Thanks to his work in Friendship and Hour, the name of Michael Cormier might be familiar to regular visitors to Various Small Flames. The Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist has been involved with some of our favourite records over the past few years. Friendship’s Shock out of Season (on Orindal Records) blew us away with its empathetic observations of modern life, and both Anemone Red (Lily Tapes & Discs) and Tiny Houses (Sleeper Records) cemented Philly super-group Hour as one of the most interesting and evocative instrumental acts plying their trade today.
Aside from his roles with these bands, Michael Cormier also records solo under his own name. His latest record, Days Like Pearls, combines the modest introspection of Friendship with the lush melancholy of Hour, utilising everything gained from past acts to form a distinctively new sound. The album is the first release of Cormier’s new record label, Dear Life Records, which, living up to its name, is interested in music and audio-based art “exploring the tiniest crevices of the human experience.” The label is yet another sign of the cohesion and ambition of Cormier’s artistic vision, extending his dedication to the wonder that lurks amid the minutiae of existence.
Not content with the one new record, Cormier is also announcing surprise album M-F today too, and we have the honour of streaming both.
Days Like Pearls
Woven out of a series of memories from a childhood on the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, Days Like Pearls provides warm and wistful vignettes that home in on very specific details. ‘Yellow Wasp Under the Picnic Table’ charts the insect visitors to an outdoor meal, wasps and flies drawn by the soda, mosquitoes by the warm, beating blood of youth. ‘Dinners’ maps a room by its objects and occupants, the buzzing lights, the telephone, the piano. The fingerprints and lipstick smudges that adorn the glasses on the table. Cormier isn’t presenting memories in a narrative sense, rather (re)building milieux with snapshots of their most memorable features, and tapping into the collective nostalgia for times now gone.
Not that such a strategy is in any way perfect. Indeed, part of the album’s power lies in its acknowledgement of its limitations. Remembering the past does not bring it back, and offering representations, no matter the fidelity, risks replacing the real with the imagined and mis-remembered. Because nostalgia is a form of constant, deepening loss, where the passing of the direct experience is followed by a slow decline of memory too, cherished moments degrading to nothing with each passing day.
Days Like Pearls operates as a conscious struggle against this process, an attempt to dam the river of time so that the past might stay close to us, pool near us, offer us its comfort and pleasures when we need it most. Michael Cormier is trying to not just remember past joys but restore them, cultivate them, coax them back to life by re-engaging with their weight and textures.
M-F
M-F (aka Monday – Friday) is a meditation on life and love in the contemporary culture, where your partner might leave for work before you wake up and return home long after you’ve gone to bed. Therefore, while the sound bears clear resemblance to that of Days Like Pearls, there is a complete flip in the focus of the writing—happiness and meaning not some past forces to be remembered but future ideals to chase, no matter how unfavourable the conditions.
Monotony drawing out the days but collapsing the weeks, the unbearably sluggish present experience somehow blurring into quick siphoning of time. The result is a cruel tension between wishing away the hours and grasping at the months as they pass. How does one live when sanity and survival rely on getting through the days, yet life slips through the fingers in a constant downward spiral?
The answer, Cormier suggests, is to be found within the details. No matter how miserable and mundane the situation, the opportunities for wonder and joy are innumerable. With its worming anxiety and tender earnestness, M-F is thematically similar to that of Mike Tolan’s Talons’ project, though unlike albums such as Work Stories and After Talons’, Cormier’s work maintains a sense of brightness. Where Tolan conjures transcendence from the martyred melancholy of perseverance in lives sacrificed and betrayed, Cormier finds a more sincere, juvenile wonder. “[The feeling of futility is] challenged by elevating the smallest moments of day to day routines to moments of absolute transcendence,” Cormier explains. “The squeezing of a hand becomes an earth-shattering expression of the deepest love imaginable.”
The position contrasts with that of Friendship’s Shock out of Season too, despite the clear stylistic similarities. “In many ways, Friendship are in a Bardo of their own,” we wrote in our review, “caught between how life has been and could be, unsure how and when, if ever, they might pass into the next part.” If Shock Out of Season was concerned with finding an exit to another more fulfilling life, then M-F is determined to make the current one more meaningful, escaping not life itself but our detrimental experience of it.
Days Like Pearls and M-F could be said to be interlinked, or rather moving toward being so from opposite ends of the track. Because the records are performing inverse roles toward the same end—Days Like Pearls mourning and celebrating the loss of the super-sensory meaning of childhood, and M-F seeking to re-engineer such an existence within the present day. Both cement Michael Cormier not only as an ambitious songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, but one with a cohesive and admirably optimistic vision for our times.
Days Like Pearls is out on the 7th June via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp. M-F is out today and available from Bandcamp too.
