It is one of the few historically recent pop-cultural attempts to visualize what spiritual healing and exorcism actually look and feel like. Even in ‘Valentine’s Day’, Valentine himself seems to want some sort of reconcilliation/confession with Marley, who I’m convinced was his first victim when he was in high school. Given the tone of the ending, I wonder if Valentine just sat there in Newton’s apartment after killing him; simply waiting to be caught. The lyrical changes in ‘Heroes’ also stand out. “Because we’re lovers” is replaced with “because we’re free now”. In the Danish / Israeli run, Valentine is present during ‘Heroes’, singing along with the “because we’re free now” line. It becomes possible that Valentine’s whole string of murders had something to do with a spiritual “blockage” dating back to the death of Marley.
On the other end of the spectrum? Marley and Newton are beyond ready for reconciliation. Once the trauma of Marley’s murder is exorcised (like Newton’s morbid attachment to Mary Lou was exorcised), neither Marley nor Newton could care less about what happened in the past. The only thing that matters is the future. “Because we’re free now.”
The 1976 Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell To Earth is chiefly about visions. Newton’s home world saw the abundance of water on Earth through their own variation of TV. Newton can see light spectra that humans cannot, like x-rays. There are scenes where Newton looks into the past of places on Earth and is seen in return. Newton also had an uncanny connection to the three humans he was to have the most involvement with before meeting them (Oliver Farnsworth, Nathan Bryce and Mary Lou).
Events like these suggest that Newton can see across dimensions as well. Many of his decisions (such as when to sell patents and begin constructing a space craft) are dictated by his visions.
In addition to this, there is a passive thematic emphasis on eyes. After the true shape and color of Thomas Jerome Newton’s eyes are revealed, we are shown Mary Lou in a room with an oil painting of a cat. The shot begins with a close up of the cat’s golden eyes with their vertical pupils. In conjunction with Newton’s extra-dimensional vision, the close up of the cat painting makes an understated connection with the eyes of a cat. To say nothing, of course, of the wavelengths of light that cats can see but humans cannot (or the resemblance between Newton’s eyes and cat eyes).
I have not yet read the original Walter Tevis novel that inspired both the film and the musical. From the research I’ve done so far, though, there is no indication that Thomas Jerome Newton was able to see across time in the book. This appears to have been the biggest point of departure for the Nicolas Roeg film and Bowie’s musical.
In the 1976 film, Newton decides to build his house at a spot where he makes brief contact with early American settlers. Another vision of one of his kind ascending from a lake toward the sky prompts him to sell all of his patents and begin work on the space craft. The reality of these visions is even validated by others, such as Oliver Farnsworth going to the site of Newton’s landing on Earth moments before it happened. Others have an uncanny awareness of Newton as much as Newton is uncannily aware of other things.
With so much investment in real visions, Newton’s obsessions with alcohol and television resemble misguided logic. Visions or prophecy are conceptually similar to remote viewing. It makes sense that Newton would investigate other means of “seeing things” that are not present in front of him. The logic would be similar to that of a psychonaut who knows they have seen something real and is trying to see more through experimentation. Newton is also a foreigner to Earth, so it makes sense for him to be blindsided by alcohol and (local human) television.
Roeg’s film and Bowie’s musical tell stories that turn on visions. In particular, the importance of true visions and the danger of false visions.
The musical called Lazarus is a continuation of the Roeg film. The fact that David Bowie took the initiative in 2013 to solicit Enda Walsh to co-write this project begs certain questions. It would not have made sense for Bowie to feel entitled to the novel that Walter Tevis wrote. But it would be understandable if Bowie felt a sense of possession or belonging with the 1976 movie that he starred in.
Another essential factor was Bowie’s love of storytelling and creative experimentation. He wrote the lyrics for 1974’s Diamond Dogs using a variation of the cut-up and fold-in technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs. Around the time Diamond Dogs was released, Rolling Stone printed a conversation between Bowie and Burroughs. Decades later, Bowie used the cut-up and fold-in method of generating ideas for the 1.Outside album.
Most famously, though: David Bowie broke ground with his use of fictional characters. Ziggy Stardust was a character that Bowie took onstage and into interviews. A fan base became attached to Ziggy and, immediately before Diamond Dogs, something had to give. Bowie had become almost debilitatingly attached to embodying Ziggy which- combined with the character’s popularity -quickly began to be suffocating. The concert recording called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture captured the very last concert with Ziggy.
After that fateful 1973 Odeon Hammersmith performance, many of his characters were handled differently. Halloween Jack from Diamond Dogs was little more than a change of clothing and a line in one song. The Thin White Duke was the next strong, distinct personality but the Duke’s volatility made him unwieldy. 1.Outside featured six named characters against a cyberpunk backdrop. Bowie said at that time that multiple simultaneous characters were less of a psychological risk. Ziggy, as a solitary presence, once threatened to overwhelm him. The large cast of 1.Outside divided the energy and thereby allowed Bowie to come and go from their world as it suited him.
And then there are the ways in which Bowie’s most famous persona would have effected the expectations of those seeing the movie at the time it was released. Ziggy was an alien that humans make first contact with in the final five years of their existence. He is deified to disastrous effect. Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien that comes to Earth in the hopes of using its resources to save his home world. Both are aliens who meet their fate on Earth. Both stories have apocalyptic stakes. An argument could be made that Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs chronicle the final era of Earth’s history. The events of the final five years, perhaps.
Bowie’s presence alone would have been a reason why many would go and at least “check it out.” It may have been obtuse for anyone to say so out loud, but a lot of those early viewers probably felt like they were watching David Bowie: The Movie. While Ziggy may have primed audience expectations, the character invented by Tevis bore a similar name to another Bowie persona: Major Tom. Like Mary Lou’s Tommy, Major Tom also left his planet and became stranded.
Here, we hit upon one of the differences between the 1976 The Man Who Fell To Earth and Lazarus. In both stories, Tommy is an alien attempting to co-exist with humanity. In the 1976 film, he has just arrived and is figuring everything out the hard way. He has a clear emotional and ethical frame of reference from his home world and he expresses this, in human terms, more than once. Sometimes, Tommy speaks over the heads of his human companions and collaborators…other times, he speaks plainly and the human characters still feel blindsided.
In one exchange with Farnsworth and Bryce, marriage and children come up. Newton is surprised to hear that Bryce has a family but rarely sees them. His reaction is quiet but it is also plainly emotional: “A man should spend time with his family.” Concern for family is, of course, the whole reason why he is on Earth.
In another conversation, he hears that the secrecy surrounding his private engineering projects has given rise to speculation that he is building weapons. He sputters, incredulously, wondering why they immediately “assume it’s a weapon.”
In The Man Who Fell To Earth, these feelings and boundaries are intact and Newton is hyper-aware of how foreign Earth is to him. Lots of things upset and agitate him and he insulates himself whenever possible.
By the end of the movie, Newton has been abducted by humans, had his lenses fused to his eyeballs by human experiments and loses any chance of seeing his family again.
In Lazarus, Newton has spent decades being wounded and entrenched. His nerves have been fried and cauterized and he exists, seemingly, only for gin, Twinkies and Lucky Charms. Only his self-isolation has stayed the same: as far as he’s concerned, humans have proven themselves dangerous.
The structure of Lazarus, predictably, contrasts inside against outside. Newton’s solitary life includes two other people: a personal assistant called Elly and a man called Michael, who appears to have a personal or professional connection with Newton. Michael’s portrayal in the Danish Aarhus production is very reminiscent of Bryce, as acted by Rip Torn in the ‘76 film (particularly with Rip Torn’s hair and makeup in the film’s final scene). Elly’s unhappy domestic life with her partner Zach forms a bridge between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
Bryce, having aged by the end of the 1976 film, while Newton stayed the sameIs it just me? Michael, singing ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, played by Bjørn Fjæstad in a 2019 Tel Aviv performance at the Enav Culture Center. This performance also shares a lot with the then-contemporary Aarhus production. Part of the same run? Newton was played by a different person, though- an Israeli singer professionally known, simply, as Adam.
On the opposing ‘outside’ half, the central character is simply known as The Girl- later referred to as Marley. Marley and Newton are our leads but their awareness of each other is often private.
The narrative constantly teases a mysterious parity between Newton and Marley. I suspect this is because Marley is “seeing” Newton just like Newton “saw” the three main human characters of the ‘76 movie before meeting them (Bryce, Farnsworth and Mary Lou). As with Newton, Marley’s sight goes two ways. While she sees Newton, Newton also sees her.
This could make Marley a 4D telepath like Newton…or maybe even a survivor from Newton’s planet. Marley has the same analytical, itemizing ear for human language that Newton had in his early years on Earth: “I’m supposed to help you in some way.”
“Well, you can help me find another Twinkie.”
“I think it’s supposed to be ‘help’ in the caring sense of the word, Mr. Newton.”
“Oh…like a…very small nurse…?”
It’s interesting here that Newton now sounds as obtuse as Farnsworth, Bryce and Mary Lou once sounded to him, back in the seventies.
I’m taking the time to hammer out these details because recordings and reference materials are hard to come by. Synopses are common but not very useful. The official cast recording tells us which actor sings what and which character they represent. While I would have loved to have seen the show in person, not everything can run everywhere. Adam, from the 2019 Israeli performance, appears to have uploaded video of most the musical numbers on YouTube, relative to other channels. The best I could scrounge up was a full-length audio recording of the show, with dialogue, incidental audio cues and the rare audience noise here and there. Eventually, I was lucky enough to see the whole thing.
Many of the scene transitions have a pastiche feel to them. The spectre of bare-assed abstraction is kept at bay by frequent simultaneity of character arcs.
Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso, during ‘This Is Not America’
Marley’s first appearance (represented in the first theatrical run and the cast album by Sophia Anne Caruso) resembles a haunting. Newton flinches and cringes around her and she never makes eye-contact with him, even if her hand ocassionally flails in his direction and touches him. Once, she dives into Newton’s arms, but it is not at all obvious who or what she is cuddling on “her end”. The whole time, she is singing ‘This Is Not America’, and its one of my favorite performances from the cast recording.
Newton, having fallen for multiple false visions already, does not take this experience at face value. We are, evidently, following Marley’s visionary/astral travels as she wanders into the home of Michael, who has discovered a separate, non-astral traveler in his apartment.
Marley’s travels, words and observations, from the latter half of her first Newton visit to her sighting of Michael and the stranger, are represented in the song ‘No Plan’. At this point in the story, ‘No Plan’ sounds like an answer to ‘Lazarus’. In ‘No Plan’, Marley is very much aware of her psychic abstraction and potential vulnerability. If ‘Lazarus’ is another timeless moment, than Newton starts the play abstracted beside past and present versions of himself and xeroxed fragments of loved ones. Marley, in her timeless state, knows everything about Newton and nothing about herself. Newton and Marley see the wilderness of time from opposite perspectives.
This prompted me to re-examine other uses of apparent simultaneity and pastiche, like ‘It’s No Game’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’. In each of those pastishes in which Newton is included, he may be ‘seeing’ the other characters through time and space. It becomes possible that Newton may even be aware of the events of musical numbers from which he is excluded- coming through, perhaps, as white noise in the background of his mind.
The ’76 film began with Newton making psychic contact, through time, with Oliver Farnsworth, Nathan Bryce and Mary Lou. What about Lazarus? Newton and Marley see each other. Elly and Michael know Newton personally, so they’re out of the running. What about the person Michael ran into in his apartment, with Marley watching? An apparent stranger, who only crosses paths with Newton later on? The prophetic trio in Lazarus could be Newton himself, Marley and Valentine the stranger.
Valentine, portrayed in the first New York run by Michael Esper
Yes, the whole prophetic-psychic contact thing is just my interpretation. There are supportive patterns, though. Much of Lazarus’s simultaneity begins to make sense when seen as visionary experiences across time. The reason it can’t be something more generalized is because there are degrees of awareness between the characters. A character could be visible to others, occasionally visible or invisible in the manner of a ghost or a witness from a psychic distance.
Newton’s mention of his visions also happen at narratively significant moments. He talks about them for the first time with Michael, before singing ‘Lazarus’. After this point, Newton will describe Marley to other people like Elly as something that’s probably not real. Slowly, his opinion changes. The next time he makes specific reference to his visions is near the end, in conversation with Valentine. He asks him if he killed Michael. When Valentine asks where the question came from, Newton says “I see things.”
Along with the placement of those two scenes, there’s the stage direction of the original run. Before the play started, Michael C. Hall (Newton) would be lying still on the stage. The actual beginning manifests around him. This, to my eyes, is a subtle echo of the scenes in which Newton can perceive things but not interact with them. That barrier alone implies that something is happening with Newton’s visions.
These associations and blind spots relate to specific relationships…yet other things take place beside and between them.
Newton and Marley are characters who can see things across time. Those who they can see can also see them (our two main characters, Elly and Valentine- even if those last two gain and lose awareness of Marley).
There are three other characters, though, who are able to approach and interact with anyone: the Teenage Girls. Many reviews equate them with a Greek chorus which is fair: they are almost always present and, when not interacting with other characters, they look and sound like the kind of everyperson / audience surrogate that backup singers normally portray in musicals. While they only take charge of the foreground twice, those are two of the most pivotal moments in the story.
In the first instance, Marley harries Newton into watching a reenactment of his last conversation with Mary Lou. Why? For “therapy”. She waltzes into his apartment followed by the Teenage Girls, one of whom walks up to Newton and apologizes in advance for any mistakes she might make portraying him. Newton corrects the Teenage Girl when she misremembers a line and then Marley (portraying Mary Lou) begins to address Newton himself in the reenactment: “You’ll be stuck in this apartment with me and I’ll always know you didn’t want to stay. Not with me you don’t. Nor for me, Tommy.”
At this point, Newton gets overwhelmed and walks out of the whole thing. Marley follows him and he asks her to tell him something only he would know. This appears to be a search for validation: to determine if Marley actually knows what she’s talking about or if this is some elaborate and sadistic manipulation. To his dismay, she relates his private memory of taking walks with his daughter on his home planet. They would rest on a hill, where he would tell his daughter stories about space, which he made up on the spot. When he was about to trail off, his daughter would tell him to “speak some more”.
Newton deflates under the realization that Marley is a genuine psychic outsider. He is on the verge of turning inward again when Marley says “(y)ou knew you’d end up like this. That’s why you let Mary Lou go. You don’t have to stay here any longer, Mr. Newton.”
1986 single
As Newton absorbs the bald reality of these words, we transition to the song ‘Absolute Beginners’. Here I gotta admit to being a bad Bowie fan: ‘Absolute Beginners’ never grabbed me. Yes, the sixties song-styling is a contrivance; the problem is that it sounds contrived. I never liked the song until I heard the version from Lazarus…and the Lazarus version is stunning. As far as I’m concerned, the Lazarus renditions of ‘This Is Not America’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’ are definitive (not to mention ear-worms).
On the far left is Elly, portrayed by Amy Lennox. Cristin Milioti was Elly early in the original run and it’s Milioti’s voice that’s on the cast album
There are a few narratively significant details about this scene. There’s more simultaneity, what with Marley and Newton singing to each other while Valentine sings backup and Elly sings the second verse. Perhaps most importantly, though- Newton commits to Marley’s plan to rescue him from Earth near the end of the song.
The Teenage Girls are also usually the most active in the songs sung by Elly and Valentine. While Newton does not have 4D visions of Elly, Marley does. Both of them have 4D visions of Valentine. The strongest argument for the Teenage Girls as “neutrals” would be the ‘All The Young Dudes’ scene, where Ben and Maemi sing lead. Even this scene has Elly and Valentine, though- they’re just being constantly ignored by Ben and Maemi. Valentine, being his usual manic and easily offended self, corners Ben and Maemi in the bathroom with Marley in tow. Things move fast from here.
A brief clip of Bowie’s original ‘Sound and Vision’ recording plays while Valentine stabs Ben and Maemi to death while Elly cringes in the opposite corner of the bathroom, holding still enough to blend into the scenery. After Valentine flees the scene, the lighting changes and Elly slowly rises to her feet, singing ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. This is one of the most beautiful song transitions in the whole play, especially as portrayed in the original New York production. Elly is as still as a statue and, once she’s alone, her first movements are when she sings “(e)very chance, every chance that I take” as she stands up.
The pose that Elly is holding for the entire scene reminds me of Bowie’s miming during the 1974 American tour in support of Diamond Dogs. The scene takes place in a bathroom but the fridge is an ever-present, reoccurring prop. The blue hair and the sequined dress are also very Diamond Dogs.Yes, my closest example was the booklet for the CD version of David Live.
‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ is one of the show’s most powerful moments in both versions I was able to find (New York and Denmark/Israel) but the next song, ‘Valentine’s Day’, is a definite win for the New York production.
Denmark / Israel. Valentine portrayed by Mathias Flint. Things stay rather stationary from this point on. The mechanical movement of the wings and Valentine’s militaristic dress made it easy for me to imagine him wearing a mech suit. I guess that impression depends on whether the mechaical movement of the wings is intentional or just a consequence of the prop. Another factor was the cyber-punky, apocalyptic sceneryNew York. Esper’s Valentine. Notice how his black, shadowy wings dwarf both him and Newton. The only thing that stands out is the pale on Valentine’s face, turning it into a little floating white dot“(i)t’s in his tiny face! It’s in his icy heart! It’s happening today! Valentine! Valentine!”
I could go on about the differences between the productions. The Denmark/Israel show appears more invested in Newton building a literal rocket. The inclusion of Newton as an active participant in the ‘All The Young Dudes’ scene creates the impression that it’s taking place in Newton’s apartment. The only reason I can imagine for Ben and Newton to know each other would be if Ben is either a wealthy engineer or a wealthy tech investor who is helping build the rocket. This would also mean that the rocket drawing on the floor of the stage is non-literal. In the New York production, the rocket drawing is just a drawing on the floor. The New York version also takes pains to emphasize that Valentine and Marley followed Ben and Maemi to a random nightclub. Newton is not present- just “seeing” events unfold from a distance.
While we’re talking about Valentine, his contrast to Newton and Marley is striking: the stage direction and the behavior of the actors in the New York performance establish that the 4D visions are a major plot device. As surely as Marley and Newton’s visions are real, Valentine’s instincts are all wrong. He slides quickly into hero-worship, during which he’ll vocalize delusional memories of things that never happened, such as Michael coming out as gay and being rejected. Valentine also has virtually no boundaries which makes it very easy for him to fall in love and lust. Give him some rejection, though, and the momentum swings in the other direction. This is usually what happens just before he kills someone.
As he sings ‘Valentine’s Day’, black balloons drop from overhead. The Teenage Girls rush onstage and start popping them, leaving only one which Valentine uses as a prop in the next dialogue scene. Near the end, they start doing their usual backup singer thing with the “yeah”s and “Valentine, Valentine”s. The Teenage Girls are also very active when Valentine sings ‘Love Is Lost’ and Elly’s performance of ‘Changes’.
Then, well…there’s the ending. This is the second instance of the Teenage Girls entering the foreground. Or, more accurately, a Teenage Girl. She is usually listed as Teenage Girl 1 and she puts her hands on Newton- with Valentine -in an attempt to make him stab Marley. This is also the first time we see Valentine and Marley interact with one another. As this is happening, Newton and Teenage Girl 1 are singing ‘When I Met You’.
