Breech Boys - 2024 - Greetings From Paradise

Slow Death Records – SDR-054

 The front cover looks like a postcard printed during an equipment malfunction. BREECH BOYS rises in enormous red letters with a blue shadow slipping behind them, while rows of small waves promise water, sunshine, and recreational escape. Beneath the title, two scenic images have been torn together: a violent natural formation on one side and people enjoying a lakeside landscape on the other. “Greetings From Paradise” appears in quotation marks, already making the greeting suspicious. Paradise is not being presented as an unquestioned location. Someone is repeating what the brochure told them to call it.

The back completes the joke with “Aloha From Kelowna,” converting a British Columbia city into a budget Pacific island and turning the 7-inch into tourist mail. A postcard traditionally selects the most flattering rectangle of a place and sends it somewhere else. Mountains, lakes, sunlight, and vacation bodies are allowed onto the front. Anxiety, family history, damaged plumbing, mental collapse, failed relationships, bad nights, and the person working behind the souvenir counter remain outside the crop. Breech Boys sends both sides.
The band name performs its own small bodily disaster. BEACH BOYS would complete the vacation fantasy. BREECH BOYS replaces the beach with the rear portion of the body, the back end of a firearm, and a difficult position of birth. Paradise develops an anatomical complication. The boys are not emerging into California sunshine according to the approved orientation. They are arriving backward, feet first, armed at the wrong end, and already making the postcard difficult to read.
That mutation tells us nearly everything about the record’s method. Familiar punk materials are not rejected so much as delivered incorrectly. The EP uses blunt hardcore rhythms, thick guitars, shouted vocals, brief durations, and simple physical impact, but small distortions keep the music from settling into historical reenactment. A woozy riff appears above a pounding beat. A rock-and-roll lead pokes through the abrasion. Chad Jones’s voice does not maintain one dependable posture of righteous anger. It yelps, strains, mutters, barks, and seems occasionally surprised by whatever has just escaped from it.
The recording credits reduce the entire performance to two people: Jones supplies the voice, while Danny Marshall supplies every instrument, tracks the music, and mixes it in a basement. This is compact even by hardcore standards. A whole band’s physical disagreement has been constructed from one instrumental body and one vocal body, then packed into a record whose five songs together are shorter than many album openers. Its smallness does not feel miniature. It feels compressed, the way a clenched fist is smaller than an open hand but carries more immediate consequence.
“Anxiety Combat Rock” announces the central conflict in its first title. Combat rock ordinarily directs punk outward toward war, state power, streets, authority, or social confrontation. Here the combatant is anxiety itself, and the battlefield includes the narrator’s body, family inheritance, generation, housing, pipes, mood, and dream of escape. The song wants to leave for a vacation island while repeatedly discovering that the luggage has already been packed with whatever made departure necessary.
The fantasy of paradise quickly becomes suicidal and absurd. A backpack filled with rocks turns the lake from recreational scenery into a possible endpoint. Religious voices condemn the narrator’s generation as defeated. Rats have returned to the pipes. Sanity leaks slowly. The body suffers a minor injury while the mind responds as though reality itself has cracked. Vacation Island then appears not as a destination on a map but as an emergency dream produced by someone who cannot leave consciousness behind.
This is the hidden cruelty inside fantasies of total escape. They promise that distress belongs to a location and will therefore disappear when the location changes. The person imagines another city, island, relationship, job, house, era, or version of the self where the old pressure cannot follow. Yet the nervous system crosses every border with its owner. Paradise may change what surrounds the mind without automatically changing the pathways through which the mind interprets its surroundings.
The music has no time to explain this carefully. It pounds through the contradiction in seventy-seven seconds. That speed is not an avoidance of seriousness. It reproduces the way anxiety compresses several incompatible thoughts into one bodily alarm. Spiritual judgment, generational defeat, plumbing, physical pain, depression, and tropical escape arrive almost simultaneously because panic does not organize its evidence into elegant paragraphs.
“Pretend Honey” brings sweetness into the modern world and immediately discovers that it may be artificial. Honey suggests affection, preserved sunlight, animal labor, nourishment, and something naturally resistant to decay. Pretend honey supplies the taste without the origin. It is emotional sweetener, a substance added to make an intolerable arrangement easier to swallow.
The lyrics surround this false sweetness with screens, hype, validation, and mental clutter. The modern world does not merely deliver information. It enters the head, asks to be believed, bathes even the cemetery in electronic glow, and constructs pulpits from images bright enough to replace older forms of authority. The person no longer needs a priest to identify salvation or failure. A feed, video, advertisement, audience count, or invisible social ranking can perform the ceremony continuously.
The command to let go of pretend honey and pretend money joins emotional and economic counterfeit. Both promise security through symbols. Money is real in its consequences yet exists through collective agreement; affection may feel real while being performed for convenience, status, fear, or habit. The song asks what remains when the person stops accepting every available substitute simply because the real need has become difficult to name.
Hardcore has always been suited to this kind of refusal. Its compression makes ornament suspicious. A song has one minute to identify the false thing, strike it, and leave before the false thing develops a marketing strategy around the attack. Breech Boys does not pretend to stand completely outside the modern system it condemns. The music is recorded, uploaded, streamed, photographed, tagged, and sold through the same illuminated machinery. The refusal occurs from inside dependence.
“Peace Lily” gives the record its strangest and most emotionally complicated symbol. A peace lily is a domestic plant frequently associated with sympathy, funerals, air purification, and the quiet visual promise that a home can remain calm if something green is placed in the correct corner. The song’s family environment refuses that decorative peace. Love becomes repulsive and dangerous, suffering is hidden behind a straight face, sobriety appears only briefly, and family nourishment begins resembling poison or preparation for execution.
The plant’s name therefore sounds less comforting than accusatory. Peace has been assigned to an object because the people in the room cannot produce it themselves. The lily is expected to absorb bad air while the family continues generating it. Houseplants often become witnesses to private history. They receive the same arguments, silences, television light, intoxication, recovery attempts, disappearances, and changing occupants without being able to describe any of it.
One memory stands out because of its painful modesty: a father remains sober long enough to coach a baseball team. The event is not presented as a complete redemption. Its value comes precisely from its limited duration. A child receives one period in which the parent becomes available enough to perform an ordinary act, and that ordinary act later carries the emotional weight of a miracle.
Addiction frequently reorganizes memory around such temporary openings. The person is remembered not only through what repeatedly failed, but through the afternoons when failure briefly loosened its grip. Gratitude and resentment become impossible to separate. The child may treasure the game while knowing that the game became precious because stability was unusual.
“Peace Lily” also keeps returning to the question of who concealed suffering most successfully. This is a fierce description of family performance. In troubled households, emotional control can become a competition nobody consciously agreed to enter. The person who appears least affected may be praised as strong while carrying the greatest unspoken pressure. Another person becomes visibly chaotic and is treated as the problem because the family’s hidden disorder has found one public body.
The song refuses a neat moral assignment. Love may be sincere and still injure. Sobriety may matter even when it does not last. Family resemblance may feel like connection or doom. The peace lily remains in the room, cooling nothing enough.
“Hands Tied” moves from family memory into bodily enclosure. Stomach, liver, concrete, walls, heat, isolation, and blue feeling form a structure whose interior has begun attacking its inhabitant. The title gives us helplessness, but the song is not passive. The narrator claws, burns, vomits, lashes out, and tries to move while repeatedly discovering that effort itself has become another source of pain.
Hands tied is a useful phrase because hands are the ordinary instruments of agency. They build, carry, defend, write, work, touch, play music, open doors, and ask for help. Binding them does not remove desire. It creates a gap between intention and action. Anxiety and depression often operate through that gap. The person may know what should be done, may even want intensely to do it, while experiencing the required movement as inaccessible.
The song also describes the claustrophobia of being considered superficial or pathetic while the body is already close to the ground. Outside judgment arrives at the exact moment internal strength has become least available. Advice can become another wall when it assumes that inability is laziness or that despair persists because nobody has yet suggested looking on the bright side.
The aggressive performance returns agency at the level of sound. A person whose hands are tied can still make noise. The shout may not solve the condition, but it prevents silence from being mistaken for consent. Punk has always understood this narrow but essential freedom: when control over circumstances is weak, control over the form of refusal may remain.
“Too Sealed Shut” is the longest song at just over two minutes, giving its enclosure time to become nearly spacious. The narrator admits being a poor participant in relationships, a bundle of damaged wiring who disappears, wallows in sad music, occupies space, and remains unable to open. Paradise returns throughout, but each repetition changes it from destination into diagnosis.
To be sealed shut is more than being closed. A closed door can be opened by the person inside. A seal suggests that the closure has been reinforced, perhaps for protection, freshness, secrecy, contamination control, or evidence preservation. The person has not merely withdrawn. The edges have been bonded until opening threatens to damage the container.
Emotional sealing usually begins as intelligence. Something enters and causes enough harm that preventing entry becomes necessary. The boundary works. Pain is reduced, danger is kept outside, and the person survives. Problems begin when the emergency architecture remains after the emergency, preventing affection, assistance, and new experience from entering through the same route once used by harm.
The song knows this and still cannot simply remove the seal. Insight does not automatically produce access. The narrator recognizes the pattern, criticizes it, and continues living inside it. This is more honest than the usual promise that naming a problem constitutes recovery. Sometimes naming only improves the acoustics of the room in which the problem remains.
Paradise becomes the name for that sealed interior. It is empty, socially erased, emotionally graceless, and strangely permanent. The person is trapped inside while also fearing what would happen if the enclosure opened. This turns the title of the EP completely inside out. Greetings are being sent from paradise because the sender cannot leave it.
The postcard format now becomes tragic rather than merely sarcastic. A postcard communicates from afar in a space too small for full disclosure. The sender writes a few cheerful sentences beside a beautiful image, while the recipient cannot see the room, weather, relationship, illness, loneliness, or financial condition surrounding the act of writing. “Greetings From Paradise” may be less a lie than the only message that fits.
Breech Boys squeezes this conflict into the 7-inch format, an object historically built for immediacy. The record does not ask for an hour of attention or claim to provide a complete philosophy. It enters, delivers five damaged greetings, and exits before the nervous system can establish a comfortable distance. The brevity makes replay feel almost compulsory. Seven minutes later, the postcard has returned to the mailbox.
Slow Death Records describes itself as devoted specifically to British Columbia punk, and the regional focus matters. Underground music becomes more vivid when it is allowed to emerge from an actual place rather than from an undifferentiated global genre feed. Kelowna is not being marketed here as a prestigious cultural capital. It is transformed into “Kelownafornia,” a private coastal fantasy beside an inland lake, complete with aloha language and a paradise whose internal population is anxious, poisoned, half-sober, sealed shut, and ready to pogo.
The cover’s red and blue misregistration captures the entire record. Each element appears twice, almost occupying the same position but never fully aligning. Tourist paradise and private distress overlap this way. Family love and family injury overlap. Honey and counterfeit sweetness overlap. Peace and the houseplant named for it overlap. The person presented publicly and the person suffering privately remain slightly displaced versions of the same figure.
That displacement produces the EP’s strange humor. None of the lyrics are funny because the underlying conditions are trivial. They become funny because language keeps finding crooked handles on unbearable material. Vacation islands, peace lilies, baseball practice, cemetery video glow, pretend honey, and postcards from paradise give distress forms that can be carried without reducing it to clinical terminology.
Punk performs a similar conversion. Fear becomes rhythm. helplessness becomes impact. Family history becomes a chorus. A basement becomes a studio. Two people become a band. Seven minutes becomes an inhabitable country.
The record ends without opening the sealed container. That is not failure. The greeting made it out.

