WITNESSES “The Collapse”
By Octopi Mills
This, apparently, is made by a fellow named Greg Schwan, and it appears the project has meddled and fooled around with other genres in the same project as well; it is told "Cinematic ambient", "POP", "Doom metal" and "Dark folk"....which is ambitious enough, but can it hold up to the curmudgeon tastes of this listener of which it is at his mercy? From the cover ( Pierre Barraud de Lagerie is responsible) I can judge, hastily, perhaps...that I don't like the feeling coming over me…
"Entrance" gently penetrates the ear orifice, softly, working it's way through wax and finding it's way into the brain there like a small screech owl would not. This turns into "The Collapse" which starts out not bad at all, taking a doomish riff into a croakish, stringy manner and is taken over by the safe, clean voice of our captain. The vocal style is one I cannot enjoy, and will not bother putting my finger on or explaining why, which is a shame because the music was doing something, I felt. I don't generally trust many people who fool around with pop music and won't seek out this to put it against what I have here as the song called, simply "Repose", strikes baldly and takes it's time to rise like a loaf of bread only to become a farmer's cream in the lap of the mind-this is not as trivial, you see…
Here I find what I cannot find platter with and the plate is like a pastry filled with conflicting things; bitter orange with burnt items peppered with sweetmeats and topped all wrong. The syrup of these things are neither heavy nor outright lightly summed up in their parts. It's as if the man is pulling a Dr. Frankenstein on a dish; putting a full fish with it's head breaded and body poached, all the while the slight tart of a candied yam stuffs and mixes with a bitter plum. The end wallows around in it's shell and wears out welcome with it's very species. Next something comes across like a cottage scene; it's an "interlude". I wonder if I am pointing my newly grown dew claw at the man in the same bitterness I have tasted in my mouth and I do recall I once knew a great man who was many things- a psychologist, farmer, oarsmen, etc. He once told me "I can make you taste lemons" and I believe him now as I taste many phantasmal things with my very mind,which has now become an animal radar.
The interlude isn't necessarily bad news but it isn't necessarily necessary either and I can't know quite why? Maybe it's the way the next song seems to brilliantly pickle itself before never becoming a lobster or something to be kept at all? I'm not sure, but the doom metal comes back after all the aloofness of a wagon ride with a steam engine over a plain of butter.
"Recorded, mixed, and mastered at The Oak Lodge and other places" is a hell of a statement mentioned in the credit notes, by the way, and is worth a oafish chuckle. There are moments to be had, here and there in the music and you'd better be damn sure that Greg Schwan will find them in his prodding and poking over things, inevitably so. "They Giveth and Taketh Away" hangs around like a drug soaked cousin in big, heavy boots, tracking mud into the house before finding his blind and wall clutching self at the end and then going back into the persona again as he fades into a kitchen somewhere. Now, the title " It Will Come for You, It Comes for Everyone" is as brilliant in itself as me not actually hearing it yet and I am indeed waiting for it to come to me like an old hound over a foggy hillside. I know it will make gravy of me and my brains. It is put at the end for this very reason, I feel. There's the haunting feeling of being lost in this song forever, but it ends; it ends. Like an air crisper courts a fruit fly, it ends, and I am left pondering a few things myself.