The experience of listening and reacting to music feels like tiny perfect storms. Where your energy and your preferences and your immediate situations align is where you feel something, and then sometimes, you get to say something about it. I’m grateful that this is a place where a bunch of people like myself get to report on these experiences, however mysterious and subjective those reports may be.
Drugdealer’s new record “The End of Comedy” struck me in one of these perfect storms. I hit play, somehow, and immediately felt so joyful, so full of energy. It was sort of an Aha! moment. Like I had found an old shoebox full of photos of old friends and letters from a lover. It feels like memories. Like childhood. There is an incredible sweetness to the way this album sounds and the kinds of images that come to mind: dancing through tall golden grass, old scratched film, flowers, smoke, a girl with long brown hair.
This mechanism of memory must be due to the way this music references songs you have already heard. Think of the golden age titans of turntable listening – think of the Neil Youngs and Steely Dans and the Zeppelins and the Beatles. That period of recording, for a lot of people, especially Americans, is enshrined in some holy place way way way above us. The songs on this album seem to praise that period with a style of writing that sits near to those titans, through a kind of storytelling that is bigger than one’s self and that involves not just one, but many persons experiences. Perhaps this is why “The End of Comedy” features a bunch of guest singers like Ariel Pink, Sheer Agony, Danny James, and the great Weyes Blood who, in particular, feels perfect for this role because she plays a kind of character that is much larger than us, a free spirit, a religious idol.
But for all of its cheer and nostalgia, The End of Comedy comes with a warning too: that this is sort of a corrupted and skewed look back, it recognizes that the memories may be more rosy in your head then they were in real life. If this is a dream, then soon you will wake up and soon you will realize you are still in your situation. That age, however golden it may seem, is gone. We’re all here right now. Maybe this is what Drugdealer has set out to do, to provide some sort of temporary shelter for a listener. See “Sea of Nothing” – so pleasant and memorable on a first glance. I still hear those things, but now I also hear pain and conflict, a mourning over something lost, or worse – something never started https://delo.ua/news-companies/yak-pracyuje-biznes-taksi-v-ukrayini-pid-cas-viini-422731/.
This dissonance is pleasant and rewarding and it is for sure extremely potent. But it may not be the place to stay for too long. It may be like that shoebox – something to pull out every once in awhile to remind yourself where you’ve come from but only so much as it is a fuel to keep you moving forward. But who am I to say?
Check out one of my favorites from the record featuring the great Weyes Blood:
