That bird is a bat

One night in the fall of 1993, I came home late after drinking with friends. Home was a shared house that I had only just moved into that day or maybe the day before, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one there that night – most of my roommates hadn’t even moved in yet.

I was puttering around in my room and close to crashing when I noticed a shadowy motion just off to the side, at about eye level. Good God, I thought, is there a bird in here? Oh, man – that’s a bat.

I leapt out of my room and shut the door. Reckoning that I’d trapped the little beast in there, I decided to hide under some coats have a bowl of cereal while, um, figuring out what to do about the bat. (I’ve been a late-night cereal-eater all my life.)

So I was standing in the kitchen, munching Shreddies, when I heard a disturbance in the air out in the living room. I leaned my head in. There it was again, that fluttering shadow, and Jesus, now it was coming right at me.

Propelled by nothing more than a base instinct to put something between me and the bat (OK, we can probably simplify all that as “mindless fear”), I abandoned my Shreddies and made it back into my room, pushed the door shut, leaned against it, panting. Reality seemed to be sliding around on me. Hadn’t I shut the door before? How the hell did it get out there? Were there two of them?

While I paced for a few seconds, I could hear the thing flapping around out there in the living room with what sounded like increasing vehemence, and the whooshing started to mix in with strange knocking sounds. Was it bumping up against the door? Then there was silence, and then a flurry of low bumping and rustling, and then I watched the bat crawl under the door and rise up and come at me.

The next hour or so resembled a French farce, but with a foul-faced flying rodent instead of an ingénue in a nightgown. Doors were slammed; rooms were fled from and returned to; corners were peered around apprehensively. It all ended with me barricaded inside my room, still-packed boxes shoved flush against the bottom of the door, a towel stuffed into the seam at the top. Every light in my room blazed. I fell asleep on my futon, fully clothed, still a little drunk, clutching a plunger in an outstretched arm.

• Mahjongg, “Those Birds Are Bats”

Mahjongg (great name) are new to me; they’re on good old K Records and they’re apparently from Missouri. This song is pretty atypical of Kontpab (bad name), the album it sits on, most of which has a chunky electro vibe that vibrates back & forth between hypnotic polyrhythms and grooveless clatter.

But “Those Birds Are Bats” (great title) is more like No Age or Times New Viking in its MO: galloping, tuneful exuberance shrouded in a haze of hiss. (The shrouding presumably serves the strategic purpose of giving the track a more evocative, mysterious patina than just some regular old pop song. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – hey, it works.)

You can buy the album here and it appears that for now, at least, you can stream the whole thing here.

Trip, Wind, Dude

As an evocation of the partly trancelike and partly nerve-churning properties of an hourlong back-country drive through sideways snow & occasional whiteout & bullying, shrieking winds, this one by Black Dice is pretty good. Probably wasn’t intended that way, but still.

• Black Dice, “Trip Dude Delay” (buy Miles of Smiles here)
  
  

Characters and words

From Thomas Jones’ review of James Woods’ How Fiction Works (which is new in the U.K, forthcoming in North America):

Characters, as well as readers, are surely entitled to perceptions, thoughts and feelings that they are unable to put into words. But because words are the medium of fiction, the writer uses the best words available to him to convey to the reader the character's state of mind.

As Henry James put it in the Preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew, a novel Wood singles out for praise: 'Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.'

The most powerful siren song

Deborah Eisenberg, in an interview in Tin House #34:

For a long time when I’m working on something, I can’t look at what my hand has produced the day or week or month before, because it’s just hideously phony. You’d think that phoniness would be something that’s achieved with work – that the natural would precede the artificial – but it’s actually the opposite for most writers, I think. There are famous exceptions, of course. But generally, unphoniness is what you achieve with work. The first impulse is always a cliché, or something that’s inaccurate. It’s a kind of inaccuracy that is the most powerful siren song, because although it’s very difficult even to approximate something it is actually possible. And you’re so proud of yourself for having approximated it, you think, Well, that’s pretty good.

