“Songs are awake when you sing them. Electricity flows between the performer and the performee.” So states the one sheet of Ruth Garbus‘s latest album, Alive People, explaining both the title of the record and the mission at its heart. An attempt to capture that lightning in a bottle so that its energy need not dissipate. Recreate the communal wonder of a show so that others might hold it too. Ordinary live records play as a simulacrum of a single evening, but Alive People is not one of those. Rather it is more ambitions, aiming to reproduce not a specific performance but the magic of performing. “A studio album full of underground anthems for sensitive people of all ages,” as the description continues, “that happened to be recorded in a club with an audience of a hundred.”
Alive People therefore blurs line between live and not. An almost surreal tone, the sense of things heightened, life stripped to its weird, wonderful energies. The mood builds upon that of 2019’s Kleinmeister, also released by Orindal Records, which used an abundance of details to achieve its singular style. “Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls,” we wrote at the time. A record which straddled the organic, synthetic and spiritual through a sense of accumulation, where the sublime and absurd sat side by side. As we continued:
Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.
Alive People is no more frugal. After the self-reflective opener ‘No Mono Aware’, which sees Garbus reflect on creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality, the record zips around a diversity of subject matter as it sees fit. ‘Healthy Gamer’ is an ode to the titular character, as well as the strange mix of confinement and freedom which marks their experience. “Stately gamer, living in your chair / Your arm’s length the limit of your stare,” as the opening lines go, though seconds later this is followed by a differing observation. “I see us in those candy lights, above the Sim sea / Arresting our development / But making us free, giving us wings.” The question then becomes, in a society so keen to scrub away purpose or connectivity beyond labour, which is more real—IRL or RPG?
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=806074819 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=1094083596]
Various collaborators helped shape the album, with elie mcafee-hahn (synth and bass), Julie Bodian (atypical guitars) and Julia Tadlock (voice and presence) all lending their talents on stage, Nick Bisceglia taking engineering duties and Justin Pizzoferrato the mixing. The result is a sound often understated but always surprising, the trademark Ruth Garbus invention extending to their use of space and patience too, allowing the songs to be some of the most visionary and intimate to be released this year. ‘Rubber Tree’ presents an interspecies relationship as a joyous mutualism, ‘Whispers in Steel’ the most delicate ballad to the traffic on Brattleboro streets you’re ever likely to hear, while ‘Waiting for the Sun’ meditates on self-care in all of its banal detail and mindful integrity.
Two small squares of dark chocolate
One or two vials of red wine
“You get the bags”
The candle smells of pine
Waiting for reality to strike
Anxiety is suffering but
Lightly, lightly
We’re waiting on the sun
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=806074819 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2450945988]
And things don’t stop there. Songs about the unreality of cinema (‘Pastel Umbrella’) and the transcendence of sports (‘Sports’) are followed by one centring on the miracle of the town hall meeting, the appropriately titled ‘Reenchantment of the World’. “When you go to town meeting you will see people’s minds / Heaping the clay onto mounds under heaven / Reaping the harvests of offices,” as Garbus sings, “And there was government music.” The track brings to mind films like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, pushing through the mundane bureaucracy of civil service to reveal the marvel underneath. That energy which exists when people gather as a community, work to realise things they could not achieve alone.
This relationship between the individual and the collective threads right through Alive People—the struggle between protecting personal idiosyncrasies and the enriching potential of the group—right down to the process of its recording. In this way, Alive People could be described as a kind of musical vérité. The product of a single mind, recorded live yet edited to be more truthful than it might otherwise manage. The sound of an individual reaching out beyond their confines in order to share their energy. Songs are awake when you sing them. Between the performer and the performee flows an electricity.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=806074819 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=61723188]
Alive People is out now via Orindal Records you can get it from the Ruth Garbus Bandcamp page.
Cover painting by Audrey Weber