Mrs. Hopewell is Christopher Nicastro, a musician from Hartford, Connecticut, who makes angsty, lo-fi bedroom pop. His latest album, Dementia Pugilistica, is self-described as “7 songs about boxers, atrial fibrillation, and facing the void”.
Musically, the album falls somewhere between the bummed-out melancholy of Alex G/Elvis Depressedly and the angsty emo of acts like Molly Drag. The record seems to grow in energy and desperation as it progresses, as if veering toward some climax. Opener ‘It Was You, Charlie’ is mostly acoustic, but develops in the second half into something more rocky. From here, elements of emo and punk are introduced, from the sunny-sounding ‘Holly and I are Soup Snakes’, to the indie rock of ‘Sugar Sugar’ and fuzzy noise of ‘What Went Wrong?’, before the 90s pop of ‘Korine’ leads into the slow-building closer, ‘On The Day You Knocked Out Jeffries’, a track which spirals into a triumphant post-rock conclusion.
All of the tracks are relatively short and snappy, allowing Nicastro to explore his ideas without the ever slipping into self-indulgence and losing the listener to boredom. This is no mean feat when taking on the kinds of ideas on display here. Nicastro himself is a boxer, and the pugilistic theme which runs through the record proves to be far more than an amusing novelty. One reading is made clear with a quote from Joyce Carol Oates on the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp blurb:
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches…and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you”
However, while this life-as-an-endless-fight-vs-yourself idea rings true, there is another, more prominent dimension which pertains to the ‘facing the void’ part of Nicastro’s description. Boxing is a brutal, dangerous sport (up to 20% of participants will suffer from the titular neurodegenerative disease), in which every Mayweather is balanced by thousands of names we’ll never know. It’s essentially a lottery where buying a ticket involves getting smacked repeatedly around the head and neck and body, and if you are lucky enough to win you get promoted to a bigger draw where larger, more powerful men do the same.
But, importantly, the intensive training, violence-related adrenaline and short-lived glory of victory provide a sense of purpose, which is pretty much our only response so far to the dreaded Existential Fear that keeps us up at night. That is, we’re aware that we are small, insignificant and certain to die, and thus adopt Void-Filling Strategies which may not be good for our physical and emotional wellbeing yet help us forget for a while. So really, when Nicastro sings about boxing, he could easily be singing about writing novels, or having sex with beautiful people, or a long-term heroin habit. This idea is set out in the opening track, where the narrator is feeling something deeper and far more painful than punches:
“They say ‘jake you got an iron chin’
but fuck won’t you please tell me when
this sickness boiling up in me
will let go and finally set me free?”
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The kicker with the best Void-Filling Strategies is sudden cessation makes things ten times worse, presumably why so many sports stars end up in such a bad way after retirement. ‘Sugar Sugar’ gets at this idea (“so i’ll hang em up and put em down and move it away/hit the bottle weave and waddle and black out on the way”) and ‘What Went Wrong?’ serves as the post-meltdown confusion, with voices emanating from the off-kilter instrumentation like ghosts of a halcyon past before the final refrain, “I don’t know where I went wrong, I don’t know what went wrong.” These two tracks work well in tandem, capturing the absurd change of focus required from athletes after calling it a day (ie. going from spending every minute optimising your running/kicking/punching and feeling existentially justified, to having nothing to do except feel worthless and existentially exposed).
The Infinite Jest-referencing ‘James Orin Incandenza’ is the song which ties all of these ideas together, and tells the eagle-eyed listener that an album about boxing is in fact so much more. Aside from David Foster Wallace confronting all of the above issues better than anyone, Incandenza is applicable and interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the heavy-drinking obsessive film-maker/wraith has both his sons enrolled in serious-level sport, and indeed his eldest crashes into compulsive womanising and depression after an injury ends his football career. What’s more, Incandenza’s father was a failed actor, an “anti-Brando”, which sits nicely with the heavy On The Waterfront references across the record. It’s the sort of inclusion which transforms an entertaining album into something more meaningful, allowing nerds to think too much and write excessively-long, rambling pieces about existential voids.
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You can buy Dementia Pugilistica now via the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp page.