People Skills - 2023 - I Will Not Die

 

Altered States Tapes – AST156

I Will Not Die sounds less like a declaration shouted from a mountaintop than a sentence repeated quietly to keep it true. Jesse Dewlow’s People Skills recordings have always placed small, recognizable songs inside damaged environments, where guitar, voice, rhythm and tape residue remain visible but never completely stable. The seven pieces here feel retrieved from a building after its occupants have vanished: melodies remain in the rooms, words pass behind walls and every sound carries a faint shadow of whatever preceded it. This is often described as hauntological music, but Dewlow’s ghosts have personality. Beneath the fog are carefully shaped songs whose emotional directness survives every layer of distortion.
Dewlow began People Skills by improvising with homemade instruments and found or freely obtained materials, deliberately working along the uncertain border between art and amateur activity. That practice gives I Will Not Die its peculiar authority. The recording never asks expensive equipment or technical polish to certify its importance. “Blue Dusk” and “The Soul of the Hotel Thief I Long to Be” drift through dim guitar figures, obscured singing and hesitant rhythms that seem to construct themselves while playing. The titles suggest disappearance, trespass and borrowed identity, yet the music remains warmer than its spectral surface initially implies. These are private pop songs viewed through dirty glass, not abstraction performed to keep the listener outside.
“Chipping Away at Here’s Laughter” and “Concept Is the Brick” bring the album’s method into focus. Dewlow does not destroy song form; he chips at it until its hidden supports become visible. Repetition, silence, crude texture and imperfect timing function like building materials, each modest by itself but capable of producing an inhabitable structure. “Uncredentialed” makes that philosophy explicit. People Skills needs no diploma, virtuoso performance or institutional permission. Its awkwardness is not an apology but a chosen freedom, allowing Dewlow to follow emotional logic instead of professional standards. The music can sound fragile while remaining remarkably difficult to erase.
The longer “Fleeting Apparition” nearly dissolves into its own atmosphere, but the album closes with its most concrete figure. “Cheval the Mailman” appears to invoke Ferdinand Cheval, the French postal carrier who spent thirty-three years constructing the Palais Idéal from stones collected along his route. Cheval had no architectural credentials, yet daily labor, private vision and accumulated small objects became a monumental work. He is an ideal guardian for People Skills. Dewlow also builds with overlooked materials, adding one rough sound to another until an impossible personal structure begins standing. The connection turns the preceding “Concept Is the Brick” and “Uncredentialed” into parts of the same quiet manifesto: imagination does not need authorization, but it does require continued work.
The album was issued by Hobart’s Altered States Tapes after a chain of connections carried this Philadelphia-area project through Sweden and onward to Australia. That crooked route suits music devoted to indirect communication. Only sixty-nine physical copies were made, but the tape does not treat obscurity as proof of superiority. Its intimacy comes from the sensation that one person constructed it carefully enough to reach another person, even across oceans and years. I Will Not Die is modest, murky and occasionally difficult to grasp, yet its title keeps glowing through the haze. Survival here is not invulnerability. It is the stubborn act of continuing to build with whatever the day has placed in your hands.