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BY GRAHAM RAE
Memory is an oddly mercurial thing. Objects in life’s rearview mirror are closer (or further away) than they appear. Amazing maze of mental smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand in mind; events we remember as having happened one way never happened that way at all. Our recollections of people and places and faces grow faded and more hazy and unreliable as we get older; thoughts of friends and enemies alike lose definition and drift and disappear into the midst of the mists of ever-flowing time, the tiny image-parts of themselves they left imprinted in our memory fading to vagrant wisps of mute monochrome (un)importance as they grow further away and weaker and smaller by the day.
That’s life.
All we are is neurons and synapses firing, a subjective stream of consciousness, a self-deluded collection of confused arbitrary memories, and ultimately these briefly-flaring-vivid-as-a-sensational-volcano-then-dimming-forever moments mean as much or as little as we want (or don’t want) them to. John Pierson, guitarist, vocalist and main lyricist for Chicago acoustic pop-punk outfit Even in Blackouts, knows this simple-yet-complex fact implicitly, and it is the examination of memory, the tricks the mind plays and how we deal with our life’s events that forms the main theme of the band’s album ‘zeitgeist’s echo’ (lack of capitalization of name is the band’s own).
Even in Blackouts’ second full-length release (after 2001’s ‘Myths & Imaginary Magicians’) is a much more musically rounded and thematically accomplished work than the band’s preceding work, their established driven acoustic sound extended by an eclectic selection of eccentric sonic cameos by cello, piano, accordion and saxophone. Overlaying all this is choir-educated lead singer Lizzie Eldredge’s crystal clear life-filled vibrant wailings, carrying us with deceptive ease over stormy troubled introspective lyrical terrain, one writer’s search for meaning in a meaningless world, a search he knows to be ultimately pointless but still undertakes because, well, what the hell else is there to do anyway?
Above all, ‘zeitgeist’s echo’ is a haunted album. Tattered fragmentary ghosts of old lovers and dead friends drift formlessly and lazily between the tracks, unquiet shades of the past rattling their chains in the confused, tormented minds of the song protagonist(s) during the running time. The cover illustrates this perfectly, if in a somewhat obscure way: a group of mourners hold a séance round a medium who spews ectoplasm into the air above them, which was a flowing viscous liquid (faked up from cheesecloth or netting covered in luminous paint) that supposedly streamed from the orifices of a medium during their contact with the ‘other side’ during the Spiritualist craze of the early 20th century. The songs here represent ectoplasm of a kind, supernatural recording material from the personal past conjured up by the channeling medium of band-as-medium. The rest of the artwork reflects this stark introspective melancholic autumnal mood too, with a selection of photos of ruined houses and cemeteries, orchestrating a concerted gothic symphony of decay and death.
“It’s the weight of Stagnation
the weight of fear
which paralyzes me for days at a time
Looking at the world so indifferently
Waiting for an unforeseen moment
to carry me away”
‘zeitgeist’s echo’ opens with the gentle, thoughtful track (merely Eldredge’s voice and an acoustic guitar) ‘Unforeseen’, whose lyrics are reproduced above. Its negative vocabulary – ‘Stagnation,’(Pierson’s capitalization, as is any other unusual capitalization to add emphasis during the rest of the wordwork) ‘fear,’ ‘paralyzes,’ ‘indifferently’ – sets the scene and tone for the album, a confused intensely introspective existential journey of (mis)understanding to be undertaken during the course of the running time. The events-numbed protagonist is waiting for something to happen to them, with this intellectually galvanizing force being provided by the arrival of the rest of the record.
In ‘The Threshold Opening’ a door is heard opening, a creaking bridge to the main body of the album, and a guitar can be heard tuning up, readying itself for the internal journey ahead.
“When I thought of all those incidences then, when I thought of all
these happenings then I was thinking of them now
It gives resonance those hours I spend contemplating the affects of resonance
Dear resonance, is the distance real?
There’s Guilt of The Past that is so past it’s still present in its
horridness, in the humor applied to ridicule, to keep what’s dreadful in the distance.
Histories of figurines so fresh in the mind of babes who were never
witnesses but must relive the consequences in the fiber of their day to day.
When I thought of all those incidences then, when I thought of all
these happenings then I was thinking of them now
It gives resonance those hours I spend contemplating the affects of resonance.
