Pretty cool, right? Apparently the Deli Magazine’s caught onto what we’re doing here at Ampeater, and they like it. This is the kinda thing that puts bounce in our step, and smiles on our partially bearded faces. Like Dr. Scholl’s, or Vampire Weekend getting sued for $2 million. We’re pumped, so thanks Deli Mag! You can download and read the whole issue in PDF here. We’re on page 11.
We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves is one the most enigmatic bands I’ve encountered recently. They may hail from Brooklyn like damn-near everybody else these days, and their songs, though incredibly well crafted, are hardly genre-bending. But when I came across their press kit in the Ampeater submissions box, I was immediately struck by their response to the question, “describe your music….” While most bands take this prompt as an opportunity to explain just why exactly they’re so fucking awesome, We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves launches into a scathing and borderline-nonsensical self-critique. “One should be careful not to expect much from (our music)”explains vocalist/guitarist Giovanni Saldarriaga. It’s “delightfully unimportant, in poor taste, demonstrably demonic, satanically pointless and thus,” he concludes, “absolutely fatal to art history majors, compost or compote enthusiasts, and class-conscious bores.” I suppose one should expect a reasonable degree of self-deprecation from a band named We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to what Saldarriaga was saying than the mere sum of the words coming out of his mouth. Was it modesty? Irony? A desperate plea for attention? Crossing off theory after theory, I finally arrived at one that seemed a bit closer to the truth—poetry. Perhaps Saldarriaga will cringe at this conclusion. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he’ll retort, “it’s satanically pointless!” But there’s a world of difference between “satanically pointless” and “pointless” and my verdict holds. Some might call this distinction merely rhetorical but the implications are actually quite vast. I wouldn’t waste my time with pointless music but satanically pointless music is another matter altogether.
I agree wholeheartedly with Saldarriaga that We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves is satanically pointless. And what’s so captivating about the satanically pointless? How is it poetic? I’m not drawing comparison to the poetry of Neruda or Rilke or Pushkin or anybody so serious. We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves approach their craft more like Velimir Khlebnikov, Lewis Carrol, or even Dr. Seuss. They’re of a breed of artist that, while lambasting the medium in which they work, never cease for a moment to delight the senses. “(Our music is) inspired by Buddy Holly’s music, the Brandenburg Concertos and cat food commercials from the nineteen nineties,” Saldarriaga continues. “Sometimes it’ll send you into orbit, sometimes Miami Beach circa 1948, a very tame year for bikinis and bathing trunks.” Or, to put it a different way, “if you keep asking us these ridiculous questions, we’re going to keep giving you ridiculous answers.”
In addition to Saldarriga, the trio features Caley Monahon-Ward on drums and Michael Leviton on bass—at least that’s the standard lineup, but the band of multi-instrumentalists mixes it up whenever appropriate with the addition of keyboards, harmonicas, whatever… Front-man Saldarriaga has spent the last several years playing clarinet and guitar in hot-jazz ensembles. Monahon-Ward drums for a number of New York area bands including Extra Life. Leviton is an established singer and songwriter who, incidentally, toured with They Might Be Giants in 2006. To paraphrase, each member of the trio is a veteran performer. Perhaps that’s why they approach We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves as a side project, a diversion from more serious pursuits (“we got together over the winter to record… only after realizing we all have mothers named Olga,” explains Saldarriaga), even though the music is sufficiently potent to warrant more attention.
A-side “Charming Man” springs into action with a sparse but energetic beat in which the power of the floor tom is tempered by the playfulness of a tambourine. Enter jangly guitar and bass followed quickly by vocals. Saldarriaga‘s accent and hyper-melodic vocal hooks bring to mind Belle & Sebastian and yes, if you insist, cat food commercials, but the final product is somewhat more manly than the former and considerably less obnoxious than the latter. The song escalates at a perfect pace. Guitar and drums launch it into a double-time feel at the first chorus and the delightfully indulgent harmonies which kick in at the onset of the second verse up the ante once more. Falsetto counterpoint throughout the third verse, a maneuver that strongly evokes the Beach Boys, and a mildly spastic guitar riff in the final chorus carry the song to a euphoric end.
