Self-Released, 2008

To begin, I would like to state a few basic tenets I more or less adhere to in regard to the medium of appraising sound recordings, A.K.A albums.

1. ‘Albums’ are documents of recorded sound and should be held separate from the idea of ‘Music’ in so much as neither requires the other in order to exist. The art of capturing and manipulating sound, musical or otherwise is what makes an album. There is much more to it than the music itself just as there is much more to a painting than the subject depicted.
2. Time does not “pass’’, rather it accumulates. Judging an album based on its constituent parts (I.E. songs) rather than as a whole deprives the album of its fullness. A couple of great/poor tracks do not necessarily make or break an album so long as they are subsumed by the cumulative overall effect of the piece.
3. All albums are conceptual whether the artists involved are conscious of it or not.

Deathconsciousness materialized from the murk sometime in January. I discovered it while convalescing from some unidentifiable virus, drifting through a hazy fever dream that lies unsteadily between consciousness and unconsciousness. This seems to be precisely what this album is all about: a soundtrack to accompany the microcosmic drama that takes place during one form of illness or another.

Interestingly, Deathconsciousness plays out rather abstractly despite bearing strong song-based, post-punk influences. Hints of Joy Divison, early Cure and two Daniel Ash projects; Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, are prevalent throughout but are always tempered with an individual element that is none but the artists’ own. As with their influences, there is also a strong undercurrent of darkness bordering on flirtation with nihilism complete with all of the paradoxes that accompany such a fascination. Painting in dark, muted tones Have a Nice Life employ surface simplicity and shifting dynamics to weave an emotionally rich tapestry on the intriguingly titled opener “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut”, before ripping it open with “Bloodhail”, a monumental expression of brooding intensity akin to the adrenal saturation of standing in a bell tower armed to the teeth. From there we shift restlessly again and again between laser focused purpose and fog-enveloped uncertainty sometimes within the same track, as on “Hunter“, the overall effect being one of disorientation and heightened alertness. “Telephony” is distant and alienated while “There is No Food” is grainy and remote. This distinction may seem null on paper but it becomes tangible in sonic form. “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail”, steeped in a dank Scandinavian underground ambiance and with a shredded aluminum guitar sound kick starts the second disc. Another dramatic transition, “Holy Fucking Shit - 40,000” begins with all the cracked optimism of a Flaming Lips’ outtake, giving way to a nervous breakdown at the midway point before finally returning to the jaunty happy-sad acoustic strumming. “Deep Deep” constructs vast marble columns of bass that support impossibly high spires of spindly treble, which “The Future” bulldozes in an inexorable yet somehow feeble industrial barrage. “I Don’t Love’s” oceanic pulse swallows up a lonely voice flailing futilely in the undertow yet in typically disorienting fashion the final track “Earthmover” is tinged with distorted hope, tiny corpuscles of light filtering through a shattered panel of stained glass.

The charges against Deathconsciousness are that it is overlong, inconsistent, and underdeveloped. I won’t argue any of these points but the failures of concision and focus conspire to create a most intriguing series of tensions and releases, and as stated above, the overall effect is what should be considered rather than the parts. On this front, the sprawling framework and tremulous waxing and waning lend an air of protracted despair occasionally punctured by glimmering shards of redemption through heightened intensity.

In Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of The Death of Marat which graces the cover of Deathconsciousness, Marat’s lifeless hand clings to a note that may as well read “resistance is futile…”. Have a Nice Life’s debut album shares with David’s painting an implied response of defiance to that statement: “…but we shall never cease trying”.

Merge, 2008

All Destroyer albums take time to burrow into the subconscious. Dan Bejar is teaching us his unique language one album at a time and the more we learn how to decipher his glyphs, the more rewarding the lesson. Trouble in Dreams is his most instantly likable release yet. With this, his ninth album under the Destroyer heading, his integration into a band setting is total and offers a striking contrast to the one man and his midi masterpiece Your Blues. On Rubies Bejar made strides toward an organic musical unity but his individuality still stood out in bold relief from the rest of the picture creating a delectable tension. Here working with the same band all is blended into a frothy, head-swirling concoction. If this was your introduction to Destroyer you would have no way of knowing that this is an individual’s showcase easily assuming that instead it was an incredibly supple indie band fronted by a rather idiosyncratic character, which in fact Destroyer now is. A collective of non-equals perhaps, but a collective nonetheless.

