Sky Furrows — Reflect and Oppose (Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube)
Poetry and rock music don’t always mix very well, but Albany’s Sky Furrows have found a fertile ground between battering post-punk groove and knotty lyric.
It helps that the poetry is above average. Karen Schoemer has made her mark on the page as well as behind the microphone, contributing verse to journals Hobo Camp Review, La Presa and Up the River and decanting it live in front of Sky Furrows and Jaded Azurites, a duo with Mike Watt. She’s also been a music journalist with bylines in the New York Times and Newsweek.
Here, her lyrics have a rough cut conversational quality, the words themselves well-worn with use (no thesaurus required) but arranged in startling, vivid images. The opening track “Shopping Bags” considers happiness from all angles. It opens with a couple posing for wedding pictures, not on the day they’re married but earlier, commemorating a happy event that hasn’t happened yet. The narrator passes by accidentally, detouring to avoid the photo bomb, sardonic and removed. She herself has just had the consumer’s pleasure of finding decent stuff in the free box, classic paperbacks, a bike helmet, teacups.
“I was excited to have all this stuff until a minute ago. Until a minute ago, I felt like I’d really scored,” she observes, casually nailing the transience of shopper’s high. Other images flash by, moms smoking pot on a stroller outing, women in hijabs conversing, the ordinary stuff of human connection. The narrator gauges her difficult relationship with these scenes in a verse that goes “Happy people are intrusive, parents, families, any person who has another/I hate them all, yet I feel dependent on them as if any chance I have for happiness rides upon their backs.” It moves quick, this verse. It takes on no unnecessary weight or sentiment. And yet it gets at something deep and resonant about modern disconnection.
The words take up the foreground, but they wouldn’t stick as well without the music, which is spare and mobile and full of sharp edges. The band shares members with psychedelic Burnt Hills—Eric Hardiman, Mike Griffin and Phil Donnelly—but their work here is tight and rhythmically disciplined. It twitches and shudders under the verses, shadowy and ominous. The sound of it reminds me most of the no wave sounds: Thalia Zedek’s band E, The Contortions, Lydia Lunch and Retrovirus.
It comes together best in the blistering “Koba Grozny,” with its lurching guitar riff, its punched out, periodically explosive drumming, its torrid blare of feedback. The music is always on the verge of busting out—you can feel the threat and release of it building—but it remains in check. The lyrics are similarly violent, recounting waves and waves of purges following the battle of Grozny, with the refrain “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” It’s a bracing piece of work, dry eyed and realistic, but also psychedelically vivid, and it hits hard right now with war dragging on in Ukraine and flaring hot in Gaza and threatening to break out in all manner of places.
Reflect and Oppose isn’t an easy album, but you won’t forget it soon.
The Albany Pine Bush Preserve, The Albany Historical Society, and the communities of Albany and Guilderland need our help to keep development out of the fragile Pine Bush ecosystem! Come join us for a night of music and giveaways to help raise money! All proceeds will benefit Save the Pine Bush in their fight against the Pyramid Company.
Bands:
• THINNER FRIENDS
• SKY FURROWS
• CHIEF
• ETERNAL CRIMES
Artists Donating Work to be Raffled:
• Abbey Saunders
• Whitney Lüdtke
• Debra Lee
• Alex Waters
• Portia E Ps
• James Leshkevich
• Shelley Scout Darling
• Amandrake Michael
• Nico Jordan
• Rachel Dreimiller
• Naomi Van Deinse
• Heather McFadden
• Grace Nichols
• Lynne Jackson
Additional raffle items include:
• $100 gift certificate to Parasol Tattoo Company
• $100 gift certificate to Lark Street Tattoo
>> $5 suggested donation at the door <<
Doors at 7
Music starts at 8