Clocking in at over five minutes long, B-side “Liza (They Don’t Call This Dancing)” lacks the radio-friendly brevity of “Charming Man” but the payoff is huge when you arrive at the dance-off outro about which Saldarriaga remarks, “I thought really sold it as a plausible Motown number.” I’m not sure if I’d call it Motown but an irresistible shuffle pulse and buoyant vocals certainly make for an explosive finale. Not that the beginning of the song is lacking in hooks; employing many of their usual tricks (lush harmonies, copious tambourine, and a vocal line that dives from high to low but remains sufficiently simple that somebody listening for the first time could probably sing along), We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves offer the listener another pop masterpiece, one that’s less conventional than “Charming Man” but equally addictive
We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves‘ debut mini-album One Belongs Here More Than You was the the serendipitous fruit of a blizzard last February. “For two days,” recalls Saldarriaga, “we laid up in the dilapidated sacristy of St. Cecilia’s convent in Greenpoint where the pew fell apart on touch and where the janitor reported to us that he played the original Toxic Avenger from the eponymous film series.” With the exception of a few vocal overdubs, all seven tracks were recorded live, an impressive feat for a band that’s yet to play a gig. In between takes, Monahon-Ward filled the role of sound engineer and producer while Leviton corrected papers on photosynthesis and Saldarriaga studied Russian. A productive way to spend two days snowed in, no? It’s one of the best self-production jobs I’ve heard. But as I keep reiterating, these guys know exactly what they’re doing at every turn along the way. And maybe that’s why they can’t take themselves seriously. They’ve seen every trick in the pop-music book and consequently recognize them for what they are—tricks. “The coronary thrombosis behind Liza,” analyzes Saldarriaga “is a little more far out than the insouciant pleading behind Charming Man.” I couldn’t have put it better. Knowing the formula to pump out hit after hit is a valuable skill indeed and one that few bands have acquired… but I suppose it could take a little bit of the fun out of the songwriting process. Oh well. If they can’t enjoy themselves, at least others will.
| Side A – Charming Man
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Side B – Liza (They Don’t Call This Dancing)
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Villagers’ Conor J. O’Brien will probably draw a lot of comparisons to another well-known singer-songwriter named Conor (doesn’t hurt that he looks a bit like him too), but where Oberst’s music, at least in its prime, was all about catharsis and abandon and wild generalizations and accusations that feel really good to yell (no matter how uncool or over-the-top or not-really-true they may be), O’Brien’s is oblique and careful. Subtle, even. His lyrics slip easily from first to second to third person, and even the first person songs seem somehow distanced, easier to hear as a narrative device than a soul-bearing, this-is-the-deeply-buried-truth-about-Conor-J-O’Brien kind of thing. In fact, O’Brien is more interested in the elusive nature of truth than in any grandiose, whitewashed statements. In the quiet, brooding, sleigh-bell touched “The Meaning of the Ritual” (the gorgeous, delicate home-made animation for which (link) is 100% worth your time and happens to be one of the only videos I’ve ever seen that made a song clearer and more powerful instead of just distracting me from it), he sings: my love is selfish and I bet yours is too / what is this peculiar word called ‘truth’. And again, in Ampeater A-side “Becoming A Jackal”: before you take this song as truth / you should wonder what I’m taking from you. This fixation on the mutability of things dominates O’Brien’s lyrics, and actually makes him more of an inverse-Oberst. Rather than shouting the capital-letter Truth, he’s exploring the multitude of truths. The songs are quite decisive, but I have no idea what I am doing, or where I am going, he says in his absurdist press bio, and though some of it may be a faux-naïf pose (Once the songs took shape, I asked some friends of mine to help me play them to people. When they kindly agreed, I decided that we would present ourselves as ‘Villagers’ – I don’t really know why.), as contrived as any other publicity stance (PR is inescapably fake; even directness becomes a mediated game of authenticity), it’s still rather refreshing to hear someone say that songs should always be treated with humor, no matter the subject matter, or that his goal in songwriting is to surprise himself. Right on, Conor.