I love LA!

My favourite songs so far of this young year are Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” (produced by Madlib), Xiu Xiu’s cover of “Under Pressure” (with Michael Gira), and this thing by Sarah Silverman (with special guest).

We don’t know how, we don’t know when

• Scout Niblett, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy I Am here)

Doesn’t get much simpler than this – a ragged drumbeat, a melodic warble, a couple tiny scraps of lyric about Death. I’m ready to ride it straight into the ground, a mile down to some spooky damp cavern half-lit by green-glowing moss.

Jens Lekman covers the song for a comp for his label, and he does the death masque as a ballroom promenade – puts his suave croon out front, dresses up the tune all pretty, the backbeat a syncopated wiggle, the keyboards blowing bubbles. There’s even a choir in there. Not that I don’t like it – I do – but there’s something more inviting about the cold comfort of the original, the green moss against the rock in the dark.

• Jens Lekman, “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (buy SC100 here)

Black ants & space months

I was really big on Stereolab at first: loved the thick keyboard whooshes, the autobahn rhythms, the blend of disparate collector-geek influences into one purposeful sound. Was all over their first few records, saw them live a couple times and dug them, etc. And then I basically lost interest. In their struggle to differentiate one album from the next, they seemed to get lighter & lighter, more abstracted, fussier. (Plus I figured I’d heard enough ba-ba-ba.) There just didn’t seem to be much need to check out Latest Stereolab Album X instead of sticking with the ones I already had.

Recently, though, I watched a documentary about Robert Moog that included some live Stereolab footage, and that revived some of my long-ago excitement. Lately I’ve been digging out some of their more “recent” stuff (by which I mean from over the past decade or so), wondering how much I’ve missed out.

Still listening & still deciding – I think I’m a long way away from being a full-on convert or anything – but a couple tracks that have jumped out so far are the two openers on their 2001 record, Sound-Dust. “Black Ants” is a little snatch of a song, and it could easily & perhaps fairly be dismissed as sci-fi kitsch, but to me it has a genuinely unsettling vibe that you don’t hear much in Stereolab. “Space Moth” is a multiparter: I find the intro spindly & skippable and the middle section solid if unspectacular. But things really get going a little past the five-minute mark, when the bass discovers some swing and the horns chip in with some accents.

• Stereolab, “Black Ants in Sound-Dust” and “Space Moth” (buy Sound-Dust here)

Spill all over you

• The Field, “A Paw in the Face” (buy From Here We Go Sublime here)

I was late getting onto this album by The Field, aka Axel Willner, a man from Sweden. Had I been less late, the record would have been a strong contender for my top-of-the-year list a few weeks back.

Like a lot of electronica, this stuff hypnotizes via pattern repetition. But in this track especially, the patterns vary subtly from bar to bar, and the variations are almost predictable but just off-schedule enough to be tantalizing. Here and throughout the record, rapid successions of discrete notes, from registers higher and lower, blend into a gestalt that’s contemplative, even soothing. More than others of its ilk (said the dilettante), “A Paw in the Face” evokes Reich & Riley and still holds up itself.

• His Name Is Alive, “Write My Name in the Groove” (buy Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth here)

From a 2001 album that I just got into, in which the jazz- and gospel-loving art rockers tackle the contemporary R&B ballad. (Not just with this song – pretty much over the whole album, though there are also a couple of more oldtimey Billie Holiday homages.) I love this song, mostly because that lovely melody in the title lyric calls to mind TLC, which is a shortcut to my heart. The singer sells it well, and that’s some real nice drum work, too.

The album has a few other great things – including a torchy ballad called “Are We Still Married” – but you could argue that overall, it’s a little too dry & reverent for its own good.

