Matt Mehlan has been making Skeletons records under various guises for about 20 years, supported by Girl-Faced Boys and Kings of All Cities and other cohorts, and kicking up a surreal and polyrhythmic racket that lands somewhere in the vicinity of experimental pop, afro-beat, free jazz, blues and acid folk. That sounds like a big neighborhood, and in fact, it is; lots of bands get dubbed “unclassifiable” and Skeletons is one of the few that truly qualifies. This one sticks out in the discography, though, for a couple of reasons — first because Mehlan is working more or less alone and second because it is so murky and downcast.
These songs are strung out and elliptical with long pauses between phrases and echoing empty spaces amid off-kilter jangles. The title track, the disc’s first, creaks to life like a recalcitrant machine, cracks of wood, an ambient hum, the loose flurries of detuned strings rising and receding amid blares of static. Even when it gets going, the song sound like a blues that lost its way, its melancholy phrases so far apart that they have trouble connecting to one another. Mehlan’s voice, too, is breathtakingly sad, listless and rising in volume only to observe, “Lonely, lonely, nobody knows me.” There’s a sample of Andy Kaufman asking an audience not to laugh — “I’m not trying to be funny right now”—which makes you wonder if it’s just too much to ask when you expect artists to perform right now, if there’s too much catastrophe around them.
“World Famous Original” pierces the miasma, with a driving, restless, rhythm-heavy underpinning. It makes you realize how much you miss Mehlan’s inventive way with percussion, which made even his strangest songs seem like a party. The song is about the way that evil wins, starting with a rat who gets a whole pizza and moving on to a fascinatingly ambivalent verse about a snake. “I knew a snake who was starving/came across a nest in the garden/one of the eggs was cracked/one of the eggs was cracked/snake wanted to transcend/Then she got hungry,” Mehlan croons, adding, “What would you do if you knew what was good for you?” He frames this uneasy observation in a wandering lick, very possibly performed on the 17-tone Shtar, an instrument invented by Shinkoyo’s Peter Blasser which features prominently on If the Cat Come Back. It sounds like a guitar, but from another planet, playing blues and folk in tones that don’t quite scan with what we expect.
The lyrics to “The Edge” and a brief musical quotation from “Lonesome Valley” suggest that Mehlan has lost someone he loves recently, and indeed, the whole album has the numbed-out vibe of recent mourning, of bumbling through the things you did before and trying to make sense of the emptiness. And, sure, lots of us feel that way right now. It makes perfect sense. Yet it’s hard to get through. The album is shapeless and full of dread. It is, perhaps, a very skilled representation of this loosely organized, discordant time, of the looming sense of disaster and the persistence of loss, but it’s hard to listen to all the way through. Be ready to be sad and discouraged and a little bored.
Breath Heart Skin was initially presented as a 21-speaker installation at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, but it translates well to two speakers at home, a testament to the mastering and to the power of the original material. While the press release speaks of “piercingly high frequencies”, “grotesque, abusive atmospheres” and “brutal power”, there’s no reason to be alarmed; these five pieces fall…