Dear resonance, is the distance real?
Talk of war and actions that resemble such and I dance in my club
with the guilt of my apathy shaking this indifference.
And then I hear Lennon’s Imagine and the generations around me
waltz in mockery and irony. I want some distance. It hurts to know
history’s closeness can blow a hole right through your bile without showing its face.
The times may be constantly changing, Bob. But what does that mean to resonance?
Dear resonance, is the distance real?
But what does it mean when everything, everything, everything
and all the particles in between become “A long time ago”.”
When the door opens and the intellectual winds of change sweep in to blow away the psychological paralysis cobwebs, ‘Dear Resonance’, a storm in the eye of the calm and one of the album’s most powerful and up-tempo songs, smashes rudely in. It’s an examination of the ever-present past, whose effects we carry around in us all the time, and its disturbing inescapable inestimable encroachment into the present. It’s lyrically very complex in its questioning, pained, existential tone, and Pierson’s background as a playwright and writer of fiction come strongly to the fore here, as in the rest of the album.
The tone and presentation of his lyrics here (leaving out slang and expletives for a fairly traditional use of English) echo those of Screeching Weasel’s (of whom he was a member, as John ‘Jughead’) 1999 punk-as-self-administered-cathartic-therapy release ‘Emo’, which served up singer/lyricist Ben Weasel/Foster’s lyrics not so much as a straight verse/chorus/verse word-scheme, but more as a series of what almost constitute short essays, mostly eschewing rhyming couplets for more serious intent of purpose, as Pierson does here.
Interesting to note that one of the songs on Even in Blackouts’ first release, ‘Love Cynical Style’, was initially written as a short play and was adapted and adopted as a song. His writing styles in different mediums bleed and blend into each other, and can’t be easily separated, making for an idiosyncratic, often asexual lyrical worldview with much more depth (and much darker) than is usually present in the pop-punk genre the band ostensibly is a part of.
Picture this for an analogy: a man (though it could be a woman – their sex is never specified) standing looking at one of those elevator mirrors where the ever-decreasing-in-size reflection extends off into measurable infinity, and eventually they stops knowing exactly where he stops and the dejected reflection starts. Or maybe they’re both one and the same thing, a coalescing coalition of shadow and substance and cause and effect and black and white and body and mind and past and present and future and matter and anti-matter, doesn’t matter because you can’t escape the never-ever-ending effects of our past stories and histories on our present and future. If we had known this fact we might have been a bit more careful who and what we set about ourselves when and where we did so. Why? Because who or what we did or was done to us might well torture us for the rest of our life.
The protagonist of ‘Dear Resonance’ knows this fundamental fact only too well, and it’s troubling them, tearing apart their peace of mind piece by piece. They are possessed by past events of their life and want some distance from them, but never seem to get any further away from what’s bothering them no matter how hard they try – and they never will. At best all they can ever come up with is some sort of makeshift modus operandi to learn how to live with themselves, emergency sanity rations, some sort of soothing psychological balm to stop them being driven insane by their thoughtlessly unceasing thoughts.
“When I thought of these incidents then, when I thought of all those happenings then I was thinking of them now.”
And sometimes the past seems so far away, the people figurine-like, rendered tiny and impotent by time and distance, and at other times the passé impasse past lives and breathes and dances and screams right behind our protagonist’s eyes, so close they can touch and taste it and wonder if there is actually indeed any distance from the event(s) at all. And thinking about the ways things resonate throughout personal and impersonal history makes them resonate and reverberate all the more, and it’s a kind of mental (anguish) Catch 22. And not only do they have their own microcosmic cosmos of demons to battle, but they are affected by macrocosmic world events too, war and famine and flood and genocide and politics and on and on and on and on and on and on and on until they have no idea who or what they (we) are anymore. It’s hardly fair but hey – nobody said life was going to be, right?
“There’s Guilt of the Past that is so past that it’s still present in its horridness, in the humor applied to ridicule, to keep what’s dreadful in the distance.”