The arrangements in Villagers‘ songs are equally subtle and delicate, choosing the intimate gesture over the grand flourish so as to keep the dramatic element of the music subdued. O’Brien’s voice burns with a gentle heat, and you’re more likely to encounter gentle piano-guitar or guitar-bass unisons than washes of strings or booming brass (though there are touches of strings and french horn on other tracks of Becoming A Jackal, the band’s Domino LP). O’Brien has a knack for writing songs that would be perfectly solid acoustic troubadour pieces and then adding just one more section that manages to bring out the the shape of the whole song the way ice brings scars to the surface of your skin.
On “Becoming a Jackal”, a rolling 6/4 tune that manages to seem circular and winding in form without really departing much from convention, this takes the form of the section that begins when I got older. It’s a section that manages to advance both the musical tension of the song and the narrative arc of the lyrics all at once. Finally we get the harmony vocals the song has been hinting at the whole time (with the doubling of key lines like that first always rearranged; the fact that the chorus is sung, doubled, at different places in the stereo spectrum from the verses; and the one tantalizing harmonized line in the second chorus).
At the same time, the story leaps forward. All along the narrator has been daydreaming at the window, both cared for and imprisoned by the song’s you, who in turn is abused by the jackals. Here he finally escapes into the streets, literally following his dream, and learns a new way to move from those jackals. The meaning of the song is elusive, as it should be, but it seems to have at its core a paradox: the need to betray something (alternatively: someone) you once loved in order to grow. It could be anything from rebelling against your parents to “selling out” as a musician, though in this case the next set of lyrics, set against a series of rhythm section breaks that make them stand out like nothing else in the song, implies the latter. O’Brien is literally selling us his fears in the form of songs, but the fact that he knows this and does it anyway gives the line an inverted meaning: releasing songs about how untrustworthy songs are is an act that has to mean he has weighed it out and decided that there is still something important and meaningful that can be conveyed in a song. Once again: right on.
B-side “Twenty Seven Strangers” is more oblique yet, a story of taking a city bus home that simultaneously begs and shrugs off interpretations, but seems to revolve around the anonymity and confusion and powerlessness of city life (anytime anyone sings the phrase fluorescent light you can bet this is what they’re getting at: nothing says urban dehumanization like fluorescent lights). The musical accompaniment is sparse, resigned and melancholy in a lovely way, just like riding home with exhausted commuters in the lighted rectangle of the evening bus. Throughout, reverby wordless vocal melodies, fingerpicked acoustic guitar and minimal drums provide the backdrop for O’Brien’s precise and even lead vocals. Not one thing changes musically in the song until 2:19, when that moment of liftoff arrives (an arranging trick that forces you to really focus on the lyrics up to that point, and also reflects the endless repetition hinted at in those lyrics), just as it does in “Becoming a Jackal”. The harmony vocals and bass finally arrive to fill out the song for the last few lines before a new wordless vocal-piano melody arrives, rising through the crashing cymbals on the first three notes as if it might transcend the song, but then sinking back down in beat-down resignation.
