“
…when you get a tooth pulled, your tongue’s always trying to make sense of it and trying to re-acclimate to the little bone cage it lives in, […] you just keep kind of probing it, probing it, probing it. […] It’s you trying to make sense of your new reality and that it’s without a tooth and a hole in your head — and sort of the fleshy, bloody mess of it.” —
Chris Porterfield, via Stereogum 2014
Chris Porterfield’s odd words on ‘Enchantment’—“
I miss you more than tongues miss pulled teeth”—is only one of the many jarring lyrical moments on
Marigolden. Porterfield examines addiction, mental health, and the human condition with unsettling language—bordering on crude or plainly weird. Porterfield makes out the “outlines of ankles, legs, and asses” from his window on opener ‘Decision Day’. He sits next to a surgeon on a plane who specializes in post-circumcision reconstruction on ‘Marigolden’. Blue-collar, mid-westisms illustrate a fantasy world of casual knifings, and golf course suicides that are addressed like regular goings-ons rather than earth-shattering tragedies. Protagonists—who seem awfully, if not entirely, autobiographical—“piss coffee” and “cough up gravel”.
Now,
Marigolden isn’t a sad-sack parody of Wisconsin or a singer-songwriter self-flagellation project—this is an album that earns its troubled gait. Field Report, an anagram of Porterfield’s own name, uses that same ugly creativity to help craft the entirety of
Marigolden’s 46 minutes—turning near standard, unremarkable Americana trappings into an honest, drunken open-mic for Porterfield. It’s not that
Marigolden isn’t thoughtful or professional—no, it just feels both uncomfortable
and natural. The music is almost besides the point: the instrumental performances have their oddities, but are largely just serviceable and reactionary to Porterfield’s dynamic vocals. In the case of ‘Ambrosia’, there are
only reactions: the tune is performed live at an upright piano in a single take, and Porterfield himself will tell you he’s not much of a pianist.
Porterfield can certainly sing though. ‘Ambrosia’ is a very moving song
because of its presentation.
Marigolden asks Porterfield’s voice be the dominant instrument, and in turn, Porterfield lets his storytelling—not his precision—be the engine to his vocal delivery. This is why
Marigolden, for all of its dive bar fetishism, is arresting: Porterfield knows how to write an honest song, and an honest Porterfield is precisely the person
Marigolden presents. “
The body remembers what the mind forgets / archives every heartbreak and cigarette” is sung on ‘Home (Leave the Lights On)’, and you can
believe you’re hearing a man who knows too well the impact of his actions. The jarring metaphors turn the sour sweet. You can feel disgusted and moved in the same moment. I can’t think of many other records that inspire that same, unpredictable cocktail of emotion—
Marigolden does it regularly.
