Left to right: Scott Emmerich (drums, electric guitars, organ, vocals), Nathan Riddle (electric guitars), Jeb Ebben (acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, organ), Frank Knaebe (fuzz bass, electric and acoustic guitars, vocals).
Photo by: Eric Dion
DEAR ASTRONAUT: “THE DARK FOREST”
This fucking night. Starless. Consumptive.
Its presence suffocates the trees, which crowd together as orphaned familiars for warmth. To search for similar reflections of desperation in each others’ leafy eyes.
I have built a fire here.
I am burning everything.
These simple human pleasures, thirsty for absolution—they drink in the heat. They are most alive in a nucleus of flame. I can feel my clothes, my tent, my food take on new shape, screaming with delight in the hot blue funk of transformation.
But I have let you live.
I have let the grass give way to your obsolete shape. I had left you playing Dear Astronaut songs until Jeb Ebben’s howl invaded me. Until I had to burn the connective tissue, for all connections are temporary and it is best to sever them while you retain the faintest grip of control. Until I had to split the night with fire.
DEAR ASTRONAUT: “A WHISPER GROWING” (LIVE AT THE BORG WARD)
Dear Astronaut: an independent Milwaukee band whose furtive noise may only be echoed in the empty wells of the future. History is written by those self-important enough to consider themselves winners. The rest are cemented over.
Dear Astronaut sing among the lost and buried.
“(We) started in about 2004 when I decided that I would start writing songs on an acoustic guitar, this beat up old classical guitar,” guitarist and lead vocalist/pariah Ebben says. “It was just a terrible, terrible guitar. It did not hold tune. But I started writing songs on it.”
Ebben has since tossed the early cassettes born from this guitar.
“The first couple of tapes that were put out were really terrible, so bad in fact that I don’t have copies of them anymore,” he says.
Then Ebben, native of Park Falls, Wisconsin, moved to Milwaukee and, with bassist Frank Knaebe and drummer/guitarist Scott Emmerich in tow, recorded several primal impulses in his living room—folk soaked in its own doomed, screaming viscera. Rotting.
They called it Songs from the Closet of Light and Swords, released in 2006.
DEAR ASTRONAUT: “DEVIL TOOK MY WOMAN”
“Devil Took My Woman”—an inversion of Skip James’ “Got” (“got” can imply inadvertent acquisition, “took” is fairly straightforward) or a surreal examination of James’ “best friend,” or a translation of his rambling wild geese—tells of a man’s disappeared love, disappeared by a horned beast who has forced her listen “to rock and roll” and to “eat mescaline,” among other perceived indecencies:
In the place where the sun don’t shine
The trees were gray and dead
The devil and that girl of mine
Made themselves a bed
On gravel and broken glass
They danced under the moon
Her skin turned pale and her hair fell out
She ate from tarnished spoons
There is little journalistic evidence for this imagery, unless our narrator has been observing these dark acts from afar, doing little to stop them, making him no better than the devil. Moreover, it is only halfway through the song that he resolves to fish out a sword and rescue his girl from bald druggy oblivion.
Here, the music escalates. What was previously only Ebben’s mad acoustic strumming is now burgeoned by electric strings mimicking ascent, picking up speed and shattering on impact. The narrator’s fictive vision, too, shatters. Only now does his own world, walled-off by ever-growing grass, seem so insular that all outside apparitions take on an air of evil, no matter their actual intent:
And the devil was no demon at all
Though he may have been a prince.
I didn’t know what else to do
So I just let her go
Returned to that green valley
Where the grass did grow and grow
Similar furies linger beneath what-once-seemed solid images in many of Ebben’s songs. For instance, in “All the Birds in the Sky,” also from Light and Swords, two lovers revel in their sickness for each other, ignorant of the unnamed horrors down the line:
And all of the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea
Could not have changed the way that we felt
When we got back to town we were told the horrible news
It comes on like an inside joke. The malicious context that curled the pages previous made manifest. The feeling of being suddenly firebombed by life.
That the song ends there, that the news is never expanded on, leaving the weight ambiguous, makes all imaginations of the future swell with awful pounds.
“I really like the idea of trying to tell a story as briefly as possible… like photographs or pieces of a whole,” Ebben says. “And maybe you’re not going to see the whole ever.”
(CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)
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