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Late last week, I got the chance to interview Jeremy Enigk, he of Sunny Day Real Estate, The Fire Theft and two solo albums. Then, per usual, I wrote an article for the Pulse in which I felt obliged to keep the focus as squarely as possible on his new disc, World Waits, along with some more general history, but now I'm taking the opportunity to say what I really think is important about Jeremy Enigk.
If you buy one album this week, buy How It Feels to Be Something On.
I came to SDRE, like most people, via their debut album, Diary. Once I'd absorbed that, I bought How It Feels, since it had just come out (this was back in '98), but then I ignored it for close to six months in favor of delving into their second album, which is either called LP2 or The Pink Album.
Once I discovered the song "Every Shining Time You Arrive" on How It Feels, though, I was hooked. How It Feels was SDRE's return album, made after the band's breakup, which was due at least in part to Enigk's conversion to Christianity. Not that that solved his problems; How It Feels is one of the most deeply conflicted albums ever made, teetering on the knife edge between corporeal love and spiritual love and in the process addressing things like capitalism, infidelity, transcendence and utopia.
The tone is set by one of the best album opening songs ever, "Pillars." William Goldsmith is at least as essential to SDRE's sound as Jimmy Chamberlain was to Smashing Pumpkins', and the straightforward tattoo he lays down opens up for Enigk's almost subliminally whispered, "Help," which rises as if from the bottom of a deep well, eliding neatly into the tone setting couplet, "But you were always one to stay the same/ girl, I know you want to be the rain." "Rain" is one of those words that creeps up continually throughout Enigk's lyrics, standing in for change or cleansing, usually, as it does here.
The track is claustrophobic and ominous in a way that SDRE never really were before. Sure, they were big, and they were depressed, but the weight of the music, combined with lyrics that hint at attempts to convert the infidels ("We'll wait for time to turn around your faith," and, chillingly, "The world we sold; there was a choir there/ there's a place for you."), sets the pace for an album that will hit both harder and softer, but invariably go for the gut.
Musical motifs crop up here that will return throughout the album, including the doubling of the vocal melody on guitar or bass. It seems like a simple idea, but it's not something you hear very much of, although the most recent Wolf Parade album puts a spin on this by prefacing bridges and codas with mirrored guitar lines in the choruses and verses. Enigk's multi-layered vocals during the bridge here are used to stunning effect, and again, we'll see this again later in the album.
The next track, "Roses in Water," centers around a loping melodic minor (read: Middle Eastern-sounding) guitar riff in, of all things, 9/4 time. Plenty of bands use odd time signatures, but SDRE seems to have a special facility, and Goldsmith in particular, for making them sound natural. The lyrics here reflect the quasi-mysticism that runs through Enigk's output, but here, he's particularly adept at spinning out evocative imagery ("Roses in water/ Wise men see/ Move around me for/ centuries") without assigning a personal meaning to it. Despite the agitated and ever-shifting musical ground of the song, it's one of How It Feels most assured moments, not to mention a relatively light palette cleanser between "Pillars" and "Every Shining Time You Arrive."
As I said before, "ESTYA" was the song that really stuck with me when I first got into this album. On a purely sonic level, it's brilliant. The acoustic guitar tone was achieved, as best I can guess, by micing not just the guitar in the traditional fashion, but also with a contact mike on the inside of the guitar's body. The result is a piano-like tone which is one of the more unique guitar treatments. As much as I like it, Enigk's soon-to-be-released solo album World Waits could have done with more of this.
Note the brilliantly unexpected and semi-walking bassline in the chorus. It's one of the last things I really picked up on, and it's a completely out-of-the-blue sonic treat on an album full of such moments.
The lyrics revisit the themes from "Pillars," but with a note of conflict. The protagonist is searching for meaning, turning outwards towards those around him ("I want to change everything/ I want to blame everything on ...") and struggling for clarity ("So the story's told beyond our grasp/ We were climbing forever, an infinite task ... Oh and all these seed will grow anyway/ Even though the outcome, we cannot say."). The turn comes in the the bridge, when his desire for spiritual purity and relief from the every day whim of fate is broken by the simple presence of someone he cares deeply for: "In the depths of my gloom/ I crawl out for you/ From the peaks of my joy/ I crawl back into/ Tearing me down every time you smile/ Every shining time you arrive." Whether you take the song to be entirely addressed to a lover, a friend or a divine presence, or some combination thereof, it's a beautiful limning of the twin desires for salvation and independence.
"Two Promises" shows the considerable influence of the Beatles on SDRE's songwriting, an influence already in evidence with their dalliance with Middle Eastern tonalities on "Roses in Water." If the previous song was about standing on the precipice between spiritual and physical love, this one has pitched headlong into the disappointment and regreat that comes with any kind of relationship. It's a crushing song, with Enigk giving it his vocal all. It's tempting to label it anti-woman, and in fact, that would be an easy charge to make against this album as a whole, but things aren't so simple as that. The song also functions as a condemnation of man's earthly desire, in much the same way as "Butterfly" by Weezer. As a whole, the record is basically anti-flesh, anti-fleeting. It's searching for something that will last. In this way, it's quintessentially Buddhist, really, at least in as much as someone going down the first steps of the eight-fold path will rail against the world's impermanence before accepting it.
