Review Summary: caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar
I wish I could say that I like puzzles. But truth is I do not have the patience, care or methodical mentality that their enjoyment requires. But these are not the type of puzzles i’ll be talking about here. They are the ones whose pieces are not fragments of a whole, but are each whole in themselves, complete totalities which nonetheless build an image that is not fully revealed, but expresses movement, a silhouette of strange trajectory. Whole pieces made of songs, paintings, books, poems or movies, in turn made of phrases, lines, melodies or scenes, in turn composed of sounds and images in time, and so on in fractal inversions until who knows where/when. I guess I prefer this kind of puzzle because it's more interesting when the pieces don't quite fit than when they do, since it calls into question the very existence of a complete and final figure. Infinitely more fun than the certainty of a prefigured image from the beginning, but at the same time never denying the possibility of a solution, a closing of the circle, the ending that puts each piece in its place.
What I wanted to say with this is that I consider Surface to Air Missive, the jangle pop and psychedelic indie project led by Taylor Ross, as a kind of puzzle. So… Shadows Leap, their latest piece, how does it fit into it? Well, in a continuous/disruptive way, of course, continuing a previous outline while blurring it in the same motion.
Music critics’ “evolutionary” discourse seems to never lose relevance, and we keep talking about an artist's “next step”, valuing growth and maturity. On the other hand, when the judgment is negative, we say: involution, setback– catastrophe! antinatura!
All inevitability, simple teleology. Sunrise, zenith and sunset. 1+1+1+ you know the drill.
Few manage to escape these discursive and rhetorical traps, and even fewer manage to do so by charging head-on and fearless. Shadows Leap is a great album just for the simple fact that it’s got some very good songs in it. It's entertaining, dark, psychedelic, haunting and weird. Deceptively simple and uncomplicatedly baroque at the same time.
But trying to explain it as a “step forward”, or the “culmination” of… of what exactly? One step towards…??? StAM's discography does not fit into a discourse of progress or synthesis, it is like trying to describe a dance as if it were a march, or a painting as if it were a puzzle. Perhaps it is more fair to speak of it, and of all of StAM's opus, as an equation for which we do not yet have all the variables, a graph for which we would need dimensions that are not yet accessible to fully perceive. At that moment, when we can freeze the image and study its shape, what would we see? What peaks and valleys?
In the meantime, I remember words that I read recently, specifically regarding literary criticism. They invite us to remember the pleasure of telling the same story again with other words, searching and changing them just for the simple pleasure of re-telling the same thing with another voice at another time. All versions of the story form part of it, yet are not “it”, and each voice that tells resonates with the others. It is the melody of the story that is multiplied and fractally reflected in the harmony of the telling.
An artist who “tells their story” will be subject to judgment on the story they choose to tell. Meanwhile, those who manage to shift their focus from the “story”, and instead dive into the timeless art of “telling”, will dance all the way across the minefield.