Marley only begins to recover memories in the final scene, when Valentine enters Newton’s apartment.
Marley: “I was alive once. I was a real girl.”
Valentine: “And what else?”
Marley: “I was cut down a mile from my house and buried in the ground. And not properly dead- I was lying there. My eyes closed. With no real future(…)I’m sorry…but it’s not me who’s going to get you to the stars but it’s you who will help me die properly.”
When was the last time the Teenage Girls took charge of a scene? Just before ‘Absolute Beginners’ when Newton finally agreed to cooperate with Marley’s idea for conjuring a psycho-ceremonial spaceship. Marley, Newton and the Teenage Girls participated in a reenactment. Perhaps the scene with Valentine, Marley, Newton and Teenage Girl 1 is also a reenactment. It seems significant that Marley began recovering memories once Valentine showed up.
Before this point, I was attached to the interpretation that Marley is Newton’s daughter, since the continuity only prepares us to expect Newton’s species to have the 4D visions. What happened to Newton’s planet, though? Presumably it died out, after Newton failed to convey water there in the seventies. His daughter may have been ‘cut down’ in such an event but that doesn’t seem likely. Let us not forget the serial killer with a preference for blades.
As Newton only comes around after the prior reenactment, Marley only remembers her name after this one. I’m not going to say that Marley was canonically Valentine’s first victim but it sure looks like it. Her apparent age may be significant to- she could have been of an age with Valentine. Perhaps he killed her when they were in high school together. This would give significance to some of the lyrics in ‘Valentine’s Day’ (a song about a fictional school shooter that Bowie originally wrote for the album The Next Day, around 2012-2013).
The transformation after ‘When I Met You’ is even more dramatic than the ‘Absolute Beginners’ transformation but I’m not going to get into that just now. I’m still not altogether sure how to interpret the very last story beats and the very last musical number.
One of Newton’s visions in The Man Who Fell To EarthMarley and Newton, singing ‘Heroes’ (the track listing on the cast album does away with the irony quotes)
Remeber when I first mentioned that the ’76 film started with psychic contact with Farnsworth, Bryce and Mary Lou? I don’t think my first idea about a Lazarus triad was wrong so much as incomplete. Marley and Newton see each other and both of them see Valentine. Distinct from Newton, Marley could be said to have her other own set of three: Newton, Valentine and Elly. Since I saw the Denmark/Israel footage first, I briefly entertained the idea that Newton also had a distinct set of three: Marley, Valentine and Ben, what with him helping to build an actual rocket.
I am tempted to treat the New York production as canonical, though, since it was the version that had the most input from Bowie just before his death. While Marley seems to have her own unique set of three, the set shared by herself and Newton looms larger.
What was the deal with the ’76 triad, again? Two of them were directly explicable: Farnsworth the patent lawyer and Bryce the engineer. Mary Lou was a wild card. In Lazarus, Marley and Newton are the first two and they’re explicable because they glimpsed each other across time. Valentine is then the obvious wild card. Then there’s the three Teenage Girls who are the only characters capable of interacting with everyone else. One of those Teenage Girls helps Valentine attack Newton and Marley, almost as if she’s the influence behind the ‘wild card’ phenomenon.
This external influence would have been present behind Mary Lou, in that case. Consider how this informs our earliest diegetic glimpse of Mary Lou- a suitcase of her clothes under Newton’s bed, first seen when Newton sang ‘Lazarus’. Later, when Elly discovers this, she assures Newton that he has the right to “play dress-up” in the privacy of his own home.
This could be a throwaway gag…but this brief moment of equating Newton with the owner of the clothes echoes something else. Whenever Newton tells Marley that she’s a hallucination, he finds he is addressing a very confused Elly. Elly later wears the clothes in a ham-fisted and aggressive attempt at seduction. And then the play’s last major plot shift may include some metaphysical force that brought Mary Lou to him in the first place.
The multiple instances of taking and replacing the case of clothes under the bed reminds me of the music video for ‘Look Back in Anger’. The song accompanies a narrative of Bowie painting a picture of an angel. The more he adds, the more his own flesh gets sapped.
The last image of the video is Bowie crawling under a bed. Perhaps that association is superficial. Either way, I thought of the ‘Look Back in Anger’ video every time someone pulled out or put back the clothing. All of these clothing-related *ahem* layers are potentially affected by the nature of the force that sings ‘When I Met You’ with Newton.
I could keep going about the possible interpretive layers. Lazarus is a beautiful show that is worth seeing, either through video or theater. Lazarus is worth analyzing in depth but this is not where our buck stops. I went over it in all this detail because Lazarus is the story that provided David Bowie with the point of departure for his very last album: Blackstar.
When I first heard Blackstar, it left me with a sinking feeling. Yes, David Bowie had just died and that was a factor…but it was also the album.
Early on, there are two songs that luxuriate in the amount of space they take up: the ‘Blackstar’ title track and a re-recording of ‘Lazarus’. Those are also, to me, the two most lyically ambitious songs on the commercial release of Blackstar. Neither of those songs are in a hurry, either. ‘ ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’ bridges the gap between track one (‘Blackstar’) and three (‘Lazarus’). It is musically energetic and the lyrics seem (to me) less ambitious and more like a vehicle for Bowie’s voice to fit in with the instrumentation (John Ford literary reference notwithstanding). ‘ ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’ was initially released in November of 2014, just after Bowie had finished working with the jazz band leader and composer Maria Schneider, with whom he created the original version of ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’.
All of the songs with the looser, more stream-of-consciousness lyricism sound as if they could have evolved from the Schneider collaboration. A lot of the jazz influence is crystal clear even if Blackstar dressed things up with a crunchy drum-and-bass emphasis. The blend of the two creates a cyberpunk effect. The Blackstar version of ‘Sue’ (track four, after ‘Lazarus’) definitely sounds like a slice of life from the version of LA that Ridley Scott created in Blade Runner. The original 2014 version, with its accoustic jazz emphasis, evokes Cowboy Bebop.
‘Sue’ is the turning point of the album. Only three songs remain: ‘Girl Loves Me’, ‘Dollar Days’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’. These songs are, pretty much, no longer or shorter than most of the album (well…except the title track and ‘Lazarus’). The emotional sketches become even more stark, though, which could create the impression that they are somehow shorter.
‘Girl Loves Me’ is playful and irreverent with dark images and implications creeping into the margins. Bowie sings “I’m sitting in the Chestnut Tree”. This refers to a location from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (which provided inspiration for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album): a bar where the victims of the Ministry of Love congregate. Each of these listless, aging people have experienced the psychological torture and brainwashing culminating in Room 101: a staged confrontation with a personal fear, calculated to make you renounce all ties except Big Brother.
Eventually, both Orwell’s protagonist Winston and his love interest Julia end up getting cracked in Room 101 and both linger at the Chestnut Tree later on. In the Chestnut Tree, everyone knows what they have in common but they never discuss it. Slang from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is used; another near-future story about brainwashing.
These shadows are there in the margins while the music has a quality that I can only describe as playfully swerving. Sort of drunk and mischievious but on the brink of trailing off. Happily drunk at eleven in the morning, not long before the depression rebound at noon.
Things get dark with the song ‘Dollar Days’. This…is hard for me to put into words but I’ll try. It has a longing quality that upsets me. It worms its way into my head when I’m suddenly hit the reality that I’ve lost someone and I’ll never see them again. And I’m not just talking about Bowie. Recent griefs, in the last few years, were made worse for me by this song not leaving me the fuck alone.
‘Blackstar’ and ‘Lazarus’ are like the delicacies of deep, secure and trusting confidence. An articulation of inner truths that cannot bear to be spoken too loudly. ‘Dollar Days’ is pain that makes you forget you were ever capable of anything as lofty as imagination or understanding.
‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ introduces the positive rebound but it’s an exhausted, relieved positivity. The lyrics are sketches of moments like the last two songs but things still get pretty lucid…maybe more lucid than I would like: “(s)eeing more and feeling less / saying no and meaning yes / this is all I ever meant / this is the message I have sent”. No, we’re not in the same pit of sadness as ‘Dollar Days’ but the notes of relief…well…they complicate things. And the relief is palpable. There’s a harmonica part in the beginning, as in ‘A New Career In A New Town’ from Low, and the chilled out, free-roaming vibe is similar. In a beginning-to-end listening, ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ leaves one of the more complicated impressions.
Some disclaimers before moving on: this is the version of Blackstar that Bowie released into the world. The worst thing I can say about Blackstar is that it’s emotionally challenging- and this is not a weakness. Art is allowed to be somber. Perhaps its the nature of that emotional complexity that makes me feel things like: “This is a little much…can’t we take a few steps back?”
Sometimes the anwer is no.
If Blackstar is a dark album, it is entitled to remain one.
I encountered a separate version, though.
Yes it’s a bootleg and yes it came out after Bowie died. 2017, to be exact. This is a cassette tape made of clear, glittery plastic, labeled ‘SPECIAL EXTENDED LIMITED EDITION 2017’ on the cover. On the back of the case, there is the star image from the Alexander Hamilton musical. It was distributed from an Italian source and it cannot be traded on Discogs. On the Discogs website, they say they only refuse to support trading items due to objectionable content or copyright violation. Unless Blackstar is shockingly offensive to someone, I suspect we’re dealing at the latter.
This cassette tape differs from the commercial release of Blackstar in two ways: the three other songs Bowie wrote for Lazarus are inserted between ‘Girl Loves Me’ and ‘Dollar Days’ and it closes with the original, jazz-centric version of ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’.
The three additional Lazarus songs were rerecorded during the Blackstar sessions and were left off, in the end. Years after Bowie died, they were commercially released on the No Plan EP.
