Friday Full-Length: True Widow, Circumambulation
Posted in Bootleg Theater on May 8th, 2020 by JJ KoczanYesterday was miserable. Wretched. Front to back. I wanted nothing more than for the day to end. I slept late, until about 6:30AM, took a two-hour nap in the afternoon — same as The Pecan — and went to bed around 8:30PM, and it was still too much day, by far. I wished I could’ve run through the thing at 1.5x speed, like you can do on YouTube. Just get it over with.
Today will be better. Or it won’t. I don’t know. It’s kind of out of my hands these days, or at least it feels that way.
I asked on the Twitterer a little bit ago where to start with True Widow, and 2013’s Circumambulation, above, was the clear pick. I’ll admit I haven’t dug in as deep as I might otherwise like to do before I write about something — though if I was to put a number to it I’d say I’ve made it through listening five or six times, and certainly I’ve reviewed records on less, if poorly — but even superficially it’s clear enough to understand why. The Austin, Texas-based three-piece’s third album came out in 2013 (right time) on Relapse Records (right place) with a murky sound that has helped define heavy/doomgaze in the years since. I read somewhere someone comparing them to Dead Meadow — their bio, maybe? I don’t know — and can’t get that out of my head, though the mood throughout Circumambulation is plainly darker. And in addition to the drums of Timothy “Slim Texas” Starks keeping things rolling, the well placed lead vocal tradeoffs between bassist Nicole Estill and guitarist Dan Phillips — as on “S:H:S” and “Fourth Teeth” — are an asset toward staving off ‘gaze monotony that, frankly, even Dead Meadow don’t have.
But it’s mellow, and it’s melancholy, and it has tonal presence, and for a lot of people into the heavier end of stuff finding it due to the exposure from releasing on Relapse — their first two records, a 2008 self-titled and 2013’s As High as the Highest Heavens and From the Center to the Circumference of the Earth were on End Sounds and Kemado, respectively — it’s easy enough to understand why it would make an impression. I did write about it in 2013, but it was only basically to note that I hadn’t heard it. What can I say? I suck at this. My head was elsewhere that year.
I wonder if I’ll say that about 2020 seven years from now. “Oh that? That was the plague year. No wonder I missed that record.”
Haven’t been sleeping, or sleeping well. I was up just about every hour last night, and I’ve been taking ZzzQuil, which is NyQuil’s sleep aid that’s not a cough suppressant. The Patient Mrs. has also been up, and has been sharing her anxiety dreams with me. She remembers more than I do. Yesterday morning, before I went upstairs to get The Pecan and received the first of the day’s many toddler-faceslaps for the effort, she told me about one in which we were running to find safety in a kind of post
-apocalyptic dystopian ethnofascist state — so now, basically — while being chased I guess by republicans who were maybe zombies but were definitely coming for us probably because she read the wrong books and one time on the internet I said Bernie Sanders wasn’t liberal enough, and we had a rag-tag crew with us but no kid I guess so at least it was probably quiet. The way she described it was somewhere between National Lampoon’s Vacation and The Walking Dead.
For what it’s worth, last night I dreamt I was at SXSW but SXSW was also Roadburn and I was hanging out with Jarvis from Scissorfight (random; he’s a nice guy in the times we’ve spoken, but I don’t know him that well) talking about old sludge bands and then I went and saw Usher and I was the only white person there but Usher was good and it wasn’t too crowded so that’s a win. There were no zombies or republicans.
I yelled at a couple cops outside Wegman’s the other day for not wearing masks. It was a minor thrill.
I’m afraid.
I don’t even know of what anymore though. Getting sick and dying in horrible pain? Fine. Bring it.
I’ve kept The Patient Mrs. on pretty severe lockdown. She doesn’t go in places or anything like that. My family is on pretty severe lockdown, as overseen by my sister. And The Pecan is young enough that I’m not worried about him getting it — I think of the 73,000-plus US deaths, one has been a child under three. Something like that. In any case, I’m way more concerned he’ll undo the locks on his window and climb out saying to himself “I can do it” before he plummets from the second floor.
When I think about it, our position could be far worse, but these are hard days and not at all given to logical reasoning.
We’re ramping up rhetoric about getting a dog. I don’t want one. I still miss my little dog Dio and any dog we get is going to pale in comparison to She Who Was The Best Dog. But on the other hand it might still be months before The Pecan can be around other kids and he needs something that isn’t his parents to spend his time with. So, dog. Ugh. Have fun, kid. Here’s a thing you can watch get old and die. That’s what’s going to happen to daddy!
Last night for dinner I made a salad with baby spinach, some leftover roasted chicken breast cut up and heated on the stove with oil, pepper and fresh-grated parm reg cheese, peppers, and toasted pine nuts. The internet is out here — need a new router, maybe, I don’t know; that’s today’s problem to solve (yesterday it was removing an old fridge from the kitchen, which I did in satisfyingly dudely fashion) — so after putting The Pecan to bed The Patient Mrs. and I ate at the table instead of on the couch streaming Star Trek, as is our wont, and then we moved into the living room to read for a bit and have dessert. She streamed an Indigo Girls live-in-the-living-room thing and was into that and I read and ate too much dessert, as I will do these days. Gotta have some reason to hate myself when I go to bed, apart from, you know, the rest of it.
But hey, the True Widow record is pretty good and I’m glad to hear something I whiffed on seven years ago. They followed it up with Avvolgere in 2016 so maybe I’ll check that out next and when the next one comes along not be such a dope. See? Learning is a lifelong process.
It’s just past 6:30AM now and I can hear the kid banging on the walls upstairs, so I should go grab him. Great and safe weekend. Wash your hands and all that shit.
