Musically, the album falls somewhere between the bummed-out melancholy of Alex G/Elvis Depressedly and the angsty emo of acts like Molly Drag.  The record seems to grow in energy and desperation as it progresses, as if veering toward some climax. Opener ‘It Was You, Charlie’ is mostly acoustic, but develops in the second half into something more rocky. From here, elements of emo and punk are introduced, from the sunny-sounding ‘Holly and I are Soup Snakes’, to the indie rock of ‘Sugar Sugar’ and fuzzy noise of ‘What Went Wrong?’, before the 90s pop of ‘Korine’ leads into the slow-building closer, ‘On The Day You Knocked Out Jeffries’, a track which spirals into a triumphant post-rock conclusion.

All of the tracks are relatively short and snappy, allowing Nicastro to explore his ideas without the ever slipping into self-indulgence and losing the listener to boredom. This is no mean feat when taking on the kinds of ideas on display here. Nicastro himself is a boxer, and the pugilistic theme which runs through the record proves to be far more than an amusing novelty. One reading is made clear with a quote from Joyce Carol Oates on the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp blurb:

“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches…and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you”

However, while this life-as-an-endless-fight-vs-yourself idea rings true, there is another, more prominent dimension which pertains to the ‘facing the void’ part of Nicastro’s description. Boxing is a brutal, dangerous sport (up to 20% of participants will suffer from the titular neurodegenerative disease), in which every Mayweather is balanced by thousands of names we’ll never know. It’s essentially a lottery where buying a ticket involves getting smacked repeatedly around the head and neck and body, and if you are lucky enough to win you get promoted to a bigger draw where larger, more powerful men do the same.

But, importantly, the intensive training, violence-related adrenaline and short-lived glory of victory provide a sense of purpose, which is pretty much our only response so far to the dreaded Existential Fear that keeps us up at night. That is, we’re aware that we are small, insignificant and certain to die, and thus adopt Void-Filling Strategies which may not be good for our physical and emotional wellbeing yet help us forget for a while. So really, when Nicastro sings about boxing, he could easily be singing about writing novels, or having sex with beautiful people, or a long-term heroin habit. This idea is set out in the opening track, where the narrator is feeling something deeper and far more painful than punches:    

“They say ‘jake you got an iron chin’
but fuck won’t you please tell me when
this sickness boiling up in me
will let go and finally set me free?”

The kicker with the best Void-Filling Strategies is sudden cessation makes things ten times worse, presumably why so many sports stars end up in such a bad way after retirement. ‘Sugar Sugar’ gets at this idea (“so i’ll hang em up and put em down and move it away/hit the bottle weave and waddle and black out on the way”) and ‘What Went Wrong?’ serves as the post-meltdown confusion, with voices emanating from the off-kilter instrumentation like ghosts of a halcyon past before the final refrain, “I don’t know where I went wrong, I don’t know what went wrong.” These two tracks work well in tandem, capturing the absurd change of focus required from athletes after calling it a day (ie. going from spending every minute optimising your running/kicking/punching and feeling existentially justified, to having nothing to do except feel worthless and existentially exposed).

The Infinite Jest-referencing ‘James Orin Incandenza’ is the song which ties all of these ideas together, and tells the eagle-eyed listener that an album about boxing is in fact so much more. Aside from David Foster Wallace confronting all of the above issues better than anyone, Incandenza is applicable and interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the heavy-drinking obsessive film-maker/wraith has both his sons enrolled in serious-level sport, and indeed his eldest crashes into compulsive womanising and depression after an injury ends his football career. What’s more, Incandenza’s father was a failed actor, an “anti-Brando”, which sits nicely with the heavy On The Waterfront references across the record. It’s the sort of inclusion which transforms an entertaining album into something more meaningful, allowing nerds to think too much and write excessively-long, rambling pieces about existential voids.

You can buy Dementia Pugilistica now via the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp page.

The post Mrs. Hopewell – Dementia Pugilistica appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

The post Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose appeared first on Various Small Flames.