It’s been twelve years since Katy Davidson released an album of new material under the moniker Dear Nora. But after VSF favs Orindal Records reissued their Mountain Rock LP last year, the band hit the road and, inspired, Davidson headed to the studio with Zach Burba (bass/synth), Greg Campanile (drums), and Jessica Jones (guitar), and Skulls Example was born. Citing influences as diverse as Frank Ocean, Gang of Four, Lou Reid and Enya, this new iteration of Dear Nora is pretty hard to pin down, the record holding folk songs and bedroom pop songs and proto-pop songs, all beautiful and strange and infectious in equal measure.
Opening tracks ‘White Fur’ and ‘Morning Glories’ sound like a sunny morning, evoking the gentle natural rhythm of the waking world, that quiet period of chirping birds and opening blossoms. But these songs aren’t just pure surface image. Davidson crafts music with impressive depth, even the seemingly simplest lines revealing themselves to be finely wrought with metaphor or meaningful imagery. Take ‘White Fur’ for example, playing this gentle naturalism against imagery altogether more preternatural (“cremate me in snow and firewater, skulls example is my name”), electric guitar swooping around in a manner reminiscent of To La Tengo’s soundtrack to Kelly Reichert’s Old Joy.
‘Morning Glories’ on the other hand has the cosy ambience of a nostalgic daydream. “I long to wander in the wild wood, where those rippling waters flow,” Davidson sings, “and go drifting back to childhood where, where the morning glories grow.” The songs on Skulls Example feel disarmingly simple, a collection observations and recollections that somehow knit into this whole. Think of them as the simple DIY pinhole viewer you fashion from an old cardboard box that allows you to see something as grand and cosmic as a solar eclipse. Nowhere on the album captures this simplicity as well as ‘New To Me’, barely 100 seconds of crystal clear sentiment that feels incredibly evocative, Davidson painting a scene removed from all trappings of modern life.
But then, as if to prove the breadth of Dear Nora’s interests, Skulls Example flips on its head four tracks in, serving up two C21st pop songs that focus a lens on our digital age, specifically the wholly unreliable nature of reality in our age of screens. “Simulation feels real every day,” Davidson sings at the very beginning of the Baudrillardian ‘Simulation Feels’, a song that somehow manages to feel groovy and loose-limbed despite its complex subject matter. This 1-2 is completed with ‘Sunset on Humanity’, which again uses gentle melody as a vector to deliver probing lines about the dissolution of the membrane between our “real” and virtual lives. “Sunset in the video game,” goes the first line. “And I’m walking on the beach. The colours are radiant, orange, blue, purple, red, yellow. I’m reaching, it’s all within reach.”
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The blurring of real and unreal is central to Skulls Example, and such tension can be applied to almost every track on the record. As the press release tries to summarise:
[The album is about] how our weird, techno-futuristic present (VR, self-driving cars, drones, Tinder dates, reality TV show government, Starbucks ubiquity, iPhone as extension of human body, Blade Runner-esque income inequality, cryptocurrency “utopias”, etc.) juxtaposes so absurdly against the never-ending backdrop of inexorable, ancient elements (fire, ice, wind, storms, mountains, rocks, human instinct, etc).
However, it might not be a simple to and fro between the technological unreal and elemental real. Because nothing is quite as it seems on Skulls Example. Even before being translated into language and crafted into songs (which is another can of worms entirely), Dear Nora’s most immediate, evocative imagery of the so-called real world is often revealed to be drawn from memory or imagination. Meaning, in effect, they are no more real (or unreal) than the virtual reality of technology. Rather, this imagery is just another simulation, a hyperreality in which notions such as fact and fiction are rendered obsolete.
Which goes some way to describing the calm and spacious title track, one of several inspired by a trip Davidson took to Oaxaca and Mexico City. The scene is crafted expertly, grand landscapes and strangely significant details combining to transport the listener to another world. “Ancient black volcanic rock courtyard heat waves rising,” Davidson sings, the song pitched somewhere between realism and surreal myth. “Two crows on a splintered cross living and dying, distant ranchero music and a scary peacock squawking near a hot pink bougainvillea.” The commitment to the physical world could be seen as a protest against the virtual, however, what might seem like an effort to disrupt the illusionary present could instead be the opposite—an attempt to weave a better, more gratifying illusion, like some omnipotent being building a simulation of its own. That magical thing: a simulation capable of feeling more real and meaningful than the blindly efficient simulation of late capitalism.
All thunderclaps and rain-scent, ‘Ancient Plain’ plays like a wide-screen desert revelation, like a considered attempt to transcend banal life. “This job don’t mean shit to me,” Davidson sings, “so I hit the freeway, bought a full tank of gas, and drove out of the city.” But, of course, this is not some Hollywood-style adventure of quick victories—our narrator is still very much of our world, trying to chat to a Starbucks barista and watching Friends in a bar on six flat screen TVs. Skulls Example could be viewed as a struggle between two competing images. An attempt to superimpose a unique vision of life over the established model, yet unable to stop the signs and symbols of the ‘old’ new world seeping through.
And that’s the big draw of Dear Nora as a whole. Despite the fact it’s strange and singular and quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year, this desire to create a better, more meaningful idea of existence is undeniably familiar, fundamentally human despite the god-like connotations (well, we were supposedly made in His image). It’s as if the songs aspire to somehow become more than the sum of their parts, fitting together just so, like words in a spell to conjure something otherwise incommunicable. As Davidson explains:
The album is specifically about humanity. Our capacities and feats are so incredible – we’re godlike – and yet we’re scrounging for happiness and basic survival, we’re heavily addicted, we just want love, we want family. We’re simultaneously so brilliant and so basic. To me, this feels like the worst and best time to be alive. I experience some level of horror and bliss on a daily basis.
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In an ideal world, Skulls Example is a far simpler album. The soul-sucking ubiquity of technology is countered by a reintroduction of a more organic sensibility. The unreal is vanquished by the real, and we realise we can touch and feel again. But we do not live in an ideal world. Late capitalism is the master of co-option, capable of assimilating anything and everything and turning them toward its own ends. Charity events seeking to warn of ecological ruin come complete with plastic toys and polyester costumes. Political and social movements, even those in direct opposition to consumerist ideology, become photo opportunities, or chances to sell t-shirts and pin badges. Try to escape to the wilderness, and they’ll sell you camping gear. You can be anyone, we are told, do anything, though only superficially, a multitude of simulations all working toward to same goal, the means to the end of shifting units and making money.
Dear Nora’s music attempts to undermine this by playing the same game, crafting an unreal reality of their own to overlay the other. And, by neutering the money-making end, they in effect invert capitalism’s technique, reestablishing the means (ie. living) as the purpose. Yes, Skulls Example might be a simulation, but it is one of the most meaningful and rewarding you could hope to find.
Skulls Example is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from their website or Bandcamp in a variety of formats.
