Sean/ Jeff heaves a sizable mass of his potent and singular existential melancholy in our direction once more, this one set to video. BAD HISTORY MONTH is the moniker he has used since his guitar playing in the duo FAT HISTORY MONTH ceased. It’s also an FHM album title. His is not a straight line.
But who the fuck wants a straight line? What we have is the video for “Staring At My Hands” from BAD HISTORY MONTH’s split LP with DUST OF 1000 YEARS. They call it FAMOUS CIGARETTES and it was recently released by heavy duty rock champions EXPLODING IN SOUND (and was recently written up Hassle-like by James Moore). Everyone involved is kind enough to allow us to premier the video. And so here we are.
The song is a stunner. Sean/Jeff lays down a strange path of song, chopped and spliced solo voice and guitar, crunchy ambient electronics, nude piano, shambling indie rock, serious riffage… it’s all so seamlessly woven together, that once you step back to scope the whole for its pieces, it’s almost revelatory. The many different colored threads used to create this patchwork shouldn’t make as much sense as it does. But it does. Oh it does! And throughout Jeff/Sean further weaves in his lessons and stories and the other mis-remembered ephemera that constitute the poetry of truly one of Boston’s finest in that department. Shades of Phil Elverum lurk here yes, but that’s only because he’s one of the few that have traveled any kind of comparable musical path, or at least that’s all that I have to communicate to you some small part about what this music is and does.
A haunting and dreamlike pop thing that gets me on the perfect day for its grey approach. The guitar sounds and vocals sound so great here. Boston’s very cool MONDO FIASCO video crew created the draining video above which I must say works so incredibly well for this song. More precisely that would be Ethan Long and Adric Gilesthat filmed the video, under strict artistic direction of Jeffery Meffery. I feel… good.