Though to focus on terrible feelings as a beginning and end of Megadead is to miss the point. […] To flatten this into the trope of anti-social introvert misses the true admixture of forces at work—the guilt, the shame, the dreams impossible to achieve. The promises that could never be kept, the nostalgia for things that never existed.

We’re really pleased to be able to share Shaw’s own words on the record with this detailed track-by-track analysis.

1. megadead dot party

Like most of my stuff these days, this started off as me just playing a sad melody on my laptop keyboard. Qwerty-Fi. And like most of this album, it mostly sounded rubbish until my friend Neil (Broken Shoulder) added his magic guitar noodling. I sent him the album demos late last year and asked if he could add as much or little guitar to them as he could, with the condition that my control-freak self could still chop them up and use them however I wanted. I loved the guitar on this one so much that I didn’t touch a thing and fairly instantly promoted it to album opener.

2. All Body Start Feeling Down

More Qwerty Action. I feel like a lot of work went into this, but I’m not sure it shows. Finding the right samples was key to setting the emotional tone here I think. The main keyboard melody is lowkey sad, but it’s the answerphone messages that really pushes it over the edge. It kinda continues with the party theme too. Your loved ones miss you, you don’t even want to be at the stupid party, but yet here you are anyway, in a mess again.

3. Melanomates

The title here is some of my best work – encapsulating my dual fears of both skin cancer and making friends. It doesn’t have much to do with the song, but it’s a winner. The song however, regales one of my bucket-list wishes to take a golfclub into work and smash up the office. I don’t want to hurt anyone, just cause insurmountable property damage.

4. PUSH IT DOWN

Another one here where Neil’s guitar probably saves it from being a pretty unremarkable B-side. He didn’t have to write three completely different and complementary guitar parts, but he did, because he’s a saint. It’s one of those moments where I think “if I’m just going to rely on someone else always saving this album from being consistently average, should I really call it a ‘Benjamin Shaw’ record?” But then like everything else in my life, I just PUSH THOSE FEELINGS DOWN and let my sub-conscience and existential early morning anxiety deal with it. It’ll be fine.

5. Terrible Feelings!

Speaking of which, here is one of my favourite songs on the album. I just like that it has no real structure or pattern, just keeps pounding and spinning like those hangover panic attacks you started getting recently. Let it be known that this is MY GUITAR on here though. All mine. Hence it just repeating over and over again like it’s an artistic choice and not just lack of skill or imagination.

6. This is Stupid.

A quick palate cleanser here. I honestly think this is just on this album to undercut myself. Or more likely to make it look like I’m undercutting myself, so the singer-songwriter-ness of my choices aren’t so shameful. The slots and pokies sounds were recorded at the Croxton Hotel just down the road. It’s a nice place with just old people playing the poker machines all day, and they let me sit there on my laptop for hours with just one drink.

7. Blue Teeth Thursdays

This is a whole lot of emotions here. Too much for me to cope with anyway, so I’ll brush over all that. The bones of it actually date back to like 2006 or something, and there’s snippets of the acoustic guitar in there from the original 2006 demo. It’s actually one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. I like how there are completely definable melodic sections to the song, but none that could be called a verse or chorus with a sentimental hook. It just keeps leaving and moving on and starting again, never really finding itself. SOUND FAMILIAR??

8. A Brand New Day

I swear this started out as an upbeat tune, like something that Eels guy would crank out in his sleep. But then Neil added his guitar and I was like, ‘damn, all this has to go’. So I binned everything I’d done and just kept Neil’s numerous guitar parts and shifted them down a few tones and speeds, and ended up with a nice wee dirge. The robot voices are from a neat freeware voice synth called Alter/Ego. The internet is ace.

9. hole

The first song I wrote for this album, and the first song I’d written in around 3 years. Again, no real chorus, but I’m not a miracle worker. I’ve seen a lot of people say they think this album is weird, but it really doesn’t feel like that to me. I honestly tried my hardest to make this album sound as beautiful as I could, and I think this last song almost reaches what I was grasping for. It’s a sad one (obv), but it’s got some nice bits in there. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy.

Megadead is out now on Audio Antihero and Kirigirisu Recordings.

Photos by Aisha Latosski

The post Benjamin Shaw – Megadead: Track by Track Guide appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album begins with ‘megadead.party’, a twitchy ambient track that’s all blips and whirs, supporting a vocal sample from some vintage information film centred on a party, a thread that runs throughout Megadead. Emerging from some long-dead decade, the voices are perked with a kind of chronic joviality, the human condition as it appears in informercials, sounding at once horrifically alienating and tremendously false.