Dreiserama

As you read “The Bulwark” (Doubleday), Theodore Dreiser’s posthumous novel, you go through all the familiar experience of first groaning over the commonplace characters and the shoddy clichés of the style, then gradually finding yourself won by the candor and humanity of the author, then finally being moved by a powerful dramatic pathos which Dreiser has somehow built up.

­– Edmund Wilson, as found in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s

I don’t know The Bulwark, but that pretty much captures the Dreiser I have read.

The olfactory sense is the sense that most strongly evokes memories of the past

• Sparks, “Perfume” (buy Hello Young Lovers here)

I don’t know much about Sparks, so when S started playing this one a lot – and as its genius quickly overcame my disinterest in the band – I assumed it was some gem from deep in their back catalogue, the era of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” or something. Turns out it’s from a 2006 (!) album, but I don’t feel too eggfaced. Lyrically the song has a fashion motif, with brand-name-dropping to boot, but musically it sure doesn’t chase any current vogue. In this age of mountain-man beards or armored glint, Sparks come to the party in black tie.

The song’s cheerfully opportunistic, though – some rawk guitar here, a limpid music-roll piano line there, strings when needed, a spoken-word bridge when needed. (Well, a spoken-word bridge might never be needed, but it’s usually fun.) The disparate elements form a whole that’s perfectly seamless, and that’s because of two things: those impossibly debonair vocals and the simple, insistent forward motion of the rhythm section.

(I was also surprised to learn that the brothers in Sparks were L.A. boys originally, so deeply had I associated them with England. Clearly I have much to learn.)

I drank the wine they had left on my table

• The Saints, “Just Like Fire Would” (buy All Fools Day here)

In which a band previously most noted for punk anthems (and previously discussed in this space by Gary Butler) goes for a slightly more reflective sound. I always imagine Chris Bailey singing this one from the corner of a trashed hotel suite, the air stale & foul, empty bottles clanking as he stirs. As if he’s always wanted to be a classic rock & roller, a god of arenas, a wearer of big scarves & round sunglasses & tight pants, a champion of debauch. His bleary vocals are a little at odds with the arrangement’s more fussy touches, like the strings and the horn line, but still, it all sounds suitably weary & decadent. And yet uplifting, too.

Truth and consequences

Although my own reading tends to favour fiction over non-, one pet peeve I’ve always had is the notion – usually put forth by novelists – that made-up stories offer access to some kind of “greater truth,” one that’s missing from mere reportage. Sure, fiction can be more vivid, more compelling, more satisfying than real life – but to claim some inside track on “the truth” is nothing more than presumptuous self-flattery.

So I was gratified to read Mark Bowden’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on The Wire, the streets-of-Baltimore TV show created by former newspaper reporter David Simon. At one point, Bowden writes:

Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story “ruined” by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least not a complete one—because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, “It’s important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

This is so well put and convincing that it almost seems as if Bowden is arguing that reading/writing fiction is flat-out morally inferior. I certainly don’t believe that, and I don’t think he’s trying to say it, either. But it is worth keeping in mind that although fiction offers us many wonderful things, it has no monopoly on insight into the world, and that the authority it claims is an illusion.

An illusion we accept willingly and eagerly, of course. I still think The Wire has all kinds of insight into the world and that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on a screen. The fifth and final season, which focuses on the newsroom of a Baltimore newspaper, kicks off tomorrow night, and since I have no cable and will be seeing it at some undefined future point, I’m writhing impatiently.

What a job, what a job

And now, because nobody demanded it, a bunch of my fave singles/songs of the year. In more or less random order. Notes when I feel like it. And now I’m going to check out some of the other year-end lists for word on all the great stuff out there that I’m undoubtedly behind on.

A couple notes: (1) I won’t bother repeating any songs from my list of fave albums, even though every one of those should by rights have one or more songs here. (2) There will be no “Umbrella” on this list. I do love the girl R&B stuff, but I really don’t get this Rihanna thing. Some cool beats here & there, but for me her vocals just flatten & dull everything.