Zorn - 2024 - Endless Funeral

 

Black Konflik Records – BKR242

A procession of skeletons, hooded mourners, demons, torches, bats, blades, and impossible bodies gathers beneath a monumental archway on the cover. Everything is drawn in burnt orange against black, turning the scene into an illuminated manuscript recovered from a cathedral whose congregation had been replaced by monsters. The figures do not appear to be mourning quietly. They are attending death as spectacle, civic ceremony, military parade, and neighborhood celebration. Along the left edge, the Black Konflik CD layout adds Japanese lettering and the wonderfully direct description “Satanic Hardcore Metal Punk,” presenting the object like an imported supernatural commodity whose contents require both warning label and advertisement.
A funeral is supposed to establish an ending. Someone has died; the living gather; the body is carried, buried, burned, remembered, and released into whatever each participant believes comes next. “Endless Funeral” destroys that function. The procession never reaches the grave. Mourning becomes permanent employment. Coffin bearers continue carrying their burden after the cemetery has run out of ground, musicians repeat the march until celebration and grief become indistinguishable, and the dead person remains socially powerful because nobody is permitted to finish saying goodbye.
Zorn turns this impossible duration into approximately a quarter hour of concentrated metal-punk theater. Hardcore supplies forward impact, thrash supplies intricate motion, black metal supplies frost and theatrical evil, death metal supplies blunt weight, and glam metal occasionally flashes through the lead guitar with no concern for whether genre police approve the costume. The songs are short, but they are crowded with riffs. Each one behaves like a miniature castle constructed immediately before somebody sets it on fire.
The name Zorn happens to mean anger or wrath in German, and whether or not that translation governs the band’s intent, it describes the physical speed with which the music moves. Yet this is not ordinary social rage presented through direct slogans. Zorn’s anger wears a cloak, climbs battlements, releases bats, summons mercenaries, and demands that demons carry the coffin. Emotion is translated into fantasy because fantasy permits it to become larger, funnier, and more physically playable.
“Warpath” begins from the viewpoint of a mercenary whose moral vocabulary has been reduced to forward motion. He kills for payment, commands an evil army, and treats hesitation as a failure of discipline. The repeated demand to get out of his way turns the song into both military chant and pit instruction. In less than three minutes, Zorn joins the fantasy battlefield to the social mechanics of live hardcore: advance, collide, clear space, re-form, and charge again.
The track’s brutality is strengthened by how sharply the musicians coordinate. The rhythm does not simply accelerate into blur. Drums and guitars lock together tightly enough that every sudden turn feels like a formation changing direction. A heavier death-metal passage lands with unusual force because it has been approached through speed. Zorn understands that heaviness is not measured only by slowness or distortion. It is created by contrast, placement, and the listener’s inability to prepare before the floor changes height.
The mercenary’s certainty also reveals why fantasy violence can be liberating without being morally educational. Ordinary life is filled with conflicting obligations, incomplete information, delayed consequences, paperwork, compromise, and actions whose value remains uncertain. The fantasy warrior knows exactly what must happen. An enemy stands ahead; movement is required; doubt is weakness. For two minutes, the song rents that certainty to the listener, then returns everyone to a world where consequences cannot be solved with one excellent riff.
“G.O.R.N.” enters a darker internal cycle. The lyrics invoke a Black Dog that must be fed repeatedly, another mission undertaken, another killing completed, and an evil rule that never ends. The Black Dog has long served as an image for depression, but Zorn does not reduce it to one psychological meaning. Here it is appetite, commander, curse, mascot, and internal machine. Feeding it provides temporary purpose while ensuring that hunger returns.
This repetition gives the song an interesting relationship with performance. A band creates excitement by repeatedly summoning the same constructed world. The coffin appears again. The ghoul escapes again. The audience demands another song, another tour, another escalation of the spectacle. The theatrical creature is fed through attention, and in exchange it gives the human performers a temporary identity larger than ordinary life. The danger and delight are the same: eventually the creation develops expectations of its own.
Zorn’s relationship with theatricality is unusually healthy because the absurdity remains visible. They do not demand that listeners believe demons have literally authorized the performance. The costumes, coffins, chains, and exaggerated evil create a shared game whose emotional effect can be real without its fictional machinery becoming doctrine. This separates camp from insincerity. Camp is often extremely sincere about pleasure, craft, transformation, and the freedom produced when embarrassment is denied authority.
“The Drunken Demon’s Iron Keep” builds the EP’s clearest fantasy landscape. A traveler must cross the mountains and Great Divide toward a fortress where a demon sleeps bound by seven chains. Prayer may be required to return home, but prayer alone will not complete the work. The demon must be beheaded or evil will remain. The song borrows the compressed logic of folk tale, role-playing quest, pulp fantasy, heavy-metal paperback, and story exchanged by children who have remembered the exciting parts more clearly than the connecting details.
Its melody gives the journey scale far beyond the song’s short duration. Tremolo-like figures flicker above the charging rhythm, while lead guitar lines make the keep appear higher and farther away. Zorn’s great trick is making this adventure feel simultaneously enormous and homemade. The Iron Keep may tower through storm clouds, but it has been constructed in a rehearsal room by friends who understand that cardboard battlements can become convincing once the drums begin.
The drunken demon is especially appealing because intoxication compromises supernatural majesty. A demon should represent immortal cunning, absolute corruption, or terrifying command over hidden forces. This one is asleep, drunk, chained, and vulnerable to practical decapitation. Evil remains dangerous but has become manageable enough to stage. The heroic journey therefore contains comedy without losing momentum.
That mixture reaches its purest form in “Endless Funeral.” The dying speaker gives precise instructions: scatter the ashes across castle walls, dig deeply, do not cry, assign six demons to carry the coffin and six more to clear the path. Death becomes event planning. Even at the edge of extinction, the individual wants authority over procession, emotional tone, personnel, and spectacle.
Funeral instructions reveal the strange human desire to direct a gathering one will not consciously attend. We select songs, clothing, burial methods, readings, guests, and disposal of remains partly to ease the burden on others, but also because imagination resists surrendering authorship. The body will be absent or inert, yet the person still wants the final scene to carry the correct meaning.
Zorn exaggerates this desire until it becomes a royal occult production. Twelve demons are apparently required for logistics, suggesting either great status or terrible inefficiency. The command not to cry rejects ordinary mourning in favor of dancing around the grave. The funeral becomes a concert, and the dead person becomes headliner.
Yet the title introduces a darker possibility. An endless funeral is what occurs when death cannot be integrated into life. Grief no longer honors attachment and gradually releases the mourner; it becomes the structure through which every later experience is interpreted. The coffin may have reached the ground, but internally it is still being carried. The procession moves through work, relationships, sleep, anniversaries, and ordinary mornings.
Zorn’s stage coffin turns that burden into play. The frontman enters the box alive and emerges as a ghoul. The funeral is reversed into birth, but the birth produces a character associated with death. This theatrical resurrection allows the audience to rehearse mortality without requiring reverence. Death becomes something that can be opened from inside, leapt out of, screamed about, laughed at, and returned to storage after the show.
“Dance of Madness” brings the procession into psychological territory. Reality becomes unreliable, the listener is trapped inside another being’s dream, and fear is given choreography. The dance is simultaneously death sentence and invitation. A helpless victim is told to close their eyes, while the music makes bodily stillness nearly impossible.
Dance has always contained this double character. It can express freedom through movement, but it also organizes bodies according to rhythm. The dancer chooses to participate while surrendering some control to tempo, repetition, crowd, and expectation. In a mosh pit, individual agency and collective force continually exchange places. A person moves the crowd and is moved by it, creating temporary madness with practical rules that may never be spoken.
The track stretches to the same length as the title piece, giving Zorn enough space to turn their short-form attack into something approaching miniature epic metal. Guitar lines become more elaborate without losing the primitive physical engine beneath them. This is where the band’s increased musicality becomes clearest. The theatrical surface may look gloriously crude, but the players are capable of precise internal construction.
The CD-exclusive “Power” extends the object beyond the official vinyl funeral. Bonus tracks have always occupied a strange afterlife. The primary work announces its ending, then another piece emerges because a particular format, territory, label, or edition has opened an additional chamber. Here the Malaysian Black Konflik edition refuses to let the procession conclude after “Dance of Madness.” The word “Power” arrives after death and madness like the energy still remaining in the corpse.
That edition history suits Zorn perfectly. The American vinyl is one body; the compact disc becomes another. Japanese lettering appears on a Malaysian label’s packaging for a Philadelphia band drawing upon European metal, American hardcore, Gothic horror, fantasy art, and occult theater. Underground music has never obeyed the national boundaries imagined by cultural gatekeepers. A coffin built in Philadelphia can be shipped across the planet and opened by strangers who already understand the ritual.
Endless Funeral is most successful because the music does not depend upon forgiving weak songwriting in exchange for a great show. The visual world attracts attention, but the songs remain after the coffin has been carried away. Riffs recur in memory, changes arrive with purpose, and the vocals possess their own jagged timing rather than merely screaming over the instruments. The band is funny, but the playing is not a joke.
Extreme music sometimes treats humor as contamination. Artists fear that one visible smile will weaken the authority of darkness, as though evil requires constant administrative seriousness. Zorn recognizes the opposite. Horror and heavy metal have always contained extravagance, costume, theatrical death, rubber monsters, elaborate typography, impossible anatomy, and pleasure taken in being frightened safely. Pretending this playfulness does not exist makes the genre less honest, not more frightening.
The group’s Satanism functions partly as a carnival language through which embarrassment, anxiety, mortality, and social restraint can be rearranged. A corset, coffin, chain, sword, or demon mask permits the performer to become temporarily ungovernable. The everyday self has obligations and inhibitions. The ghoul has an entrance cue.
That transformation does not eliminate anxiety. It gives anxiety a body capable of moving through a room. The demon, mercenary, funeral master, and mad dancer are all exaggerated forms of determination. They know what they want even when what they want is absurd, destructive, or impossible. The anxious person wants that certainty and may experience it briefly through performance.
The cover procession therefore need not be interpreted as movement toward death. It may be movement away from private paralysis. Every monster has arrived dressed for the occasion. The castle doors stand open. The dead are more socially active than many living people, and the funeral refuses to end because nobody wants to return yet to ordinary clothes.
Eventually the needle lifts or the CD reaches silence. Coffins become props, demons become friends carrying equipment, and the endless funeral ends for the evening. Its endlessness survives only as repeatability. The ritual can begin again whenever the record is played.
That is a kinder kind of eternity than permanent mourning. It allows death to be approached, staged, shouted at, danced around, and then temporarily dismissed. Zorn does not conquer mortality. They give it a great party and make it wait outside while the amplifiers are packed.

