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An album like a full stop and a new beginning.
Words and a Farfisa, that's all. Saying no as a way of life. The unclassifiable as a musical style. Disappearing as a means of advertising. The muted as a style, but a style of what?
Having emerged from the faux-jazzism of the Lounge Lizards, from the polished professionals of deconstruction, Steve forsakes style. He renounces isms. Renounces the isthmuses of grey sidewalks, the freshly pressed suits, the allure of the businessman’s uniform. Combing his hair, already knowing, of course, that in the city that never sleeps, in his boxed-in yuppie life, every day will be the same.
Going to bed already knowing that he won’t obey the alarm tomorrow—you’ll get up on any foot and the crumpled warmth of the sheets, the sleepy whiteness of the sheets, you’ll leave only to pee—no, he won’t give that up. A domestic exile, a self-imposed rebellion against oneself. This, Steve tells himself, is just what is needed.
But let's start from the beginning.
NYC, Nineteen Eighty-One: frustration and icy elegance, monthly salaries to collect on Wall Street and a fair amount of crap to step in. At night Steve with his bass shatters the established certainties of those who, unaware and inert, believe that “jazz has nothing left to say, here where everything is new,” and you, with the reckless lizards, what do you do? You play the night. Meaning that at night you play (and in the day you splash about in finance), and what you play is the night (the night, yes, of your discontent). The riotous night of your city, but kaleidoscoped by shattered glass thrown there, behind a bin.
Joking and playing around with something like this, with such a dizzying trinket, you're already in postmodernism but without feeling its weight.
It doesn't take a damn thing to toss everything to the winds and reset. This, from that nocturnal trinket, you’ve learned, perhaps, indeed surely. And so here you are, with an aseptic and alive Bildungsroman, written with little, with very little, and with feelings as if thawing in an empty fridge—the art of writing albums as one contemplates a carton of expired milk. Lives of tin foil, with a side of bland organs.
A strange affair, truly. I really don't know what else to tell you. Listen to it.
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