Humor is a necessity to maintain any level of sanity in an insane world these daze – any clown can tell you that. Sick jokes are a great release and relief for the simple single fact that at any time we can be assailed by thoughts of how vile an entity the (in)human race can be: death camps, rape camps, eugenics, religious fundamentalism, prostitution, child molestation, drug addiction...the list of human attributes that make you want to eat a gun goes on and on. I mean, who wants to be part of a species that could perpetrate something on its own kind like the Holocaust? Sometimes being a rat or roach would be a more palatable option. But humans have done this stuff and we still have to deal with this knowledge as part of the race, like it or not, through no fault of our own; laughing and screaming sometimes come from the same psychological defense mechanism area in our brains.
“Talk of war and actions that resemble such and I dance in my club with the guilt of my apathy shaking this indifference. And then I hear Lennon’s Imagine and the generations around me waltz in mockery and irony. I want some distance.”
Coming on the heels of talking about the effects war and violent events have on us, mentioning the unworkable utopian ideal song ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon almost seems like another sick joke. Lennon’s Heaven is an anti-Heaven where the human race foregoes race and religious hate and bigotry and everybody lives as one, a Christian ideal that will never come to pass. Nice sentiment, but completely impossible. It’s a kind of psychological escape/defense mechanism here too though, almost as a mockery of the protagonist’s thoughts, but music obviously is very important to them, an escape velocity medium for understanding or escape when things get too close for comfort.
The numbness and indifference and shapeless guilt at inaction presented here is a very contemporary mindset, symptomatic of the Western world and its increasingly nullified, bombarded-by-electronic imagery thought processes. And real things like war cease to have any meaning anymore to people only peripherally affected by them, and Lennon’s wistful wishful anthem rouses the protagonist slightly from their sleep-in-life. Before they probably drop right back off into blissful numbrain slumber again.
One thing though. Pierson mentioning Lennon and Dylan in this song is a somewhat risky proposition. By mentioning such critically feted classic tracks as ‘Imagine’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, he is showing where his songwriting allegiances lie, using specific songs and their contents to make a point within the context of his own lyrics, but it also comes perilously close to Pierson placing himself in an esteemed pantheon of epoch-chronicling protest songwriters he really has no place in. Because the person on this record is protesting about nothing so much as his/their own confusion as opposed to having the wider social context (except insofar as the listener can identify with the concepts being presented), that Dylan’s and Lennon’s work encompassed.
“But what does it all mean when everything, everything, everything and all the particles in between become “A long time ago.”
What does it all mean? Well, ultimately it means nothing at all, because nothing truly means anything. The human race is a genetic accident supposedly scientifically unraveling itself like an old worn flesh comfort blanket, extending in all directions everywhere at once and any search for meaning can only be superficial and subjective and incomplete; one man’s meaning is another man’s meandering or madness. That’s just the way it is, the way it always has been and always will be. Trying to find meaning in our lives is like trying to describe the ever-evolving shape of clouds blown across the sky on a windy day, and words are a very inexact medium to try and capture the essence of anything. But writers still try anyway. Cos as I put it earlier on: what the hell else is there to do anyway?
Well, maybe move on from ‘Dear Resonance’ and discuss the fact that three of the next four songs (whose lyrics I am not going to reproduce because I am only discussing certain songs and themes here) on the album all deal, by accident or design or accidental design, with people haunted by past lovers or dead friends.
‘In A Letter Never Sent’ (written in fine rhyming couplets by Brad Lipman – especially worthy of note is the great line “I couldn’t help but think I was only wasting ink and I probably needed to freshen up my drink”) is about somebody who has written a letter to their now-gone lover asking them for a second chance at love, assailed by memories of them, but they ultimately will never post off the letter, because they know there’s no point in doing so.
‘If I Never See You Again, That May Still Be...Just A Little Bit Too Soon (But I Love You Anyway)’, the long-titled next song, lyrics by Pierson, once again presents us with a confused, ambivalent protagonist. Possessed by thoughts of a dear departed (yet also reviled) lover, they muse over getting back with the questionable person in question, but know that to do so can only lead to conflict and chaos. But it’s such a tempting thought...no it isn’t...yes it is...no it isn’t...and their problem is never resolved to their satisfaction. Lines like “Spontaneity hid our thoughts and passion ignored the truth” link this song thematically to the later song ‘Curtain’, also about troubled lovers.
‘One Fine Day’ is one fine cover of the old Carol King song about a young woman, dumped by her adored lover, who kids herself that her man will come back to her at some point in the future. But it wouldn’t be wise for her to hold her breath whilst waiting for this.