Wand - 2024 - Help Desk / Goldfish

Drag City – DC925

The object shown on the cover looks like customer service after its final emotional breakdown. WAND appears in enormous white letters above a yellow smiley face raising both middle fingers. The face remains perfectly cheerful because it has only one expression available. The hands communicate everything the smile has been forbidden to say. Behind them sits an urgent red field, the color of warnings, error messages, emergency buttons, clearance stickers, and the little badge informing an overworked employee that another problem has entered the queue.
A help desk is where confusion must become legible before assistance can begin. The person seeking help describes what has failed, selects a category, repeats what has already been attempted, and waits while the problem is translated into the language of a system. The system may be genuinely useful, but it can only address what its forms are designed to recognize. “My password has stopped working” fits inside a ticket. “I no longer recognize the life connected to this password” does not.
The smiley with its raised fingers perfectly captures this contradiction. Its face says that the institution is happy to assist. Its body says that the institution has exceeded its capacity for patience. It is hospitality and refusal condensed into one mascot, emotional labor revolting while the uniform remains on.
“Help Desk” does not sound like a band confidently supplying answers. It sounds like several people circling a distress signal whose meaning keeps changing as they approach it. The arrangement is spacious, murky, and quietly enormous. Guitars quiver rather than strike, bass gives the music a hidden floor, and the drums move with the care of someone walking through a dark room where another person may be sleeping or injured. Cory Hanson’s voice appears close enough to confide but distant enough to remain uncertain whether the message has reached its intended recipient.
The opening promise that someone will try to help arrives with an immediate qualification: perhaps the person in trouble could simply work it out. That sentence can be encouragement or abandonment depending upon how it is spoken. “You can do this” and “deal with it yourself” often wear the same words. The song lives inside that unstable tone, where care is present but cannot prove that it will be sufficient.
Its images move through graves, sheds, nests, caves, roads, animals, faith, hiding, running, and the difficulty of admitting that someone else may be right. These are not ordinary help-desk categories. They belong to older systems of shelter and danger. The shed is a rough human structure; the nest is a structure built by instinct; the cave is protection, burial chamber, origin point, and place into which frightened creatures retreat. The song gradually moves assistance away from offices and toward the basic question of whether one being can build a safe enough place for another.
To help someone out of a grave sounds heroic until the lyric makes the timing uncertain. Is the person already dead, merely mistaken for dead, hiding among the dead, or waiting for someone else to notice before completing the disappearance? Rescue becomes morally urgent while remaining practically unclear. One person may desperately need intervention and still resist the hand reaching toward them. Another may offer help partly from love and partly from the need to become indispensable.
This is where “Help Desk” becomes more than a song about alienation. It examines the intimate power contained inside assistance. The helper gains access to weakness, information, and decisions that the distressed person cannot currently manage. Care can restore agency, but it can also quietly replace it. The difference may depend upon whether the helper wants the other person to become free or permanently grateful.
The song never establishes one clean position. Desire, frustration, protection, shame, and hostility pass through the same voice. The listener cannot separate “I want to save you” from “I want you to behave in a way that allows me to feel like your savior.” Wand lets these emotional frequencies interfere with one another instead of cleaning the signal.
That interference reflects the method from which the music arose. The band entered the studio without finished compositions, generated hours of improvisation, and later listened for passages that seemed to contain their own internal demands. In that sense, Wand became a help desk for the music. The raw recordings arrived as unsolved cases. Instead of asking how to impose a familiar Wand song upon them, the musicians asked what each fragment appeared to need.
This is a profound change from the model of a songwriter issuing complete instructions to supporting players. Improvisation distributes uncertainty. Nobody can know exactly what another musician will do next, and every contribution changes the meaning of what has already happened. The composition becomes an act of mutual assistance: one player creates a problem, another offers a route through it, and a third reveals that the apparent solution was actually another opening.
“Goldfish” is the creature left swimming after the administrative system closes for the evening. Its title introduces a living body small enough to be contained inside a bowl and visually available from every side. A goldfish has almost no privacy. It eats, sleeps, moves, and excretes inside the same transparent enclosure while a larger species looks in whenever it chooses.
The fish may not understand that its world is decorative. The castle, gravel, plastic plant, filtered current, and boundaries of the bowl appear simply to be reality. This makes the aquarium an unusually exact image for consciousness. Every person experiences existence from inside a container that cannot be viewed completely from within. Language, family, body, history, culture, and sensory limits form the glass. We may recognize some of the enclosure while remaining unable to imagine the room outside it.
The popular claim that goldfish possess only a few seconds of memory has long made them symbols of perpetual rediscovery. Whether or not the biology supports that myth matters less to the song than the cultural image it created. The goldfish circles its bowl and meets the same castle as though for the first time. Repetition becomes innocence rather than imprisonment.
Wand’s music complicates that innocence. “Goldfish” glows, but its light carries melancholy. Feedback seeps around the guitars, piano notes appear like objects seen through moving water, horns spread color without becoming triumphant, and the drumming places small precise disturbances across the surface. The composition seems to rise and sink simultaneously. It is sunrise viewed from underwater, where illumination reaches the body only after being bent by another medium.
The song’s six minutes do not build toward the explosive release one might expect from Wand’s earlier psychedelic rock. Energy is dispersed through texture. Instead of a door being kicked open, the dimensions of the room slowly become questionable. The walls may be moving outward, or the listener may simply be losing the ability to locate them.
This makes “Goldfish” a natural survivor from the Vertigo sessions. Vertigo is not merely dizziness. It is a disagreement between sensory systems about one’s position in space. The eyes report stability while the inner ear reports movement, or the body feels stationary while the world appears to rotate. “Goldfish” produces a gentler version of that disagreement. The rhythm establishes an environment, but the surrounding tones make the environment appear to float.
Bruce Bickford’s drawings deepen the effect. His animation was famous for worlds that could not remain in one shape, where bodies, landscapes, machines, monsters, and architecture continually transformed into one another. For the “Goldfish” video, scanned drawings made before his death are placed into new motion. The artist is absent, yet marks once produced by his hand continue changing position.
This is not resurrection. The drawings cannot restore the consciousness that made them. They do, however, demonstrate that an image may contain unrealized movement long after the moment of drawing has ended. Someone else scans, sequences, edits, and displays the material, discovering paths through it that the original artist may never have specified. The dead hand stops moving; the line keeps traveling.
The goldfish and the posthumous animation therefore share a strange life. Both exist inside visible enclosures constructed by others. The fish moves through a tank; the drawing moves through a screen. Each can be watched repeatedly, and neither can explain its experience of being watched. The viewer supplies interiority.
After the two Wand pieces, the record returns to “Help Desk” three times. This sequencing turns the second side into a support ticket routed through separate departments. The original problem has already been described, but Beat Detectives, Dead Rider, and Dean Spunt each receive different permissions, tools, assumptions, and listening habits. No remix closes the ticket. Each demonstrates that the ticket contained several problems hiding beneath one number.
Beat Detectives rebuild the song around rhythm and nocturnal electronic space. The original’s organic uncertainty becomes a city of delayed signals, beats, reflections, and half-lit movement. Their version treats the voice less as a narrator standing inside a band and more as information circulating through an environment. Fragments become signs glimpsed from a moving vehicle. Help has entered the network and acquired a pulse.
This remix makes the phrase “help desk” sound institutional again, but the institution is now open after midnight. Fluorescent offices, empty transit platforms, server rooms, surveillance monitors, call queues, and distant apartment windows begin assembling themselves around the beat. Human need travels through machines that remain active while most human bodies are asleep.
Dead Rider approaches the song from a different angle. Their music has long understood negative space as an active ingredient, and the remix makes Wand’s structure bend, shimmer, and squirm without simply destroying it. Sounds appear to negotiate their own right to occupy the foreground. The song becomes less a building than a body trying to reposition itself inside uncomfortable clothing.
The Dead Rider version recognizes that assistance can be disruptive. A real solution may require dismantling the arrangement that allowed the original problem to remain stable. The remix does not decorate “Help Desk.” It changes where the song appears to possess joints.
Dean Spunt’s treatment moves furthest toward blur. As a member of No Age and an artist interested in repetition, noise, objects, and recording as material, Spunt allows the song’s recognizable identity to dissolve into smears, tremors, and hypnotic recurrence. The help desk has stopped interpreting the caller’s language and begun listening to the electrical texture of the connection itself.
A conventional remix often locates the most reusable component, places it over a new beat, and produces a parallel version suited to another social setting. Spunt makes the notion of usefulness stranger. Voice, rhythm, and atmosphere become substances rather than messages. The song is not answered. It is rubbed until the printed instructions disappear.
By the end of the record, “Help Desk” has existed four times. The repeated title begins behaving like a phrase spoken into an automated telephone system that fails to recognize pronunciation. Each repetition changes emphasis. HELP desk. Help DESK. Help? Desk. Eventually the words lose their ordinary service meaning and become two objects placed beside one another: assistance and furniture.
A desk is a surface where problems are processed while the body remains seated. It divides worker from customer, clerk from applicant, expert from person seeking access. Help becomes something administered across the barrier. Yet a desk is also where people write, draw, assemble, repair, and imagine. The same object that bureaucratizes assistance can support the creation of another world.
The EP’s artwork compresses that contradiction into its smiling insult. The mascot belongs on a sticker, skateboard, tool case, school notebook, service counter, or piece of industrial equipment. It is instantly readable and emotionally impossible. The face cannot stop smiling; the fingers cannot stop objecting. Cheerfulness and rage have been assigned separate parts of the same body.
That division resembles life inside a band, job, relationship, or digital platform. People learn to maintain acceptable surfaces while other gestures leak from beneath them. A voice says everything is fine. A foot shakes under the table. A hand tightens. A joke arrives carrying the information that direct language could not deliver.
Wand’s 2024 music frequently inhabits this leakage. The band’s earlier records could erupt with enormous fuzz and clear physical attack, but these pieces allow pressure to remain internal for longer periods. Density has not disappeared. It has moved beneath the surface, where feedback, arrangement, hesitation, and nearly buried instrumental events create the sense that the song knows more than it is willing to state.
The two originals and three remixes form a small study of how meaning survives alteration. “Goldfish” remains alone, protected inside its bowl, while “Help Desk” is repeatedly opened, copied, reassigned, and modified. One track represents containment; the other becomes circulation.
Yet the contained fish moves constantly, while the circulating help request may never reach resolution. Motion does not guarantee escape. Distribution does not guarantee understanding. Sometimes the most widely shared distress becomes the easiest to process without truly encountering.
The EP does not solve this. It offers several forms of listening. Wand listens to improvisation until a song appears. The remixers listen to the song until alternate structures appear. The listener hears the versions sequentially and begins noticing details in the original that may have remained invisible before transformation.
That is the real service provided by the record. It does not answer the problem. It changes the ear receiving it.
Anyone with the physical 12-inch, knowledge of the design credits, or insight into how the remixes were exchanged and assembled is invited to add another department to the case file. The help desk remains open, although the mascot may have complicated feelings about your call.

Jim Nothing - 2024 - Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn

 

