VIII: The Golden Archipelago (Or, a herald for more pretentious music snob nonsense in the future)

(Stolen from an older post for another blog I used to write for. I may have to post some more stuff there. Keep your eye on it here).

Shearwater is my favourite band out there right now. I love every inch of their arty pretentious emotionally-fueled rock, and they've rewarded us with their latest album, The Golden Archipelago.

2006’s Palo Santo was a raw affair, a concept album conceived by the band as they struggled to find their footing after Will Sheff’s exodus. While it featured what I believe to be the band’s strongest and most consistent lyrics, the sonic texture of the album was extremely uneven between the ambitious arrangements of the five standout tracks (1, 2, 5, 8, 10) and the slower songs like Failed Queen and Nobody. This disparity was made more acute with the release of the deluxe edition in 2007, which featured vastly improved recordings of the five standout tracks.

I’ll stand by Palo Santo; it’s still my favourite, though it’s a flawed record. When I write stories I find they typically reflect the sentiments and emotional timbre of the music I’m most attached to at the moment. I wrote a series of short fictional “dreams” based on seven different faces of the Tarot, though as the writing progressed it became increasingly clear that Shearwater provided most of the inspiration for the work.

I came to Shearwater through their 2008 release Rook. Where Palo Santo was rough and course, Rook was as smooth as glass. I can’t name a single weak song on the album: each one is well-constructed and minutely refined, like a delicate piece of stained glass or an ice sculpture. The whole album swoops, flutters, dives, much like its namesake.

And while I found Rook to be technically satisfying, breathtaking, I couldn’t help but find the textured sound of Palo Santo more compelling. I’ll freely admit that Rook is the “better” album, but Palo Santo got under my skin in a thousand different ways, and each time I listened through I found something new, some lyrical hook or link I hadn’t found before.

So far I don’t know what to make of The Golden Archipelago. I do know that, from listening through it dozens of times, the album manages to hone the band’s sound. The raw energy of Palo Santo meets the careful construction of Rook. The sonic landscape of the album is entirely new as well. Palo Santo sounded like an undercover transmission from across enemy lines in some war-torn wasteland, replete with an unsettling feedback interference that pervaded every track. The album is uncomfortable in every respect. Rook took me north to a landscape of craggy glaciers and moonlit wastes. The waterphone “South Col” impresses the image of a graveyard of wrecked ships captured in the ice, the wind scratching across their hollow shells. Take a look at Kahn & Selesnick’s most recent project, Eisbergfriestadt (from which the cover image was taken) and you’ll get a clearer sense of the sonic landscape Shearwater are building.

The Golden Archipelago journeys south to the Pacific. The album hits you like the swelling of some huge wave: the sea, the storms and the tide create the heartbeat of the album, which is warm where Rook was cold, welcoming where Palo Santo was alienating. Like Rook, The Golden Archipelago is all about the narrative and emotion, less about the strength of the individual songs, though each song possesses a singular and unique effect as each one did in Palo Santo. I can’t pick a single song I don’t like. That said, I’ve yet to be impacted by the lyrical content.

Having grown up in Nabire, a small town on the beaches of Western New Guinea, I find the album’s approach to be quite powerful. The Papuans, descendents of the Aborigines, have found their freedom hounded away by the constant press of the Indonesian military. As a people their very identities are being auctioned off to machine gun carbines and motorcycle smoke. Songs like “Uniforms” and “Runners of the Sun” embody the steady attrition of this people’s way of life. It’s an album of unimaginable scope and scale—encompassing every facet of the landscape I grew to love, from the slow moving glaciers up in the mountains to the humid chokehold of sea level. And always the sensation of wind and rain, the images of the sea woven throughout, the devastation of the tidal wave and the fury of a volcanic eruption.

Yeah, I’m all about the hyperbole. Shearwater invites these images, though. I remember when I first introduced my friend Josh to the band on the floor of my parents’ basement in Colorado (“La Dame et Licorne” from Palo Santo) he got this far away look in his eyes and told me this was the band he’d been looking for. Fire and water and earth and wind: it had them all. Shearwater gives voice to the unspoken fury and serenity of the natural world, a rage in the face of all we’ve taken for granted in the day-to-day ho hum of concrete suburban/urban life. Take this band up the mountainside or into the blanketing quiet of your bedroom and you’ll find yourself transported to a world with its own mythology and a pulse all its own.

--Duke

VI: Town Sketch

(Impressionism--working on the novel ideas. Things evolving.)

Pines fringed town, the black water –lapped shores and fishing men in white sailed boats. An old man and a Labrador out for the morning walk, shadows etched against the fog and spray. A calm day. Five two story red brick buildings, the eaves frosted with the early winter snows, a clattering diner on the cobbled main road, and a lone figure, pack slung over his right shoulder, walking down the road, cracked leather and flannel and scuffed hiking boots.

Round white stones. The sound of birds and the quiet sough of the lake in the morning, and the sour breath of fishermen. Five men work in a small mine, pointless venture begun generations, a hope of gold or diamonds, kept aloft only by the occasional windfall. Tourists unwelcome. Founded in the latter half of the 19th century by enterprising Frenchmen who promptly forgot they’d built their new home on the edge of the world, at the farthest reaches of hell. It’s a cold town, a drowning town, a whispering town: ten plump middle-aged women, ten greying mid-lifed men, and the few children who’ve stayed to tend the shops and their grandparents staying home.

There are two ways out: the rustling crick across languid waters, or fifteen miles of old pavement, past the parish and graveyard, to the backroads to the seven eleven to the ridges of mountains and rivers. It is this quiet, prized life the wandering man seeks. He walks into the café, bell-rung door, sits on a creaking bench to be seated. Seven AM and the men have gone to fish, the tourists have bought their tickets and the coffee has begun to settle, to thicken. The newspaper is two weeks old; the dark wood of the café smells of smoke and beans, and the air is warm, so the man sloughs off his jacket, rises and rings the bell on the counter.

If you LIKE it, then COMMENT!!! (And if you don't, then TELL ME)

V: The Little Mermaid Part 1

(artwork by Gabriel Pacheco)

(If you followed my old blog, then this is rehash. I started working on a project with Redmoon Theatre about a year ago--writing the script for a re-imagining of "The Little Mermaid". I went straight to Hans Christian Andersen's classic--no Disney here--and wrote the first half of the play until the project was scrapped. I intend to finish it . . . someday. The following is spoken by the Little Mermaid herself. I've removed stage directions as well, so use your imaginations, why don't you!)

(Message me if you wanna read it. Sorry, but I really want this one to get published some day)