Tiny broken operatic sounds dissolved a loss that could not be found
John Vanderslice: Pixel Revolt
‘So you hope that one person could solve everything, and for me that’s you. Sometimes that dream is a sad delusion, but sometimes it’s true.’
Myself being a disarrayed, damaged individual whose emotions rarely reach the surface in my day-to-day life but are always at war just below (leading the less perceptive in my life to simply view me as cold), that statement from “Exodus Damage” is an all-too-accurate statement of the way I form relationships, and it never fails to raise a wave of feeling that gathers in a hot cluster at the back of my throat. “Dead Slate Pacific” follows this theme further, with someone who keeps their sanity by holding on to someone else – ‘the only thing standing between me and that long rope over a carpenter’s beam was you.’ There is something about John Vanderslice’s voice that I find terribly affecting, a certain evocative wounded quality that gives the words he sings an extra resonance, well complementing his expressive, free-associative storytelling.
This is a storytelling album, the songwriting harks back to masters like Harry Chapin, they of the powerful, emotionally true character portrait. “Letter to the East Coast” is a simple, poetic metaphor of love falling apart just as the urban decay of New Haven, Connecticut and Joan Crawford, the verses echo each other in time – ‘being Joan Crawford at 21 was easy’ the first line, and later in the song, the clinching gut-punch delivery ‘being Joan Crawford at the end, that was hard.’ “Peacocks in the Video Rain” is about the act of emotional transference and projection in pop star obsessive fandom to cope with inability to directly deal with life – ‘love is hard to give, love is hard to take.’ None of this is impersonal, even within a role it is impassioned and grief-stricken. “Continuation” is as far detached as Vanderslice ever gets, as it is a story of a serial killer dying and the killings continuing with a specificity that means one of the case’s detectives has continued the murders (based on Lars von Trier’s film The Element of Crime), but it still contains the chilling moment when the narrator who narrows down the suspects to one realizes that his suspect suspects him – ‘after weeks of pursuit, we locked up in a feedback loop. He was following me too.’
Vanderslice has a definite political bent and there are echoes of it throughout. “Plymouth Rock” is the most distinct, from the point of view of a young soldier getting shot in the throat immediately after stepping off the helicopter in Iraq, laying in the dirt bleeding to death during the firefight. “Exodus Damage” takes an alternate point of view of a member of a militant American anti-establishment group whose beliefs and confidence in the cause are shaken by the events of September 11th (with the title taken from Silver Jews lyrics!), thinking ‘no one ever says a word about so much that happens in the world.’ “Trance Manual” takes the role of an American journalist in Iraq visiting a prostitute.
However, I do not want to suggest that this is without joie de vivre or humour, because it is also often funny and memorably offbeat. In “Exodus Damage” the narrator’s disillusioned refrain is ‘Dance Dance Revolution is all we’re going to get’ (in other words, real revolution is not forthcoming), and “Dear Sarah Shu” is a list of instructions left on microcassette for someone taking over a job, warning of incredible perils and suggesting hanging files from the ceiling in event of floods and using a dental mirror to check the corridors before entrance (all of this a coded message about an ex, and concluding with the devastating line ‘in the end it was love we had to learn to survive’). Musically, it is also quite playful, electronic beats and whooshes intermixing with cellos, acoustic and electric guitar, bells and chimes, brigades of organs, and all manner of percussion, sharply, perfectly produced. Thoroughly magnificent.
94% => ****1/2 —currently # 11 on my best of 2005 list—
Leave a Reply