Melted Ice Cream – MICV015

The cover looks like a neighborhood remembering itself through several incompatible systems. A blurred hillside occupies the upper photograph, while the lower image shows some kind of skeletal shelter, frame, garage structure, or unfinished room. Architectural diagrams run along the top and bottom edges, their little boxed forms and cross-braces suggesting routes, rooms, windows, or instructions for assembling a place. A broad salmon-colored stripe divides the images, smaller marks repeat across the bottom like missing letters, and an upside-down number 23 sits near the corner as though the sleeve has been rotated, misfiled, or recovered from a planning office after its original purpose was forgotten. Nothing is centered in the conventional sense. The record appears less illustrated than mapped.
Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn performs a similar operation upon inner-city Auckland. It maps a place through bicycles, pubs, roads, trees, shorelines, long afternoons, feedback, old drinking habits, cats, flowers, gambling screens, fading light, and people whose identities are revealed only through the way the singer notices them. The neighborhood is never introduced through famous landmarks or a tourist’s elevated view. It appears from inside daily movement, one avenue, garage, window, bar, road surface, and patch of changing light at a time.
The title joins a person to a suburb so closely that the boundary between them disappears. Grey eyes look at Grey Lynn, but Grey Lynn may also be looking back through those eyes. A person becomes a local weather system, while the neighborhood acquires a face. Grey is not treated as the absence of color. It contains overcast light, asphalt, old timber, evening, memory, melancholy, silver guitar tone, and the soft visual grain of the cover photographs. Lynn supplies the human sound at the end, almost a name spoken after the color has settled.
Jim Nothing is another wonderfully misleading construction. It sounds self-erasing, as though James Sullivan has stepped aside before anyone can accuse him of importance. Yet the songs are filled with evidence that nothing is never actually nothing. A cat playing in a doorway matters. A bicycle matters. The last leaves on a tree matter. A quiet afternoon matters. An old-timer placing a bet matters. The joke inside the name is that someone calling himself Nothing has become unusually attentive to all the small somethings other people discard as background.
“Hourglass” begins with time converted into landscape. Sand belongs both to the instrument measuring time and to the beach where time is often temporarily forgotten. The song keeps returning to the fact that time will not come back, but the music refuses to sound defeated. Guitars sparkle, drums move forward, and the backing vocals add warmth around the central warning. The hourglass keeps track even when the person does not, yet the song itself creates another relationship with time. Two and a half minutes can be replayed, allowing the same passing moment to return without pretending that the listener remains unchanged.
The production history gives that opening track another meaning. Its first recording was clean enough to make Sullivan uncomfortable. The professional microphones and studio clarity produced something recognizably good, but not yet recognizably Jim Nothing. He returned to the garage, added overdubs and layers of feedback, and allowed the song to acquire the abrasions through which his own identity became audible. This is not a simple preference for bad sound over good sound. It is the recognition that technical improvement can sometimes remove the conditions under which personality becomes visible.
A perfect recording may reveal every instrument while hiding why the musicians needed to make it. Garage noise restores scale. The listener can sense the walls, limitations, cold air, improvised setup, and decisions made without an institution waiting to approve them. Feedback is not damage placed over the song. It is the garage asserting that the song passed through an actual room.
“First Bite” introduces one of Sullivan’s marvelous miniature people: a pill vampire wearing dad shoes on a Sunday, watching a cat play in the doorway while competence gradually subsides. The description is funny because its details refuse the grand authority usually granted to a vampire. Immortal darkness has reached middle age, pharmaceutical dependence, practical footwear, and quiet domestic observation. Yet the figure is not merely mocked. There is tenderness in the act of seeing someone so exactly.
The phrase “enough is never enough” opens the song outward. Appetite survives every attempt to domesticate it. Medication, consumption, attention, affection, entertainment, work, intoxication, and self-improvement all promise a point of sufficiency that continually moves. The pill vampire does not need a Gothic castle. Contemporary life provides subscriptions, prescriptions, screens, and Sunday afternoons in which hunger can continue without ever clearly identifying what it wants.
“Wildflowers” moves into the inverted seasonal world of a Southern Hemisphere December, where Christmas belongs to heat, melting roads, swimming, and plants releasing themselves into summer air. Sullivan even hesitates between “tarmac” and “bitumen,” allowing the material beneath his feet to become linguistically unstable. This tiny uncertainty is part of the album’s charm. The singer does not need to know the approved word before the road can carry him.
The flowers, seeds, heat, roadside quicksand, and psychedelic memory turn the song into a local summer mythology. Falling becomes successful because the people once “tripped” and “fell so well.” The line transforms failure into an art of landing. Youth is remembered not as a period when nothing went wrong, but as a time when falling could still feel collaborative, funny, and temporarily free of permanent consequence.
“Easter at the RSC” constructs a secular religious service inside a sports and social club. Old-timers try their luck at the TAB, spectators send hand signals toward the referee, beloved songs play, doors stay open, and the repeated instruction to “sell your car” arrives like advertising, prophecy, and financial emergency fused into one phrase. Easter traditionally concerns death, return, and transformed life. Here resurrection may mean winning a bet, finding a gap in the replay, surviving the long weekend, or exchanging an automobile for whatever dream feedback promises.
The RSC becomes a neighborhood church whose rituals are gambling, sport, alcohol, screens, memory, and familiar company. The song does not treat these practices as degraded substitutes for something sacred. Repetition, hope, disappointment, communal watching, and belief in unlikely reversals already make them religious in structure. One in a million remains almost certainly impossible, but people gather because impossibility becomes easier to hold in company.
The title song is the album’s emotional center because it joins escape fantasy to the discovery that remaining can also become meaningful. The singer remembers drinking himself beneath the table and mentally driving state highways, wishing to leave while physically staying in the same place. Travel happens first as imagination, the road becoming available inside the mind before the body follows it.
Then the song slows into a tree-lined avenue, fading light, books, grey eyes, Grey Lynn, and “Marquee Moon.” Television’s great song of nocturnal urban revelation becomes part of an Auckland afternoon without swallowing the local scene. The reference is not a badge displayed to prove taste. It names the way music from another city can enter a neighborhood and change its light. New York guitar lines pass through decades and hemispheres until they become part of two people reading quietly in Grey Lynn.
