For all the nondescript, boring flyover characterizations of the Midwest, there have been a lot of slashers set here. There’s some special menace, a pastoral horror in the cracking woods behind the lakeside campfire, the loneliness veining along two-lane highway riven hills. Sleepy neighborhoods with grass lawns and buried histories of violence and displacement. And then there’s the slow-walking terror of growing old, and (God forbid) alone. You used to play out here. Even caught in the grip of ecstasy, fireflies dotting the night’s telephone wire laced trees, the thought laps your neck, “I don’t feel right.”
The self-harmonizing chorus behind that unsettling thought is Lexington’s James Friley, repeating, “Why do I?” The questioning border state is home for this self-titled record, a self-reference to dispel the generic, decade-crossing references whose spirits have hissed like tape throughout the project’s life. There’s a mirage of clarity on this recording, an unnatural pool to emerge from replenished. Or what’s that swirling, Beyond The Black Rainbow drone to open it all up? A deep warm something? I’ve grown suspicious of somethings ever since Phil Elverum dreamed up a thousand, no matter how warm. The piano that comes ringing out of the noise is triumphant, woozy, ready to party, but the drone never really goes away. The thought laps your neck.
Centerpiece “Evergreen Psycho” makes me wanna shuffle back and forth on my feet in a Christmas light lit, small-staged corner venue in my hometown (in your hometown). Friley’s romantic yearning is a recurring fixation in this still celibate-sounding dreamy hellscape, almost always addressing an anachronistic “you” who is “she,” “baby,” “darling.” He’s pining for the lake inside you while begging to be the bone that would sink to its bottom. All the while, he’s dreaming the day away in a putrid glam jam (how now the beautiful ghost of Bowie seems to haunt every backward-looking rock arrangement). But the backward look isn’t unimaginative, and it’s all in good humor. To conjoin “What’s that smell?” with “And who’s that girl?” takes a macabre-goofiness — to drag his tongue across the inside of his cheek for biting and then stick it out at you.
Idiot Glee’s is a sonics to match Queen of Earth’s crossfades, an unsettled post-youth retroflection of (be)wildering woods. The lurking anxieties that animate the record are covered over with fun, with play, its listenability acting like an invitation to its darker deeps. It all seems to lock into place on closer “The River”: big, anthemic guitar-slides and a steady beat. I think I’d get a good feeling from whatever gloomy romantic indie movie would close with its glittery rock & roll wish, something like comfort, a memory not so haunted, the deep breath of satisfaction that it wasn’t meant to be. Or so I’ve been told.
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