Anyway:

Devin the Dude with Andre 3000 & Snoop Dogg, “What a Job”
Man, this one has me hooked. Maybe the order isn’t totally random.

The Cave Singers, “Seeds of Night”
I came to this one late in the year, and thanks only to S, but this would also be a strong #1 of 2007 candidate.

CocoRosie, “Rainbowarriors”
Sappy fer sure, but it works for me.

Lavender Diamond, “Open Your Heart”
I know they’re American, but it sounds like some great lost Britpop, sun glinting through raindrops.

Feist, “1 2 3 4” and “I Feel It All”
At least half of the album puts me to sleep, but I absolutely love these two, and even overplay and iPod commercials haven’t killed them. Yet.

Caribou, “Melody Day” and Miracle Fortress, “Have You Seen in Your Dreams”
I could swear each of these quotes fleetingly from other Canadian songs – the Hidden Cameras’ “Ban Marriage” and the Stars’ “Elevator Love Letter,” respectively. But each one is its own compelling thing too.

Bishop Allen, “clickclickclickclick” and Page France, “Here’s a Telephone”
Saw both of them live this year. The Bishop Allen show in particular was one of the more enjoyable concert experiences I had in 2007.

Eve, “Tambourine” and Lil Mama, “Lip Gloss”
This is the girl R&B I like.

Kanye West, “Stronger” and Pharoahe Monch, “Body Baby”
I don’t think I dig the Pharoahe Monch song just because of the conventional rock & roll trappings – I think it’s just because of its ferocious energy.

Grinderman, “No Pussy Blues”
I like Nick Cave best when he’s funny. Well, he’s always kind of funny. But I like him best when he’s this kind of funny. Like that really long song from a couple albums back, “Babe I’m on Fire.”

Springsteen, “Radio Nowhere”
Liked the single a lot – it wasn’t reinventing rock and roll or anything, but it sure didn’t sound like typical E Street Band stuff. Then I listened to the album a couple times, and it sounded like pretty typical E Street Band stuff.

Matthew Dear, “Pom Pom”
Pneumatic.

Devendra Banhart, “Lover”
Funk it up, Devendra!

Of Montreal, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”
Couple other songs on the album could be on this list too, but the Krautrock vibe puts it over.

Eluvium, “Amreik”
On repeated listens, the album got a bit too dinner-classics for me. But this one still gets me.

The Shout Out Louds, “Tonight I Have to Leave It”
Or “In Between Fridays I’m in Love Just Like Heaven.”

Round up the usual suspects

Since everyone else is doing it (OK, almost everyone), here are my fave albums of the year, and I’ll even throw in a few mp3s. These are alphabetical by artist. Later I’ll try to do a singles/songs list too.

Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum
Some genius stuff here, really energetic & creative. Although it’s recorded fairly cleanly, with each sound element discrete & identifiable, to me it still sounds almost oppressively fecund, like some teeming dusky jungle. But once you’re in you don’t want to come out.

Coltrane Motion, Songs About Music
Wrote about it here.

Holy Fuck, LP
Plus their self-titled EP from early this year, which was mostly rendered obsolete by this new full-length.

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Not to mention the various alternate-version B-sides and the rereleased also-very-cool 45:33.

M.I.A., Kala

Plants and Animals, with/avec
Can an EP be on my album list? Sure. Wrote about it here. Looking forward to the full-length.

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
While it’s obviously highly enjoyable, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at first seemed a tad disposable. But it really came into focus a few months in; the little strangenesses reward close listening, while the pop and funk affectations make Spoon more purely pleasurable than most of their contemporaries. If this were, er, a ranked list, this one would be at or near the top.

Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich
Here and here.

