Since 1997, Mark
Beazley has operated under the name of Rothko in a variety of
incarnations, first as a group, then later in duo and solo form. Even
as a trio, however, the bass guitar, or rather, several of them, have
been at the heart of Beazley's instrumental canon. Having broken
cover early in 2016 with Discover the Lost, the first Rothko release
since 2007's Eleven Stages of Intervention album, Beazley follows up
in double quick time with this stark and startling collaboration with
Johny Brown, the restlessly prolific street poet, soothsayer and
driving force behind The Band of Holy Joy.
www.cargocollective/rothko
The result is a
suite of first person monologues charting the rites of passage of an
inner city kid as he searches for something better, finding it in a
doomed romance before drinking his pain away until he can move on.
Recorded live in one take in July 2016, Brown's social-realist
narrative is delivered unadorned by any musical frills other than
Beazley's bass, which moves from plucky jauntiness to an echo-laden
death knell that sounds like it might explode.
The opening The
Mainline Landscape of My Youth sets the scene through a series of
spoken word sense memories of brutal youth. These are scab-deep in
the unsentimental cruelty of urban urchins scrambling in the dirt
inbetween blowing up frogs or putting foxes heads on sticks. The
ickyness of summers long since past is at play both here and in the
title track in a way that recalls the early fiction of Ian McEwan,
only grittier and more pungent. Its nostalgic grit bring Keith
Waterhouse's There is A Happy Land and Dennis Potter's Blue
Remembered Hills to mind.
As old wounds are
re-opened, One Day I Will Get There is a yearning for other
worlds beyond the back streets. In We Have Great Fun, the
bravura of kids games have given way to the macho bravado of running
with gangs. The story's protagonist is painfully aware of 'that
feeling that something is missing / I should be writing creating and
kissing / When up the garage walls my life I am pissing.'
Salvation comes
through a love affair with a flower girl in And Then A Silence For
The Soul, which blossoms into something serious in The Rose
Grows Tender in the Shade and the domestic bliss of Here I Am
With Someone Who Cares. Things don't last, however, and Fabled
Women, Transitory Disturbances gives way to the self-loathing and
self pity of Because I Just Started Drinking Again. A final
parting shot comes in I'll Be Gone Before You Leave before the
restless quest out of the wilderness begins again in the closing The
Boat Must Sail On.
While this sounds as
kitchen-sink as it gets, Brown's first person confessionals become a
litany of underclass aspiration delivered with an emotional rawness
which, with only Beazley's bass to bolster it, sounds even more
exposed. As the narrative darkens, the music clangs, echoes and
simmers with portents of doom, yet leaves acres of space for Brown's
voice to peal out, impassioned but still vulnerable from the effects
of the short-lived joys and broken dreams he's purging.
In this respect, as
the past catches up with him, and, accompanied by Beazley, Brown is
like a Geordie Jacques Brel styling a set of twenty-first century
post-punk chansons. These go beyond the drizzly sentiments of bedsit
romances to lay bare a tortured maelstrom of words and music that
eventually thunders to the raging calm of a story only a survivor can
tell.
Product, January 2017
www.cargocollective/rothko
ends
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