The song’s deepest movement is from wanting to get out toward learning how to see where one already is. This does not mean every urge to leave was immature or mistaken. A place can feel imprisoning during one period and beloved during another because the observer, relationships, habits, and available futures have changed. Home is not a fixed property of geography. It is a changing agreement between location and attention.
“Can’t Find It Now” lasts barely more than a minute and turns absence into a problem of insufficient brightness. Whatever has been lost may still exist, but there is not enough light to distinguish it. This could describe memory, purpose, an object misplaced in a room, a former self, or the first reason a song was begun. The piece leaves before the search can become dramatic, respecting the ordinary way lost things remain lost. Most disappearances do not receive conclusions. People simply stop looking for the day.
“Raleigh Arena” is a love song to a road bicycle and one of the purest expressions of physical freedom on the record. The title names Sullivan’s beloved bike, but it also transforms the city into an arena entered through pedaling. Movement requires no fuel purchase, timetable, permission, or sealed compartment. The rider is exposed to weather, traffic, gradients, smells, sounds, and sudden changes in the neighborhood, but this exposure is part of the freedom rather than a flaw in it.
Its motorik pulse creates a road beneath the words. Repetition becomes rotation, each musical circuit resembling another turn of the wheels. The lyric is almost childishly direct: riding feels good and free, and everyone should have access to such a machine. That simplicity becomes political without acquiring a slogan. The bicycle is inexpensive relative to a car, physically empowering, spatially modest, and capable of converting a city from something passed through behind glass into something continuously encountered.
The song also explains the album’s method of observation. Walking and cycling operate at the speed at which small features become visible. A person in a car moves between destinations. A person on a bicycle experiences the material connecting them. Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn is written from that connecting material.
“Lucky Charm” asks to become a protective object for another person while admitting that years, seasons, and unrealized possibilities continue moving. A charm is carried because someone believes proximity to it may influence chance. The singer does not promise complete protection or control. He wants to be the small object accompanying another person through uncertainty.
This modest scale saves the song from romantic conquest. The desire is not to own the beloved’s future but to become something fortunate within it. Even the movement from “lucky charm” to “lucky one” and finally “only one” feels less like increasing possession than language gradually admitting the full size of its hope.
“The Shimmering” returns to the shore at night, where streetlights, stars, waves, reflections, and human figures begin sharing one unstable surface. Shimmering occurs when light cannot remain fixed. It trembles upon water, glass, leaves, metal, and the eye itself. The object appears to move because illumination keeps changing its angle.
This is also how memory works across the album. Events do not return as solid reproductions. They shimmer according to the present from which they are recalled. A drunken period, bicycle journey, pub afternoon, psychedelic summer, or person’s eyes may look different each time memory’s light reaches them. The song accepts that instability as beauty rather than evidence that the memory has failed.
“The Present” performs the album’s most graceful word-turn. “You are the present” identifies another person as both the current moment and a gift, while “I’m the afternoon” makes the singer a temporary portion of the day. One person is time itself; the other is weather passing through it. The lyric keeps nodding toward the past while remaining bittersweetly aware that staying is an active decision.
This may be the record’s quiet philosophy. The past deserves recognition without being allowed to govern every room. Escape remains imaginable without being automatically necessary. The present is not an empty interval between what has been lost and what may arrive later. It is another person sitting within the afternoon.
“Sundown Clown” turns evening into permission. Once the sun disappears, clowning begins, drinks are poured, and everyone does whatever is necessary to continue. The clown can be comic freedom, intoxicated foolishness, emotional disguise, or the self who emerges when daylight’s duties release their grip. The world keeps spinning around the singer, the listener, and the neighborhood whether the night becomes celebration or avoidance.
The song does not condemn drinking despite the title track’s memory of drinking beneath the table. It recognizes that the same act can belong to different chapters. A drink can accompany friendship, ritual, escape, dependence, or ordinary pleasure. Songs do not need to issue one permanent verdict upon every behavior they contain.
“Out of Reach” is full of nearly graspable purity: a tree clinging to its final leaves, moonlight tea, flowers, Antipodean stillness, and medicine dreamed into existence. The repeated insistence that something is pure begins sounding less certain with every return. Purity may be precisely what remains unreachable.
This is fortunate. Pure scenes, pure genres, pure memories, pure motives, and pure identities usually exist only after inconvenient material has been removed. Jim Nothing’s music is valuable because it refuses that cleaning. Jangle carries feedback. sweetness carries sadness. A garage shares authority with a proper studio. New Zealand guitar history coexists with local details too peculiar to become generic heritage.
“The Pass” closes in a town where gold once drew people toward the river and then disappeared. Bells continue ringing although almost nobody remains to hear them. Words have been written into rock, ribbons are cut, and commemoration survives the community whose life supposedly gave the ceremony meaning. The song turns a former mining settlement into a meditation upon how places continue after their economic purpose has been extracted.
It is a darker companion to Grey Lynn. One place remains inhabited through attention; another has become monument, inscription, and echo. The bells ring for everyone, but nobody is left. The record ends by asking whether a place lives through buildings, population, memory, repeated sound, or the person who carries its story elsewhere.
Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn gathers these questions without becoming burdened by them. Its melodies remain immediate, guitars shine and fray, drums keep the songs lightly airborne, and backing voices create small openings around Sullivan’s understated delivery. The album’s intelligence never needs to announce itself because it is embedded in what gets noticed.
The cover’s floor plans, photographs, colored blocks, and unexplained number finally resemble a personal archive being converted into shelter. One image shows landscape; another shows construction; the diagrams offer possible arrangements without telling us which one was completed. Perhaps the album itself is the completed room.
It has been built from a garage, a studio, a bicycle, a neighborhood, friends, flowers, wagers, forgotten towns, and time passing through grey light. Jim Nothing stands at the center by refusing to behave like a center. The songs keep looking outward, where nothing important is happening and everything is.