The very end of “Twenty Seven Strangers” is in fact my favorite moment in the entire 7”. The original melody reappears twice. The first time it’s suspended over the full band and drenched in reverb just as it was at the songs start. The second repeat is pared down to just O’Brien’s voice and guitar, the same two instruments with which the song began, only this time his voice is up close, stripped of the distancing effects that hid its texture and flaws. We listen to his voice hold the final, gentle falsetto note and then crackle and sputter out like a guttering candle, the sound of the anonymous soul stepping off that city bus.
| Side A – Becoming a Jackal
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Side B – Twenty Seven Strangers
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The Window Right are a three piece space rock musical outfit. Right? Suppose so. Space is a nice place for these Brits. None of their tracks can seem to stay grounded. There’s an skyward trajectory to their instrumental stylings, an upward lift that breaks songs open from a jog to a gallop to a sprint. Combine the grand scope of prog rock, plus terse jazz nods, with the epic vistas of krautrock, and circumscribe the action inside the crisp lines of Brit pop, and you have the Window Right. They are a live band’s live band. Grinding out technically accomplished digital/analog jamouts that preserve an unleashed spontaneity alongside the precision. Though the three piece has performed with the likes of Damo Suzuki, famed Can vocalist and all around avant garde rock god of the 1970s, the Window Right’s music trends towards the ultra-contemporary. In their pulsing metric machismo, the guitar/bass/drums/laptop ensemble achieves the automaton flair of a mellower Richard D. James. The gentle valleys and peaks are even reminiscent of pre-suck Coldplay (yes, there was a time they didn’t suck), though when the band dials up the intensity they match the aggressive ferocity of neukrautrock and hausrock contemporaries Dinowalrus (in the US) and Drum Eyes (in the UK). The scope of the Window Right’s music spans a vast emotional and historical divide, the sort of reach that only instrumental music, without the articulated commitment to topical ephemera, can accomplish.
The affinity between The Window Right’s approach and some of the classic Krautrock has spawned an ongoing collaboration with Damo Suzuki. The three members of The Window Right - Matt, Neil, and Smudge - bring a new school element of laptop sampling and electric beats to the old “meat and potatoes” rock ensembles of yore. When the new and old school elements meet each other halfway on the shared common ground of live improvisation the results can be pretty magical. A recent TWR/Damo gig at the Hoxton Square Bar in London was an exercise in pure spontaneity, sheer creation, a rock ‘n’ roll séance. None of the songs were premeditated, preplanned; the night unfolded as an adventure of raw musical intrigue, a Lizard King odyssey importing digital elements back into the primordial analog soup of surly, sweaty invention. With such an superlative rapport, the upcoming TWR/Damo gig at the Hebden Bridge Trades Club at the end of July is not to be missed.
Chainsaw guitar chews through the first minute-and-a-half of the A side “BOW SONG”, a metal machine monument to sonic violence. For The Window Right, the industrial siren song acts as entrée to a more primitive landscape that relies on the textural possibilities of sound over the melodic. A warm walking bass opens up a grand vista premised on the vagaries of a spare, warbling three or four note guitar lick. Barely a lick, a skeletal apparition of a musical theme. This is music for the millennial masses, part of the wayward joint drift of the avant-garde and popular consciousness away from the ideological mainstream of modernist constructivism. A Beatles/Stockhausen presentation of a Can/Reich production of a Neu/Glass film. The Window Right chases after the profane peculiarities of transcendence in songs that wrinkle and flex between opposed poles of ectoplasmic desire and astroliminal logorrhea: grade-A existential jabberwocky. The song opens up with a light touch reminiscent of a new age minimalism, but the percussion bites down hard, the sting and moan of the electric guitar radiates a feverish intensity that militates against the too easy mystico-spiritual solutions of the unicorn-and-seashell elite. In the contrapuntal variations of light and dark you can hear the bloodbath of the mid-20th century, the total annihilation that sucked the air out of Western civilization for a generation, the lingering embarrassment of rehabilitation, the survivor’s guilt. “BOW SONG” searches for a clarity free of remorse, but uncovers only the needling tension of an anxious soul trapped in a hall of mirrors.
