Description
When ‘Sink Like A Symphony’ came out in 2006 I was working at a record store in Portland and I persuaded every customer I knew to buy a copy. I really loved this record! It was also a time in my life where I felt fragile and coerced. I struggled to make decisions. I also had kind of a lot of crushes? This record spoke to all of that, the swarmed feelings, the hurt, the brightness of other people. The lyric where he says “Oh life remystified/oh walking valentine” was so important to me, also the one where he says “flames in my mouth/named after feelings” and the song title “Susceptible to Ghosts.” At the time I compared this record to The Microphones ‘Live in Japan’ record and ‘In the Airplane Over the Sea’ which helped convince a lot of people to check it out. I have been listening to this reissue, which re-sequences the record and makes the whole thing feel a little more breathless and I am unsure of the Elverum/Mangum comparisons anymore. But when I think about what I love about those records – the way one jams too many words into each line; the way the other clarifies the nightmare of oversensitivity; the way one layers voices with something inhuman and something so human about it; the way one makes the presumably spent gesture of strumming major chords on an acoustic guitar and yet it feels stirring and direct and mysterious; the way they both have spent so much time thinking about and arranging these songs but play them as if it’s a first take. I stand by all of that regarding ‘Sink Like a Symphony.’ Reissue limited to 300 copies.