David Grubbs & Loren Connors - 2024 - Evening Air

 

Room40 – RM4226

The cover contains a horizon but refuses to declare where the horizon is. Loren Connors’s monochrome painting appears to divide into air, water, shore, fog, and dark land, yet each region quietly leaks into the others. A pale band seems to hover above a heavier black field. Tiny marks near the lower edge might be reflected light, distant structures, waves, scratches, or places where the painted surface has remembered the hand that crossed it. The image is called A Coming to Shore No. 21, but it does not show arrival as a clean event. Shore remains something emerging gradually from atmosphere.
Evening air behaves similarly. It cannot be pointed to as an object, yet it changes every visible object. Heat leaves the ground, distances soften, sounds travel differently, and forms that were obvious in afternoon light begin surrendering their borders. Evening is not night, but the certainty of day has already begun withdrawing. Connors and David Grubbs make music inside that transition. Guitar and piano remain recognizable, but neither instrument consistently occupies the expected ground. Notes arrive, fade, reflect, and occasionally become indistinguishable from the space around them.
The label name adds another quiet chamber. Room40 originally points elsewhere, toward codebreaking and hidden transmissions, but here the words become literal again: a room containing forty possible meanings, or the fortieth room reached after all familiar rooms have been exhausted. This music does not feel designed for a large public square. It creates a room whose dimensions are determined by attention. Listen casually and it may seem almost empty. Listen closely and the apparent emptiness develops doors, drafts, distant motion, and the acoustic evidence of things waiting outside sight.
The two musicians first met as a duo more than twenty years earlier in the chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery. That origin remains audible even though Evening Air was recorded in a studio. A chapel teaches sound to behave differently. Silence is no longer the absence between events but part of the architecture holding them apart. A single note can establish height, stone, distance, and the presence of bodies attempting not to disturb one another. Connors and Grubbs do not reproduce church acoustics here. They preserve the courtesy such acoustics demand.
“Evening Air” begins with Grubbs at the piano and Connors on electric guitar. The pairing might suggest a clear division between struck notes and sustained ones, piano providing points while guitar provides atmosphere. The performance immediately complicates that expectation. Grubbs allows chords and isolated tones to hang long enough that the piano begins behaving like weather. Connors’s guitar enters with gestures so thin and carefully placed that they can resemble marks made upon paper rather than amplified strings.
Neither musician appears interested in filling what the other leaves open. This is more unusual than it sounds. Much improvisation is governed by response: one player makes a statement, another replies, and musical intelligence becomes visible through speed of recognition. Connors and Grubbs practice a slower form of recognition. A sound may be answered by allowing it to remain unanswered. Respect becomes audible as restraint.
The title piece does not develop toward conquest. It develops toward acquaintance. Piano and guitar gradually learn the pressure each can exert without forcing the shared air to become private territory. A low piano tone may alter the emotional color of a guitar line without touching it directly. A guitar sound may make the decay of the previous chord suddenly noticeable. The musicians communicate not only through what they play but through what each performance causes us to hear in the other.
“Choir Waits in the Wings” introduces a group of singers who never enter. The title locates them beside the stage, prepared but withheld. Their waiting becomes more powerful than an actual choral entrance because imagination can supply a choir larger than any recording budget. Every sustained guitar tone or gathering piano resonance begins to suggest voices assembling behind a curtain.
A choir traditionally converts separate breathing bodies into collective speech. The individual singer becomes part of a larger mouth. Connors and Grubbs accomplish something almost opposite. Two instrumental voices remain clearly separate while occasionally producing the sensation that a third body has formed between them. The imaginary choir is not added to the music. It appears within the overlap.
The wings are also where performers remain visible to one another while hidden from the audience. They contain preparation, nerves, whispered instructions, props, dust, practical labor, and the ordinary bodies that will soon enter a stage and become symbolic. This album often feels as though it remains in that side space, listening to art before art has completed its public transformation.
The long first side belongs to Grubbs’s piano and Connors’s guitar. The second side changes the furniture. Connors moves to piano for “The Pacific School,” “Enjoyment of Ruins,” and “Child,” while Grubbs takes the electric guitar. The reversal is not presented as a stunt. No announcement tells the listener to admire their versatility. The instruments simply begin revealing different temperaments under different hands.
Connors’s piano playing has a beautiful untrained exactness, not because it lacks knowledge but because it refuses the instrument’s social pressure to demonstrate pianism. The piano carries an enormous historical institution inside it: conservatories, recitals, domestic respectability, composition, virtuosity, and the authority of Western notation. Connors approaches it as a field of available sounds. A key is permitted to be one event rather than evidence of mastery.
“The Pacific School” lasts barely two and a half minutes, yet its title opens toward an ocean and an institution at once. A school can teach doctrine, but it can also be a moving community of fish whose coordination has no visible conductor. Pacific can name an ocean or a condition of peace. The piece hovers among these meanings. Connors’s piano tones appear as dark bodies briefly surfacing while Grubbs’s guitar supplies water, current, or the reflected sky.
The Pacific is too large to be seen as a whole from any shore. It must be understood through local encounters: one wave, harbor, crossing, map, storm, memory, or horizon. The same is true of musical traditions. Nobody hears an entire lineage. A listener receives one record, one performance, one borrowed influence, and gradually imagines the larger sea from those partial contacts.
“Enjoyment of Ruins” is a dangerous title because ruins are beautiful partly through damage someone else may have suffered. A collapsed factory, burned home, deserted institution, or abandoned town can become visual pleasure once the people harmed by its failure have left the frame. Ruin photography often turns consequence into texture.
The piece does not sound triumphant enough to celebrate destruction. Its enjoyment is quieter and more ethically uncertain: the pleasure of hearing forms after their intended function has ended. A broken wall reveals layers hidden during the building’s useful life. A failed machine becomes sculpture. A musical phrase interrupted before resolution exposes the assumptions through which listeners expected it to continue.
Connors and Grubbs do not construct complete melodic buildings and then theatrically destroy them. They begin with fragments already carrying the dignity of remains. The listener is not invited to mourn the missing whole because there may never have been one. Ruin becomes a method of composition in which gaps are original features rather than later damage.
“It’s Snowing Onstage” is the album’s magnificent disturbance. Both musicians take up electric guitars, creating a denser, more confrontational field, and Connors unexpectedly moves to drums. The surprise is not that percussion appears but that it behaves according to no familiar contract. The drums do not stabilize the guitars by supplying a dependable rhythmic floor. They enter like objects dropped into weather.
Snow onstage makes the boundary between representation and environment collapse. Stage snow is artificial weather, flakes manufactured to create an image for an audience. Actual snow would disrupt equipment, alter surfaces, endanger movement, and potentially force the performance to stop. The title leaves us between those conditions. Is the stage convincingly pretending to be outside, or has the outside entered and begun damaging the illusion?
The guitars gather in rougher formations than elsewhere on the record. Their lines push, hover, and occasionally lock together before separating again. Connors’s drumming introduces impacts that seem less interested in measuring time than in proving that time has a body. A drum is struck, air moves, the room answers, and the guitars must continue in a world changed by that impact.
The piece is the longest act of weather on the second side, yet it never becomes a storm in the conventional free-improvisation sense. Its tension comes from unpredictability without aggression. Snow is quiet while transforming every surface it reaches. The track covers the stage this way, changing the visibility and footing of everything already present.
“Child” closes the album in a little over two minutes. Knowing the composition’s history gives the miniature tremendous gravity: a mother’s child killed by the freight trains that once ran through Manhattan’s West Side streets. Yet no voice explains the story here. Connors plays piano while Grubbs’s guitar remains near him, and grief is returned to the condition before narrative organizes it.
A child is a person, a relationship, a future, and a word adults continue using after the person it names has grown or died. To a parent, the child may remain “my child” beyond every alteration of age and even beyond death. Language preserves the relationship while reality removes the body.
The brevity refuses monumental mourning. Public memorials often enlarge grief into architecture because ordinary scale seems incapable of carrying it. “Child” remains small. This makes its absence feel closer. The piece resembles an object kept in a drawer, touched rarely because it contains more feeling than its physical dimensions should permit.
Grubbs does not attempt to replace Suzanne Langille’s absent voice or imitate the emotional information words once carried. His guitar remains a companion to Connors’s piano, perhaps carrying what another person can carry when grief itself cannot be shared equally. One person experiences the central loss; another remains nearby without pretending proximity creates complete understanding.
This has been the ethic of the whole album. Collaboration does not require merging identities. Connors and Grubbs preserve difference so carefully that their moments of convergence become extraordinary. They do not constantly prove that they are listening. They create conditions in which listening can be inferred from the survival of each other’s space.
After two decades, their return is not framed as unfinished business finally completed. Evening Air does not attempt to update Arborvitae, exceed it, or demonstrate everything learned during the interval. Time is allowed to exist between the records without becoming a burden the new music must explain.
This may be why the album feels simultaneously old and newly made. Piano and electric guitar carry no obvious timestamp here. There are no fashionable production gestures announcing 2024. Yet the music could only have been played by these people at this stage of their lives and history together. Timelessness is not the absence of time. It is time felt without being advertised.
Room40 is an ideal home because the label repeatedly treats listening as an active physical and philosophical practice rather than passive receipt. Its releases often enlarge the space between almost nothing and almost too much. Evening Air remains near the first boundary, but close listening reveals that almost nothing may contain an impossible amount.
The cover painting finally stops resembling a landscape and becomes a score. Dark horizontal fields indicate duration. Pale bands indicate air. Tiny marks become notes, boats, distant lamps, or incidents in the painted surface. The coming to shore may be the music approaching audibility, the musicians approaching one another, or the listener gradually recognizing a form that was present before recognition.
Arrival never becomes complete. The shore continues emerging. The choir continues waiting. Snow continues falling upon an indoor stage. The child remains held inside two minutes of sound. Evening enters the room without opening a door.