The fragile pitter-patter of a bright-eyed Telecaster ushers in an air of sobriety on the B side “GREENDIVIDEDBBLUE”. Gone are the Sisyphean gesticulations of “BOW SONG”. In their stead a palpable calm overtakes the music, as slow and gentle as an advancing cloud. The guitar notes pass crisply and clearly; the hi hat rings clean; the bass leads you by the hand. The overall approach is so well calibrated that you hardly register the quickening pace, the rush of the cymbals, the measured ecstasy of the slide to double time right before the three minute mark. As if a wind picked up; as if a jet pulled off the tarmac; as if a wild horse had jumped the fence, headed at breakneck pace into the highlands, the sinews straining with mad grace, becoming a blur, a speck on the horizon, then lost into the free nothing. The Window Right’s B side is an acceleration into empty freedom, free of pain and devoid of hope.
A new EP and a new album are in the works for The Window Right. The trio are feverishly recording material now, esconced snugly in their studio above a London carwash. Hours and hours of live jams are being put down in search of that magical moment. The method speaks to the Window Right’s commitment to the live sound, the limitless challenge of capturing the uncapturable, sustained by the enduring belief, which all musicians share (except DEVO), that music is a moving image of eternity. A hearkening to the immutable gyrations of the celestial spheres. A six-stringed paean to the gods supported by beer, perspiration, and the white noise hum of a warm amp. More gigs are on the horizon for The Window Right, around the UK and on an upcoming Scandinavian tour, so look them up before the album comes out because nothing replaces the experience of live music.
| Side A – BOW SONG
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Side B – GREENDIVIDEDBYBLUE
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New York City, more than any other place I’ve ever lived or visited, isn’t so much an objective location as it is a flexible concept. My New York isn’t Your New York, and it’s definitely not His or Her New York, or god forbid, That Guy’s New York. Most people carve a comfortable space for themselves that’s situated between the extremes of Gotham City’s criminal dystopia, Sex & The City’s 5th ave glitz, and GG Allin’s East Village nest of debauchery. Somewhere in this mess of fictional bubbles is an objective portrait of the city at large that accounts for the millions of people struggling to reconcile their fantastic projections of life in the big city with the reality that most of us wake up, go to work, do some shit, go home, eat some shit, and go to bed. We value good art as a culture because it pulls us just a little bit outside this reality and into the liminal space that separates the daily grind from what we always thought life would be like “when we grew up.” That’s good art, but truly great art keeps us there long enough to grasp whole handfuls of fantasy. It’s a precious thing. The dream isn’t to escape the metropolis but to feel like we’re living inside some highly stylized version of it that could only exist in someone’s head, and for but a moment at that. Filmmakers have it easy, they can literally mold a world and present it to viewers, and writers have hundreds of pages to describe and expand upon their thoughts, but songwriters have a meager 2 to 5 minutes to do the same, and so pop songs seldom grant listeners this level of creative freedom. But when I hear Hank and Pigeon, I imagine two people, living in a New York that’s not mine and can never be mine; a New York in which pigeons become trapped inside apartment walls, in which people stand on opposite street corners talking on the phone, in which songs are written like letters to a friend, and in which all of this can be boiled down into a simple melody.
Morgan Heringer and Alex Wernquest hardly knew one another when they began the odd practice of songwriting as correspondence. Wernquest had a background in blues guitar; Heringer in jazz vocal music and composition. The story of Hank and Pigeon tows the line between truth and fiction in so much as the truth is so perfect that it’s hardly believeable. When Bob Dylan first came to New York City he claimed to have been born from a Cherokee mother who abandoned him at birth with a traveling circus coming through New Mexico, so compared to that it’s believeable, but it nevertheless reads like the kind of urban fairytale that I’d expect to resurface as the plot of a quirky Swedish art film or animated short at Sundance. Heringer and Wernquest had played together in a band, but not the kind of band that sleeps in a touring van together–rather, the kind that hangs out every once in a while to record and play the occasional gig. They happened to be on the phone discussing one such gig when they met at opposite street corners in Manhattan. It would have been a simple matter to hang up and continue the conversation in person, but the two stood there in plain sight, talking. Add rain and replace Wernquest with John Cusack and you’ve got yourself a PG-13 romanic comedy. The incident, however cute in retrospect, went unnoticed by Wernquest until he showed up to an open-mic at the Sidewalk Cafe. Heringer took the stage, and as Wernquest sat listening he heard a line float by that went something like, “The things you say to me on the other side of the street.” Heringer had taken their conversation, or rather the situation surrounding it, and turned it into a song. But it wasn’t just a song. It was a song to him, a song for him, and an invitation of sorts. Wernquest did the only thing he could–he wrote a song back. And Heringer wrote a song back. And so they became Hank and Pigeon.
