The Chills Brave Words. Morbidness adheres to Martin Phillipps, though it is normally of a pleasing sort. A willowy tone is the determinant in his voice, in his lyrics, and in the genial pallor that surrounds the Chills. It may have been an outgrowth of Martyn Bull's leukemia and tragic death at 22, his demise might have partially injected even more mortal fears into the atmosphere around the band but it was there even in their youth, in the shadowy organ led waltzes such as Satin Dolls, This is the Way, etc...and later in cliched drug habits, bankruptcy and coarse tributes from other bands that would add a existential bleakness that was no longer tempered as it had been early on by escapist tendencies of inexperience. Track one, the mood is desperate, lyrical longing, the organ a slow grind to neutralize the human emotion that only thinly resonates in the vocal. The words play as if sung from the teletype machine growing more rustic even now draped in darkness in the corner. Second song has started just now, Rain, it is one of their most magnificent and most famous songs. It's a glorious repeating riff, short stabbing verses and then a lolling repeating type chorus that is just awesome. But still, even here, as his voice yearns into semi-falsetto it can be reckoned as inalterably morose. The big sadness conflicts with the cartoon image they projected otherwise. On album covers and the like it was pipe cleaners and erector sets, claymation, bright colors and whimsy. I went to a party last evening and after getting over the shock of being at a party with people around my age and having conversations with my mad dental hygienist I found myself talking to someone who had just lost her grandmother. She had died after an 11 month struggle with cancer. My own grandmother had died of colon cancer, well one, yes, obviously I did have two. Both of my grandfather's had passed on years before I was born. One had fought in both WWI and WWII and had a serious passionate crusade to conduct against the legacy of Maurice Richard and I found myself writing a fantastic biography of him in fifth grade which was read by my teacher in parent teacher conferences to my parnets and they admitted they didn't know the man I had described, neither did I, all is fair. And, well, the other apparently spent the good majority of his days making his wife's daily being a miserable existence. This was the fate of my maternal grandmother, amazingly one of a brood of 19, the one who lived on well into my twenties but whom I knew less well than the grandmother that died when I was 6. Cancer is an abomination to endure. I was six, I knew not the call of disease but rather the exhaustion of the room, the energy it drew from everyone in attendance of its ravages, from my parent's came bursts of helplessness, a late arrival was my father's rage when i recorded over a cassette that contained the last vestiges of his mother's existence, her speaking voice recorded while she held court at a holiday part the year before. Speak for Yourself a sprightly celtic influence on this, a rollick or shout more than a singalong, it's stirring. I found this album in a Sam Goody, on cassette. I had already decided I loved the Chills before hearing a note because The Chills is just an unbelievably terrific name for a band especially one that sounded like this. And then there was New Zealand and its representation of the end of the world, the kingdom escaped from a wardrobe, people decades behind the times, reverse flow toilets and the ephemera of the Moa. The first website I ever made was a ludicrous enterprise where I assembled semi-explicit plans on how to construct a time machine. It was not an original idea. I had stolen it from Alfred Jarry but originally I had credible ambitions to accept input from dozens of friends(as if I had dozens) on its design and eventual implementation. I could claim it was a high minded metaphorical exercise but it was not. It was possibly more fruitful than spending a few hours speaking about death, time machines must be asymmetrical in order that they may slip between the crevices of spacetime and aphids are key. I surprised myself with my familiarity on the topic of death even though truly only one person near to me have died. My best friend from childhood died. It's strange still to learn of death and experience death through technology, to not have heard from someone in over two years and one day receive a phone call from her mother telling you she has died carrying groceries on a stairway, losing her footing and striking her head and dying. It's still something you expect to overcome, some day you will turn the next corner and run into her and you will excuse your clumsiness and beg a thousand pardons for not having called. There is a song called Ghost of An Unkissed Kiss that always entices memories that seem inappropriately hopeful and the nights of moonlight fishing in the center of Lake Voorheis, a dedication on the radio when being driven to the airport, the smell of curry when you walk together to a friend's hme, and the after school ritual of waiting on the curb and staring up at the bedroom window watching her recognize the exact moment you have departed. And the sadness of the tender whisper in your ear at her engagement party when she confessed that she had always imagined "it would be us getting married.". Wet Blanket. I have experienced death in strangers, more commonly. When I was 12 at school, on the last day of session, there was the traditional antics of youth in the front green and parking lot and a young girl, only a year older than me had come to school intoxicated and fell and her head laid open for everyone to see on a parking curb and she died on the spot while the revelry continued unknowing. When I ran over as a witness I don't remember feeling anything at all, i told my mother about it, I went to do my paper route and only occasionally had dreams of her riding on the back of my moped. I wasn't converted into being thoughtful or inspired by the experience, but I remember the pangs of guilt over my not having fully rehearsed to proper course grief all summer long for when we returned to school the next year it was a small dedication in the next year's yearbook, a stain on the parking lot, nothing further to be concerned over except for the fact that my life went on when apparently others had taken a pause from the ghastliness. Ghosts has begun. Martin P's more intricate dissection on the topic that seems to be preoccupying my thoughts today. i thought of someone else all evening long, a living, sentient being, I had made a conscious effort to avoid it, but chanced good intentions turn over regularly in the course of human events or something even more inscrutably vague. And so when at the aforementioned party this person who may be a close acquaintance of my mad dental hygienist with the chrysalis tattoo behind her right ear, eloquently recalled the patterns of her grandmother's needlework and dear and kind eyes, I thought only of words on a page and what they could mean outside of what they meant. My mind turned to rediscovering a kind soul's warmth and I listened with the false intention of caress but under the duress of heart confusion. House With One Hundred