What if an album isn't an album? What if it falls into absurdity while no one is listening? Does it make a series of obnoxious sounds? I'm probably coming off like some Bacharach-rocking philistine, but I really really like songs. Failing that, riffs. Failing that, music. The album Way by Ecstatic Sunshine fills somewhere between zero and three of those categories. It consists of half an hour of largely interchangeable guitar loops. You know: the kind of stuff where what they did doesn't matter so much as the fact that they did it (and did it first). Unfortunately for Ecstatic Sunshine, no one cares about Who, Why, and When. What happened to What?
Right, right. Minimalism. Deconstruction. Post. Meta. Liberal arts. The centerless, horizonless sphere where significance used to reside. Delay pedals and marijuana. I'm over over it. FUCKING MOVE ME. And who knows, right? Maybe these guys are some sort of sophisticated sex-robots. Maybe the title of this album demonstrates a calm, Lao Tzu-like vision of the universe that I cannot grasp. Or maybe it's more like this:
Q: Isn't this album infuriating?
A: Way.
Or whatever. My infuriation is completely my own, because this band has absolved themselves of all responsibility. They're just out there floating like so many beer cans in a stream. In fact, the idea of a twisted version of organic beauty seems pretty appropriate here. To justify this kind of music, you would have to argue for a beauty that comes before what we can write. Something that falls quite naturally out of calmly repeated sound. Like what you find in a waterfall, say. Or in the polyrhythms of walking feet. Occasionally, Ecstatic Sunshine actually produce this effect, which is a fucking feat. At least as often, we're confronted with what may as well be a battalion of distant car alarms.
The idea of a man-made natural beauty also crops up on Way's cover art. The more I glare at this picture, the more I like it and believe it's a key to the album. It's a natural scene, complete with trees and waterfall, turned upside-down and decorated with plastic eyeballs. Accidental beauty, but ironic, self-denigrating. Clearly composed, caricaturing human creativity (see the guitar lines that burble through the three long songs) but sounding, intentionally-unintentionally, like bird-song. The second track is called "Herrons" Fine: this album is pretty like birds are fucking annoying, and it's annoying like birds are sort of cute at five in the frigid morning. Maybe even musical like falling down is humorous.
With sufficiently odd albums, I like to play a game. I imagine what the ideal fan does while blasting the record. There are always a few funny answers to this question, but on Way, the answer is this: anything at all. Christ, something. I can't imagine listening to this without doing something else. It would be a disservice to myself and to the music. This album is referential without a referent, wide without depth, and cheap while sounding expensive, like every debased imitation of nature.
And yet. Fuck! I was really getting some good self-righteousness going. At the end of the third and final track, as if in spite of their intentions, Ecstatic Sunshine lay down a very good series of guitar tracks. Coming after a bunch of loopy synth and guitar, it almost feels kind of like an imitation of what could once have been "Baba O'Reilly." It is simple and direct and it is rock and roll. Should I view the whole album as prelude to this thirty-second success? No. That wouldn't be fair to the band. So let's remember that these guys are capable of something else, and that they choose to bob in the murky po-mo tide. Why?
See also
Dont fall asleep to the end of track one. It seriously felt like I was falling off the edge of a five-dimensional cliff.
