Review Summary: What is there to know?
Fragments.
Even in the most deeply personal narrative records, you can only know so much of an artist’s story by what they choose to tell you. Maybe the picture only adds up to 75% once you’ve had your fun pushing pieces together on the countertop. More likely you only get a curated chunk, the rest safely banked in the artist’s head forever. Maybe they don’t even have it all put together themselves. It’s all fragments, the way memories can be.
A Fear of Open Water is, in the words of its creator Mike James, “sort of an anthology of opaque memories from my childhood” and deals with an attempted coming to terms with a traumatic event from those years. He speaks of sifting through social worker reports trying to piece together the whole of it, this thing unspoken to us, the outsiders, and certainly incompletely known to the victim, a toddler. Opaque is the right word. The music boils lo-fi indie, swirling, droning ambience, and harsh noise into a package that is many things, but not seizing. The lyrics are cryptic, intimating harsh sorrows, but never with the detail for us, again the outsiders, to know. One hopes a light has shone on something for James in all this.
And yet there is a pull to know. It’s not as if the music isn’t arresting in its depressive droning. The gently plucked guitar passages are never vigorous, but the notes always feel perfectly chosen somehow, especially on a track like “You Left and I’m Going Through the Motions” that manages to be an earworm seemingly against all odds. “Joust” feels like an indie single chopped apart and put together again. The chorusing of “one day you could feel better than you’ve ever felt” could have been something anthemic in a different context, with different feelings behind it, but here it is insistent, against all other forces. Static-y bursts cut in and out, halting.
The most poignant moments are when emotions are allowed to flail. On “Her Ghost is Gone” the harsh noise takes center stage, constantly fighting to blur out the serene guitars, while blown-out screams wail overhead. One has to seek out the lyrics to know what is being said. On “Waterboarding School”, where noise and screams are even more dominant, the lyrics have been redacted.
I was often reminded of the wonderful film Aftersun while listening to A Fear of Open Water. It follows a young girl’s vacation with her divorced father, who is dealing with inner turmoil he tries and often fails to conceal from her to defend her joy and innocence. The savagery of it is the things she picks up on and the things she does not, and the looking back on it through the lens of memory, trying to understand. Trying to know. Mostly the not knowing.
Fragments.
