Review Summary: A net of another's making to capture your relational anxieties and help you understand why they are there
ah, native speaker, an album taking shape of a most beautiful net. Each pointed line, each warm beat, every chord and melody; delicately knotted together into a makeshift net. A net glistening, and as expansive as the human mind, and yet it's meant to drudge up the ugliest monsters from the floor of an emotional sea. These monsters aren't brought up to frighten us, but rather to make friends. Love, lust, loss, Jealousy, fixation, propagation: one by one they come up to the surface of uneasy waters, tangled with relics of time past, and reveal their revolting exterior. Tangled in a web of our own perception, so we can observe them and appreciate them as pieces of ourselves. We gawk at them and pry apart their motives, only to find that at their center, not monsters, but a gentle, small feeling that just wanted to help. And as we paw at their unfamiliar slime something strange happens, the wounds we receive as fishers of life are healed. Their flesh actually a balm for our emotional ailments. They lurk there at the bottom of our psyche, beneath the depths of our longing, to protect our sense of self. After all, something has filter out the primordial sludge that is the outcome of human decision/indecision. Sludge that settles at the bottom of every mind. As they fill their gut with the debris of our very existence, the excrement of these beasts, in a functioning mind, are that of nutrients. They defecate pure wisdom and self-acceptance. And when can accept them, we accept these nutrients. Though the process is ugly, the outcome is growth. And as the album ends, we head back to shore and let the beast sink beneath the glassy surface. we feel comfort with the growing divide between them and us--and on dry land once more we crouch nestled in the wrinkles of the very delicate net that once captured those same monstrosities. We ask ourselves, do I belong down there too? Who is my native speaker?