‘Quote From A Respected Smart Ass’, the next offering, isn’t a song at all. It’s a quote from Groucho Marx: “Your eyes, your throat, your lips...everything about you reminds me of you. Except you. How do you account for that?” Backwards-looking at a lover who isn’t/wasn’t what they seem(ed) to be.
‘Schadenfreude’ is the next song. It has only one word in it: the titular one. Taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others; hmmmm. To be perfectly honest, it beats me what it’s doing here. Sure it has some meaning I’m just not intelligent (or German) enough to grasp.
‘Song For Remembrance’, the next song about somebody haunted by and mourning their dead friend, has rhyming lyrics by Brad Lipman once again. Thematically it fits right in with the not-exactly-cheery whole.
‘The Writer’ (starting off with a lazy piano roll reminiscent of the old Beatles/Lennon tune ‘Let It Be’) is a song also included on the 2003 Even in Blackouts EP ‘Foreshadows On The Wall’, though redone here to a degree. Lyrically oblique and surreal (interesting to note the image of ‘needles with teeth’ – Screeching Weasel had a song about nightmare needles too – drug reference perhaps?), it paints us an impressionistic portrait of a writer (oddly enough, given the glaring clue in the title) surrounded by his own strange syllabic creations, and it has to be said that some of it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. “He takes his young into his hands and folds it into a little square and slips it in his sock” anyone?
Didn’t think so.
At this point the door which opened before ‘Dear Resonance’ closes in ‘The Threshold Closing’. This is a demarcation zone wherein the events from door opening to door closing can be examined as part of a whole by the writer in question in this album. To an idiosyncratic sea-shanty-sounding cheery accordion wheeze the writer, left to wander his long dark night of the soul by himself again and contemplate preceding events, is berated (in Italian for some reason!) to get away from the door, to make himself scarce. ‘Darling You’ follows this ejection of the self-seeker from the album’s event horizon, a lyrical construction of self-lacerating confusion and introspection and apathy before segueing into ‘Consequences’, another one of the record’s main songs thematically.
“I am waiting. Yes I’m waiting. I am waiting for myself. You see?
Every once in a, every once in a while I’ll arrive with some sort of,
some sort of information. And at times I haven’t the faintest hope,
there’s no methodology for piecing it together.
A choice as simple as what path to take home transforms into an
edified marker in my identity. What will I become? I haven’t the
faintest hope of piecing it together, of making it better.
Sometimes I just have to laugh at the things that I say, and the things I do.
Laughing at how deep I think I’ve become.
Sometimes I just have to laugh at the things I say, and the things I do.
And sometimes I just have to laugh at the things I say, and the things I do.
Laughing at how illogical I think, I know I have become. I have become.
It’s not a pleasant laugh like a guffaw or a tattily.
It’s hurtful and relentless.
So relentless.
I need time to sort through the mess (repeats many times)
I need time.
At which point, a word on the protagonist on this record. This person (people) is (are) really indivisible (to me) from John Pierson himself (at least in the words he writes). He has said that with Even in Blackouts he is attempting to create something new instead of living off his old reputation with Screeching Weasel, an attempt to create something in zeitgeist mode instead of living in the zeitgeist’s echo (ie his career with his previous band; hence the album’s title) with unoriginal material. He has also been exploring how much of his music/writing was created out of a need for a kind of artistic therapy, and this album does definitely explore those themes.
Pierson will never solve his artistic conundrums because he is living what is essentially the writer’s eternal dichotomy: to write about events you have to recall them and analyze them, which is not a state conducive to forgetting about things you don’t want to remember anymore, especially when you consign them to the page for all eternity. So the need for self-expression and any kind of art therapy, and the need for therapy because of art, is a never-ending ever-decreasing circle, always feeding off itself, eating its own tail. Pierson writes because he is a writer and he has to write, and will never finish: all art is a work in progress (or regress back to base sources and resources and inspirations) and thus, by definition, can never be finished except by the death of the artist.
And this need to write, to process overwhelming information (and things that have happened in the preceding songs), is explored in ‘Consequences’. The person in the song is waiting impatiently for his own comprehension of events he has undergone (or people he knows have undergone) to hit him, a longed-for-and-needed understanding which is only occasionally glimpsed and grasped in artistic form, ie writings (his ‘methodology for piecing it together’) on whatever subject he has in mind. And he never truly fully seems to understand, comprehension is fleeting and befuddlement soon descends again to muddy any intellectual waters rendered clear by crystallizing thoughts on a subject by writing them down; bailing water out of a sinking boat with a bucket, in other words (and words and endless words), a hopeless, impossible task.