Maryrose Crook & The Renderers - 2006 - Ghosts Of Our Vegas Lives

 

3 Beads Of Sweat – 3BOS 1009.2

Four nocturnal creatures float against a brown field like brooches removed from the clothing of the dead. They resemble moths, but ordinary moth anatomy has been embroidered, jeweled, armored, and ceremonially altered. Pearls hang from one set of wings. Another creature carries a metallic structure across its body like a tiny coffin, shield, or mechanical heart. Their antennae curl upward, their wings display eyes and patterns, and each insect occupies its own pocket of empty space beneath Maryrose Crook’s looping blue title. They are specimens, ornaments, spirits, and performers waiting for the casino lights to return.
The cover does not show Las Vegas. There are no hotels, slot machines, fountains, marquees, cars, crowds, or desert highways. Instead, it shows what may remain after Vegas has disappeared: four glamorous insects dressed for an evening whose human guests never arrived. The spectacle has contracted from architecture into tiny bodies. Sequins have become wing markings. Pearls have become defensive camouflage. Entertainment has survived as evolutionary strangeness.
A moth is drawn toward artificial light with such determination that attraction may become fatal. Las Vegas is a city built almost entirely from artificial light, a vast machine for pulling bodies toward promises of luck, pleasure, wealth, reinvention, and temporary exemption from ordinary consequence. To place moths on the cover of Ghosts of Our Vegas Lives is therefore to place desire itself under glass. The creatures approach illumination without understanding the machinery producing it.
The title does not say “ghosts of our lives in Vegas.” It says “our Vegas lives,” suggesting that Vegas is not merely a location. It is a kind of life people construct wherever illusion, risk, glamour, performance, and private desperation become inseparable. A Vegas life may be lived in Christchurch, Port Chalmers, a coastal town, a suburban room, a marriage, a touring band, or an imagination that keeps wagering its remaining hope on the next illuminated sign.
“Ghosts” makes those lives retrospective. Perhaps the people survived while earlier versions of themselves did not. Perhaps certain ambitions, lovers, rooms, bands, habits, and imagined futures continue moving after their actual circumstances have ended. A ghost is not simply the dead. It is something that has lost material authority without losing emotional influence.
The album itself became such an object. Recorded in 2002 and withheld until 2006, it spent four years existing without public life. The performances had occurred, the tape held them, and yet the record had not entered the chronology through which listeners ordinarily understand a band. By the time it appeared, it was already transmitting from an earlier room. The release did not document the present. It allowed an unfinished past to begin haunting the present officially.
That delayed existence distinguishes it from a conventional Renderers album. Brian and Maryrose Crook had long served as the band’s twin compositional centers, their voices and songs creating different entrances into the same damaged country landscape. Here every song belongs to Maryrose. Brian remains crucial, but as guitarist, sound-maker, arranger, editor, and atmospheric conspirator rather than alternating author. The billing acknowledges the shift precisely: Maryrose Crook with the Renderers.
This does not reduce the band to anonymous accompaniment. It changes the emotional geometry. The musicians gather around one writer’s cosmology and help its weather become physical. Thom Bell’s bass and Robbie Yeats’s drums establish ground without making that ground safe. Brian’s guitar behaves less like commentary than climate, arriving as heat, electrical pressure, distant machinery, metal collapse, or a horizon darkening faster than expected.
Maryrose’s voice occupies the center without dominating it through volume. She sings with the authority of someone who has already entered the dangerous place and has no need to exaggerate its danger for visitors. Her delivery can feel weary, watchful, tender, and strangely formal. She does not chase the song. She allows it to approach at its own pace, even when the instruments begin mutating around her.
“Under the Sea” opens below ordinary visibility. The sea is not treated as recreational water or picturesque coastline. It is depth, pressure, concealment, and a second world existing beneath the one in which people breathe. The arrangement moves sparsely enough that every event acquires distance. Lesley Johnson’s cornet appears not as a bright brass declaration but as a small procession heard through water, a sad choir reduced to one instrument and refracted by the surrounding space.
The opening establishes one of the album’s central movements: calm is created carefully enough that its destruction matters. When the song eventually gives way to grinding metallic force, the change does not feel like a routine loud section inserted for dynamic variety. It feels as though something enormous has crossed beneath the previously still surface. The sea has not changed character. The listener has finally perceived what was living deeper down.
Underwater existence is a useful image for memory. Events remain preserved but inaccessible in their original form. Light reaches them altered. Speech becomes pressure and vibration. Objects drift away from the places where they entered. The person looking down from the surface may see only darkness while an entire wreck, city, animal population, or former life continues below.
“Dream That You’re Driving” transfers this submerged state into motion. Driving in a dream combines apparent control with unstable geography. Hands hold the wheel, yet roads rearrange themselves, destinations move, passengers appear without explanation, and brakes may stop obeying physical law. The driver performs competence inside a world being generated faster than it can be understood.
Driving is also one of the great private theaters of modern life. A person sits alone inside a metal room while landscapes pass, music plays, remembered conversations restart, and futures are rehearsed. Movement can resemble escape even when the road eventually returns the driver to the same emotional address. Dream driving intensifies that contradiction. The body may not move at all while consciousness travels enormous distances.
The Renderers’ music is particularly suited to this uncertain road. Country rhythm implies travel, but psychedelic abrasion makes the destination unreliable. The song can suggest highway space without promising that the highway belongs to the waking world. Guitar becomes weather passing the windshield. Repetition becomes road markings. The voice remains the one familiar object inside a landscape that may dissolve at any moment.
“Night Train” introduces another vehicle, but trains differ from cars in one essential respect: the passenger does not steer. A railway follows an existing line, and its freedom consists only of moving rapidly through a route decided elsewhere. The familiar railroad rhythm gives the song bodily momentum, yet that momentum contains fatalism. Once aboard, the traveler may change compartments, look through another window, or pull an emergency brake, but cannot persuade the tracks to lead somewhere new.
Night intensifies this surrender. The train moves through places the passenger cannot properly see. Occasional lights indicate houses, crossings, stations, factories, or roads, but most of the world becomes black land inferred through vibration. Sleep and wakefulness exchange places. The carriage becomes a temporary community of strangers whose separate destinations are joined by machinery.
This is where the album’s patience becomes distinct from simple slowness. A slow song can merely delay arrival. The Renderers make duration feel inhabited. Repeated motion gradually alters the listener’s sense of scale, much as a train’s constant rhythm can make speed feel stationary. The song does not need to race because the rails have already removed the possibility of stopping casually.
The title track gathers the album’s central words into its longest and most elaborate chamber. “Ghosts of Our Vegas Lives” sounds glamorous before it sounds tragic. Vegas gives the ghosts costumes, lighting, mirrors, cocktails, velvet ropes, stage entrances, and an audience that may or may not exist. These are not pale figures wandering a ruined farmhouse. They are spectral entertainers who remember exactly how the room looked when everybody still wanted something from it.
Brian Crook’s lead guitar becomes one of those ghosts. Maryrose has singled out his solo from the song years later, and the attachment is understandable. The guitar does not simply decorate her composition. It enters as another character, ominous and strangely articulate, saying what cannot be translated into the singer’s language without reducing it. The marriage between songwriting and guitar noise becomes almost literal here: one partner establishes the haunted architecture, the other opens an electrical passage through its wall.
A Vegas life depends upon surfaces. Casinos hide clocks and daylight so that time becomes difficult to measure. Carpet patterns, mirrored ceilings, artificial skies, themed rooms, and constant sound prevent emptiness from becoming obvious. Even loss is surrounded by celebration. Lights flash when machines pay out, but the larger building survives because most wagers disappear silently into it.
A ghost performs the opposite operation. It makes hidden loss visible. The apparition is evidence that an apparently completed event remains unresolved. By joining Vegas to ghosts, the song reveals the sorrow required to maintain spectacle. Every illuminated promise creates a shadow populated by the people, chances, identities, and years consumed in its pursuit.
The phrase “our Vegas lives” also avoids moral superiority. These are not the degraded lives of strangers being observed from outside. They belong to “us.” Everyone constructs some illuminated version of the self and places bets upon its survival. A musician wagers years on songs. A painter wagers solitude and labor on images that may not be understood. A lover wagers vulnerability on another person’s continued presence. A listener wagers time on the possibility that unfamiliar sound will eventually open.
“A Little Strange” shrinks the scale after the title track’s grandeur. Strangeness rarely arrives by announcing total otherness. More often, one detail fails to align. A familiar room contains the wrong object. A person speaks in a nearly normal tone while one phrase changes the meaning of everything around it. A song follows a recognizable structure until keyboards begin casting a color that does not belong to the expected hour.
