Review Summary: Its awesome for me to see Dan Bejar do something this weird and out there, it feels like these three beat up a children’s album until it crawled into the fetal position then force fed it acid or something.
Points gray was formed sometime during 1998-1999 and consist of Robert Dayton, Julian Lawrence and Dan Bejar, their only project “Offshore” had an incredibly limited distribution in 1999 and it had to wait 13 years for a legitimate release of the project. This shoddy release is likely why this is a pretty obscure artifact in all of these guy’s discography but it’s certainly not intentionally hidden, all of these guys have spoken proudly of this album, and I can see why. I am extremely familiar with Dan Bejar; he is my favorite artist by a large margin, and I had no idea who the other two guys are, so I went into this album expecting something more like “City of Daughters” and I was pretty surprised when I resurfaced with some sort of gnomish acid folk.
The album starts with “Echo power” and it works well as introduction to this very sparse, rustic, and somewhat grimy soundscape, which is accomplished by very simply played acoustic guitars, with some light piano which are both jarred by a smattering of “Percussion”. That’s in quotes because the sound I’m alluding to I think is just two trashcan lids clashing together or something, they come in around the two-minute mark and because they are used with a sense of reluctance so it’s not evocative of chaos, rather they add to the sense of settled debris. As in the first leg of the track with just the guitar and piano create a sense of dreary hopelessness and the clashes add dynamics to the song certainly, but don’t do anything to differ from the spectral disconsolate feeling despite the shock value which could be credited to it. The Vocals stick out the most not only in this track but the whole album, Robert or Julian is the main vocalist I actually can’t find out who, this isn’t a well reported on album and they don’t specifically credit who the main vocalist was but it’s one of them who I’ll refer to as Jobert.
Jobert plays really well in this sparse underground environment because throughout the album he gives a very raw and visceral performance, there’s a song on here called “No” where he has to wail the word “NO!’ for the entire 4 minutes and he pulls it off, he is able to bring a very real sense of emotional depravity to his baritone. I also appreciate the fact his despite the emotional impact being the most noteworthy thing about his performance, he doesn’t operate like Alexis Marshal because he maintains some form of professionalism, his baritone at points sounds really operatic and its very interesting to watch the contrast of grandeur which comes with the scale and proficiency of his voice being matched with him sounding like his crying. On the topic of contrast Dan Bejar is the backing vocalist (most of the time) and despite him being my favorite vocalist of all time I do think it’s smart to give him this position as Dan’s presence as a main vocalist is very specific and its one of sarcasm and vodka, he just cant really sell songs that are this emotionally blunt about its despair. But he excels in his position at embellishing Jobert’ s vocals because Jobert has a very deep and loud voice which is wonderfully contrasted with the thin reedy voice of 1999 Dan Bejar.
“Stone Mary Stone” is a great exemplar of that blunt songwriting I was talking about as these guy’s knack for smart contrast! The Writing is about how everything; life and art is all temporary and will inevitably be gone, I’m pretty sure the persona on this track is urging the title character to seek comfort in that but it could easily be despite that, or the “That’s all right” line could just be an act of sarcasm. Regardless this is one of my favorite songs on the album because the vocal performance feels despair ridden and it matches the sparse grimy soundscape, however an unavoidable component of that soundscape is this weirdly smooth bassline which creeps in especially during the chorus of the song, its so out of place with the vocals and the minimalist percussion but it empirically works. The most noteworthy thing about this track though is the ending, which introduces us to the fact that despite how raw the album came off as, its about to get very weird and woozy, the bottle was spiked with acid.
“People Hate you in this town” is a song about how the persona is hated by everybody around him and it sounds like a damn children’s singalong. these very dire lyrics are delivered by a very chipper group vocal performance, the rhymes are all very simple and spelt out and the composition is also very simple and easily understood, because of this the song comes off as infectiously playful, juvenile, and jaunty, cemented by the group going “yeah!” over the tackiest “bee boop” noises they could get their hands on. It’s a surreal to say the least and it marks a change in the whole album because from here on out I started to notice more whimsical elements to the songwriting most apparently in “Attractor of moths” where the vocal performance is at its most children’s story book-ish with the same bleak songwriting. I should note that the songwriting on this track is the most Dan Bejar-like writing on here, they even use the word “Penchant”.
But the hallucinatory feel created by very dire lyrics contrasted with a springy tone are present in all the tracks but are somewhat more subdued. “Help me to nick the stones that surrounds us” has several lyrics which evoke that old children’s story aesthetic to it, but its noticeably “Frowny frown” which utilizes this juxtaposition the most to its benefit. The chorus of the song is the title of title sung out in a very obviously sad drawn-out way, almost to the point where it feels dramatized to a juvenile extent but is then jarred with the line “It’s so ***ing lousy to be alive!”, once more weaponizing this juvenile bluntness to push the song into a darker lurid direction.
“Tonite you sleep alone” is the only optimistic song on the whole record and it might just be the best, it’s a track which exclaims defiance in the face of loneliness and the soundscape expands throughout the course of the track, starting with a guitar riff then bringing on layers of synths to amplify the sense of liberating animated triumph this song is able to evoke, it feels like an empowering march which would happen in the third act some medieval children’s play down to an interruption from the goblin under the bridge. The goblin in this case being Dan Bejar who interrupts this song for a weird little animated snippet where his vocals move along with a singular smooth guitar riff, only for the song to continue unfazed by this cutaway. This track exemplifies the weird whimsical nature of the whole album and would be a phenomenal closing track, unfortunately the actual closing track is “weeds” which I have already forgotten about but it’s only a 2-minute track so this track practically speaking works as a great closing track.
I do have issues with this album, again “Weeds” is just not something I remember that much, I praised the vocal performance on “No but I must stress that the whole song is Jobert crying “no!” in tandem to some guitar strums of varying intensities, Jobert did his best, but I very rarely am in the mood to listen to 4 minutes of it. Another track which didn’t need to be 4 minutes long is “Growing beards” which I think is a very well written song, the beards represent the perils of aging and death which is why beards are called several things like “face suffocation” which obviously is an allusion to death but its also called “ foliage autumn”, by comparing it to autumn leaves it’s implying the imminent winter season which is dire because it leads to the end of the year where the leaves will die. My issue with the track is that it ends at the right spot- around the two minutes mark, but then just starts up again for another two minutes with the exact same lyrics, they played the song twice basically.
My final critique and thoughts on this thing I guess is just that I don’t listen to it enough is because of what it is in concept. It’s a raw album full of despair, so it sonically sounds dirty, sparse and downbeat, even in the acid folk stuff. But it’s sort of wrong to levy this criticism because it kind of feels like I’m levying it towards a whole style, regardless of when I do choose to put this thing on, I’m still consistently entertained by the choices made on this record, and how it can capture a manic sense of manic disconsolate in such a selective, sparse environment.
(btw Dan Bejar put out a children’s song, for children called “You Gotta Wonder, Snowy”, its on SoundCloud please listen to it, its horrifying and he made it for children to like listen to and everything)
