Review Summary: muzak for suburban ennui
What is it about the fragmentary, the intangible, the willfully dislodged, that always seems to evoke the corresponding cover art? Right now I have a mostly blank word document, reflecting a blank mind, which in turn manifests as a blank expression. But in a minute, the needle will drop again and all that is void will start to glisten.
I’m sick of imagery but I can’t help but return to it come always. A
Tesselation is rather a revolving door of zeros and ones, and a
Thread of Light is, alternatively, the first breath we take on our last day alive. Hold it.
It’s whatever, but it’s worth acknowledging and appraising how music such as this -- music that exists for imagery’s sake, can prevail as textural accompaniment for a life that continues to phase through varying shades of grey.
Rotation doesn’t feel of my world -- it doesn’t feel congruent with small talk or unattainable ambition and, as much as I wish it were so, my world doesn’t revolve around blossoming synthwork and cascading percussion. But that’s why I’m eternally grateful for when these dimensions converge, bleeding into one another the way the atmosphere dissolves into the universe that it owes so much to.
Because that’s what
A Kind of Leaving does -- it dissolves. Even Sieliff’s clarinet rings out resigned as the piano exhausts all its energy on its own motif. Golden Retriever posit this song as the axis that the rest of the record revolves around, as if they, rather abruptly, are able to focus their vision against the clutter and the whirlpooling. It is placed there selflessly, as the rest of the record inflates and deflates capriciously during its improvisational bent -- the word ‘beguiling’ comes to mind, but songs like
Tesselation and
Thirty-Six Stratagems are wholly unpredictable, with the latter elucidated by its own mental relapse.
These are minimalist compositions pulling volte-faces before they get bored with an idea, and because of it, thirty-five minutes feels like nothing. In fact, this record illustrates the idea that written-time and improvised-time are two entirely different entities. The plaintive woodwind melodies here are splayed out like bedsheets, hiding minutes at a time before a single, underscored note brings us back to our bedroom, our car, our slowly rotating cycle of days.
Golden Retriever are like experimental composers who forgot what they were experimenting on somewhere down the ever-turning line. These songs, by virtue of their existence, are inimitable -- enacting the laws of chance and possibility on the most rigid of routines. And so I will wake up tomorrow at one in the afternoon, I will put on this album while I half-heartedly look for work, I will grapple with the weight of the future, and then I will sleep with the hope that something may change.
Jesus Christ, I need to stop complaining.