‘All Body Start Feeling Down’ feels wonderfully evocative, its wheezing keys like a laboured heartbeat, answering machine samples adding that strange lonely sensation of speaking into the electronic ether, of missed connections, of having your modulated voice broadcast to no-one in an empty room. Eventually a snippet of the earlier sample reappears, “having a wonderful time” repeated over and over so that the statement subverts itself, betraying a vast hollow space beneath its surface. Making their first appearance in the final third, Shaw’s vocals respond in turn, their weary and emotional sound suggesting such a realisation is not new. “It’s okay,” he repeats, referencing the proverbial party of the opening. “It’s okay to go home.”

The keys at the start of ‘Melanomates’ could almost be Sigur Ros at their most restrained and poignant, although wordless Architecture in Helsinki-style blah-ed vocals soon dispel that illusion. When Shaw starts to sing, the track reveals itself as something like a mix of slow-motion Why? and a more rickety DIY take on Justin Vernon’s electronically modified collage pop. “I’ve got a mouth full of thunder,” he sings, “a head full of rain, a desk by the fire escape and you on my brain.”

It’s a continuation of a theme that has threaded through much of Shaw’s work, something which he reflects on in the album blurb.

I reckon I peaked somewhere around 2012 (didn’t we all). Luckily for me, it was exactly around the time I also peaked in shame and anxiety about doing any kind of art at all. Especially music… so what’s changed? I’m still doing this shit as I hurtle through my 30s. Goodbye pension, goodbye family, goodbye career.

Lead single ‘Terrible Feelings!’ is something of a centre point for the album, both temporally and thematically. Its title alone sums up Megadead pretty neatly. As Shaw explains to Atwood Magazine in their premiere of the track, “‘Terrible Feelings!’ started off as just a title in my phone, and quickly became the inspiration for a whole album of terrible feelings.” The song sits on a bed of anxious electronics that sound like the laboured robotic movements of some grey and lonely future, Shaw’s jaded vocals adding an all too human element as he sings:

“Hey apocalypse,
it’s nice to know you still be trying
To lift me by the hips
And make believe like I be flying away,
you’re all terrible people, with terrible clothes,
go away”

Though to focus on terrible feelings as a beginning and end of Megadead is to miss the point. Take ‘This is Stupid’, which sounds like having some crushing epiphany amongst the gaudy lights and chimes of an arcade, a glimpse at the stomach-sinking emptiness behind the shiny candy-coloured facade. The realisation isn’t awful despite the surroundings but because of them, just as parties can be sad for their very abundance of so-called fun. To flatten this into the trope of anti-social introvert misses the true admixture of forces at work—the guilt, the shame, the dreams impossible to achieve. The promises that could never be kept, the nostalgia for things that never existed.

‘Blue Teeth Thursdays’ follows, what would be a sombre and downbeat piano ballad in another dimension, but here fogged and textured with Shaw’s usual ambience, and even the seemingly positively titled ‘A Brand New Day’ holds the same sense of miserablism. Opening with the lonely whining buzz of a lone fly in an otherwise empty room, the track captures that suffocating stillness of hopelessness, where ordinary days become long stretches of time to be endured and served. “Got a heavy head of hollow, a belly full of grey,” Shaw sings, “a big bowl of sadness, it’s a brand new day,” the final line reinforced with electronically modulated voices that again suggest something phony at the heart of such truisms.

Finale ‘hole’ is perhaps the records most tender moment, building out of minimal piano and a sense of surrounding silence, almost reminiscent of one of Meursault’s piano-led songs. Although tender doesn’t mean redemptive, this isn’t exactly a rosy, optimistic sign-off. Shaw maintains his sense of low-key misanthropy until the very end.

“So I dig me a hole
And I fill it with thinking
But the wind takes my hat
And I blame it on people”

But is Shaw really a misanthrope? For all the frustration and (self-)loathing in show, there’s also something else. Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes. He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.

“There’s a mirror,” says the voice on PUSH IT DOWN, questioning the loner of the party on that very status. “Go on, look at yourself. See if you can discover what it is.” Only, what if the problem wasn’t to be found within? What if the problem was all around?

Megadead is out now on Audio Antihero and Kirigirisu Recordings.

