When emigrating to the United States, a relative of The Fourth Wall‘s Stephen Agustin left behind a young daughter, erasing everything from their life in order to start fresh in their new home. The fact struck Agustin as a visceral example of what he calls the “poetry of forgetfulness” so common in those who move in search of something better or different. “There was almost a way in which the impulse to revise or destroy history became a condition for achieving this joyous state,” he explains. Be that in terms of family, community or the wider national picture, with those who left countries like Korea and The Philippines for the US forced to ignore or forget the violence their new country had inflicted on those in which they were born.
Such thoughts came to inform every aspect of The Fourth Wall’s Return Forever, an album which combs through the complexities and contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey. Lead single ‘Never a Part’ introduced the record, a song based around an imagined conversation between Agustin and his grandmother which interrogated the nature of familial bonds. “With a sound at once visceral and soaring,” we wrote in a preview, “the song pushes into the intangible strangeness of unconditional love while confronting the poetry of forgetfulness head on.”
What the song best captured was The Fourth Wall’s ability to explore big picture concepts and highly intimate experiences simultaneously. Tracks like ‘Darkness of Heart’, a clever flip of Conrad’s classic novella which, as we put it previously, “present[s] a non-Western protagonist’s journey deep into the so-called ‘civilised’ world, only to see the truth behind the illusion of the American Dream,” eye themes with the widest of views, but never at the expense of the individual human lives governed by such forces. “My family history has always come to me in fragments and I’ve had the sense that there will always be an irreducible remainder that I will never have access to,” as Agustin explains. “I became interested in how this unintelligible past affects notions of my own identity.”
Return Forever acts something like a prism through which Agustin beams such complexities, each song offering one component wavelength of the unmanageable whole. Be it the xenophobic needle of opener ‘Interrupts the Dream’, the furious, affirming defiance of ‘Can’t Lose That Loss’ or ‘Grain By Grain’ with its marching rhythm, where a building intensity might lead to clarity or further confusion. “I recall you had eyes just like mine / Leaving your memory took so little time,” opens ‘Only The Joy’, a direct engagement with the story of a parent leaving a daughter behind. “Only the joy passed through.” The song encapsulates the layered nature of The Fourth Wall style. The bright, almost devotional sound possesses a tenderness which should be absent from such a scenario, resulting in a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.
The penultimate track ‘Conatus’ plays something like the sonic equivalent of this phenomenon, escalating from hushed intimacy to joyous momentum and finally towards a chaotic finale. It displays a runaway energy capable of lifting one off their feet or burying them beneath its noise. As though having built beyond its own control the sound’s power must be left to crown or destroy whoever it may, and those involved are best advised to not take it personally. It’s left to closer ‘No Daggers’ to ask if blame might be attenuated in such circumstances. “Must it always hurt / For the wheels to turn / Can I love you still without any daggers?” Agustin asks, though ultimately concludes the record by foregoing any hope of a bright epiphany in favour of accepting irresolution as the natural state of things.
No one has to understand it all or forgive it all
When the codes reset forgetting all to save it all
I’ll still remember youYou’re my brightest one
I can’t give you up
This could be the ending
But you return forever
Return Forever is out now and available from The Fourth Wall Bandcamp page.
Album artwork and design by DB Amorin