The album shifts gears in terms of song structure here at the near halfway point. "100 Million" takes a stab at capitalism and greed, lamenting our desire to own everything we see, and even things we can't see ("Pay for the hole in the ground to place your bones ... Pay for the simplest things"). I'm going to take a pass on analzying the lyrics with a microscope so I can focuse on the geekiest musical thing I can imagine. If you're not into time signatures and in-depth musical analysis, feel free to skip way ahead.
In what amounts to the chorus (in that it contains the song's title and is a different part following two verses and pre-choruses), SDRE pull of a neat trick. A lone guitar is introduced, playing a simple waltz-time figure: one bass note followed by a simple chiming figure over two different chords. It's four measures of 6/8, for those of you sight-reading along at home. The bassist (Jeff Palmer of the Mommyheads, filling in ably for absent founding member Nate Mendel--more on him later), though, plays a figure which breaks down into a measure of 6/8, a measure of 7/8, a measure of 6/8 and a measure of 5/8. Goldsmith, on the drums, kind of splits the difference, accenting the first beat of Palmer's third measure with a cymbal hit, but then hitting the snare on the guitarist's backbeat. The net effect is that the bass note followed by high figure pattern of the guitar is switched around, resulting in a chiming figure followed by a bass note. What's ill is how they pull it off so casually. It's really the thing that keeps the song pulling itself forward up the hill of the album as a whole, leading to a kind of plateau where the title track looks out over the whole affair from the midway point.
"How It Feels to Be Something On" is the dark heart of the record, possessing a mournful quality about wasted days intercut with moments of clarity and light. After intoning, "We're going nowhere," Enigk sings, "Don't tell me now, the days I've had/ To fill it up but spill instead." A list of empty objects follows into the chorus, which ends with the very slightly life-affirming: "All these things. I've seen/ How it feels to be something on," a line which Enigk sings with a combination of resignation and relief. His intimate relationship with his faith is shown when in the second pre-chours he switches the line to "Don't tell me God, the days I've had ..." He's practically begging/ordering God to not make him face his wasted life. He owns up to it, though, holding desperately to those few moments when he's been at peace. It's a kind of grace note of hope in an otherwise deeply dark album, and it leads nicely into the album's emotional highpoint, "The Prophet."
"The Prophet" is a song that I didn't care for for a long time, but once I could appreciate it in the scheme of the entire album, it grew in my estimation. Again, moments of light and hope are precious commodities on this album, and Enigk's entreaty, "Will you carry me cross the sea? Will you carry me?" has an innocence that's hard to resist. It serves as an answer to some of the concerns of other voices on the album. The walls that the protagonist kept trying to build in "Two Promises" here fall down, allowing "hearts to pour out/ when the frozen ground/ comes alive around us." The song stands at a turn in the road from weakness and depseration to strength, as indicated by the hopeful journey to the end of the album that begins in the next song.
Aside from having one of the great song title of all time, "Guitar and Video Games" is a heroic call to arms, throwing off the trappings of weak-willed human desire for something better and stronger. "All this time looking for love/ and you want to find peace but you find ... me," sings Enigk, drawing out that last pause to show just how disappointing people can be. Somehow, though, in some way, "we find the true story/ a tale/ writing itself as we sail/ a story/ a tale/ writing itself as we wail." The album's hero has grasped a thread running through, and he's prepared to hang on and ride it out to the end, saving just one last volley for those left behind.
In our interview, Enigk indicated that he was through pointing fingers because it was just too hypocritical, so I'm glad he managed to get "The Shark's Own Private Fuck" out of his system before he became the bigger man. Rumor has it that the song is directed specifically at bassist Nate Mendel, who decided to stay with the Foo Fighters rather than return to record the third Sunny Day album, but personally I think Enigk just took the kernel of his anger over that situation as the jumping off point for this harsh screed against materialism. "You talk to yourself/ Believing the fear that drives your greed/ When you discover the empty place/ A hollow world of instant pleasures," sings Enigk, condemning those who would cling to material pleasures, to the fruits of their labors: Things, and nothing but. It's a brilliantly bilious screed, but it doesn't hold out much to replace greed with. That's what the closing song is for.
"Days Were Golden" finishes the album on an up note, the protagonist waving goodbye to a place that promises only "a dying cold world but gold, shimmering gold" and onto a place of better things. The song's chorus neatly packages up the message of the album as a whole: "Come momma now, tell me a story/ Only laughing/ About our gilded wasteland/ Devoured, torn into pieces/ Come now we shine/ Small things ever calling out your name/ you hear some other time unchained, alive/ a world undefined."
The thing that makes this album outstanding is its cohesiveness. It's not simply a collection of woe-is-me whining and victimhood. It's not a parrotting of the words of the faithful simply entreating you to take their path to make everything better. It's a complex, nuanced look into the conflicts and desires that bind us to this world even as we strive to break them. And, in the end, it's a promise that there's a way forward.
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