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His new album, Guppy, definitely falls into the latter category, an album of lush ambient music bookended with genre-bending tracks which hint at Shaw’s thinking. Opener ‘Pride Of Canada’ is the first, an industrial-sounding song of shambling drums and throbbing noise which swells toward what are pretty much the only vocals on the album, with Shaw sounding pretty defeated and self-loathing:

“I don’t know what I should do
with all this great potential,
I’ll probably piss it up the wall
and claim artistic intention.

“I don’t know who I should blame
for all my bad decisions,
there’s so many, they’re all such dicks
I haven’t time for this.”

‘Palette Cleanser (So’s Your Face)’ begins with whirling strings which slowly subside into a single furious whine. This is eventually joined by warm drones akin to those on Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold on Canvas, before falling victim to distorted buzzes and the concluding sounds of haunted piano and poltergeistic percussion. The drones grow again into ‘Pylon Pile-On’, which we described in our preview as “something comfortably sad and vividly alive, like watching rain fall onto a city from the window of a train”. This mood is interrupted comically by the retro shampoo ad on ‘Good Arrows’ (“Everyone knows that beautiful hair makes a girl look beautiful!”), as if your view from the train is broken by the empty promises of billboards. The track evolves into a Trouble Books-y song of spacey electronics and background noises which sounds like vocals either ancient or alien or both. The conclusion features the disembodied voice from a vintage radio programme, playing on a loop like a broken museum exhibit, gradually fading behind the noise like the ever decreasing echoes of a history slipping to the back of public consciousness.

“Coal mines and slag heaps, narrow cobbled alleyways and ugly rows of back to back houses”

The next few tracks continue the memory theme. ‘Hell’s Teeth’ is a low deep hum adorned with minimal piano and a field recording of people chatting, with wobbles with bursts of noise like something from a horror soundtrack, as if a troubled mind is trying and failing to look back with rose-tinted glasses. ‘Dreams of Fields (Cows)’ opens with what can only be described as a weird little squelchy froggy noise, before muffled piano carries the track through flitting electronics and dripping water and an insectile hum. The damp imagery continues with ‘Fishing with Dad (No Dad)’, a track which buzzes with life yet still sounds distant, the musical equivalent of looking back at old photos and crying with equal parts fondness and regret, amazed at how you managed to bumble through life taking everything you had for granted.

As if acknowledging the emotional turmoil across the record, second bookend ‘Not Today, Satan’ is built around a voice, omniscient and semi-robotic but also kind-sounding. Like one of those disarmingly sincere internet scams, the voice is hugely compelling despite setting off major alarm bells in the cynical part of your brain, tempting you into believing everything can be solved without time or pain or effort by one magical arrangement of words.

“Let’s clear the air about some certain things, let’s talk heart to heart. Are you saying to yourself, just about now, ‘I can’t change, I’ve tried and tried many times but failed. There’s something terribly wrong with me that makes me different form other people. There’s a deep dark secret that keeps me from being a total person’. Let me clue you into something, my dear friend. Everyone has something wrong with them, whether it be drinking, or drugs, or perversion. Now listen very closely because I’m going to say something very imp-”

Guppy is about being human, an album which tries to provide instinctive answers to unanswerable questions. Or rather, one which formulates the human-questions correctly, allowing the creator (and, by proxy, us) to transcend their bifocal, street-level view, their smallness, to look down on things from a comfortable position, making the absurd, confusing and overwhelming world become, for the shortest of whiles, knowable. The result (for the creator and us both) is a weird sense of attachment to our situations, a form of nostalgia for a life never easy but uniquely ours, that feeling of calm wonder which visits all too rarely (when driving home after a happy family gathering or watching a foreign sunset) where some semblance of context is achieved and a strange joy is found in melancholy. We know we have to go back down, but for now at least, that is okay.

Guppy is out now on Kirigirisu Recordings, and you can buy in now from Bandcamp.

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“Guppy then eschews the whole singing thing for waves of many-coloured drone, field recorded texture, and sun-struggling-to-break-through-heavy-cloud burnished flakes of melody”

You can pre-order Guppy now via the Kirigirisu Recordings Bandcamp page. If you liked Ricky Eat Acid or Danielle Fricke’s Burrow (or, probably more likely, you are familiar with Shaw’s other instrumental work) then you’d be wise to do so right away. 

The post A New Album From Benjamin Shaw appeared first on Various Small Flames.