Vampire Weekend, “blue CDR” demos
Here. Saw them live a few months ago and again last week and was struck by the difference in crowd size. The buzz is building, I guess. Accordingly, the second time they seemed more confident, and they duly withheld “Oxford Comma” (the “hit”) until the end of the set proper. But dudes, if you’re going to be touring a lot, you gotta have some more songs. Learn some covers or something! (I never fully trust a band that never does any covers. But that’s my baggage.)

White Rainbow, Prism of Eternal Now
The latter ambient-roomtone tracks are perhaps a bit too minimal for my taste, but the stoner jams more than make up for them.

Among those bubbling under are records by Shocking Pinks, Deerhunter, Burial, Oh No, Tinariwen, and lots of others. Also it was great to see new reissues of Pylon’s Gyrate and Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. And a new Savage Republic that I only found out about recently and have not even gotten to yet. And I’m looking forward to checking out Miles Davis’s Complete On the Corner Sessions in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

• Black Moth Super Rainbow, “When the Sun Grows on Your Tongue” (buy here)
• Holy Fuck, “Frenchy’s” (buy here)
• White Rainbow, “Mystic Prism” (buy here)

The mud above and the stars below

In a bookstore last night they were playing Tom Verlaine’s first solo album in its entirety, which was making me happy indeed. This song in particular is on my Anywhere Anytime list.*

• Tom Verlaine, “Red Leaves” (buy here)

Great guitar work, which is to be expected – the steady chug in the left channel alongside the jazzier flecks in the right. And the chorus, while pretty minimal, is still damn pleasurable. I’d argue that the background coo helps out disproportionately, but then I tend to like background coos disproportionately. The shameless rock-star tricks at the end – the key change and then the double-time drumming – also work on me like sugar.

Man, I’ve just listened to this like 10 times in a row. You should too.

* (It’s true, and it’s a real list. On my iPod. Called “Anywhere Anytime.”)

The Mist

(HERE BE SPOILERS, BIG SPOILERS)

I’m not sure what I finally think of The Mist, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella. Its premise is pure B-movie: a bunch of folks are holed up in a small-town supermarket as an otherworldly mist – one filled with ugly, terrifying, and very deadly creatures – creeps across the world. Sounds damn good to me, and I liked the King novella a lot when I read it many, many years ago. The movie, though, has some great stuff and some really not-good stuff.

The setup is strong, and it leads to some brilliantly horrific scenes, like one in a darkened pharmacy overrun by – well, overrun by things you don’t want to run into. There’s also a great bit when several characters are trapped in a car and some barely-seen behemoth stomps by; Darabont captures not just terror, but convincing strains of awe and wonder, and at times like that the film is almost Spielbergian.

Almost. As soon as that thought bubbled up in the theatre, I became keenly aware that Spielberg would be doing this with much more visual style.

(One side note. While the film is remarkably faithful to King’s novella, I do give Darabont points for one very wise change. In the novella but not the film, the male and female leads have a quick hookup. I guess there’s no sex like Trapped in a Supermarket by Giant Bugs from Another Dimension sex.)

On the downside, you have to sit through a lot of clunky dialogue – most of it lifted directly from King, from what I remember – and some ridiculous hammery from Marcia Gay Harden, playing the supermarket’s resident religious loonie. Seriously, they should take away her Oscar for this one. Holy shit.

You also have to endure some half-hearted attempts to dress up the pulp thrills with thematic resonance, such as in a painfully expository scene in which the characters discuss the thin facade of civilization that masks humankind’s essential savagery.

Just to be clear, I’m not complaining that The Mist actually has some ambitions – I’m all for thematic resonance, even for pulp thrills. It’s the half-heartedness I object to: if King/Darabont really want to say something, surely they could say something that hasn’t already been said, and more eloquently, a hundred times?

For example, one angle that seemed underexploited to me was that the mist forces the characters to engage with nature – even a gruesome burlesque of nature – in a way that almost nobody has to any more. Which could have led to a more nuanced exploration of what place values and meaning have in a purely “natural” world that runs on the laws of the jungle. The humans wonder what the mist means – hence the religious loonie’s prominence in the plot – and what their own lives mean in a mistified world. But the giant spiders that prowl around out there don’t think about what it all means – they just want to eat something and avoid getting eaten by something else.

