A more compassionately adroit reader
might have phrased the matter differently, or perhaps begun the Tarot session
with the question of concern. As it stands, “The fun is over” is a blunt assessment
of expectations, or to my mind an improvement on the old addiction canard: “Insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
There are varieties of fun a person learns to surrender as they mature. Most of
us got thrills putting our fingers near daddy’s face, so he could pretend to
bite them. And for most of us, that fun was over by the time we turned five. So
it goes. Life requires a continual recalibration of expectations and experience.
Leonard Nevarez is a huge Martha and the Muffins fan, and does
some snappy deconstructing of their oeuvre (among other matters) over here. It
sounds like the folks at 33 1/3 turned down his proposal for a booklet devoted
to either This Is The Ice Age or Danseparc, I’m not sure which. It also
sounds like the University of Toronto Press has agreed to a larger MatM-based
project. A loss to the hipster press is an academic gain I look forward to
reading. Excelsior, dude.
Anyway, I am deeply indebted to Nevarez for framing
MatM’s aesthetic as a sort of cartography of longing (my words, not his),
because it’s helped me identify what makes Delicate
so appealing to my ears. Nevarez seems a tad non-plussed that this latest album
appears to no longer chart out their earlier social-displacement within the
Global Village — a more intimate location-by-location exploration of the sort of
thing David Byrne & Co. gave the Reader’s Digest treatment, in “Cities.”
MatM’s focus may have shifted somewhat, but I think it’s a good thing. Real
Life Massive Wallops tend to hone one’s focus on the intimate and immediate — the journey nevertheless continues, albeit on a vastly re-calibrated scale. Take a seemingly throw-away song like “Crosswalk,”
an extended stream-of-consciousness riff appended to the chorus-chant, “All she
wants to do is cross the street.” The collected words and images are surreal
and harrowing — the soundtrack, perhaps, of a midlife mind in its ape’s journey
as parental eyes watch a child negotiating with street traffic. Somehow the
journey from here to there, across the street, concludes with life in balance.
Delicate touches on other adult
concerns, from mortality to chafing against social/religious edict, the
age-alteration of desire and expectation. The sound may not have quite the
youthful stride of earlier MatM albums, but remains unmistakably Muffin-esque.
After 25 years of no Muffins on the eardrums, the overall effect of listening to Delicate was akin to enjoying a deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. She hadn’t changed a bit — except in all the necessary ways.
Heaps of fun material await you here, at the official Martha and the Muffins site.
2019 Update: additional fun to be had here.
After 25 years of no Muffins on the eardrums, the overall effect of listening to Delicate was akin to enjoying a deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. She hadn’t changed a bit — except in all the necessary ways.
Heaps of fun material await you here, at the official Martha and the Muffins site.
2019 Update: additional fun to be had here.
No comments:
Post a Comment