The subdued lilt of opener “Blue Flower/Blue Flame” defies expectation by remaining just that for its full running time. Typically Bejar would have cracked the song open midway through with an exhilaratingly messy guitar riff but here he lets the song be, which while at first seems almost disappointing actually ends up feeling like a more authentic approach. This “getting out of the way” of the songs is a common thread throughout Trouble in Dreams and an atypical one from a man who usually leaves indelible fingerprints all over his work. This new found ease of expression is in evidence in “Dark Leaves from the Thread” where the words roll off of Bejar’s tongue like an incantation and “Rivers” where his lyrical flow matches that of the titular body of water. Elsewhere “My Favorite Year” glides on shoegazing atmospherics and a motorik rhythm and wouldn’t sound out of place on David Bowie’s Low. While “Shooting Rockets” touches on epic prog-inflected grandiosity with striking results. The closing duo of “Plaza Trinidad” with its arch, disaffected swagger and the bathed-in-grace poignancy of “Libby’s First Sunrise” point to Destroyer’s mastery of disparate styles and moods.

Dan Bejar once commented to the effect that the spaces in between meanings are where you stick the poetry. On Trouble in Dreams there are a plethora of spaces created in which to find the sadness, beauty, absurdity and hope of a seemingly endless and yet all too brief cycle of sunrises and sunsets. A fellow believer in the idea that art should be the proper task of life once echoed Bejar’s sentiment through the ineffable medium of space and time by writing “when one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets”. And there, my fellow travelers, is where you stick the poetry.

Talitres, 2007

Like the film making process from which it derives its title, Stars Like Fleas latest album is a pointillistic pan and zoom expression of memory and experience not only in content, but also in technique. The sonic and emotional dynamic range of The Ken Burns Effect is nothing short of astonishing. Moments of hushed meditative intensity erupt into howling storms of futility, flailing resplendently into the all-erasing void. Chances are you will not appreciate this album fully until about the fifth time through and it may take twice as long before you actually enjoy it, but if you have the patience for this particular strain of alchemy, the experiment will eventually sink in repaying you exponentially for the effort of attention it requires.

The opening piece, “Hoax Head” introduces the album to a chorus of random studio chatter and instrumental warm-ups like “What’s Going On” being transmitted from an alternate reality. You get an idea of what you are in for as strings moan, woodwinds sigh and percussion clatters aimlessly about before the sounds come to their senses in the great swelling strains of “Karma’s Hoax”. A voice as odd as it is beautiful, all edge and elegy sets the tone, the only element that even remotely resembles anything related to popular music. What happens around it is unfathomable: a complex fusion of free-jazz, orchestral chamber music, and post-rock that improbably retains an otherworldly transparency and lightness. Even when it all falls apart at the 2:30 mark, there remains an aura of clarity within the white-noise maelstrom. The long droning fade-out is like the final whimper that inevitably follows that which is born with a bang. In contrast “I Was Only Dancing” is nearly conventional with its gorgeous pedal steel guitar and gently throbbing double bass framing a melody that a band this experimental has no right being able to concoct. “Falstaff” is so diffuse that it is almost left entirely up to the listener whether they wish to adhere the separate elements together into something recognizable or to just float away in its out-of-body spaciousness. “Early Riser” is an attempt to make musical instruments sound like household objects and perhaps offers a window into the once proposed Pink Floyd album where every sound would be generated by such random bric-a-brac. “Berbers in Tennis Shoes” gets back to relative accessibility by way of strummed banjo and vocalist Montgomery Knott’s plaintive obsession with cursed romances such as those that he ruminated almost exclusively upon in 2003’s stunning Sun Lights Down on the Fence. But whereas that album relied heavily on the shock of jarring collocation, here the band works it hyper-synthesis of disparate sounds and styles into a more flowing organic whole. “Toast Siren” withdraws back into the folds of abstraction though this time remaining anchored to a pulsating rhythm. By the time the vocals enter the mix the song becomes an anthem for the disenchanted, the repeated chant of “it’s treason” resounding from beneath the floorboards. This anthemic quality is carried over into “See for the Woods” a lament for the error of misconception. Rolling drum patterns launch the chorus of “always, always” into a doomed loop of eternal recurrence. The lovely optimism of “You Are My Memoir” should sound awkward in relation but once again Shannon Fields and company manage to not only make it work but to also imbue it with profound conviction. The final track “Some Nettles” is the magnum opus that brings all of these strangely affecting pieces together into a unified whole, serving to encapsulate all that has gone before and to advance it to the point of exhaustion. Mahlerian in scope and sound, the track attempts to encompass “the whole world” into its 13:41 and comes frighteningly close to succeeding.

The Ken Burns Effect is “The Glass Bead Game” of music. Like Hermann Hesse’s masterpiece it envisions a complete synthesis of knowledge, an embrace of the entire realm of experience. From Debussy’s impressionistic water-coloring, to Mahler’s aforementioned majestic sweep, to Coltrane’s restless quest for truth in sound, to Talk Talk’s graceful ascension into boundless dimensions, Stars Like Fleas absorb all of these influences and take them into new places. Places where if we dare to follow, thanks to artists such as them, there will be sufficient light by which to travel.