“Fuck these faceless homes and everyone who lives in them / But I still want to be here.” Not read nor heard a better line about Los Angeles than this one in a while (besides “Nobody walks in L.A.” — yay Missing Persons, sorry Randy Newman). In fact the lyrics across the board here are like a dark, gnarled forest, at night, covered in vines and huge canopies, equal parts scary and beautiful. And given the sad fate of Scott Hutchinson, it’s very hard not to read the whole record as a cry for help. But somehow the music, with its Eno’s U2 treatments and uplifting electronics and periodic guitar crunchiness elevates this above an exercise in eternal wallowing.
I have to admit that after “Death Dream” I cringed as Spotify turned to song 2. That was a very, very difficult listen — ink black lyrics, very intense. Not that it wasn’t good — just that the imagery is so, so tragic, I wasn’t sure I could go on. But after that I liked how the tunes themselves stood on their own, and many have a beat underscoring them instead of just washover waves of keyboard chords. I particularly like “Get Out” (I figured this HAD to be the single — a terrific song), “Still Want To Be Here”, “An Otherwise Disappointing Life” (another great song) and “Break”, which are bleak, but somehow almost sweet in their pain. “400 Bones” returned to a difficult place, and “Lump Street” almost seems like a rejoinder to “Where The Streets Have No Name” (“Yes they do, Bono, you woman, and this one SUCKS.”). The time signature shift is unexpected and seems evocative of a man struggling to escape his fate. I quite liked the construction of that one. “Die Like A Rich Boy” is a tough closer that seems to foreshadow that Scott, like the band, is out of hope.
A lot of these songs refer to “home” as if it’s an awful and dangerous place — a trap — and after reading about the genesis of this record and the broken relationship in LA that inspired it, it made a lot of sense. As a companion to sadness, unlike fake angst merchants Radiohead, this has depth and feeling. Because it (of necessity) has little joy and no humo(u)r and is so personal, it would be hard for me to play it all the time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good or that I wouldn’t be in so dark a place that I wouldn’t identify with it and use it to underscore my mood. I guess what I learn here is there’s always someone worse off and in a darker place than you, for whatever reason.
I liked this — it’s between a 7 and an 8 in fact — but I’m taking the 7 because it’s a hard listen through and through and it’s not where I am at the moment nor as a person generally. Fortunately my California home is substantially more joyful, though maybe I feel a tad luckier to have it after listening to this. "Get Out" is a fucking stroke though -- what a song.