Hank and Pigeon is two voices, very much separate but interminably attune to one another. Each song is identifiably a Hank or Pigeon composition, usually according to the principle vocalist. There’s a consistency to their songs, even though each writes with a wholly different background and approach. Heringer’s songs are often modal, with chords expressive of her background in jazz. She writes on the ukulele, which as a relatively new instrument in her repertoire, affords her the opportunity to experiment with chords and harmonies that wouldn’t necessarily occur to her otherwise. Wernquest’s background in blues draws him towards more basic harmonic structures with an emphasis on the interaction between vocals and accompaniment. The variety of sentiments and moods that the two are capable of creating is extraordinary, and since each lends his or her finishing grace to the other’s compositions, the album reads like letters written by one and edited by the other such that both voices are always present but in varying roles. While sitting together during an open mic, the two began jotting down ideas and phrases, just little mental snippits. Unplanned, each went home and wrote a song based on their collective brain droppings that evening. Heringer wrote “Feathers and Fur,” the B-side of this digital 7-inch, and Wernquest wrote “When Will We Become,” the closing track on their phenomenal donation-optional album available on Bandcamp. One listen will tell you that theirs is a special kind of collaboration, different from the great songwriting pairs that come to mind, but somehow also better. Recurring themes run through their songs, most of them shared stories between Heringer and Wernquest that through the course of the album implant themselves upon listeners. As these little quirks reveal themselves to us, we get closer and closer to Hank and Pigeon, until we become a part of the discussion, watching their conversation unfold while taking part in it ourselves.
A-side “In the Ridge” introduces us to the pigeon character. Heringer and Wernquest sing, “I’m a pigeon and I’m living in the ridge between the walls.” It’s born of a true story, in which Wernquest consistently woke to strange sounds within the walls of his apartment, and imagined that such cacophany could only be caused by a pigeon flying around inside. From an academic perspective, this whole scenario situates Wernquest on the edge of a fictional Kafka-esque New York in which pigeons actually do nest in apartment walls. It’s a crazy alternate reality that I so desperately want to be true, and “In the Ridge” makes it so for a beautiful two and a half minutes. The song opens with a 5 (and a half) year old’s rendition of the song, which he renders as “whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion, tooshie tooshie, tooshie tooshie, whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion, whoopee cushion.” The lyrics pick up considerably in scope and depth after that, but I really like something about starting a song with a child’s voice. When most artists cull vocal samples they look for snippits that can be construed as sinister, like The Books sampling a deadbeat dad ignoring his child, or Neutral Milk Hotel sampling a kid putting down punk music, but here the sample reminds me that sound is sound. A beautiful song is essentially the same thing as a whoopie cushion, and it’s useful to be reminded of that. It’s also nice to hear it from a 5 year old and not John Cage. “In the Ridge” is a Wernquest composition, and alternates between two main chords for the entire song. Yet somehow, the vocals are layered over this sparse accompaniment to give the impression of fullness, completeness, and near-perfection. Wernquest’s restraint on the guitar is commendable, and his style of playing is just casual enough to be truly endearing. The recording itself is part of the magic, done live on a TEAC 1/4″ reel to reel in a single 12 hour marathon session that went well into the morning hours, during which Heringer and Wernquest recorded all 9 of the songs that appear on their album. Wernquest explained to me that this was the first time he’s ever made music with someone and had no idea what it was supposed to sound like. There was no formula for Hank and Pigeon, no musical template. In fact, they never really had any intentions of forming a proper band. It just happened, and the result is something so natural that it’s almost impossible to hear without feeling some deep and abiding attachment to the music. As a lyricist, Wernquest is among the best we’ve featured on Ampeater. His words read like a pastiche of modern literary greats, mixed with the surreal experience of living with 8.5 million other New Yorkers. Take a look:
Woke up this morning
Sky was falling
Walls were cracking
Tumbling down
Was startled by the sound
Crack in the window
Hit my pillow
While red rain was
Pourin down
My brain spilled on the ground
I heard a moon man
Brushing his hand
On the glass and
Plaster cracked
Was flat on my back
Now I’m a pigeon
And I’m living
In the ridge
Between the walls
Hoping the plaster falls.