Rooms. In another shared with stranger's moment I witnessed a gruesome death in a car accident. Though the passing happened in secret, in a Chrysler Lebaron. We were sitting in Ann Arbor, in a restaurant cataloguing a grueling afternoon of P. Chem recitations and laboratory examintations and we were feeling the worse for it but then came a sobering tide of emotion. Like patricians in the colosseum who had entered to watch a soul cast into the darkness as if a flickering candlelight in a sudden gale across the shore. The young person behind the counter called frantically into the telephone, it's the clearest memory, the slang riddled excitability, the breathless description of the scene where this person had been thrown from a vehicle and thus lay controted, lifeless, along the side of Stadium Blvd. The maudlin elegance of this song lingers, its sounds revisiting their ghostly counterparts, their complements. It turns out it was played by those past their emotional peak, it is wan and transparent, but utterly compelling and heroic. It is a reflection. It is more than an introspection. It's always more marvelous when experienced in the evening, strange for a comic book. Nighttime is for the introverted, those who can't live without so they pour all of their emotional being into sharp flashes of imagination and false constructions darting across a vague horizon the lies between the living, the vital, and the dying, the dreamers. Hollow bones filled with extra chambers of the heart that have the muffle arrhythmic beats of weak willed artists tucked inside. Looking for a Chagall sky at dusk when all around you is the brilliance of anonymous beckons the better angels to their reward. Dan Destiny and the Silver Dawn. I was in the company of many people just after their death when I was a nursing aide. I was an excellent nursing aid. Mainly I was appreciated
because I was intensely curious, perhaps selfishly, about all of our patients. I chatted with most of them and with an innately annoying habit of asking far too many questions should I not petrified silent by your existence I weaseled my way into memories constructed around the flowery days of the youth of weathered friends. They had built the MX missiles that inspired nightmares of armageddon where I would invariably end up in the tiny bathroom in our house while the end came desperately tying to keep the fallout away by stuffing damp towels along the threshold. Others dated Elvis Presley. Some boasted of having eaten the same meal every day for lunch for 30 years. Alzheimers robbed some but still these empty vessels greeted you each morning with a wrinkled, unworried smile and later one felt regret when the families would receive only expressionless stares in response to their searching embraces. A sprite, this jangly Dan Destiny, I have the original version on a Bucketfull of Brains Flexi somewhere. In fact I have everything the Chills ever released up until some point when it didn't seem necessary any more, sometime during the Clinton era. They meant so much to me. It was not disappointment that caused my heart to stray I only let the distance become filled in with distractions and excitements of a different age. Night of Chill Blue. Is this the superior sequel to Pink Frost? On some overcast days it is their greatest song ever. A simple repeating guitar line, the garage rock opera drama of the percussion beneath the warm tones, and the climactic rush near the end, not overflowing with activity but always with a taut visceral suspension. Pink Frost has that alien emotional luminescence that perpetually retains it otherworldly nature even but NOCB has it by a hair. Next one, 16 Heart-Throbs, the oddest song on the album. It is perhaps a distant cousin to earlier born oddities such as Dream by Dream or Whole Weird World but by these moments of careerist expansionism Martin P. was well over the carefree recklessness of twee psychedelia. Mentions of corpses. Cleaning a corpse for transfer from is an initially unsettling prospect that turns peaceful and safe. You are near someone when their soul has just departed this plane of existence there is still all of the human ambience surrounding them, death could pass for sleep, their cherished photographs on the dresser next to the bed still embedded with their last mournful glances as they involuntarily discover the power of mortality and the feebleness of their appreciation for the days that passed before the days that were forgotten. The only torment remaining is the false reflexes of a body establishing an equilibrium with nature, an empty room, a naive boy. "Remember the good times with you Jane". Brave Words, the title track, has started and it is a personal made political song, perhaps a silly declaration antithetical to the yuppie lifestyle. Were there legitimate yuppies in New Zealand? Outside of Auckland, when I was there, it seemed that most inhabitants had only just escaped 1954. There were slabs of meat though, staring out from every shop window, it was the nostalgic gourmand. Nice anatomical imagery to be discovered in the lyrics. This is the sound of the South Island. Another amazing song has just begun Dark Carnival, an epic piano-led ballad. It's dramatic and pressing, not ethereal in as much as it is forcefully melancholic. Nordic. There is a new Haruki Marukami book just out and it chronicles his life as a runner. It has received a puzzling review in the Economist this week. I wonder if it is half as mad as his fiction writing, could his legs have legs carved from windmills, turning quickly the concrete aggregate to diamonds used as lenses to avoid the depths of 1000 tiny entrances to deeper wells with Otis elevators propelled by tiny copies of Michael Faraday. Or some similar sort of ridiculousness like earnestness or coherency. It did take me a while to get past my prejudice and into the lovely state of Hard Boiled Wonderland but then somehow I raced through Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Where should I turn next? To the running memoir? He details the euphoric ordeal of a 62 mile marathon. Ugh. I am the world's worst runner. I will run 17 or 18 days in a row and then not run for 19 or 23 or 87 days in a row after that. I don't know why. I enjoy running. It is only breaking through the inertia of inaction that is keeping me from world record times. Sometimes i think of some things or some persons who might inspire me to run anywhere any time but then her memory dissipates in the emptiness of rooms after exercise, the reward feels diminished. Last song, an absolutely marvelous song, Creep, it's skeletal pleading to the void, it rings back with a warm echo and caress of soft acoustics and dream warring. On the desk about me there are not any personal mementos, there is barely a single acknowledgment of my existence in anywhere that I conduct my life. I have left a sterile imprint on this world. The photos on the wall are of strangers. Each photo has been cut from a calendar. Walls are painted colors that are bright and alienating; the rug seems random and undisturbing. I need a photo of my mother somewhere. Before I live through a plane crash and search frantically through my wallet looking for the last vision to comfort me in my dying.