Swearin’: Just
This is probably my favorite record of the year. I like the guitar tone, how it’s anchored low enough that it combines with the drums and dispatches these kind of insistent, splaying sub-rhythms. Allison Crutchfield, the singer, is the sister of Katie Crutchfield, who also filmed a video for this series. Katie’s video is more mannered, but in an airy, indefinite way, as in the bodiless manners of ghosts. Initially I think this quality issues from the haunting subtraction of ambient noise, the way that, in this cemetery, in the honeyed overgrowth, there’s no animal disquiet. Instead Katie is surrounded by a voided dome that intensifies her shape. (I’ve found that people appear most human in mindless space.) Her songs usually have a talking cadence to them, speeding carfuls of syllables. This one doesn’t. This one stretches, as if remembering a skin. (Later, while writing this, I listen intently and finally notice the insect chirps, a whole lightly-pieced web of them, that decorate her performance, and, nearer the end, her woe of bugs.)
People describe guitars as “crunchy” a lot but I feel the Swearin’ record is one of the word’s more correct applications. It’s as if a body is being tossed against and through it, settling occasionally between ridges. Otherwise I wonder if my enthusiasm for the record is not an indication of its precise appearance in my life. Big guitar records get bigger, acquire totemic weight when you require that they carry you through your bullshit, which they do. They sail you through privately, as if in an extra dimension, which is considerate of them, when all you feel you have to contribute to the physical world is stupid emotion.
I just thought about this movie for a few minutes and I started crying (“tears of joy”). it’s really amazing to me how this exists and how it’s not something I just contrived in my head to make myself feel better about being alive. anyway, after watching it, I like being alive a lot…I can’t describe how I feel about it other than that I love it more than anything else I’ve ever seen or heard! I would put this behind a read more but who cares