This endless inability to grasp any explicatory truth that will render a subject understandable and graspable frustrates the hell out of the protagonist. No matter how deep and intelligent and artistic a person he thinks he is, his incomprehension is always deeper and (he is) always ready to make him a laughing stock of him(self). The wordwork in ‘Consequences’ sometimes seems like the thoughts of a person being engulfed by eternal loops of sensory overload, life taking its toll, and madness seems quite within grasp sometimes.
But the protagonist’s ability to laugh at himself is his saving grace, even if knowledge of his occasional absurdity stings and wounds his pride: after all, insane people don’t know they’re insane, so if you can still see the bizarre aspects of things you say and do you still at least have some sort of a foothold in consensual reality, no matter how occasionally tenuous. Any artist without a sense of humor and ability to take a step back and have a laugh at their own stupidities (without that laugh tipping over into self-hatred, as it seems sometimes to do here) is going to take themselves far too seriously and ultimately fall over their own ego into pretension and solipsism. Sometimes we all need time to sort through the mess and its Consequences for us all.
It has to be said, the incomprehension and formless constant pain flowing through this album is somewhat difficult to take. Much of the wordwork is from somebody who does not seem happy with life (hopefully Pierson has enough distance from his subject, ie himself or his protagonist projection of himself, to take some artistic license with this aspect of things) and is unable to understand or cope with existence and all its outrageous slings and arrows assailing them on a daily basis. However, if somebody is starting to think so much about their way home that they have problems with it, they either need medication...or slapped and told to get a grip and stop thinking about silly, pointless things so much.
The lyrics don’t make for comfortable reading, and I have occasionally wondered how Pierson makes Eldredge understand what he is looking for her vocals-wise with some of the somewhat oblique subject matter that life and her youth (23 to his 37) might not have informed her about yet. Saying that, she does a sterling, beautiful and yes, once again, haunting job of singing on ‘zeitgeist’s echo’, with the band’s constant punishing touring schedule in the three years preceding its release obviously having a had a salutary strengthening effect on her voice.
It must be said, though, that her fragile ethereal fetherlite-cum-lusty-gusts-of-vocals occasionally sound a bit too much of sweetness and light for the subject matter, but that’s only because she has such a clear, strong singing style that she could imbue a song on insurance seminars with fun and life and beauty, a talent which comes in handy before the end of the record. For now, though, we move into a complex, compact three-part song: ‘Curtain’.
‘Curtain / Part’ 1 is subtitled ‘When They thought they knew what they were after’:
“She had a pussy that could devour, there seemed to be no way to satisfy it.
She kissed with a desperate passion forcing her lips through his face
and biting into the painted crumbling wall behind them.
He couldn’t hold back his own desires, but they knew that this could be nothing
Nothing satisfying, for her or for him.
He chewed at her juices the way he had learned from his instructor.
What was she after? What hadn’t he learned? He wanted it to end,
she wanted it to continue forever clawing after an orgasm but always forcing it back.
‘Curtain / Part 2’ is subtitled ‘The Pondering, Philosophique’:
SPOKEN
“If he had only known more, perhaps he could have satisfied her without it
becoming dangerous and endless. He lost the ambition to continue and only
wanted to hold her in his arms, close her frightened and crazed eyes with
his palm and press his lips against her hair. Squeeze her tight, releasing all
the frustration of the moment, of every single day of their lives that purposely,
coincidentally or accidentally led them to where they were now. When he
stopped trying, when he stopped moving, she continued to grind,
took to pleasing herself to no avail.”
UNSPOKEN
The excitement was in the flirting, the friendship was buried in the early stages
of intellectual and passionate discussions about their supposedly desperate
situations. It could have ended there. They meant something to each other,
it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t an extended communication, Their meeting was the
breeding ground for epiphanies. They continue to use the experience for their
own advantages, for moral support, for comfort when all seems tired and incongruent.
‘Curtain / Part 3’ is subtitled ‘All that’s left is the shadows (and more paths than breaths):
The sun began to shine through the curtained window. It was already tomorrow,
It was already next week. They were already on separate paths.