Maryrose’s keyboard contribution gives the track another interior. Keyboards can imitate orchestras, organs, furniture, machinery, and weather while remaining physically compact. On a record devoted to ghosts, they are ideal instruments because they allow absent bodies to appear as timbre. A choir can arrive without singers. A church can arrive without stone. A carnival can flicker briefly inside an otherwise empty landscape.
The title’s understatement is important. “A little strange” is what people say when they have not yet decided whether something is dangerous, beautiful, embarrassing, supernatural, or merely unfamiliar. The phrase keeps judgment suspended. That suspension is central to Maryrose Crook’s art, where exquisite rendering attracts the eye toward scenes whose implications remain unstable.
“Storm from the East” makes direction meaningful. Weather arriving from the east carries different associations depending upon where the observer stands, but the title treats the storm as a force with origin, intention, and travel. It has crossed distance to reach this particular place. The horizon becomes a form of warning.
Storms reorganize scale. Human structures that appeared permanent become temporary arrangements of timber, glass, roofing, wire, and habit. Air becomes visible through what it moves. Trees reveal wind direction, windows reveal pressure, and electricity reveals vulnerability by disappearing. A storm does not introduce fragility. It demonstrates the fragility already built into the calm day.
The Renderers excel at this threshold between atmosphere and event. Guitar distortion can hover for long periods as meteorological possibility before becoming impact. Drums can indicate a front moving closer without simply increasing speed. Bass gives the weather mass. Maryrose remains the observing consciousness, not untouched by the storm but lucid enough to describe its approach.
“Fall of the Earth” expands disaster beyond weather. The title may mean the earth dropping away, civilization collapsing upon it, or the season of fall belonging to the planet itself. It could name geological failure or moral descent. Its relatively brief duration prevents apocalypse from becoming luxurious. The world falls in three and a half minutes, leaving little time for speeches.
Apocalyptic music often flatters listeners by positioning them among the exceptional survivors. Destruction clears away bureaucracy, routine, debt, and social embarrassment, allowing hidden courage to emerge. “Fall of the Earth” carries no need for such heroic fantasy. The title is almost impersonal. The earth falls, and the individual voice becomes one small consciousness inside the motion.
Placed after “Storm from the East,” it suggests escalation, but also the human tendency to interpret every approaching darkness as totality. A storm becomes the end of the world because the mind experiences danger from its own center. The planet may continue while one person’s world ends completely.
“Blood of the Angels” gives celestial beings bodies. Angels are usually imagined as spiritual messengers beyond ordinary flesh, yet blood implies circulation, injury, lineage, sacrifice, and death. To see angel blood would mean that the supposedly immortal can be wounded. It would also mean the sacred has entered matter deeply enough to stain it.
This image belongs naturally beside the jeweled moths. Both angels and moths possess wings, but wings do not guarantee escape. The cover creatures appear magnificent while remaining pinned within the square. Their ornament may be armor or evidence of captivity. “Blood of the Angels” treats beauty similarly. Beauty is not protection from violence. It may make the wound more visible.
Maryrose’s larger visual world repeatedly brings holiness, insects, flowers, organs, ghosts, meat, jewels, demons, and domestic objects into close proximity. The categories do not remain clean because experience does not keep them clean. The sacred can be grotesque. The grotesque can be tender. A wound can produce an image of unbearable beauty without becoming good.
“Sea of Total Darkness” returns to the album’s opening element, but all remaining light has been removed. “Under the Sea” still implied a surface somewhere above. A sea of total darkness has no visible boundary and no guaranteed direction upward. Depth becomes absolute environment.
This is where the band allows psychedelic rock to swell most openly. Wah-wah and large guitar distortion turn the sea into unstable electrical matter, something less like realistic water than a mind attempting to imagine endlessness. The effect risks excess, but excess belongs to the subject. Total darkness should not behave tastefully. The instrument searches the blackness and repeatedly returns altered.
Darkness can be terrifying because it removes evidence, but it also removes spectacle. Vegas cannot operate without visibility. Signs, games, faces, money, surveillance, and desire all require illumination. In total darkness, the architecture of temptation loses its authority. The person may be lost, but the machines designed to guide that loss have gone silent too.
The sea is an especially powerful opposite to Vegas. One environment is engineered to keep human attention occupied continuously. The other exceeds human attention completely. Casino space is constructed so that nothing appears accidental. Oceanic space remains indifferent to whether anyone interprets it.
“The Outgoing Queen” closes the record with a figure who is leaving power, leaving a room, leaving life, or perhaps simply leaving the stage before another queen enters. “Outgoing” can describe sociability, departure, a telephone line, mail being sent, or a person whose term is ending. Each meaning gives the queen a different sadness.
A queen embodies public visibility. Clothing, gesture, ceremony, lineage, and controlled appearance transform one person into a symbol larger than private life. An outgoing queen must separate from that symbol while everyone continues looking. She may be gracious, furious, relieved, erased, or already turning into an image through which the next era will remember itself.
As the album’s final song, it also feels like Maryrose dismissing the ghosts after their performance. The moths have completed their night flight. The vehicles have reached darkness. The storms have crossed. Angels have bled. The sea has removed the remaining lights. What exits is not merely a character but the authority that held the sequence together.
Yet departure is never complete on a recording. The outgoing queen can be summoned again instantly. She leaves each time and is never gone. This is the peculiar mercy and curse of recorded sound: an ending becomes repeatable, preserving the exact gesture of release while preventing release from becoming final.
The album’s labels sound almost designed by the music. Three Beads of Sweat reduces bodily effort to a tiny visible sequence, three drops proving that internal heat has reached the surface. Tinsel Ears suggests hearing decorated with cheap glitter, festive and artificial, perhaps slightly ridiculous. Together they unite labor and ornament, the physical and theatrical, which is exactly where Maryrose’s songs live.
Tinsel imitates precious metal without pretending to possess its permanence. It shines for a season, tangles easily, and is eventually packed away or discarded. Vegas is tinsel architecture enlarged to civic scale. The jeweled insects on the cover elevate this cheap shimmer into devotional ornament, but their luxury still feels homemade and biologically impossible.
The album’s long gestation adds another form of tinsel time. Recorded in 2002 and released in 2006, it arrived after the period that created it had already begun receding. A lesser record might have felt delayed or outdated. Ghosts of Our Vegas Lives benefits from appearing out of sequence. Its music was never trying to report the newest moment. It was already listening for what survives moments.
Its connection to New Zealand guitar music is unmistakable, but it does not rely upon the bright jangle often used internationally as shorthand for that history. The Renderers belong to a murkier geography where country music, free noise, post-punk, psychedelia, and maritime dread share weather. American forms cross the Pacific and return altered by distance, local musicians, unstable recording conditions, and landscapes that refuse to behave like imported mythology.
Calling the music Southern Gothic is useful only if “southern” is allowed to rotate on the globe. The American South does not own decaying houses, religious dread, family ghosts, rural isolation, violence, desire, storms, or damaged grandeur. Canterbury and Otago can generate their own haunted south, one in which the sea replaces the swamp and the light falls from another angle.
Maryrose’s authorship sharpens this distinction. She does not merely sing inside a masculine tradition of doomed wanderers, murder ballads, damaged cowboys, and desert prophets. She constructs her own occult geography from queens, angels, moths, dreams, storms, vehicles, and oceans. The characters are not introduced through explanatory biography. They arrive already carrying symbolic charge, as figures do in dreams and paintings.
This may explain why some listeners experience the album’s repeated slow builds as too much of one method. The songs do share weather, duration, and a tendency to move from spacious restraint toward larger disturbance. But repetition here is not laziness. It is ritual architecture. The album keeps placing different symbolic bodies into the same atmospheric machine to learn what each one reveals under pressure.
A storm, train, moth, queen, angel, driver, and ghost all move differently, but each is caught between destination and disappearance. The train follows rails. The driver follows a dream. The storm follows pressure. The moth follows light. The queen follows ceremony. The ghost follows memory. The album asks whether any of them is truly choosing the route.
The cover offers no ground for its creatures to land upon. Each floats alone, richly decorated and anatomically improbable, while the title curls among them like smoke from a vanished sign. Their solitude is not absolute because they share the same brown night. They form a constellation, and the listener supplies the lines connecting them.
That is what the songs do across fifty minutes. They do not rush to prove their relationship. They remain separated by titles, silences, and different imagined landscapes until a larger design gradually appears. Sea connects to sea. Driving connects to trains. Storm connects to planetary fall. Angels connect to queens. Vegas connects to every beautiful mechanism that survives by persuading us not to look behind its light.
When the album ends, the ghosts have not been exorcised. Exorcism would require naming what entered, determining that it does not belong, and forcing it outside. Maryrose Crook grants the ghosts citizenship. They are not invaders of life. They are what our previous lives become once we can no longer inhabit them directly.
The lights dim, the wager ends, the queen departs, and four jeweled moths remain awake on the cover, carrying the entire abandoned casino upon their wings.