Hailing from Steubenville, Ohio, Dear Other are more ambitious and inventive than your average folk rock band. Their initial release, The Incredible and Death Defying Expedition to Planet X, was a soundtrack to an original children’s rock musical staged by a children’s theatre in their hometown, while the genre-hopping Lift/Love combined spoken word samples and particle physics to explore the various forms and trials of love. Last year’s EP Proceedings from courtroom B served as a bite-sized introduction to the band’s versatility and invention—the opening track stripping things right back to intimate lo-fi hush, the second finding a playful drama and the third stretching over eight minutes with grand electronic washes. If any common thread links Dear Other’s music, it is this sense of exploration and vision. The willingness to constantly push boundaries and evolve.
Enter The Wizard Clip, a brand new Dear Other record that might just be their most ambitious to date. The album is based around the historic exorcism in Middleway, West Virginia of the same name. “The truest ghost story ever told,” according to Rev. Alfred E. Smith, which started when a dying stranger appeared at the house of one Adam Livingstone asking for a Catholic priest, though passed away before one could be found. The usual phenomena followed—disembodied voices, broken crockery, snuffed candles without apparent cause—as well as a more distinctive detail. The disticntive sound of heavy shears, and people reported half moon shapes being cut into the fabric of their clothes.
Dear Other give this story its full due, each song detailing a development as explained in the maximalist titles. Take opener “Clip Mysterious. Sing in me Holy Ghost, and by the intercession of Servant of God Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, in me tell the tale of Adam Livingston, Early American, his passion, his house, his conversion to your Holy Church, in Jesus’ name, Amen! Amen!” But their lyrics push beyond the source material too, the opening line finding time to reference peer-reviewed papers and the Dreamworks Animation logo, pushing an already strange record into something pretty unique.
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The tale unfolds with this blend of the playful and the eerie, Dear Other’s sense of humour shining through. “Let’s review the principle facts,” goes ‘Witches, Run!’ “You believe yourself under attack by a demon or a spirit that’s attached to your house.” But their attempts to banish the entity, all decidedly non-Catholic, fail miserably. “You try the Methodists? Of course you’ve tried the Methodists. You try the Presbyterians? Oh, but they didn’t help you none.”
The band’s own musings are no less funny. “I don’t think houses get haunted no more / ’cause everyone rents,” goes the opening verse of ‘Houses Haunted’. “It seems to me owning the thing is prerequisite / for a dead occupant / to take effect.” But however sharp and wry, the ironic overlay never undercuts the story, a feature of the band’s wholehearted commitment to the project at hand. What emerges instead is a picture of a haunting in all of its intricacies. A ghost shot through a prism and separated into its multitudes of meanings. Bizarre, disturbing, vaguely ridiculous. A matter of human fundamentals. Love and pride and terror and faith, not to mention epiphanies both dreadful and glorious.
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The Wizard Clip is out now and you can get it from the Dear Other Bandcamp page.
