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Rating: There are albums that change your life. They are very few, the result of selection or a bolt from the blue, but when they arrive, they tear you apart like a dying pig in a slaughterhouse. They open your legs and rape you with violence. They arrive and you feel bad, but at the same time, you like all this suffering and end up loving it. Listening to these albums dresses you in invisible bruises. They rip your guts out with long, black nails. They make you feel tremendously vulnerable.
You are a virgin. You are naked. You are useless.
Frantic. Broken. Weak.
You breathe with difficulty with an IV stuck in your arm.
Speaking of "A Promise," I'm not speaking as a fan (which I am), but as a hypersensitive person. Because it is a carnal album, made of sex and death, of growing despair, but also of childish boldness. It dares where others would stop, pauses to look into your chest and whispers, "Fuck me." You may find me vulgar, self-destructive, fussy, tedious, whining. Well. I don't care. Because this is true love.
Ten songs hidden behind a naive cover that encapsulates their essence: the degradation of sex without feeling, combined with the massacre of innocence, in an aseptic yet tremendously vile/intimate atmosphere. And the soul's embrace begins.
The beginning is already an orgasm: from the exhausting and wonderfully attractive strumming of a painfully beautiful ballad like "Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl", to the revolutionary "Apistat Commander", passing through the unexpected conclusion of the pure suffering of "Walnut House". There is rage in "Pink City", which is pure noise, but also deviated innocence in the cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car". There is a whole sick philosophy, a seductive world adrift, a river of seminal fluid thrown violently into a black sky, filling it with dead stars. It's "A Promise", one of those albums you either love or hate, it's true. But if you hate it, it's because you refuse to enter into such a high emotion, in a continuous rollercoaster of brilliance, of vivid emotions, of moments on the verge of improvisation.
It is sparse, yet at the same time as complex as few others: it is the ripe fruit of Jamie Stewart's tree, among the most brilliant contemporary songwriters of our time. To prove it, there is a track like the bloodthirsty "Brooklyn Dodgers", but above all an extraordinary diptych, beyond masterpiece, dreamy and disfigured. The first, "Sad Redux O-Grapher", is the prophetic subdued black mass on the end of love (in which I find myself completely) and, the second, "Ian Curtis Wishlist", the pleasant hell to seal the work. It advances with enveloping music that destroys itself with synths that take you to heaven and leave you there, floating, while Stewart's throat inflames, unravels, self-destructs.
It is the miracle of music.
Close your eyelids and, even when the album is over, it is still there.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl (03:18)
You say I am loca because I am your girl
You say I am stupid because I am your girl
You leave me out on the steps you dress me up like a boy
You say that I am your secret love
You say to be quiet but I want to tell the whole world
I like my neighborhood I like my gun
Drive in my little car I am your girl and I will protect you
We do it in the back of my little car
Pull up my pants and fix my bra go on home to your kids
I'm going to be quiet and I'm going to tell the whole block
02 Apistat Commander (04:35)
up, along the rocks,
it's good, it's not so hard now.
up, I bite my tongue, who cares?
this chance to drop off
all that you left you left for someone all of this hurt that's wilted off
all this relief, it's the oddest thing
oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Chen, he'll never come that's fine,
I lost my thought
Wei, Huai could talk me down
still, still this chance to drop off
04 20,000 Deaths for Eidelyn Gonzales, 20,000 Deaths for Jamie Peterson (03:16)
Awful is all, awful like cookie
Sour and ringing and lost to this world
These are times, I should shut up about Iris and Oly,
He didn't know how else to be
Hmm hmm hoot hoot
Cherry oh Cherry
While your friend killed her baby
Cherry oh Cherry
I am at your command
Hmm hmm hoot hoot
05 Pink City (02:13)
Anthony Llyod cops horse like a reporter
A two hour plane trip from his life's work
His most important story, sound is faster in water than it is in air
A hydrophone will let you know faster that your grandma and your niece are shot dead
There's a call at tonite's last hour
A bitter pill you've got to swallow it unravels like an affair your only chance to leave BOOGIE TOWN
All my life in the pink city
08 Brooklyn Dodgers (03:51)
Sorry I walked away when you told me what you were scared of the night that you turned 12
Trying not to cry in front of your older brother
He knows where I live, he's not interested
I can't have nice things, like a boy who stays who stays around
When I needed him the most on your walk
Hold your head up high and when you watch me fall
Please look back for the last time
Brooklyn dodger
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By zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Almost impossible to listen to with headphones, the sweet and slowed melodies, electronic sounds, screeching noises, and Jamie Stewart’s voice... there are no half measures for his voice.
But don’t be frightened by Jamie’s screams, nor by my review, it takes strong nerves on the first listen, but I swear it’s worth it... it’s a difficult but beautiful album!!
