http://gzarapanecko.bandcamp.com/album/small-mercies
Once or thrice in 24 fortnights, you hear an album you could listen to at *almost* anytime/place/interval. The above is such an album. PG-13. Apropos of Weddings/Funerals. Excellent for a twilight bed sprawl and not a poor choice for a picnic. You can drink whiskey to it, or tea. I listen to this album and my faith in songwriting is reborn.
Matlock’s writing walks a fantastical line between hopefulness and morosity, familiarity and eclecticism, earnestness and jest. There is a very well articulated building happening here. One of those house-like structures you dream about, where ornate equals depth and you are crawling and floating simultaneously. Probably anything could happen in this album; the orchestration, especially, oscillates between melodic outbursts and scratching. Even so, there is nary a fractured moment, as it all ties back to Matlock’s voice.
We trust this voice. His storytelling feels, at times, shamanesque. We want to believe the shaman, he is an old friend, a lullaby. We want the mythical in the empirical, and he knows where to get this. We want legends, midday naps, rhetoric.
I feel like we should maybe pin down children and make them listen to this record. I bloody worry about the younger generation, locked in gadgets; they are evolving/growing passcodes. Grammatically deficient. Incapable of cursive or calligraphy. We need to force-feed them bedtime stories. We need to lock them in basements and set this An Historic album on repeat. The festival is the mind, kiddo. Reality is a sung narrative.
thesupercoda 