Endearments – Ocean
Genre: Indie Rock, Dream Pop
David Lynch had a great way of addressing his critics who complained that his movies made little sense, or shared little in common with reality. Lynch replied that most of the time, life makes no sense so why should people expect art to be any different.
It’s true. The alchemy of life is lost on most of us. That’s the reason why most people make up their own inner mythology, provide meaning to events that are arbitrary or associate themselves with things with which they share little in common. Since there’s no map that we’re given to life, we naturally want to create our own. In the absence of any power to render our drawings meaningless, we are able to forge ahead.
Endearments’ Ocean is the kind of indie-rock tune that celebrates inner-myth, the hero as deceived lover taking arms against an ocean of troubles. The tune twists turns and whistles like a ship being rocked back and forth on troubled waters. In the end, all the pain and misery ought to mean something. If music can’t help us understand it, where can we turn?
Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly – Early in the Morning
Genre: Blues, Folk, Americana
Work, ambition and initiative are well and good. Don’t trust what those anarchists tell you. Those are needed for any kind of society to thrive. However, it is also true that the fortunes of many, and the wealth of nations was built on the back-breaking, unindemnified work of millions.
You can tell a lot about the place you’re in by the work songs still floating about. In Eastern Europe, for example, work songs often blend into tunes about the loss of personal freedom. Many North-American blues songs share similar stories. If any truthful, meaningful progress is to be made, these stories need to be told in their original form.
This is the task that Walter Parks has taken up. The former sideman to the legendary Richie Havens, brings his soulful, weathered vocals and refined gift for orchestration on the traditional blues number Early in the Morning. Parks’ hypnotic holler is the sound that’s worth a thousand words. This is music for healing.
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