Erotic dementia and slippery-syllable cliterature. The first part of the song (with ‘Keyboard and backward guitar by ‘Noj Nosreip’!) introduces us to a sexually symbiotic couple crawling under each others’ skin and bone, borne on crashing orgasm tsunamis. Dopamine and endorphins rushing through their ecstatic sweating twitching night-writhing frames obscure the fact that they are, ironically, an ill-fitting couple locked into a fevered loop where they sexually attack each other for no clear reason, hips and lips between hips, with the male of the couple looking for...what? Everything...nothing...something, dammit! Certainly more than a mere panting partner parting her legs for him, that’s for (un)sure, although that is certainly part of the equation.
Part 2 takes us to a place where the male protagonist, initially as predatory as his sexual partner, comes to an epiphany and realizes that this unhealthily twisted pseudo-relationship is not what he wants and he just wants it to stop and for them both to be able to feel some kind of stable intimacy without it being derived from sex. His partner, however, is still locked into a psychopathological loop and continues trying to screw herself – or him – or them both – into the ground. Eldredge’s vocals (joined by those of Noelle Krimm and Rachel Claff) are looped in the background of the song at this point, reprising lines from ‘Dear Resonance’, ‘The Writer’, ‘If I Never See You Again, That May Still Be...’ and ‘A Song For Remembrance’, loosely tying together the album’s themes of art and confused thought and memory and the loss and betrayal by time and life.
One unique feature of this song is the part labeled ‘Unspoken’. It comes on the heels of the ‘Spoken’ part of the song and is not actually on the album – it literally remains unspoken (the band’s first album had an ‘unspoken’ gag on it too). Quirky, humorous twist, but one rendering this part of the wordwork in the booklet, the man recounting what he has learned from the whole experience, completely unavailable to anybody who burned the CD! Interesting too that an ostensibly sonic artist would use silence – and refer a listener back to words on a page – to paint a fuller word-picture too; an attempt at bridging the chasm between the two artistic disciplines.
Part 3 of the song acknowledges that the couple will now be left with hazy confusion-and-sex-filled afterimages of their relationship, and have got more ways that they could go in the rest of their lives than they would ever have time to go, as do we all. The constant flow and crushing pushing rush of relentless interminable time has already pushed them away from each other, days flying away to bridge the gap between them and their educational sexual and intellectual experience. But it has not been a negative experience for them, and they have both taken something valuable away from it, illuminating booty salvaged from the crazed storm of a bad wet dream...and they will never forget each other, for better or worse or perverse.
The name of the song ‘Curtain’ serves a dual purpose at this stage of the album. It brings the curtain down on the (psycho)drama that has just been playing out in the song (the line about ‘more paths than breaths’ relays how the main character feels to a degree about their experience, about how they have wasted their time and learned what they wanted by getting what they didn’t want, and they feel they have lost time in their lives they will never get back), and is a humorous reference to ‘curtains’ in the sense of the word meaning ‘death’, which leads us into the last song, ‘Heaven’, one of the most delicate and beautiful (and, it has to be said, depressing) compositions during the running time.
“I changed and I can’t tell the difference
I can’t feel the difference
God, I can’t feel anything
I’m tired of justifying
I easily tire of thinking of change
And when I say, “I don’t know.”
I’m simply giving up.
You had it all, or at least what was good enough
I have what you had, or so I’m told
I can’t see how we’re the same
I can’t feel what’s the same
God I can’t feel anything (x2)
And when I say “I don’t know.”
I’m simply giving up.
And when I say “I don’t know.”
I’m simply giving up.
Let’s say there’s this thing called heaven
And you’re there waiting for your memories to return
Watching who’s stepping through the gate
That’s all fine, if it’s gotta be, but when I die don’t look for me.
When I die don’t look for me.
(Speed increases)
I’ll just kill you. You’ll be dead again you bastard
I’ll hug you, I’ll cry in your arms, I’ll slap you and kill you again
You bastard.
The death of a loved one is always traumatic and this poignant, emotional, depressed, angry, hurt, confused, despairing song reflects this. The album’s beleaguered protagonist has gone through their experiences and come out the other side, seemingly none the wiser, and word-and-world-weary to boot. Once again emotional numbness is the central leitmotif of the song. It’s easier to stop feeling, at least temporarily, than it is to deal with the overwhelming pain of the death of somebody you care about, although it’s a false escape and the grief is ultimately going to have to be dealt with one way or the other.
