An Album for Maundy Thursday

Posted on | April 9, 2009 | No Comments

It was pure accident that I had my first listen of Elvis Perkins’ new album on Maundy Thursday. The record, the self-titled Elvis Perkins in Dearland (EPD), has been out since the beginning of March, but I somehow missed the release date. But I can’t complain. The timing turned out to be perfect—this album is the perfect complement to the narrative of Holy Week. Perkins’ first release, 2007’s Ash Wednesday, was moving, dark, and heartfelt. His personal history is marked with tragedy: his father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS, and his mother died in one of the hijacked planes on September 11th. In an interview on NPR, Perkins admitted that his songs are almost all the musical grandchildren of his parents.  Many songwriters put on affectations of suffering. The self-pitying artist is a familiar cliche. Perkins’ own personal history gives perhaps more justification for this than the typical post-bourgeois indie artist can claim. He had the ethos to pull off tragedy, and he did so to much acclaim in Ash Wednesday. And this is exactly why the progression from Ash Wednesday to this new album is (wonderfully) surprising.

The title track on Ash Wednesday set the tone for the rest of the record: “No one will survive / Ash Wednesday alive / No soldier, no lover / No father, no mother.” For this first album, at least, life is frozen in the moment of remembrance that all life is dust: “So each day is Ash Wednesday / All this life is Ash Wednesday.” Only at the very end, in the final track titled “Good Friday,” do we get a glimpse of hope:

Come lay here beside me
And I’ll fear no death.
I’ll give you my body
And I’ll breathe your breath….
Though this life
Is Ash Wednesday,
It’s Ash Wednesday,
It forever approaches Good Friday.

Now, with the release of EPD, we finally complete the story of Holy Week. At the beginning of the album, the story opens at night: “When the moon buries a sun in the dead sea / it’s the cemetery of the century, but / Hey it was a starry day.” In “Hours Last Stand,” the nighttime vigil begins to break. Perkins sings to an unnamed mother and child, “Now, now woman / sweet, sweet child / little baby / the black, black night / will famously make of every little thing one.” The daylight is pressing on him, pounding his eardrums. The sunrise begins to crest, and the protagonist drifts into either love song or lullaby: “Love you, baby / like mariners love the sea. / When I go to Heaven, / I swear you will go with me.” The song closes as he dreams of the sun, and then awakes. 

[audio:http://www.theopolitical.com/data/I Heard Your Voice In Dresden.mp3]
["I Heard Your Voice In Dresden"]

The following track, “I Heard Your Voice in Dresden,” immediately opens to the sound of some unidentified voice, followed by the appearance of a woman at the “gates of the dawn.” The narrative voice tells her to “raise the warning / he’s bottled his tears … raise the warning / the beginning is near.” If you’re familiar with Ash Wednesday, this track may strike you at startlingly unfamiliar. Aside from the signature driving percussion and Perkins’ own Dylanesque voice, it sounds almost nothing like the dirges of the first record. Perhaps most surprising is the joyful convergence of the chorus into a resounding declaration, “Glory glory glory, Hallelujah.” If Ash Wednesday presents all the dark problems of the world, sin and death, the first half of this album rises up to the Easter hope which casts out all doubt: “Now let us together sing the sun / to the home in the heavens / from the sea from the sea.” From this high point, the record moves on to address the woes of Ash Wednesday. EPD’s second half addresses the problems of loneliness (“Send My Fond Regards to Lonelyville”), the fear of death (the powerful track, “I’ll Be Arriving”), final judgment (“Doomsday”), and perhaps even the search for salvation (“Chains, Chains, Chains”).

[audio:http://www.theopolitical.com/data/123 Goodbye.mp3]
["123 Goodbye"]

Perhaps the most moving track, considering Perkins’ biography, is the penultimate track, “123 Goodbye.” Perkins sings of a “once upon a time” when he and an unnamed person(s) were happy even in the midst of sadness. He confesses, “I love you more in death / than I ever could in life.” The chorus, which repeats the count, one, two, three, brings to mind a freeze-frame photograph in which everyone is smiling, a flash of memory that can remain long after it’s past. Perhaps it’s too intrusive to read Perkins’ personal history into all this, but this song certainly seems like some sort of final goodbye to his parents. When the song culminates in an arpeggio of strings and an extended chorus, both the songwriter and the listener are offered a moment of catharsis.

In the final track, the narrative voice tells his spurned lover to plant a flowering tree in the middle of the rubble and desolation of doomsday. Anthemic horns supplement the percussion, leading up to repetition of the question, “How’s forever been, baby?” Perkins voice, which had been so intense and soaring earlier, winds down into meandering quiet, and maybe even weariness. It’s ambiguous whether the final question is earnest or mocking, whether the eternity it summons is restful or regretful and tired. The open-ended question to his former lover seems to begin another narrative rather than close the preceding one. Perhaps that’s just another story for another day. Perhaps Perkins’ inner altar boy couldn’t outlast his adult skepticism. Holy Week doesn’t last forever, after all.

But then, maybe it does.

Comments

Leave a Reply





About

Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

Subscribe to this blog

Search

Davey Henreckson's currently-reading book recommendations, reviews, favorite quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists

Categories

Admin