In so much as the main figure in the song actually transforms into a pigeon, it’s hard not to recall The Metamorphoses, and the general expression of Kafka’s utterly disorienting and yet somehow comforting prose style. It’s magical realism at its finest, and it recalls the aforementioned liminal space (in this case, literally as well as figuratively, given that the pigeon is trapped inside the wall) between an objective reality and the one that exists in the songs of Hank and Pigeon.
B-side “Feathers and Fur” is a showcase for Heringer’s extraordinary voice. There’s something about it that immediately dispells any thoughts of “girl with a ukulele” syndrome, an oft lamented part of any open mic performance. Heringer is above all else highly trained, and her emphasis on precision separates her from the masses of songwriters that have also chosen this particular instrumental combination. I’m most struck by her control of each vocal phrase, as she ever so slightly tapers the closing note without sacrificing sound quality or pitch. If there’s any effort required to produce such a natural tone, it’s almost impossible to hear it in Heringer’s performance. The tune opens with a ukulele, cycling through a chord progression that’s so far off the beaten path it needs snowshoes. And yet, it benefits from the same simplicity that makes “In the Ridge” truly memorable. As a listener I’m swept along by the inconstant motion of the song, like an old music box playing some long lost waltz subject to oddly timed variations in tempo as its rusty cogs struggle to keep pace. It’s a song that belongs to the night–both written and recorded after midnight, and it has a patience and calmness that reminds me why it’s worth staying up until the day’s frantic movements have faded away. The relative quiet of the early morning hours really does work wonders.
It’s difficult to determine at times whether Pigeon is being used as a pseudonym for Wernquest or perhaps refers to an actual bird. The wonderfully playful line “Don’t break your clavicle crushing acorns in the park.” suggests the latter, while “Pigeon if you’ll be my muse then I will be the best friend a boy could ever hope to never see” (a terrific line, by the way) provides equally compelling evidence for the former. Moreover, Heringer directly references “In the Ridge” in the song’s last line: “And the walls are slowly caving in.” The pigeon is ultimately untouchable, a dream pigeon that exists only in the mythology of Hank and Pigeon, and any reference to it duly functions as a placeholder for Wernquest as a person. There aren’t many bands that have successfully developed such a complex set of allusions on their first album, and I doubt there are any bands that have done so without conscientiously setting out to do so. But Hank and Pigeon evolved as the natural outgrowth of two creative spirits interacting through their art. It’s not at all contrived; this is about as real as it gets. Even on my most jaded days, when the monotony of existing’s worn a hole in the fabric of my imagination, Hank and Pigeon somehow remind me that I can still daydream, that I can still imagine a world in which pigeons burst through walls, or in which every cell phone conversation takes place on opposite street corners. So put on Hank and Pigeon, and if it strikes you just right, head downstairs, out to the corner, and give someone a call. Maybe they’re closer than you think.
| Side A – In The Ridge
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Side B – Feathers and Fur
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