And then there’s the ending, which was radically reworked along the journey from text to film and which is, as everyone agrees, a holy-fuck moment. Let’s just say that a small band of weary survivors runs out of gas – literally – and makes a very dramatic decision about what to do with themselves. But if they had just held on for five more minutes….

I’m pretty sure the King novella ends on the word hope (it’s amazing what you remember of something you read when you were 16), and the necessity of keeping on keeping on is one of its main themes. I suppose the movie’s ending offers the same message – but this time delivered as a very stern lecture.

I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. Nathan points out here that faith in a guiding almighty is not a matter of choice, that you don’t choose whether or not to believe, and I wholeheartedly agree, since I would love to believe but can’t seem to any more. And that’s not because the world is a horrible place or evil goes unpunished or any of that stuff. There are no reasons per se. I just look around in my, er, soul for belief and find none.

OK, getting off track, sorry about that. So: I consider myself more or less an atheist at this point in my life. But one holdover of my Catholic upbringing is a gut superstition that it is not your place to decide when your time is up. That is decided for you.

That said, the controversial decision made by the characters late in the film still seems like an eminently reasonable one to me. And I really don’t know what Darabont was trying to get at by immediately (immediately!) showing us that it was the wrong decision. Was he trying to send a choose-life message? Or did he just consider it a sardonic O. Henry/Twilight Zone twist, albeit an exceptionally cruel one? Me, I was just left scratching my head; the ending didn’t so much tilt the movie’s tone as obliterate it, leaving nothing but empty bafflement.

(Finally, on a lighter note, one thing has always totally undermined King’s novella for me, and likewise this movie: I almost laughed out loud every time the word “mist” was used. “There’s something in the mist!” “I’d like to know more about this mist.” “We have to try and get out of the mist!” Bear in mind that the “mist” in question is a classic pea-souper that covers everything and allows no visibility for more than a couple of feet. So what human would look at it and call it anything but “fog”? However, no one in the novella/movie is allowed to use the f-word at all – because John Carpenter already had dibs on “The Fog.”)

Flowers & organs & plants & animals

• Plants and Animals, “Guru/Sinnerman” (buy digitally here)

This has jam-band trappings, I suppose, but it just sounds like great jazz to me. The repeating vamp/pulse of the bassline holds things steady while guitars & bongos orbit in crazy looping flares. And then, holy bonus, it morphs into “Sinnerman”! No one can do it like Nina Simone, but still, I’m usually inclined to be charitable with other versions – God bless ’em for trying and all that. This one holds up nicely; I like the distended phrasing on the vocals. (The whole thing also reminds me very much of Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” another song I dearly love.)

Plants and Animals are apparently from Montreal, and this is from a four-song EP called with/avec that’s definitely worth seeking out. One song, “Who’s Lola?” comes off like a veritable mini-suite a la The Who 1967. Another one, “Faerie Dance,” is beguilingly pretty, and I have to give them props for having the stones to call a song “Faerie Dance” without, well, being Marc Bolan.

What with/avec also really reminds me of is this:

• Six Organs of Admittance, “School of the Flower” (buy here)

See what I mean? The arpeggiated little guitar riff maintains coherence the same way the bassline does in “Guru/Sinnerman,” allowing everything else to twist & howl at will and setting up great furnace-roar electric guitar work.

School of the Flower was probably my fave album of whatever that year was – 2005, I guess. Alas, I find the two Six Organs records since, including the brand-new one, pleasant enough but not that interesting or inviting. To my ears Flower had a sonic variety and a loose, associative quality that they haven’t recaptured; the stuff since then seems dry and schematic in comparison. In fact, it’s with/avec that sounds like the Six Organs album I’ve been waiting on for a couple years.