You could pretty much make this playlist with your own music library. If you got Blackstar and the No Plan EP, just plop’em between ‘Girl Loves Me’ and ‘Dollar Days’. Maybe throw the original ‘Sue’ onto the end, if you feel like it. That last part is the most negligible. I like the original ‘Sue’ but putting it at the end like that feels like a pallette cleanser. It’s nice but obviously unnecessary. Sometimes it can hit like a reply to the earlier ‘Sue’ which is neat. The three other songs and their placement change the whole flow of the album, though.
Before I saw Lazarus, I felt that Blackstar relied on the associative impressions between songs. Each one is self-sufficient but each one also has a linear association with the music before and after. It starts with a glimpse of the beyond, goes back to ordinary life and then another glimpse; shorter than the last. The narration goes through a grieving cycle in the absence of a third.
Before the playful ‘Girl Loves Me’ can transition to the sad-drunk ‘Dollar Days’, a third introspective beat occurs with ‘No Plan’. Since I had years of listening to the commercial Blackstar beforehand, I had long thought of it as an album “narrated” by one perspective. It is comparable to an experimental film with one character in either one or two locations. Not only does ‘No Plan’ provide another introspective beat to go with ‘Blackstar’ and ‘Lazarus’ but it almost feels like a scene change. Maybe a cut to a second person. Yes, that’s the job it does in the musical: Newton sends out a beacon with ‘Lazarus’ and Marley pings back with ‘No Plan’. But the transition from ‘Girl Loves Me’ on the 2017 Italian bootleg is so different that it creates the same effect: a new place, a new person or a new development from the original protagonist.
After I saw Lazarus, there was something about the structure that stayed with me. The play alternates dialogue skits with musical numbers. This surprised me, since Bowie has said in the past that he prefers musicals that are sung-through: meaning no conventional dialogue. One hundred percent of it occurs through music. In a 2021 Rolling Stone interview, Lazarus director Ivo Van Hove said that the music was meant to integrate with the spoken dialogue. Songs like ‘Absolute Beginners’ involves Newton and Marley and the scene they share. Yet it also involves Elly and Valentine, who are not present. As Valentine sings ‘Love Is Lost’, Ben and Maemi are dancing in colorful film projections.
In other words: every song is “spoken”- even the ones with only a single character. When Newton sings ‘Lazarus’, he is convinced he’s alone and is surprised to find that he isn’t. Even Marley seems a little abstracted when she first appears- slowly becoming aware of Newton as she sings ‘This Is Not America’. I know I said ‘No Plan’ was like Marley’s answer to ‘Lazarus’- and it is -but it’s a delayed answer. She’s half-alone, like Newton. As Newton was surprised to find Marley listening, Marley is surprised by the apparitions of Newton, Michael and Valentine. All you gotta do to create infinite layers of who is adressing who is to introduce 4D telepathy as a plot device. It’s also an easy device with which to introduce the simultaneity of character arcs- as if to be psychic is to hear everything, all the time, even if it mostly sounds like static.
Lazarus relies on an AB rhythm with its music and scene transitions. Blackstar has something similar going on, although it’s back-and-forth reciprocity only holds through the first four songs. The rest of the album from that point takes place while waiting for a third encounter that never happens.
The addition of ‘No Plan’, ‘Killing A Little Time’ and ‘When I Met You’ struck me as a return to the AB rhythm. It could just as easily be the other side of the wall, though. More specifically- if the narrator is left hanging from ‘Girl Loves Me’ to ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, then maybe ‘No Plan’ to ‘When I Met You’ is the other side of the isolation. The other person who is left hanging.
More superficially, it’s just comforting hearing the lyrical excess of ‘No Plan’ through ‘When I Met You’ because so much of Blackstar is tense and withdrawn. It evens out the album’s rhythm but it also changes it deeply. The gut-punch of ‘Girl Loves Me’ through ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ is robbed of its urgency.
What makes the original Blackstar so tense is that the angst is a creeping intuition. One effect of the three song addition is giving specific voice to the angst with the song ‘Killing A Little Time’.
‘When I Met You’ is neither the first time Valentine has been in Newton’s apartment nor the first time the two have met. Earlier in the play, a subplot develops around a relationship between Elly and Valentine. When they first meet, Valentine convinces Elly to introduce him to Newton. When they meet, both Valentine and Elly start peppering Newton with questions about the drawing on the floor (“I drew something awful on it” as the feller says) and his mental health. Newton’s last encounter with human medical attention ended with the worst trauma of his life so he bristles, leading us into ‘Killing A Little Time’.
In the original Blackstar album, the narrator’s suffering is very reactive. The anger of ‘Killing A Little Time’ allows him to claim ownership of his pain which makes the end easier to bear. The more I think about this, though, the more I wonder if there are other factors.
The most obvious theme shared by both Lazarus and Blackstar is sacrifice. Blackstar discusses this in more emotional terms but both works touch on ceremonial sacrifice. The ‘Blackstar’ music video shows the corpse of an astronaut falling toward a planet. It is found by a girl with a tail who discovers, once she looks inside the helmet, that the skull is encrusted in jewels. Either the skeleton was venerated where it lay at one time or it just “is” what it is. Either way, she brings the skull to a village where a religious awakening happens. According to the lyrics “(s)omething happened on the day he died / spirit rose a meter then stepped aside / somebody else took his place and bravely cried / ‘I’m a Blackstar’/ how many times does an angel fall / how many people lie instead of talking tall / he trod on sacred ground he cried aloud into the crowd/ ‘I’m a Blackstar'”
The logic of ceremonial sacrifice is apparent: something is sent across in exchange for something else. In ‘Blackstar’, the mystery behind the bejewled skeleton creates an opportunity. It cannot speak for itself so others attempt to speak for it. They attempt this with nothing more than boldness and imagination: “I can’t answer why / just go with me”. The words of this person contain an interesting echo: “I’ma take you home / take your passport and shoes”. Usually, you don’t need your passport and shoes if you’re going to one place and staying there. Not to mention: removing your shoes is necessary spiritual grounding for many magical and ceremonial workings. Before the first repetition of the “something happened on the day he died” lines, Bowie sings “I want eagles in my daydreams / diamonds in my eyes”. These could simply be the fantasies of one claiming to fill the void of the corpse but “diamonds in my eyes” sounds like a passive reference to the jewel-covered skull. It furnishes splendid visions but there remains a genuine mystery at work. To want diamonds in your eyes is to commit to something sight-unseen.
Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom and Thomas Jerome Newton have something in common: all three were sacrificed to the outer darkness, never to return. Yes, there is exploratory and visionary abandon and the joy of discovery- all the romantic, escapist bells and whistles. The problem is bringing your discoveries home. In the meantime, how are those behind the sacrifice rewarded? Newton created revolutionary new engineering patents for governments and corporations to sit on and never use. Ziggy started a movement on Earth during the last five years of its existence which turned into just another distraction. If Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs cover the aftermath, then things apparently got darker from that point on. Major Tom got his own miserable follow-up in the song ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
With the first two, the fault lies with the beneficiaries of the sacrifice while Major Tom is the author of his own suffering. This is not a unilateral process with a single player, nor is the individual exonerated.
Lazarus pushes a little further, though. Newton is still in “space”, never to return. Is he merely a burnout, like Major Tom? The play does not make him socially enviable. To Elly and Valentine, he is a target of ridicule, larceny and violence. What even happened to him, in the end?
I, at least, like thinking of stuff like that. We know Marley was never physically present at all during the time frame of Lazarus. Valentine would not have left Newton in peace, either. But isn’t Newton immortal?
I think a more accurate term might be ageless. He will never age or experience physical illness. He is not immune to violence, though. In the ’76 film, he is physically traumatized. I can’t think of any reason why Newton would be immune to stabbing. Valentine may well be remembered as an ordinary serial killer, perhaps subject to urban legend: ‘did you ever hear his last victim was a humanoid alien’, etc.
Newton is held in contempt, exploited and murdered. But was he ‘wrong’?
Newton began to hope again after Marley put him through a reenactment. The ‘Absolute Beginners’ number is about him accepting that he has no further obligation to Earth and is free to take Marley seriously. This ultimately leads him to reenact Marley’s murder by Valentine. If Newton didn’t survive, then perhaps he escaped. He arrived on Earth via sacrifice. He only leaves by way of another sacrifice.
Then there’s the role of prophecy. Newton is only given reliable visions in snippets. What are we to make of the big picture? Was his planet meant to die out and was Newton meant to die on Earth, with only another ghost for company?
This is what makes interpreting the song ‘When I Met You’ so hard, whether it’s in Lazarus or Blackstar. At first listen, the song sounds bipolar. Whoever the narrator ‘met’ could be either the best or worst thing ever. They may have been pulled from misery that they took for granted, to relearn what affection and pain are. They either realized how bad things were or everything got worse. And we don’t know which.
The addition of the three songs on the Italian cassette tape makes the build up to the conflicted ending more approachable. The narrator is dwarfed by an unanswerable question in ‘When I Met You’ and then begins the movement through ‘Dollar Days’ to ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’.
What the three songs offer are the lucidity of an inside view. Should we be so quick to ignore the outside view, though? If the addition of those three songs gives an authorial statement from the ‘inside’, what about the ending of the original Blackstar? We don’t hear the narrator’s internal monologue. With Bowie’s lyrical sketches, it’s more like seeing him than listening to him.
The idea of adding the No Plan EP rerecordings to Blackstar changed the album for me, for awhile. I loved hearing the narrator speak up a bit in the second act. I appreciate what this brings to a relistening but I also realize that Bowie had a beautifully visual mind that we are poorer without.
I saw this album in a dream several years ago. I’m out foraging in the ruins of civilization as part of an organized effort. We are looking, in particular, for technology that can be reverse engineered.
