Pitchfork

I'm going to have to throw this couch out. But where? How can I even ask myself something like that? Fuck, I need... I need to go out. Where are my cigarettes? I have to turn the music off. Was this going on the entire time? I can't remember playing this. Don't forget to erase the messages. Don't start crying. Come on, fuck, stand up. Pick yourself up. Did anyone hear me? He still seems awake. Maybe he is awake. Do you think he'd be mad? Should I pick him up? I have to move him and clean this room. How am I going to do that? I have to do it tonight. He would hate me if he could see this. I can't think about this now, I have to go out. Where are my cigarettes? Fuck, cats, where did you put my cigarettes? Turn the bathroom light off. Turn all of them off, don't forget. Set the alarm clock. I can't think about this right now. Don't look at him, it makes you sick. I have to write tonight.

Nothing will be open now. I can go to the field near the highway and sit down. This shirt is sweaty. I hope no one is there.

I already miss you. How are you? Where are you? Could you see me? Were you mad? I was mad, I know it. I'm sorry for everything, and I really do hate myself. I hope you know that. I think you're going to haunt me until the day I die. Listen, I have to write tonight, so I'm going to have to file you away for a while. God, we came so close. We went to the very end, and I know you didn't mean everything you said. Or maybe you did. Heh, you bleed like a motherfucker. I'm sorry, I just didn't expect it. I don't know what I expected. I have to write tonight.

Houston's premier avant-folk trio has done it again. Ack, what a terrible way to start a review-- especially for this band, for this record. Charalambides (Tom and Christina Carter, Heather Leigh Murray) have a way of making openers and brief descriptions seem worthless, like covering cakes with the bodies of grasshoppers and dead leaves. Haha, no. Like the knowledge of your own end: Whatever you might want to say about it seems overwhelmingly lacking, disrespectful. The estimable Peter Pott says any review that reveals its own uselessness is doomed from the start, yet in the case of Joy Shapes, that's entirely fitting. Its music dooms, from Tom Carter's opening three-note toll to Murray's obscene ghost-calls to a rotten garden of mutated strings and hollow bodies panging away into my blank face. I wish you could hear it. I'd love to see the faces of a million frozen capitalists (me and Bob hate you, Pitchformula) forced to listen to this, held captive in a theater a la A Clockwork Orange, with visions of their assorted ideas of a black, holy void playing before them to this music. Yeah, Charalambides have done it again, and I wish
                                                                                              You
                                                                                                         could
                                                                                                                hear
                                                                                                                      it.

What a beautiful night. All the cars passing by look like fireflies. They move by slowly and resolutely, but I can't really hear them. I can hear the grass, and I think that's a breeze. Sometimes the wind sounds like someone singing. What a stupid thing to say. I've really got to start writing greeting cards, there's probably good money in that. But it's true, sometimes the wind sounds like a fucked-up cabaret singer, just letting loose with moans and whispers like she doesn't care who hears it. Why should she care? What did Madison say? "All the bad choices ppl make for themselves come down to thinking they're a person that they're not." Maybe so. But this singing couldn't care less. It winds through desperate weeds and my hair, and would sooner level the city behind me than stop to consider who it is, why it's singing. Crazy, what music can do. How am I going to live with myself?

The droning, consonant pull of the title track doesn't so much ebb and flow as drift, always towards some pristine reservoir. I don't normally associate "bliss" with this band, and though it's unfair to assume soft, major-keyed trance necessarily equates to bliss, I fall into the trap this time. But it's a bliss that discards expected notions of peaceful resolve and acceptance; Joy Shapes plays for people who realize what terrible things they are capable of (or have already done) and are leaping hopelessly into areas of the mind safely buffered from the real world. Some people call this "transcendent." "Stroke" is similar, at least insofar as it sticks to major keys (and devilish sevenths) and gentle processions, though is wilder at heart. It has distant chimes, ringing in no obvious order or tonality, that make everything positioned on top of them seem heavenly. When the female voices enter almost seven minutes in, I struggle to compare them to anything-- maybe it's reminiscent of the last song on Vision Creation Newsun, when the savage Boredoms shed their spikes and let the blood on their teeth dry as they slept. Charalambides don't play with sharp teeth; they're wild like vines and centipedes.

Had I known you could bleed this much I might've reconsidered. But we'll see each other again. And I know I'll get everything that's coming to me. Fuck, even now, as I'm standing over you, torn and broken, you seem amazing. Did I do this? You still feel here, not here. I could never really hate you. Jesus, I didn't do this.

As Joy Shapes unwinds with a gradual, near-violent climax of howling feedback, doubled by voices disconnected from their bodies on "Voice for You", it occurs to me that these songs aren't so much hymns of passing to the other side as murder ballads. They're for murdering daydreams and the outside world; killing off connections to other music, and mental archives kept around in case you forget what "joy" and terror are supposed to feel like. I guess I should say that it's the best Charalambides album I've heard, if that makes a difference. And it's not that I think daydreams should be killed, but that some music has a way of sparking more than just your everyday escapism. That's healthy, right? Of course it is.