Arris lays above me, subsuming my eye line like burnt caramel spooled into the red sea. ‘if I stick out my tongue,’ she says, ‘I can taste the electricity between your atoms. It’s like irradiated snowflakes.’ As I shiver and shake, something deep beneath the lizard brain wakes, extending tendrils through neuron and nerve ending, subdermal first but rending tissue so quickly, burning through me, yearning to be free. I submit and let its rough light permeate my pores and core, a bodily blitzkrieg that finds me fuller, occupied rather than conquered, activating cellular citizenry now primed with purpose.
We fuck so hard the fittings crack and the knick knacks clatter from the mantle. Afterwards, we lay in sticky splendour and quiver in each other’s arms. I love love, you say. I too, my love, adore ardour. We lock fingers and describe each other in fine detail. You, I say, are the corona that makes sunlight special. And you, dear one, are the defiant moon in daylight. The tides shift when we kiss, something tectonic quakes, and the world is rearranged. The stars align and this time we make love. Did you feel that, we say. My love.
Over unsweetened coffee and sweetly unexpurgated company, she asks me, ‘If I could grant you any wish, what would it be?’ I wonder if I should tell her my heart’s tacit part in this pact. My desire’s been given to me already, in fact, I asked for her and payed my price in full the minute she materialised. My soul in whole laid at her feet like some chivalrous throwback aimed at spare her spirit from the muck of the world. I smirk and tell her, maybe I’d like to be invisible, but she already sees right through me.
I found myself looking at me and the voice in my head said, I love you. It took a minute to realise I wasn’t talking to you and another to assimilate the shock. I’ve never said it to myself. I never knew I could or that if I did I might mean it. I said it again just to check and wept. I love you. I sat and wondered. Did I come across this myself or did you give me the key? Which thread of fate was wandered and was it alone or did we walk a similar road?
Article originally appeared on The Music Aug 21st 2018
Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have circled each other for over a decade, with Garwood’s guitar strung across both Gargoyle and Blues Funeral, yet, this is only their second double billed album.
Following on from the five-year-old, Black Pudding, the pair have created something a little lighter on the palate, let’s say white souffle by way of the bayou, but that doesn’t betray its density.
For fans of their equally extended careers, there’ll be some retread, though it’s less like local streets and more akin to visiting cemetery kin. The new ground covered is fresh and dirty as turned earth.
Inherently touching and darkly familiar, With Animals dulcet batch of misery is a slow-motion gut punch — the sort of thing that might slip out of a whiskey bottle onto a dusty old porch, staining a permanent lineament. There is so much gravel washed sadness you’d be forgiven for missing the slight social commentaries embedded in Lanegan’s lyrics. The title track’s knife-like chorus, “Girl, you are a murderer,” serves as an ode to meat consumption and also a wonderfully anti-romantic diatribe — combined with Garwood’s cutting compositions, their songs have a tendency to stick in your soul.
At turns crying and laughing, sweetly embracing, sharing saccharine saline and saliva, relief and disbelief, utter joy and the exquisite agony of existence. At some point we stop being merely ourselves. We expand and dissolve, slipping between the atoms of the universe into something seraphic. She licks my tears and declares them ambrosia. I trace the inside of her soul and graze the contours of Gaia. We regress into evolution, animal and archaic, exponentially experiential, presently intense yet stretched from creation to cataclysm, living outside of chronology. We laugh with each other, cry, sigh, and realise who we are.
I feel her hand on my shoulder, incalculable aeons of stardust settling. You should be working, a whisper. ‘I was daydreaming about you,’ I say. Only the day? A solar echo. That seems restrictive. Her laughter spools out, universally intertwining light and sound, gravitational waves and electromagnetism. Every move she makes causes an affect. ‘I wish you were here,’ I say, finding myself laughing. It took so long to parse, with nothing but theory until I’d felt the physics. I reach through space to take our hand and her voice is mine, ‘Even when I’m not there—’ I’m here.
I tell her, I think I made you up. She agrees but differently and laughs a little at me. ‘Solipsistic isn’t it? What if I made you up?’ Honestly, I’d considered it and decided if that were the case then I have nothing left to be afraid of, she made me exactly the way she’d intended. You are perfect, I tell her. She smiles and it is beyond imagination. ‘I’m just a mirror, honey.’ I look into her eyes and see myself forever in them. Whether I’ve invented you or you me, I don’t care because now it’s real.
Explaining romance to Caleb is like teaching algebra to bricks, though you can at least build something with the bricks when you’re done, I don’t expect anything less than a mere scientific shrug. ‘It’s just biochemistry,’ he says. ‘I could plot it on a graph for you.’ You don’t have all the data, I say, testing a hypothesis. ‘And you’re not objective,’ he tells me, ‘so, to which bias do we skew?’ I want to shake him and scream, some things just can’t be measured. How about we call it spooky action at a distance with a sensual slant?
Article originally appeared on The Music Aug 7th 2018
Exploding onto the scene in 2017 with all the velocity and cult acclaim of a popped pimple, The Gametes have been enjoying something in the field of meteoric success.
If you imagine Mr Bungle and the descendants of Devo shouting from the shores of The Lord Of The Flies, you might begin to imagine how unpredictable their sound can be. Simultaneously whimsical and dire, they flit from surf rock to gothic faster than you can sing space opera and with far more dramatic flair. After displaying a penchant for narrative songwriting on their debut, The Sweat Tapes, they’ve dove directly into the concept for their follow up.
A sci-fi leaning story about a lone space traveller, the underlying problem with The Astronomical Calamities of Comet Jones is that the narrative isn’t overly interesting or conceptually original but the execution is definitely both. Outrageous and eclectic, each track does an excellent job of showcasing their eccentric ideologies.
Like your favourite director’s worst movie, the album loses gravitas even as its narrative seeks to build mass, and yet, it is utterly, indefinably loveable.
I took up my chisel and spent decades learning to sculpt. I watched masters and amateurs, stopped and started, erred and marvelled, sometimes channeling the divine and sometimes chipping it astray. Often, I would simply look at the flecks of my efforts strewn to the ground. Often, I would cry for these scrapped carvings, wondering if my work would ever be done, my mind’s eye always in defiance. One day I showed you my labours, not exactly satisfied but contented by my efforts. ‘I love what you are making,’ you said, ‘but I really love what it’s made from.’
I have to say it while she’s calm so I might get heard. You make me feel disentitled to my opinion. She doesn’t look at me, ‘Is disentitled a word?’ I think so. ‘And that’s your opinion?’ That’s condescending. ‘No sweetie, that was patronising. This conversation is me condescending.’ You fucking strip me of my humanity and then blame me for being a zombie, like a proper voodoo puppet for you to play with. I feel like I’ve been shot and asked to pay for the medical expenses. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says, ‘we both know you couldn’t afford that.’
I keep dropping your brain on people that don’t even know you. Yeah, I say, you were telling me about that the other day, or showed me this article, or read it, said it, did it… All the things you know and do in my conversations; depth, breadth and dimensions, I only wish it were truly you and not just your thought. Actually, I was telling my friends only the other day about how you’d said that or something similar, I think. Funny, I can’t quite remember now, I’ll have to ask you next time I talk to someone.
I’m standing with strangers, near enough to one myself but not for the charms in my pocket and graces of fate, watching her play a piano in the street, beaten old upright been community curbed, loose a few boards, some keys, and an octave or three. She lays out a film score near to denouement, full of latter act arpeggiation here played as prelude. As the piece unfurls she pours herself into the sound until she is no longer conscious of how impressive she is, merely the pressure of the keys, the rhythm and its needs. My heart sings.
A Few Short Words 