So I’m looking around in this gloomy, hilly place. The sky is red and has been for awhile- but never brighter than either twilight or dawn. To my surprise, I find a large but squat vehicle parked in the shadow of a hill.
It was, pretty much, a big trailer with unfamiliar doodads, here and there. And an internal computer and hardware for an internet connection. Those last two details were the ones that mattered. These machines would be the basis for accessing information long buried in unusable drives. More importantly: this was basic, functional computer design- something many had thought gone forevever, according the dream’s context.
There were other things, of course. Little bedroom nooks containing vestiges of human remains. Cooking amenities. Near the driver’s space, there was a stereo. It looked pretty normal for the car stereos I remembered- at least a certain kind. The physical media slot was too short and thick for a CD but wasn’t quite right for a cassette tape or 8-track either.
In some sliding compartment, I found several thin, small, glassy squares. Some of the glassy-plasticky cases had white stickers with labels written over them in pen or marker. There were also what looked like store-bought cases with album covers printed on one side. There was at least one Nirvana album- it was either Nevermind or In Utero. Maybe both. There was also a printed case featuring a Marilyn Manson painting, left of center against a black background. The painting depicted a gaunt face with burning eyes and a halo.
Vinyl cover ❤
The one in my dream had the painting closer to the bottom and all the way against the lower left corner. Above it was like an inch of space where the black background continued which was used for the artist and album name. I assumed it was, anyway.
Thing is, I couldn’t read any of the writing I was seeing. I couldn’t even tell you what a given word in this alphabet looked like. The dream either happened too long ago to remember (I’d ballpark it between 2016 and 2018) or the letters were so unfamiliar to my eyes that I remember them, simply, as unreadable. But I apparently had enough memory in common with my waking self to recognize that it was a Marilyn Manson painting (the Nirvana was likewise only recognizable by the album art).
Am I saying, unequivocally, that I “foresaw” this album? Of course not. Sentiment and memory have a way of washing together in pareidolia. But the resmblance with the odd little album from my dream is uncanny.
The version of One Assassination Under God – chapter 1 in the waking world is also an odd little album. The chapter 1 part makes me think of the narrative ambition and conceptual wheels within wheels within Holy Wood. If so, I’ll be happy to see it manifest in future chapters. I’ve always loved him best when he goes artsy and esoteric.
Chapter 1 is brief and substantial. Relatively brief, anyway. I recently got reacquainted with my vinyl copy of Holy Wood and I think it’s the ideal way to experience the album. Like the vinyl version of Mechanical Animals, each side of each LP is a thematic vignette. Vinyl Holy Wood, though, has its vignettes in the same order as the CD, with each one on a single side. I was listening to it while writing yesterday and the overall effect is epic.
Epic usually entails size. If Holy Wood is a big-budget art house film, One Assassination Under God – chapter 1 is more direct and punchy. Things unfold just as sequentially, though. The first song, the title track, has a surprisingly familiar relationship with the rest of the album.
In Manson’s ‘Triptych’ the opening songs are like a zoom-in: first the place, then the people, then the person / viewpoint character. Antichrist Superstar: Irresponsible Hate Anthem, The Beautiful People, Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World. Mechanical Animals: The Great Big White World, The Dope Show, Mechincal Animals. Holy Wood: Godeatgod, The Love Song, The Fight Song.
The same pattern holds true here: One Assassination Under God, No Funeral Without Applause and Nod If You Understand. The subject matter of this jumping-off point feels similar to grief. A way forward is forecosed, resulting in corrosive skepticism: it was always bullshit and all those steps forward were a waste of time at best and self-destructive at worst.
We are, however, only in the first half of the first chapter. If the Triptych narratives zoomed in to an individual viewpoint character, to slowly come around to either confirmation or denial of the establishing shot of the ‘place’…than this album zooms out.
The next song, As Sick As The Secrets Within, reintroduces coccoon-womb imagery recognizable from ACSS and HW. Musically, it embraces layered, “wall of sound” instrumentation in contrast to the more stripped-down numbers beforehand.
Speaking of stripped down: for someone who became a Marilyn Manson fan around age twelve-thirteenish at the turn of the millenia, the simplicity stands out. We Are Chaos was a relatively simple album but not like this one. The alternative country energy-exchange from Shooter Jennings made it feel like a new, unfamiliar and seductive landscape. Even if We Are Chaos was shorter and less narratively complicated, it still had meticulous, creative exuberance. Imagining Manson and Jennings writing that album is like imagining kids coloring: even if the picture is simple, the kids are excited by every little nuance and, as soon as they notice the potential for something, one of them needs to grab a crayon and make sure it happens.
In the Triptych albums, the larger-than-life feelings were the jumping-off point for larger-than-life stories. In One Assassination Under God – chapter1, the larger-than-life feelings get gulped down and passed-by in the first arc.
Or, if not passed-by, Manson does not layer them in the same way he used to. The murky, watery atmosphere from As Sick As The Secrets Within also appears in Death Is Not A Costume and Sacrifice Of The Mass, as does the elaboration of the imagery. One of my favorite things about One Assassination Under God – chapter 1 is how As Sick As The Secrets Within and Death Is Not A Costume build on each other. The first one is a nesting doll- people inside of people. The second continues the zoom-out with anthropomorthic house/place imagery. I can’t help but wonder what kind of resonance this has with Marilyn Manson himself, since he’s always had a very creative and recognizable way of anthropomorphizing, going back to Portrait of an American Family but just as visible in The Golden Age of Grotseque, the short film Doppelherz, The Pale Emperor and We Are Chaos.
The more single-ready songs like Sacrilegious, Meet Me In Purgatory and Raise The Red Flag provide contrast to the more dense numbers and makes the simplicity feel a bit more…safe, let’s say. Meet Me In Purgatory is the only Marilyn Manson song that, to me, feels like it could have come from the same family as Long Hard Road Out Of Hell (I know it’s an ACSS outtake but it does not require ACSS for cohesion). Raise The Red Flag nearly raises the spectre of genuine positivity before Sacrifice Of The Mass ends things with an unsettling cliffhanger. With the simplicity.
Yeah yeah, I said Sacrifice Of The Mass was one of the complicated ones. I think I only said that because it paints a vivid picture that the punchy songs usually don’t have room for. It’s simple, though. It is evocative of a haunted village, like Cupid Carries A Gun. That song was orgiastic and swaggering, though. Sacrifice Of The Mass is resigned. I almost said ‘heart-broken’ but this album feels more like a reaction to heart break rather than the thing itself. It is haunted by the fear that all of those swallowed feelings were not transcended- merely waiting for you to notice them again.
Perhaps it’s more unsettling than it would normally be, since we know this is just ‘chapter 1’. One Assassination Under God is yet to be completed, so who’s to say where the ending of this segment will lead.
Like a lot of people, I first became aware of Ambrosia Parsley and her band Shivaree from movie soundtracks. Goodnight Moon, from Shivaree’s first album in 1999 (I Oughtta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump– one of my favorite album titles ever) has been in a number of movies over the years. The one I saw first was Kill Bill Vol. 2, but it’s also on Silver Linings Playbook and at least a few other films. Someone I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 with said it was a cover of a Leonard Cohen song.
It isn’t. Speaking as a writer, though, I would be pretty stoked if someone had mistaken my lyrics for Leonard Cohen. And lyricism is a real strength of Ambrosia Parsley. Her lyrics are both very visual and very conversational. Leonard Cohen has gone there before but it’s never really been his central strength. Cohen’s lyrics were extremely conceptual and economic like Allen Ginsberg. Ambrosia Parsley is closer to Jack Kerouac.
I don’t want to imply that Ambrosia Parsley doesn’t have concept-driven material either, and she definitely knows how to let a small collection of words do the work of many. But her writing for her Shivaree body of work definitely emphasized her ability to be explosive and colorful. There are some really cool surreal touches on the first two Shivaree albums, I Oughtta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump and Rough Dreams. The lyrics to Goodnight Moon are suggestive and abstract and Daring Lousy Guy closely pairs the mental image of a flat-in-front (potentially plastic) Ken doll boyfriend getting spanked without pants on. That combination of mental images snuck up on me- her voice is just so rich and her music hugs the complicated edge of simple, straight-laced songwriting. For an example of her more conceptual lyrics, see her recent singles Atlantis and Let a Wolf.
Maybe that’s why her lyrics run such a wide range. She’s actually quite the disciplined musician. Maybe the effusive lyrics counterbalance the economy of the songwriting. David Bowie and Warren Zevon took advantage of that balance often. This actually makes my heart go out to Ambrosia. She exemplifies an aspiration of mine.
I’m a messy writer. And I love other messy writers. I love that Salman Rushdie included a number of vignettes in The Satanic Verses that fleshed out the world of the story but didn’t explicitly move the plot. I love it when Anne Rice (R.I.P), Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore do the same thing. Ambrosia also appears to be a messy writer but she’s a messy writer who understands simplicity. I’ve always aspired to that.
If you’ve never heard of her, Ambrosia Parsley’s music has always been somewhat close to what people think of with the words ‘singer-songwriter.’ The first two Shivaree albums included elements of country, folk and alternative rock. Daring Lousy Guy (Shot In The Head) and After The Prince And The Show Girl (Rough Dreams) are clearly influenced by R&B. Thundercats, John, 2/14 and Reseda Casino could probably do rotations on modern rock forums. All of those are from Rough Dreams, though, which was never released in America. John, 2/14 had a music video that aired on European MTV though, and the album charted in France. Shivaree recorded a rather beautiful concert that can be found on YouTube under the name ‘Rough Dreams in Paris.’ Ambrosia’s more complicated and experimental work make it fun to imagine her touring with bands like The Bridge City Sinners or Hillbilly Moon Explosion.
