#harmoneering

[humblefalconer-blog]

HARMONEERING 4— LCD Soundsystem, "This is Happening" • Do you ever find yourself worrying far too much about how you're a twenty-eight year old living with his mom in a town entirely too warm in the summer months and you haven't really done anything with your life and your overweight and incredibly self-conscious about it and so you don't always dance in front of others because deep down you believe more than likely you look ridiculous doing so causing an existential rift in the fabric of your being because you can dance and you like doing it? Yeah, me neither. And maybe neither does James Murphy. I think that might be kind of what This is Happening is about. It's also I think maybe about existential dread. That's kind of the feeling I get when I listen to it late at night hoping to syphon a bit of its energy as I drive down the road, thinking about whether James Murphy would want to hang out with me. Or whether David Foster Wallace listen to early LCD before he killed himself, and whether the record maybe made his life a little bit more colorful in his last gray days, which I imagine they were. I didn't know DFW, but he feels like a friend to this day. So does James. I think maybe they would both have grinned along with me as I grinned my life away because I can absolutely get down on my two feet and I will absolutely steal yourself girlfriend if you're not careful and she catches me confidently cutting a rug a mere seven sexually saturated feet away. I think they would have thought to themselves, 'this is right.' And it probably would have been.

[humblefalconer-blog]

HARMONEERING 3——Dan Deacon, “Bromst” •

Sometimes migraines can be day enders. Sometimes they lead to naps. Naps are great. Dreaming when napping is great. Sometimes I dream about odd shapes and people, and wonderful colors that spin and collapse into sound. Bromst is like that kind of dream. The kind of dream that has you sweating profusely, drenching your recently washed bed linens, launching you upright in the middle of the night sort of feverishly and you awake, finding yourself folding dirty laundry from your laundry basket, stacking it neatly on the bed, humming gently to yourself incoherent melodies that more than make sense to you in your dreamland stupor. The kind of dream that answers the profound questions of existence in ironic ways, but you can’t initially trust the advice because it appeared to you in a dream and who the hell did Sigmund Freud think he was anyway, so you contemplate the vision in the back of your mind for hours upon end, sleeping and waking to the thought of it and then one day you impulsively buy a one way ticket to the Ivory Coast and it feels like crack-cocaine, the same sort of high you received when you still bought drugs from your ex-girlfriend, and you don’t tell your neighbors where you’re going, leaving the living room lamp glowing like a sentinel in the dark, paying your bills months in advance so no one knows to search for your body, which will eventually wash up on the shore of a small coastal town, and the investigators suspect no struggle upon examination and later declare your death an “accident”, although it was no accident because you truly sought out an end to all your troubles, and you sang a sad tune all the way to the bottom of the ocean until the melody turned optimistic, like the way you feel encountering an ex-lover and seeing her smile you at in that way again, and all of a sudden your home in the deafness of bliss for one moment more before the sea water fills your lungs and the agony almost sets you free and you acknowledge your place in the world for the time and all of a sudden with the definitiveness of a rapidly closing door toward a flickering candle atop a mantle you’re gone in a smolder, never to speak an unkind word again. And there’s peace in it, because for whatever reason we were never supposed to hold fast to this life and before your breath gives out you realize this, though maybe there is a bit of regret still inside of you for letting it go, but you do so anyway to reveal a brightness so vibrant it cleanses the whole of you and you need not want any longer.

[humblefalconer-blog]

HARMONEERING 2——The Antlers, "Hospice" • Life can be like an old man, all craggy, concrete faced, and broadly chested, even with his unyielding back issues that leave him hunched over when he sits every once in a while, one arm often resting on his knee seeming as if he has found real intrigue in what his guest has said, though in reality he's alleviating the stress forced upon his back, who fought in world wars and commands respect but who crashes into his stone brick mail box and calls the police after hiding his car in his garage and covering it up even though he's already had two DUIs and this should potentially seal the deal for his driving ability, and as police ask to see his car upon arrival, he asks how that's relevant, because clearly some drunk kids have hot-rod'ed their vehicle in to his mailbox and he is the victim here, though they insist as one of them proceeds to radio in a possible search warrant. Life can also be like a young girl, pale as a ghost wrapped in a white linen window skirt on a cold winter's day, the snow piling up from up drift come all the way from Buffalo, even as strange it may be this early in the season, patiently waiting as best she knows how in her small inexperienced world through the torture of her phantom limb simultaneously insisting it's not there and chiming as if a high power firework had been lit and detonated within the calcium of her ill fated and weakening bones, the blood thickening and luke warm, hope and perspective long since vanished into the strong-willed and pitch black night like a noble vestige the lords of old would reckon back to with fond revery. Life can even be like a boy of five tightening his grip on the glimmering balloon in the dead summer scorch, radiating in the joy that such a magnificent marvel of magic will bring if one is still innocent enough to consider how religious a floating rubber oval filled with simulated breathe tied to a string can be, only to be crushed by the weight of the panic that sets in when that item of worship is lost with the slip of the fingers, it to float beyond our wildest imaginations, we gather, only to deflate above a tropical wünderland where the tribals are ten feet tall, terror eyed and carry long spears decorated between battles with the heads of their enemies, and the weeping for renewal is endless and forever traumatic, until we forget what it means to feel and trust in our later days after being thrown so thoroughly in the mud of desperation and despair. Life can be like that. Hospice can be that too. But the reward of endurance through the misery of our time is only bested by the journey we're taken on, the people who are our fellow pilgrims straining toward the voyage ahead, trusting that to see each other again further through the years is guaranteed, and the pain that builds us up for the glory to be revealed in us one day when we will at last be reunited with our truest, healthiest selves, fully intact with every corresponding bone, whole and satisfied with its placement and psychical reality.

[humblefalconer-blog]

HARMONEERING 1——Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest" • Do you remember the sweaters that Cosby wore? Before the rape. Although I don’t know when the rapes started. So before we knew and we were still young and his sweaters made us feel warm. That’s how I feel about Grizzly Bear’s extraordinary album “Veckatimest”. Let me be perfectly clear, before the rapes. It’s an awful thing that son of bitch did. I feel uncomfortable even using the reference, but damn, look at that album cover. If that ain’t the Cosby Sweater to end all Cosby Sweaters. And the album is just warm. Like nestling up to a campfire in the bitter cold of winter, bundled and wool-hatted. Frost on the beard of a long journeying, and long delayed fur trader in 1902 Siberia, the thaw reaching his face, granting his blood optimal flow once again. He grins as he remembers a loved one. That’s how warm Veckatimest is. Real talk. And it’s a necessary album in a strange, vociferous, lamentable world. It’s colorful and eclectic; an album you could play on a road trip with your parents potentially. Hopefully your parents are hella tight. I trust they are.