the quantitative differences between songs. But it’s great once you do; each gets at you for a different reason. There’s a particularly great part to every song if you listen for it, be it the epic build in Long Highway or the brooding power behind Nobody Nowhere. Prisoner by no means goes out with a bang. The last third of the album is quiet and introspective, but ends leaving you wanting to listen again.

I’m very excited by the prospects for this band. If The Jezabels keep doing what they’re doing, the fluid evolution of their sound will be a source of continued enchantment with each release.

Rating:

One Shit-ton of Stars

I wanted to speak,
But instead I trained to think
And the world passed by.

Work your loom to break your fast
Poised in crook of tree.
But when what you’ve wrought at last has caught
What use has it to thee?

With satisfaction comes regret,
For trailing silver thread
Your opus diei, now broken, frayed
Must snare tomorrow’s bread.

Once again you set to task
With steely entrails spun
An argent harp twixt steady bark
A joy for you to run.

As works the world, I’ll ne’er again
Behold your web as new
What use to me could knotted strings be,
But what use has it for you! 

Since entering teenage I can only remember letting myself cry in front of people not belonging to my immediate family twice, and both times have been this school year. I like to think I’m getting better…

We live in an old chaos of the sun