Her more recent material, though, errs on the side of simplicity. And maybe my radar isn’t the best, but Ambrosia Parsley’s recent offerings under the name Amb. Parsley kinda…flew under the radar. I only became aware of them when I saw her Instagram story almost a year ago advertising the single Over the Overlook. She has released eight singles in the last few years, and some years before then did a solo album called Weeping Cherry.
Over The Overlook and Heavy Metal Stacy both put Ambrosia’s conversational voice front and center. Heavy Metal Stacy could fit in alongside some of Ambrosia’s more whimsical and energetic songs like Reseda Casino, Someday or Thundercats. Mexican Boyfriend from Shivaree is less energetic and whimsical but it has a retrospective attitude that could work well alongside Heavy Metal Stacy, in a concert or something. Skin & Bone from Weeping Cherry would also work well on that setlist. Another quieter Shivaree song it could compliment well would be Five Minutes. Heavy Metal Stacy relates stories of a bygone best friend. It reminds me of a few of the totally unexpected friendships from my childhood. Growing up in a smaller, rural place, you make your own fun and you get used to a lot. The necessities of isolation cause some very unexpected (and sometimes very powerful) connections to form. This was echoed in the next single, The Kindness of Strangers.
On the other end of the spectrum are songs like Beneath the Bird Feeder and It Won’t Be Me. It Won’t Be Me is synthy, melancholy and remote with vampiric metaphors reminiscent of the costume Ambrosia is wearing on the cover. The song would be at home on the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie alongside scoring by Angelo Badalamenti. Beneath the Bird Feeder is simple and atmospheric with poetic lyrics about bird seed and falling snow.
Maybe this is an accident of my retrospective listening, but Beneath the Bird Feeder makes for a neat segue to Weeping Cherry which starts with the same solitary, mental point of view with the first two songs, Empire and Rubble.
There are some superficial connections between Weeping Cherry and other Amb. Parsley and Shivaree material, but not a lot. Weeping Cherry doesn’t really sound like anything else that she’s ever done. Maybe this is because of the material that she wrote for Shivaree, which was the band she broke through with, but when I think of Parsley’s writing I think of an outward-facing point of view. She’s just so good at using conversational delivery which always feels a little outward-facing, even if it doesn’t have to be. Weeping Cherry feels more personal and somehow transient. Empire has a soft rhythm that’s both anxious and resigned, as if some leave-taking is in process. Rubble follows with a less pressured voice but just as isolated with it’s speculations on the thoughts of a loved one and one’s own immediate fate. My Hindenberg takes a similar perspective to a more accepting and empathic place.
In case I haven’t emphasized this enough: she writes just as well in a solitary voice as she does in a conversational one. Good Shivaree examples of this are New Casablanca, Five Minutes, Mexican Boyfriend, Stealing Home and Arlington Girl.
Speaking of Ambrosia’s more stripped-down moments, with her voice taking the entire foreground, the title track of Weeping Cherry is a good one. She uses the dominance of her voice to focus on multiple characters. It even starts with a loose third-person point of view: “That was no way for a queen to end / what’s under her bed /never used to be a dark thing.” I’d be happy with an opening line like that for a story. More lines I have to mention: “Well, history / unwashed and unsaid / I left my best dress and my shoes on the bed.” That’s from Skin & Bone but it builds expectation in a way that’s similar to Weeping Cherry. Weeping Cherry looks backward at a story, giving the feelings up front but only fleshing it out bit by bit, so the contextualizing emotion goes through a number of changes. Skin & Bone is more rooted in the present but it uses expectation in a similar way.
Among the eight recent singles, Let a Wolf and Atlantis have the most concise and direct language. No Good In The Daytime is a close third and the more personal associations add depth to the philosophical lyrics. Those three songs would go beautifully with the five others on an album.
The Christian references sound natural for a reason. It’s a strummy, acoustic folk song and when Warren sang those particular lyrics he affected a whoop-like blue-grass vocalization.
American folk music evolved alongside American gospel music. It’s the reason why we expect to hear Christianity more often in country and in the roots of R&B.
I was raised with an ethnic spirituality in a heavily Christian environment. This tradition came down through my mother’s side of the family. My father was raised with a soft Methodist emphasis but has been an agnostic for as long as he’s been making his own decisions.
My parents got divorced just before my eleventh birthday. My mom was approaching her late thirties and my dad was almost forty. He was open about how much the inevitability of death weighed on his thoughts.
This was an intense time for my dad and I but also a precious time. He began working at the printing press at the local newspaper, sorting papers and delivering them at night in his van. Consequently, he slept during the day more often and was forced to economize his energy. Between errands in town, he would often take naps in his van. He kept it well-stocked with junk food.
The van was also where I heard most of his music. Which brings us back to Warren Zevon. Dad had just discovered Life’ll Kill Ya, which was probably Zevon’s most recent album at the time.
My parents had shared custody so I spent time with both of them. Once, when a psychiatrist asked the right question in the right way, I became unusually open. I spoke plainly about gender dysphoria and constant sleep deprivation. Including the more gruesome intrusive thoughts.
Doctor told mom and mom told dad. I had already been aware of how news like this impacted them both and I had developed a sense of responsibility about it. Broaching these topics with them never helped.
Those events happened about a year after dad discovered Life’ll Kill Ya but both dysphoria and insomnia hallucinations were present well before that year. Death was on my dad’s mind for one reason and it was on my mind for another, but it was in both of our thoughts.
And it was in Warren’s thoughts because of cancer.
Warren Zevon being Warren Zevon, he could not separate spirituality from its relevance to death. For a million good reasons, of course- both spirituality and death are encounters with the unknown. Ditto for Christianity.
When I first heard I Was In The House When The House Burned Down, I wondered if my dad was reconnecting with Methodism. If he had been, it would not necessarily have driven any sort of wedge between us. I had Christian peers who were nasty little proselytizers but my dad was a very different person than them. And then I heard the rest of the album.
My dad and I both agree that the last three albums of Zevon’s career are extremely different from the rest of his discography. Warren Zevon was always a talented writer and lyricist but, in the final three albums, lyrics and ideas seized the foreground. Since Life’ll Kill Ya was my introduction to Warren Zevon, his earlier work felt different. Whimsical, witty and interesting, but different. I liked his simple and earnest approach to storytelling, exemplified in songs like Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, a ballad about a Danish mercenary who met his end in Africa. I was also captivated by Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels by then, so I couldn’t resist a romantic story about a phantom gunslinger named Roland. I was also taken by songs like Carmelita and The French Inhaler, which were emotional portraits conveyed with simple, poetic narratives.
This poetic storytelling is present in his last three albums, just situated in more of a conceptual framework. I was watching the Orville episode called Gently Falling Rain last night with my wife and afterward, while she was busy, I listened to Genius from Warren Zevon’s My Ride’s Here.
The episode had three main characters: a human diplomat, an alien demagogue and their half-breed child. Both the diplomat and the demagogue are exceptional, powerful people in their own right. The exceptional qualities that can amass power can also make one isolated. Power itself can be seen as a kind of isolation. In Stephen King’s final Dark Tower novel, the character Ted Brautigan says that gifted people usually feel like fifth wheels.
My dad told me, shortly after the divorce happened, that dying alone was one of his deepest fears. Judging from the albums Life’ll Kill Ya and My Ride’s Here, Warren was also haunted by the prospect of loneliness before unknown. In the song Genius, the explicit narrative is a love triangle with comparisons made to historical figures. On a less explicit level, the song describes how unique people can hurt each other in ways that others cannot. It insinuates that the experience of profound isolation can teach dreadful lessons of self-preservation that can prepare you to deceive and abandon the ones you love.
On My Ride’s Here, Genius follows another track called Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song), which follows You’re A Whole Different Person When You’re Scared. Hit Somebody! is also about the pain of alienation. Our main character, Buddy, is a Canadian farm boy who “grew up big” and “grew up tough” but was let down by his coordination:
Hesaw himself scoring for the Wings or Canucks
Buthe wasn’t that good with a puck
Buddy’s real talent was beating people up
Hisheart wasn’t in it but the crowd ate it up
Through pee-wee’s, juniors and midgets and mites
He musthave racked up more than six-hundred fights
Ascout from the flames came down from Saskatoon
Said “We’ve always got room for a goon
Son, we’ve always got room for a goon”
Buddy loved the game and wanted to score goals like any other player. But his only value to the team was his ability to protect the fast players and beat the crap out of the good players on the other team. To a lot of people, this sounds like a quirky, off-beat story. It is quirky and offbeat, in a way. The quirkiness is accentuated by David Letterman yelling “hit somebody!” during the chorus. My dad ordered the CD single before My Ride’s Here was released. I remember the single disc had For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer after the Hockey Song.
On the album, though, the song is sandwiched between You’re A Whole Different Person When You’re Scared and Genius. Someone like Buddy cannot escape his rural self-awareness. He is valued for something other than the game itself, which can make you feel out of your depth. Anything about you that sets you apart can make you self-conscious if your value in a group is incidental to the group itself. The quirky appearance is then equated with alienation. The chorus says as much: “(b)rains over brawn, that might work for you / but what’s a Canadian farm boy to do”. Buddy is constantly reminded of his difference from the rest of the team and he can only score his goal by exposing himself to a goon on the other team.
This narrative is also present on Life’ll Kill Ya. The third song is Porcelain Monkey, one of Warren’s iconic lyrical sketches of Elvis, opposite Jesus Mentioned. Both of those songs look back on Elvis from a time after his death. Jesus Mentioned is reverent and the earnestness is depicted by the path of reverence taking one beyond the ugliness of death and addiction. In contrast, Porcelain Monkey is like a bitter, spiteful look backward. A journey that starts as “an accident waiting to happen” and ends in a lonely death with a figurine used to smuggle drugs.
