Spelling Reform are back with Stay Inside, a brand new record that signals something of a change of direction for the band. Gone are the breakneck tempos and snappy sounds of previous releases, replaced by what the band call “introspective, mature and quiet-loud missives and character studies.” Ironically, the influence of John K. Samson still hovers over the sound, though this time it’s less to do with the racing energy and more the intelligent and inventive lyrical style. The slow-burning nature the songs allows a far more considered approach in terms of lyrics and themes, as highlighted by the sprawling single ‘The Chicago Board of Trade‘, where Wisniewski stretches out into the newfound space with an idiosyncratic eye for detail.

Today, we’re happy to share ‘The Second Coming,’ a brand new single ahead of the release of the record next week. Opening with a paschal warmth worthy of the title, the song sets up an earnest tone before the vocals skew the mood with a cynical irony. Though far from being a lesson in spiky scepticism, it’s the song’s quirkiness that truly stands out, because the brightness of the introduction not only remains present, it is grown through call-and-response refrains and a playful guitar solo. If the sincerity in Wisniewski’s vocals by the final chorus doesn’t quite find salvation, then it is at least enough to push the needle back to agnostic doubt, where nothing is ever set in stone, and the possibility of wonder remains.

The post Spelling Reform – The Second Coming appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.

As though the music audience was tuned into such ideas, Time Without Measure proved something of a breakout record for the band. It earned a place on CMJ’s Top 200 chart, garnered respect from the BBC and saw support slots for some impressive acts, essentially gaining far more attention than their previous work. Lead Eric Krewson used this as a signal to double down on his artistic direction, taking time out not only to write new songs but to edit and hone them, before teaming up with Daniel Smith at his studio in New Jersey (where the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Will Oldham have recorded).

The result is Child of My Sorrow, a brand new full-length album, and one every bit as ambitious and sophisticated as the previous The Chairman Dances releases. Setting the tone, ‘Amce Parking Garage’ throws us headlong into a world of anxiety, the supermarket setting befitting of an experience so coloured by consumerist forces. The song is something of a clash between the human and inhuman, individual spirit butting up against insidious forces that seem determined to break it.

This is clear on ‘Mascot’ too, a person not only reduced to ludicrous banality but threatened by it, existentially. Here the protagonist plays the Chick-fil-A cow mascot, a bad experience made worse by the competitive configuration of our society. If competition is the Great Commandment of capitalist thought, then dressing up as a cow to hawk mass-produced fast food brings not only the immediate discomfort of poor ventilation and limited vision, but also something wider and more wounding. This is sweaty embarrassment not as an end but a means to realizing your place and so-called ‘value’ to society. Your failing position in the competition of life.

“From eight to nine on weekends, you called to check in, to make amends with your sister living on the east coast. You in a cow suit, her writing for the Washington Post. It was a sad scene—you spread out on the floor, all those dads crying, you crawling toward the door.

It was a sad scene—you spread out on the floor, tired of wanting, wanting more”

However, The Chairman Dances have never been satisfied with highlighting the worst of society, and Child of My Sorrow is far from a one-dimensional jab at neoliberal culture. As hinted at on ‘Iridescent’, this is a band more concerned with the shining spirit of humanity in the face of such turmoil, drawing not just hope but meaning from those working against the cold individualism of our time. ‘No Compass, No Map’ feels like a direct challenge to such a blank rigidity, a song so intricate it is tempting to imagine a complex machinery behind, only such an image does nothing to suggest the spontaneity and sheer life of the track.

The song seems an important one, because it triggers something of a turning point for the record. From here on in, even the most morose and melancholic songs possess a bright spirit and call to change, as though subject to the realisation that we can be more than consumerist shells. Of course, this is not some pure white epiphany of goodwill. Often, as on ‘A Half-Mile From Allentown,’ the sensation registers as a nameless confusion, as though the world is suddenly too strange to inhabit normally, or perhaps the protagonists too strange to live in the mundane world.

There’s wariness too, and no small amount of regret, as highlighted by the warmly nostalgic pair ‘No One Can Hurt You (Like A Friend Can Hurt You)’ and ‘Hannah, I Know It Wasn’t Always Easy’. Punctuated with synths, the latter is a slow-burn memory as held late at night. Indeed, this kind of longing could be said to be the presiding sensation of the record, though it’s one far removed from the material-orientated kind that drives our age. Instead, this is longing for something more, meaning garnered through connection, be it with another person or higher power, a value whose absence is marked by a kind of mortal pain.

But what if absence is the natural state, The Chairman Dances ask? If there is no conscious loss to which to attribute our pain, then it is all too easy to assume that suffering is the default setting. Hence the confusion, the disaffection, the wide-eyed stumbles down gaudy supermarket aisles. The constant competition where even the winners feel like they are losing. But this doesn’t have to be the way. As the closing title track goes:

I sat down in a folding chair and we formed a semicircle. We formed a human chainfull of smiles, full of care. I wouldn’t let go. And if he would call to me, well I would gladly leave. I would gladly believe in just about anything. And I wouldn’t let go. I remember my mother’s voice, her kind and quiet way. And when her heart stopped, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t let go. When Jesus finally comes for us, I will gladly go. I’d be glad to know there’s more to life than pain.

Jesus, be near me

Child of My Sorrow is out via Black Rd Records and you can get it from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.