A self-questioning, uncomprehending tone once again sets the scene. The person whose loved one has died is trying to understand in what way they were similar to their dead friend, but cannot make any sense of it. It’s partly a song about loss of a part of oneself, a part never fully understood, to the living person’s consternation. In what ways were the two of them alike? What does the death mean? Has part of the person died with the deceased? If so, what part? Why did it have to happen? Why did they have to die?
The song starts off with the sound of rain falling, and Eldredge’s voice is small and emotionally flat and tired and questioning, complemented initially only by tense, intense acoustic guitar. When the shattered-sounding singer reaches the words ‘...when I die don’t look for me’ the song builds in force and pace and tempo, ever-louder drums and an electric guitar kicking in as these words are repeated over and over and over, an atheist Tantric tears mantra, until eventually all that is left is squalls of feedback howling a mournful electric banshee wail of loss and longing and anger and depression and blackest eye of smothering merciless night.
It’s interesting to note that, although the death has caused our observer a great deal of pain and confusion, they still do not allow themselves the luxury of believing there is a heaven (here Pierson rewrites the first line of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, inverting it for cynical, knowing effect) and that they will see their friend, who arrived (in this supposed place) there before them and who is waiting there for them, again. The old atheist’s problem: by giving up consensual traditional religion they give up all antiquated notions of hell and the Devil, but they also give up the comforting ideas of God and redemption and the afterlife where they can be reunited with those who have died before them. Life’s pointlessness can be a bitter pill to swallow sometimes.
The confusion of the person left behind is perfectly expressed in the last few lines, where they move from anger to longing to see their loved one again and back to anger, rage at being left alone, rage at the part of them that died with the deceased, rage at a lonely frightening uncaring universe, rage at their incomprehension of what has happened to them, rage at the emotional storms raging unchecked through them, wanting so so so much just to have and to hold that one dearly beloved person again but knowing they never can and hating them for it, missing them beyond reason and comprehension, reminded of their own mortality, a sensitive person in sensory overload at the inescapable certain cellular knowledge of the inescapable end to all our lives, Death.
On ‘Myths & Imaginary Magicians’ there is a song about Peter Flynn, a friend of Pierson’s who committed suicide by hanging himself. One has to wonder if ‘Heaven’ is about the same person and event; the protagonist here is devastated by the death and incredibly angry at the deceased. Suicide brings about that emotion in those left behind, anger at the extremely selfish act that has condemned the living to go on after the suicide has gone on before them. The song certainly comes from kind of private personal pain and confusion, as does much of the rest of the album seem to.
It is art as therapy as understanding as a permanent record as communal existential catharsis as an expression of purest essence of pain transformed into something beautiful and uplifting and hopefully finally maybe even healing. And the record ends with the sound of a train in the rain, bearing the character and listener to the next unforeseen station in life further down the way to eternity. Moving on, finally, righting a debilitating pained train of thought that has been off the psychological tracks for far too long and low and lonely.
Ultimately, ‘zeitgeist’s echo’ appears to be a kind of pyrrhic victory over nothing, with all the events the main character undergoes hardly seeming to provide them with much more knowledge of the human condition than before they underwent the things that happened to them and they pondered over. But shaping endlessly twisting-and-turning-in-the-psyche freefall freeform pains into words or songs can render them more comprehensible and thus easier to deal with; there is no such thing as a nihilistic work of art. And if the only lesson truly learned is that we have to get over what tortures us and move on and beyond it (though never able to finally fully forget, whether we want to or not) then the whole thing has not been a total waste of time. And maybe, in the end, that’s the whole point.
The furies and futilities expressed on this record are those felt by each and every one of us at some point in our lives, good or bad or ugly as this may be, and it’s ultimately a redemptive tract, a tired nod towards a distant dimly-remembered feel-good dawn, the first feature-revealing warming rays of the day on the grateful face of an emotionally razed person who has been on a journey to the end of the night for far too long and who almost couldn’t remember what the sun looked or felt like. But if it’s darkest before the dawn, at least there still is a dawn. And the eternal infallibility of the strong human spirit is a zeitgeist that will echo and resonate through our species until the end of time.
(01/23/05, 2.21am)