If one looks for songs that depict an obvious narrative on Life’ll Kill Ya, you might be tempted to stop at two songs: Porcelain Monkey and Ourselves to Know. Songs that rely strongly on idiomatic constructions tend to be more conversational than narrative, like the title track or For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer. Life’ll Kill Ya has some fun gray areas, though.
Novel uses of idioms and commonly understood metaphors engage a prior frame of reference. They rely on a base of knowledge that the listener might show up with on their own. They begin in a way that’s engaged with others. Songs like Hostage-O, My Shit’s Fucked Up and Don’t Let Us Get Sick derive strength from the opposite end of the spectrum, of something spoken in solitude.
I remember I was fifteen by the time I started to appreciate Ourselves to Know and it was because I was ripping my dad’s CD on a disc-writing machine my mom installed in her stereo. I had to start and stop each song. It required a little more attention than recording a blank tape. The disc-writer had to be stopped at the same time the song ended, so I pretty much had to listen to the whole album in order to make the copy. This was easier if I just hung out next to the stereo and listened to each song closely. When I got to Ourselves to Know, the second to last song, it became one of my favorite lyrics. It still is.
Among my favorites on the Life’ll Kill Ya song cycle, Ourselves to Know shares the title of favorite with Don’t Let Us Get Sick. Jill Sobule would perform that song often when she toured with Warren and he would cover her song I Kissed a Girl, lending his own quirkiness to a male gender-flip of a song about romance between females. After Warren’s death, she offered her cover to the tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich and it’s probably my favorite from that collection. On a mix CD I made as a teenager, I put Jill Sobule’s cover of Don’t Let Us Get Sick after You Got Lucky by Tom Petty and before Exploration B / Haunted, by Poe.
That energy-exchange reminds me of a mix CD I made after finishing the Dark Tower series. After Warren’s song Genius, I placed a live version of Wash My Hands by Meredith Brooks. Before the end of Roland’s pilgrimage, he loses three companions who all gave him a second chance but were simply not meant to follow him to the end. In the past, he made grievous sacrifices for his grail…and he learns that to seek his grail is to acknowledge that it is meant for him alone. To love others is to know that their own paths are as binding as his own.
When I was planning the mix CD, Ourselves to Know felt like the perfect transition to the end, but it’s just so tranquil and reflective. What that story transition felt like, as I read it, was reflective but not tranquil. Musically, Genius to Wash My Hands was a better match. Meredith’s screaming, war-like chorus could have come from Roland himself.
I have vague memories of reading a biography of Warren Zevon that quoted a reaction that Jackson Browne had to Life’ll Kill Ya. He said that it began with the Crucifixion and ends with the Crusades. If Ourselves to Know is the Crusades, I Was In The House When The House Burned Down must be the Crucifixion. Sure enough, it mentions “the man with the thorny crown” and his cross. “I had to stay in the underground” has a number of probable non-religious interpretations, but thanks to Ourselves to Know and Jackson Browne I’m tempted to make a connection to both early and medieval Christianity. Early Christianity because of the persecuted Christians hiding in Mediterranean catacombs, medieval Christianity because of Les Innocents cemetery in Paris. Disputes between Parisian nobility and the Christian Church often centered on how to manage the overflowing volume of corpses in Paris throughout the Middle Ages. Andreas Vesalius made significant anatomical studies on the bodies crowded within Les Innocents. The grisly historical art in the album booklet make similar associations.
Ourselves to Know details the reflections of someone at the end of a “long hard road”. A journey may start with the most sublime visions but never cease to be true to yourself and those you encounter along the way. If nothing else, you will certainly know yourself better.
Well well well. Tim Skold ‘liked’ my insta post when I got his Dead God album in the mail. There’s no way I’m not gonna review it then ^^
(I intended to do this a long time ago when it actually happened but I had a few more entries that I thought I could finish first)
This EP is a very pleasant blindside. Since this was recorded between the 2002 reformation of KMFDM and a separate project MDFMK and widely circulated during the Grotesk Burlesk tour in ’03, I had no idea what to expect.
Most of my memories of KMFDM are from their mid-nineties material which (in my opinion) was heavy, rhythmic and relentless. As relentless and driving as a lot of club-oriented music from Northern Europe in the mid 90’s, like Lords of Acid. Tim Skold’s collaboration with Marilyn Manson on The Golden Age of Grotesque was rhythmic and heavy but a little less married to the common hallmarks of industrial metal with some clear classic rock influence.
The title track has a swing-like rhythm and syncopation which reminded me of Doll-Dagga Buzz-Buzz Ziggedy-Zag. The percussion slaps on every song but the title track is a decent showcase of what’s on offer. In general, though, Dead God is distinct from both KMFDM and Skold’s work with Marilyn Manson. Musically, the whole thing is very tightly written and very glam rock. This adds a little context to the genre-savviness he brought to both The Golden Age of Grotesque and Eat Me, Drink Me. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear Tim Skold singing.
My favorite song on this is If, but the title track and Don’t Pray For Me get stuck in my head a lot. If this material was released as an album in 2002-03, I suspect one of those last two would be obvious choices for singles. My favorites from the second side of the record are Believe, I Hate and Don’t Ask Me, all of which sound like they would be amazing live.
The apparent discipline is even more impressive considering that Dead God was written, recorded and produced only by Skold.
my audiophile wife bit me and turned me into a vinyl nerd send halp D:
The first time I heard Red Black and Blue I misheard the first lines sung after the spoken-word intro. What I heard was “Set fire to the Tree of Life / love or death / just to watch the suffering”.
For my entire first listen, that question felt like the crux of the album. Do our fundamental passions drive us to destroy ourselves or do they push life forward to its natural and appropriate conclusion?
This remains front and center in the title track. Chaos cannot be cured but the influence it has over existence often feels adversarial. We have all heard some variation of “change or die.” One of my artistic heroes (equal in stature to Marilyn Manson) is William S. Burroughs. This very question was often at the center of Burroughs’ writing, from Junky to The Western Lands. Burroughs wrote that life is defined by process and change and that all pleasure is rooted in relief. Relief is the absence of suffering and suffering is a predictable consequence of process and change. The allure of addiction is relief from life itself.
The Book of Job and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s telling of the Faust story discuss whether suffering is “evil” or if it is endemic to the nature of life. It is common for those fresh off of bad relationships to say “I wasted X years on that POS.” Or “X years of marriage, gone because of (infidelity, substance abuse, etc. by the offending party).” This reveals an unspoken attitude that something has been debited from our lives. The phrasing has a close association with what we mean when we talk about “wasting” one’s life or time.
Claiming that suffering is objectively necessary arouses comparisons with social Darwinism and social accelerationism. Historically and ideologically, those concepts gravitate toward fascism. On the other hand, Marcel Proust held that his most valuable experiences happened while suffering. The question of suffering is shaped profoundly by context. Does a thwarted intention indicate waste? What about the intentions of one who causes waste?
Sooner or later, free will enters the equation. Are we or are we not empowered to choose our own goals and evaluate our own success, failure or contentment? If we are, what about everything beside our priorities? John Lennon said that life is what happens when you are making other plans.
If the camera of your mind is always running whether you are happy, miserable, safe, unsafe, in or out of control…then there will be more footage of things not going according to plan.
“Love or death” might be more vague than “not for death”, but I like my misunderstanding. It suggests that the fire consuming the Tree of Life might be love, death or both.
Not that I’d sell short the spoken word part. I love how quintessentially Mansonian the word play is, like the echoing shapes and voids in various contexts. A needle in a void, followed by a snake on the surface of water. Next is a bee in mid-air. It reminds me of the lyrics to Bowie’s Rock’n Roll Suicide: “Time takes a cigarette / puts it in your mouth / you pull on your finger, than another finger / then you’re a cigarette”.
There is an associative continuity between the beings in the void. This continuity, for me, is almost stronger than the apparent lyrical construction. If I might drift completely into hyperbole for a while, these lyrics are more visual than poetic. It reminds me of David Lynch (in a good way). When the music video for the title track came out, I wondered if the use of digitally manipulated photographs and industrial imagery was expressing a David Lynch influence.
Let us not forget the music, though: Don’t Chase The Dead is a gloriously simple wonder. It feels like musical territory that Marilyn Manson must be familiar with. It reminds me of how The Birthday Massacre channel the legacy of Siouxsie and the Banshees. That influence is closer to Marilyn Manson than them, but this is the only song Manson has written that sounds like it. The understated use of keyboards and rattling percussion bring a lot to the song. It is a subtle but effective way of bridging the goth-alt country energy exchange between Manson and Shooter Jennings.
I mentioned in my first We Are Chaos review that each song beautifully segues into the next. This is especially true with the songs that are the most different from any other Marilyn Manson material: Paint You With My Love and Half-Way & One Step Forward. The lyrical treatment of “the void” comes closer to the foreground in these songs. Subject matter includes the value of memories and the potential for blindness within “calculated” incrementalism.
Closer to the end of the album, the dynamism between Manson and Shooter becomes nearly as pronounced as Paint You With My Love and Half-Way & One Step Forward. That same energy exchange can be heard during Solve Coagula, which has lyrics that echo words I’ve heard in my own head many times: “there’s no one else I want to be like / so I stay the same like nobody else”.
In the lyrics of the final song, the meaning of the word ‘needle’ is a matter of perspective. In an Apple Music interview coinciding with the release of We Are Chaos, Manson suggested that it could be the needle of a record player. This reminds me of Manson’s online journal entry immediately preceding Lest We Forget in which he wrote about “all (his) goddamn Frankensteins coming back for some sick closure.” It creates the impression of Manson’s art having its own autonomous existence. Like all art, it becomes separate from its creator.
