We have already told you about one great album from Logan Farmer’s Monarch Mtn this year, premiering I Woke At The Station last winter. Atmosphere is key to Farmer’s music, and the album created its own world “brimming with characters locked in a lonely urban sprawl,” the melancholic and dangerous backdrop across which his protagonists and villains can move. “A sad, shadowy city,” we wrote, “where numb people wander and sometimes collide, all haunted by a vague, ubiquitous sense of loss that turns hearts into holes and men into mimes or monsters.”
The thing with creating such vivid worlds is that their confines are vague and distant, and Monarch Mtn’s noir metropolis is crammed with stories yet untold. Which is perhaps why, mere months later, Farmer is back with days of sleepwater, a brand new record that is every bit as darkly atmospheric as its predecessor. However, to say the album is a direct continuation would be misleading. There is a distinctive change in the spirit of the music here, days of sleepwater seeking out space and autonomy as though reacting to the suffocating oppression that marked I Woke At The Station.
Take for instance the slow and considered first track ‘canyon blues’, Naarah Strokosch’s cello bringing an air of elegant sorrow as it saws sombre against a backdrop of subtle percussion. As on I Woke At The Station, the lyrics bristle with desperation and implicit violence, though while the previous songs felt as though they were careering toward these emotions, ‘canyon blues’ is more of a retreat or escape—leaving the dense tangle of civilisation for something more open and free.
“Highway 1 like a cancer in my mind
Scattered ashes on the sheets
I’m too nervous to be happy all the time
Hope you never get scared of me”
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Follow-up ‘trick of the light’ is a sparse and candle-lit croon, Farmer’s velvety vocals unfurling across barely-there guitar and snaking sax, while, in comparison, ‘no embrace’ sounds rich and graceful, a song about being isolated as the world ignites in celebration or disaster. “Fell asleep with headphones on,” Farmer sings, “as royal city burned / Not for me, this other man’s concerns.” The result is sad and strangely isolated, synths like an angelic choir adding a gravitas to an otherwise ordinary scene, dispatches from a dark and lonely room illuminated only by the light of the 24 hour news on the TV.
Cello again winds itself across ‘the glow’, a stripped-back acoustic song, before the eight-plus minute epic ‘iron sphere’ unfurls patiently from a quiet artificial dawn, ending eventually with sci-fi synths that bring an ominous air. The track is fraught with guilt and loss, and the synthetic nature of its close carries its own dread, as though the characters within are overtaken by some great pressing force as penance for past actions, or perhaps emancipation from the forces that held them.
The strangeness carries over onto ‘on the stone’, its weird dreamy blurriness presenting open spaces which the ghosts of Farmer’s characters haunt, before closing track ‘bedlam goes quiet’ presents what is perhaps the strongest narrative of all—a series of images bathed in neon and shadow.
Bedlam goes quiet
And she leaves the bed
Beer in the shadows
With a Texaco attendantShe drives all night
Just to clear her head
Nearing Montana
A wild dog’s spiritRises from the earth
Finds the traveller
Carrying her load with tired limbs
There is no wrong that time forgives
There was a sense of inevitability about I Woke At The Station. Every scene and interaction eventually lead to death and destruction, its inhabitants moving with the vaguely depraved self-interest that is the cultural logic of such a space. The world of days of sleepwater is no lighter, but Farmer’s interpretation of and reaction to the atmosphere signals a change. Darkness breeds darkness, and allowed to fester can become a self-perpetuating thing that metastazises unto ubiquity. Here, Monarch Mtn do not pretend that suffering is abating, or can be dispelled by a mere shift in perspective, but rather choose to fight the phenomenon. days of sleepwater exists to fight the creeping dark, and not embrace it.
days of sleepwater is out now and you can get it from the Monarch Mtn Bandcamp page.