Sebadoh
Harmacy

THE REVIEW

"Pain deserves infinite respect, precise timing, and music to accompany it"

"Harmacy" is a broken piggy bank: there are the coins... and there are the pieces.

The coins are small treasures of music that the "greats" are not particularly interested in, because they (apparently) have little value: they have a slightly shabby shine, that of low fidelity, they don't care to show off, they don't indulge in virtuosity, in guitar finesse or sonic sophistication. Many are just the whispers of a boy with thick glasses, a bit awkward-looking, who you can't help but imagine locked in his bedroom, sitting on the floor writing love songs for a girl who, if she ever loved him, no longer does ("Perfect Way", "Willing To Wait"). Some of these coins have remained in his pocket as memories of some journey. Some seem to even come from the land of small dinosaurs ("Beauty On The Ride"), even though it is 1996 and a lot of time has passed. Others, finally, have the bittersweet taste of a nursery rhyme without a happy ending ("Ocean").
All, rare and precious, are just a few grams of guitar and voice. A gentle guitar and a gentle voice.

The pieces are sharp and rough songs, scattered everywhere, like marbles. And they seem like the usual pranks of Loewenstein, the most "pixian" mind of the group: almost as if wanting to let the guitars grind their teeth a little, after so much calmness. Almost as if wanting to make room for screams, alongside the whispers. Some pieces last just a little more than a cigarette puff to vent anger ("Love To Fight", "Crystal Gipsy"), others are shabby approaches, drafts of themes that find their beauty in not having been corrected ("Hillibilly II"), and others are just an excuse to have fun and make some noise (the cover of "I Smell A Rat").

"Harmacy" is like those glasses that, if hit, don't break, but become a mosaic, a spider web of hundreds of fragments, glued to each other, each different from the others. Maybe it is not the masterpiece of Sebadoh, and maybe it is too fragmented, too discontinuous, "inconsistent", but it is a record that makes you feel good listening to it.
It is a tangle of sadness and things that go or have gone wrong, where, however, there is also room for subtle irony, for a pinch of misogyny ("Look, baby, I'm not a mind reader: you're gonna have to tell me so you're lookin' down at your shoes again"), and for that desire, which sometimes you felt growing inside, to tell even the love of your life to go to hell ("The way you are, that's the worst thing you could do").
But, above all, there is that almost too empathetic sensitivity with which Barlow talks about difficulties and misunderstandings ("If there's a right thing to say, I'm sure I missed it by a mile"), lack of communication ("Silence's like disease, but I dare not say it hurts"), of impotence and frustration in the face of relationships that go to ruins without anyone really wanting it.
"Harmacy" is just the broken sign of an Irish pharmacy, but, perhaps, it is also a word and a place that do not exist (the "pain factory"?!), a place where, every so often, one cannot help but return.