There is a more intuitive lyrical connection, though: the needle in the horror that can fix your blindness. The associative transformations (needle, snake, bee) can distract us from the backdrop. What does a needle do? It pierces and connects. Using a needle to “fix your blindness” almost conjures the image of a child poking holes in something to give it eyes.
This could lead to the autonomous creation: the thing that gets scratched and put away, never to be played again. Or, if the needle scratches a surface before breaking, maybe there is nowhere for it to go.
From GioBlush Design
Perfume and Keep My Head Together both reminded me of an essay that Marilyn Manson wrote immediately before the release of The Golden Age of Grotesque called Putting Holes In Happiness.
Around the same time, a forum called The Oracle was created on Manson’s website where fans could post questions and possibly receive a public reply. One poster said that they knew someone experiencing a suicidal crisis. In Manson’s response, he included a link to this essay.
Putting Holes In Happiness describes a pernicious subtext to the 90’s, gen-X-led celebration of individuality. Other alternative musicians from the same era, like Billy Corgan, have talked about the gen-X effort at demystifying psychological catharsis as one of the strengths of that generation. Corgan has claimed that he set a unique example by discussing subjects like personal, childhood trauma with the press. There is something to be said for that: obviously, a social climate where psychological struggle is not stigmatized is one where it is easier to get help. Manson himself has not minced words about his personal history.
An unfortunate consequence, though, is the potential of privileging a personal narrative over the deeper, interpretive possibilities that art needs in order to survive. Resonance is the lifeblood of art and, if everything is a strict, literal, memoir-like personal statement…it dampens resonance.
It also has more superficially annoying consequences, such as the proliferation of psychoanalytic interpretation. Art is frequently reduced to a veiled autobiographical statement. It creates a culture where college students and high schoolers feel like literature only “comes to life” when they are given a SparkNotes study guide. This would make the life or background of an artist a better key to their work than their own art. This elevates a factual narrative over interpretation.
This correlates with the rise of social media and the influencer / social media personality. Inevitably this impacted the relationship between celebrities and their fans. The exhibition of a public personality is now as much of a point of contact between the public and an artist as the artist’s material.
When personality and autobiography are privileged above everything else, discussion of personal meaning and motivation dominates the conversation. When someone sounds off about politics, philosophy or art, it is now easier to speculate about their unstated mental and emotional motivations than listening to their words. One might say that the line between pathology and empowerment has been blurred.
In The Golden Age of Grotesque, there are three songs that are explicitly about this blurring: (s)AINT, KA-BOOM KA-BOOM and The Bright Young Things. The last two are particularly relevant.
From GioBlush Design
KA-BOM KA-BOOM describes the futility of an existence in which everything is only relatable to the most directly personal values. All interaction with the outside world is barely distinguishable from a consumer choice. If the outside world has any value, it is as an occasion for the inner world.
This, for Marilyn Manson, is a bit of a challenging undertaking: one of the defining statements of his career is the origin of meaning within the self. At the same time, this is precedented. Even on Antichrist Superstar, his signature work in the eyes of many, the crab-bucket homicide of capitalism is discussed in the first two songs.
To clarify, I do not think Manson has ever ceased to believe that the origin of meaning is personal. But songs like (s)AINT, KA-BOOM KA-BOOM and The Bright Young Things reveal his awareness of gray areas.
Social reinforcement has a way of shaping our internal worlds. When consumerism is your only window on existence, autonomy is traded for expression. Without action, little else remains. Social media has made it easier than ever for our pain and angst to be offered to us as a consolation prize for the surrender of our autonomy.
This adds depth to Manson’s reply to the suicidal fan on the Oracle forum: do not accept your own suffering as payment.
This album, for me, is in event. I have known Rachel- the frontwoman of dedbutherflys -for over ten years. We met online, when we were what the world now calls “eggs.” We bonded as we read each other’s online journals and later saw more of each other than anyone else may have, at that point in our lives. She listened to me talk about my stories and she told me how things were going with her current band at the time, 11:34. She taught me everything I know about sludge metal and introduced me to the music of Acid Bath and Cancerslug. We hit agonizing brick walls together and talked each other through. She sent me pictures when 11:34 opened for Otep, in Pennsylvania.
And here we are, then. Rachel’s first album, a solo effort under the name dedbutherflys, recorded in collaboration with Taylor Kouqj Bull of Seventh Wave Studio, in Harrisburg, PA (who is a musician herself- her own material is created under the name Kouqj). On to the music, then!
Catatonic Despair is an instrumental but not quite what I would call a normal intro. The opening notes sound like slow beats with gentle echoes between them. If you don’t pay attention to the track sucesssion, it sounds like an extended beginning to Back On Da Liquor, which is when we hear Rachel’s voice for the first time. Lyrically, Back On Da Liquor describes a world that refuses to listen to you melting into a silent and passive mental landscape, like a “natural habitat” of enforced loneliness. I also gotta mention that, during our long and passionate friendship, I didn’t get Rachel mad at me very often but…well…it’s happened before. She never went as far as yelling at me but I did learn to recognize a subtle build-up in her voice, just before it’s about to become elevated. This is my first time listening to Rachel sing and I never would have guessed how expressive that emotional build-up can be.
Back On Da Liquor is a slow burn of depressed ferocity which explodes to satisfying effect in Magic Murder Bag- if I’m ever able to see dedbutherflys or any of Rachel’s other bands live, this is one that I’ll be hoping for. This is the shit that headbanging was made for- an extended guitar part would make this delicious to be in the presence of. To say nothing of how beautifully the percussion comes out- which would be Rachel herself on drums and Taylor Kouqj Bull on bass.
(For the record, this album was assembled from multiple, separately recorded tracks. Rachel played every instrument except bass, which was played only by Taylor Kouqj Bull)
Also: “I’ll kill you just because I’m hungry / I’ll kill you just because it’s funny” sounds just like her.
Killer Clown keeps up the pace with delightfully manic syncopation between the percussion and guitar. Maybe I shouldn’t be as focused on this as I am but Rachel’s voice does an awesome job of supporting the bond between melody and rhythm in general. Is that to be expected, though? She’s been playing in various sludge metal bands in Pennsylvania for over a decade, largely as a percussive musician. If anyone would know anything about that, a drummer would.
Next is Mr. Bradley – Mr. Martin. If I didn’t already love this woman like my own flesh and blood, that song title would win me over. A fellow Burroughs lover :3 The song itself is a snare drum solo that’s just soft enough create an anxious build-up of tension. This leads us into Blowjobs 4 Satan, which is the first time we hear dedbutherflys reaching for the typical speed of metal drumming along with what I suspect is some layering of vocal tracks? The fast guitar makes this all add up to a “wall of sound” effect. That’s the phrase a lot of people use to describe it. I’ve always thought of it as being more of a watery effect, since it feels immersive when its done right (like it is, here). There’s a sudden sound sample that signals a guitar-driven key change with each electric note getting stretched longer and longer with distortion. After the dynamism of the “band-scale” sound combination, the electrical distortion outro has the right atmosphere to sustain and subtly shift the tone near the end.
The opening riff of The Chase reminds me of something Akira Yamaoka would compose for a Silent Hill game. Around fifty seconds, the rest of the tracks kick in with the drums taking a strong lead. The guitar slowly assumes the foreground as the song gets heavier. As I’m listing right now, The Chase is probably the most dynamic song on the album so far. The combination of Mr. Bradley – Mr. Martin and Blowjobs 4 Satan was rich and satifying and energetic, but this sounds like a journey through a hostile supernatural landscape. This is the second song that’s made me think of an imaginative “place” so I think this is seriously coming together.
Aaaaand what have we here??? Hermaphrodite Love!!! Can it be that my sludge metal musician friend is able to write large hypnotic instrumental segments that actually carry serious weight? I haven’t heard anything like this since I last listened to Hella or El Grupo Nuevo Omar Rodiguez-Lopez! Maybe this is just my erratic failure to follow genres closely, but this is actually pretty different. You normally only find this kind of comfort with experimentation with electric dream-poppy stuff but it combines beautifully with the sonic abrasiveness of metal. Actually…sludge metal is more atmospheric than a lot of metal sub-genres. Could it be that dream pop and sludge metal are fellow travellers? Am I profane idiot? This album might make me commit to that opinion.
Singing comes back with Rum is Gone. In a time where literally every fucking body is caught up in labels and wanting to look good…I am like, jump-up-and-down stoked about an MtF metal singer who ends a verse with “choke on my dick”! She also just now informed me that she got the phrase “same sex dates” from me ❤ Around the 3:30 mark is another key change that at first tempts you to think of it as a bridge. And what the fuck is going on with the guitar’s rhythm near the end? I suspect I’m discoverying a low-budget metal album that baits you with successive instrumental innovation in ways that you normally only get from avant-garde jazz and witch-house. I think this is why I was hesitent to call Catatonic Despair an “intro” track- because it isn’t. In light of the nature of the overall album, Catatonic Despair is actually the first song, if that’s not redundant.
Second to last track is another instrumental- Candyland Vampires! And I totally gave her that name! There, it’s out of my system. I have a running list of word association experiments. Candyland Vampires brings us back to the distortion-heavy ghostliness of The Chase. Somehow this feels warmer, coming off of Rum is Gone. For this she used an Earthquaker Afterneath pedal and it’s both haunting and euphoric at the same time. Perfect preparation for the opening of NB AF. From what I understand of the recording process behind this album, NB AF was intended as a bonus track but I think this should actually be the canonical end of the album. Rachel forcibly drags the foreground back to her voice and doesn’t fucking let go. Back to the syncopation sweet spot from Magic Murder Bag except there’s more of it. Another song I’d be thrilled to hear live!
AilixChaerea 