The post The Chairman Dances – Child of My Sorrow appeared first on Various Small Flames.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that the band’s debut full-length Time Without Measure is an album with lofty goals. As the press releases states, the album explores “history and biography, faith and doubt, in unexpected and meaningful ways,” with Eric Krewson and Co. looking to history for inspiration. “What sets Time Without Measure apart — and what makes the album so relevant in 2016 — is its political nature. The album depicts the lives of ten (mostly) activists who demanded progress and, in return, were demonized by the powers that be.”

Opener ‘Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’ is a snippet from the lives of the pair who created Catholic Worker Movement, a organisation which aimed to provide help for those struck by poverty, as well as protesting (nonviolently) on their behalf. The song finds Day working as a journalist, with Krewson conjuring the dualism of being a normal, humble person (“I wake up each morning in the newsroom that doubles as my bedroom, which doubles as my closet”) while also working toward huge, socially progressive ends.

“I’m up late each evening cleaning the dishes, Tamar at my knee and Peter at the table reading a book or two or three, when he gets to talking. Of leaving this city and taking the worst off, taking them all with us, just over that bending river”

‘Augustine’ finds the saint the bewildered by the names that dream of him, the music brash and confident in a way one is entitled to be when thought of so highly by Calvin and Dylan, while the verses of ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’ has the skippy energy and catchy repetition of a children’s verse. Complete with handclaps and echoed refrain, the track mimics Hamer’s habit of singing hymns with her civil rights group to maintain spirit and morale. And spirit they needed — the song is a reference to her bus trip to Indianola, Mississippi, where she travelled on the urging of Rev. James Bevel in order to register to vote. With the rhythmic chorus, the song is ready to singalong with from the off, and certainly captures the sense of carefree momentum that surely enchanted those brave enough to risk discrimination and death in order to gain what their people deserved.

‘Thérèse’ describes the beginning of the end for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who, after going to bed on Good Friday joyous after the Lenten fast, woke to find blood on her handkerchief, a sure sign of the death sentence that was tuberculosis. “I woke up with a pounding in my chest and a ringing in my ears,” Krewson has her say amid the cinematic swells of instrumentation, “you would have thought that I’d protest”. In reality, Thérèse was immensely touched that Christ should speak to her so clearly on the anniversary of his own death, providing the album with an example of capital-F Faith. The following track ‘Jimmy Carter’ is far less sure, finding the former president citing Flannery O’Connor (“It is much harder to believe”) and Paul Tillich (“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element”) as touchstones in his own struggles. The song is slow and wide and almost peaceful, before growing into a finale not quite transcendental but near enough, as though Carter grows into an understanding of Tillich’s words.

“I have found it’s much harder to do right. Doubt, fear and worry—and unbelief

O what sweet relief I found in Mark 9:23-4. I gave a sigh.”

‘César Chávez’ casts the civil rights activist in a light both typical and not, a man who takes out equity loans and recognises his wife’s favourite clothing who finds himself in the headlines and having visions in his sleep. ‘Kitty Ferguson’ offers progressive views of a different kind, providing yet another spin on the idea of faith by challenging the militant opinions on both sides of the religion/science divide by claiming that the two fields can coexist, striving, as she put it “[to] wrest both science and religion from the dogmatists of scientific atheism and religious fundamentalism”.

‘Catonsville 9 (Thomas and Marjorie)’ focuses on the Melville’s from said organisation, a Catholic couple who fought to bring attention to US involvement in Guatemala and served time after the Nine burned draft files in protest against the Vietnam war. The song finds them happy and relaxed, as though entirely convinced in their actions and beliefs, and finding the prospect of prison less of a burden than acting against their values. As ever, Krewson manages to cultivate a real sense of character, their playful intimacy possibly the biggest symbol of protest against the sanctions of bloodshed and fear peddled by their opposition.

“My wife and I drive to Catonsville, homemade napalm in our laps. Sun soaked and happy, we spill cherry cola on the map. My wife and I talk about the years, philosophy and its limits. Though we’re off to federal prison, there’ll be conjugal visits”

‘Peter Gomes and Nancy Koehn’ is based around a personal remembrance written by Koehn for the preacher and theologian Gomes, speaking of a man who saved her life and those of many others through his elegant insights into religion and life. The song plays as a suitable ode to what sounds like a great man (who Koehn called “a blazing light”, and Krewson “a sign for the living”), but also a meditation on faith, serving as a reminder that any holes in thinking and philosophising can be filled through empathy, compassion and friendship, acts which might just end up becoming your belief itself.

As if that lot was not powerful enough, The Chairman Dances close the album with ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, a track about the anti-Nazi dissident who, despite being imprisoned and finally executed, lives on through his book, The Cost of Discipleship, which argues against the commodification of faith. The song finds Bonhoeffer under threat, perhaps from the Gestapo or the hangman or maybe the more general fascist danger, though amidst the violence holds onto his unshakeable trust in something bigger than himself.

“I was up smoking a cigarette when the curtains were thrown open. The night spilling in. And I thought about you, I thought I might see you bathed in light”

Just as with Samantha Says, The Chairman Dances succeed in bringing characters to life in three dimensions, though on Time Without Measure the feat is even more impressive as the roster of figures are not only numerous but also known to history in decidedly superhuman terms. Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.

Time Without Measure is out now via Black Rd. Records and you can buy it from the Chairman Dances Bandcamp page, including a rather lovely CD edition.

The post The Chairman Dances – Time Without Measure appeared first on Various Small Flames.