Review Summary: Common existential despair
It's two in the morning, and everybody else is off to a night of drinking in town. I stayed in. Matter of fact, I stayed in something remotely resembling a hostel, dark and unwelcoming halls, malfunctioning lamps and the scent of a room that has up to this moment been occupied by people getting ready to head out. I have seen some barely clothed women, drank quite a bit, and even attempted to go along with the others. I couldn't. Because none of this had any semblance of a meaning whatsoever. None. I was awake that entire night, heart rate up to a probably unhealthy BPM count, thoughts colliding with and canceling out one another; too powerless to willfully live or die. And that's when Geoff Rickley screamed "Ambulance, let me in / Don't make me stay here" into my ears, the starting point of a charmingly terrifying journey. It's safe to say I survived, but during the course of this record, it's also safe to say that I've been to hell and back. In more ways than I cared to count. So here it is, right off the bat: Common Existence will crush you. It will open up every single wound you thought you managed to saw shut a long time ago, only to flesh out your weaknesses and past mistakes, and drive you closer to acceptance. An acceptance that is anything but uplifting or redeeming. But it is acceptance nonetheless.
"We could be the heartbeat / And everything nine tenths collapsed / Would come back to life" - but we're not that heartbeat. We're more like the failed organ, using up its ever-fading muscle memory to connect with anything worth pumping blood into. And Common Existence is the perfect soundtrack to this. From the opening drumbeats to the cathartic climax of "You Were the Cancer", this is very much a cleansing process; stopping just short of erasing the listeners themselves. Everything you ever loved or held to be worthy of your affections is going to die here: marriage ("Last Call"), the fact that you've been born ("Time's Arrow", the reinterpretation of a Martin Amis novel), science ("Unintended Long Term Effects"), but most of all: your personal attachment to faces, memories, people, and life in general.
While a track like "Circuits of Fever" might feel to be out of place, it is essential in completing the picture, and strip you to the bone. "You are my blanked out pages" seems to continue the journey inwards, a journey that ultimately ends with the faux-hateful outburst declaring how "You were the cancer / That's all you'll ever be".
When the reality is that "you" probably still are something, not so much cancer but all those barely conceivable feelings and phenomenal qualities of thought that are poured into the verses:
"It's a missile sleeping in the ground / It's a camera trying to photograph a sound"
"It's the comfort in a bathtub full of ice / It's the promise of a peaceful afterlife"
Because "you" are still there, whether in the fingerprint on a doorknob, in the echo of a speeding car, or in the smell of that particular brand of coffee. And "I" know this, however much I would like to ignore that. Thursday's here to never let the "I" forget that the old rooms might be boarded up, but the architecture did not change a bit. One burning question, however, needs to be addressed: why on Earth would anyone want to expose themselves to this kind of existential torture? And the best I can do is to point you towards approximately 90% of the music you listen to when you're using it as some kind of therapy, and say: you're already listening to it, you just don't know it yet.
The next day I felt hollow and stripped of any kind of worth. The gals and guys probably had a pleasant night, one that they will forget sooner rather than later. I went to work after a cold shower, moral obligations doing much of the work of the motor functions, and I was almost certain in the knowledge that even if I thought "you were the cancer", "you" were pretty much the thing keeping me alive.
It is nice to be reminded every now and then.
