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$14.99 CD
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GARY WAR
Jared's Lot
(Spectrum Spools)
 "Thousand Yard Stare"
"Care Less"
When word hit a few months back that a new Gary War album was on the way, I had a feeling this could be the one. Mr. War (né Greg Dalton) has certainly been impressing me these past few years, and his last full-length, 2009's Horribles Parade, was a powerful record that merited multiple listens to reveal its own refracted, demented magic. Shortly after, Fixed Identity, his label with Taylor Richardson, put out one of the best reissues in recent memory with Martin Newell's Songs for a Fallow Land, and soon after that, Dalton and Richardson released their own collaborative project, under the Human Teenager alias, on the Spectrum Spools imprint. That album wasn't a major departure from Gary War, but it did show a newfound predilection toward clearer tones, even if clarity is essentially antithetical to the Gary War aesthetic.
Gary War's sonic palette hasn't really changed on this new one, Jared's Lot -- in fact, a few of the tracks here could have been included on Horribles Parade. Still, his analog-filtered combination of Chrome-inspired electro-punk, video game music, B-horror films, BBC Radiophonic Workshop and private-press synth-damage is evolving. Off the bat, opener "Thousand Yard Stare" confirms a sense of delivery, recalling the glistening poly-fidelity (and anthemic tone) of John Maus, Dalton's former bandmate in Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti. The claustrophobic basement murk of his earlier recordings has been replaced by widescreen richness, and the track is catchy as hell, even if he does reveal, in characteristic fashion, that he's "haunted by psychotic visions." That may as well be Gary War's mission statement. "Superlifer" trades in electro-punk, albeit filtered through a phase-heavy auto-tune. Luckily, the lyrics are printed in the sleeve, otherwise, it'd be an impossible task to make out lines such as "Floating high outside of time/Behind the fabric of seeing" -- his words move in parallel with his songs, narrating like an auditory companion.
Jared's Lot is probably the most upbeat sounding record Dalton's made, but under the surface, it's chock full of end-of-humanity angst (maybe genuine, or maybe somewhat put on). The words "hate," "horror" and "annihilation" recur throughout the album; the word "fuck" appears four times in a single song. The neon-lit atmospheres dim considerably, though, on the Chrome-esque "Pleading for Annihilation," the guitar taking one of its lone spotlights. And what would one expect with a title like that? Meanwhile, "Care Less" careens with its sequenced bass line into Italo/cold wave territory and wouldn't sound out of place at a Wierd party. The drugged-up symphony that is "World After" might be the album's loveliest moment, even if, like everything Gary War does, it teems with schizophrenic anxiety. Evoking Cleaners from Venus or Washed Out, or perhaps '60s UK acid rock by way of '80s paisley underground via a hundred phasers, the song is a kaleidoscopic vision, the sun finally rising after the apocalypse. Closer "Muscle Dysmorphia" is the sound of Gary War at the disco that evokes the kind of minimal synth material being produced in France circa 1978. So young. And so cold. So of another world, yet of ours. Alien Soundtracks indeed. [AGe] |
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