Review Summary: blithely i, go idly by
Re: psychedelic folk songs emanating like steam from some soft-edged oblivion.
I don’t understand this record much but I think that’s the point. These could be songs to fall asleep to or they could be songs to trip to, but they are consistently indecipherable; buzzing with leisured static and/or melting into each other under the dusky glow of background ambience.
These tracks, consigned generally to the periphery, feel like collages fished out from a box of childhood mementos.
Melody Unfair, for instance, moves in a cloud of dust, but just
stuff (bleeps, bloops, the rattling of a tom) make their peace underneath it all. None of it makes sense to the point where it feels aleatoric, and then it ends and you have to play it again, fruitlessly trying to wrap your head around what is essentially five minutes of acoustic ambling.
That’s the concept, I think. Eucalyptus is a record that makes it impossible to remember the order of things. Ideas (from the metallic slides that introduce
Jackson 5 to the hopeful, tribal chanting that ends it) seem to be reshuffled every time the album plays – with the focus being a lack thereof, and Avey Tare prevaricating to (or at) his own emotional responses until they walk away.
Back to me:
Eucalyptus is a dissociative, probably. Continuous listening proves a muddied brain, the oxymoronic flashing of muted colour. I end up daydreaming when I listen and it leads me to a very honest and honestly unexpected realisation – that all music remains servant to a specific purpose, even if it's to create a half aloof, half engaged atmosphere like
Eucalyptus does, with the loose and fraying thread that holds it together. To connect this record to its past relationships with AnCo and
Down There, it is more subsumed by the fog, more laconic than both counterparts. It’s not a whole lot of nothing, but it’s a whole lot of something that both rejects focus and needs it to exist. In such a manner, I guess, it succeeds at occupying a mostly vacant space, and in music these uncharted territories are there to be explored. So it wanders in, looks around momentarily, then coils up in the corner.
