(desperation + noise)

Photo by: Marina Pollock

The fire uncovers my sleeping bag, exhuming it angrily into the air. You would tell me I should have thought this through more.

Memories return like pigeons. He was dead and you were crying. I pulled weeds from the soft ground, who in their last moments had sought to wring a permanent mark in the black earth. I was their failure.

They were everywhere—sad, coiled husks that once lunged for the very thrill of existence, that in order to do so fed themselves with the spinal fluid of their less ambitious brothers. And when I turned to see the greatest lot of them gathered at your feet, I wondered if they secretly wished to pull you into the earth. If you would let them.

As I have let Attic Songs pull me in. As Ebben strums lonely on his acoustic, its insides fundamentally empty, just softened wood and space, I am fingering a blade of grass, imagining its thick roots. Thinking of all the living matter writhing underground, wondering if the deadness above is the nature of anything so permanently open casket as the world.

Attic Songs is mostly Ebben on his own, communicating through sepia tones and the dispersed necks of broken bottles—reconstructing memories from genuine mental wreckage. The reconstruction goes poorly on “Recurring Nightmare Blues,” where within the construct every turned corner is pregnant with horrors and every bridge traveled is a bloody tongue:

I was walking down
That long and lonely road
When the policeman
Brought me a rose.
I said “I don’t think
I can accept your gift.”
So he shot me down
In a hail of bullets.

It is an existence of pure turmoil and antagonism—the narrator twice shot down and his soul posthumously abused by authority.

Things are decidedly more peaceful if still strained for hope in “St. Croix #2,” where Ebben attempts reach through the camera noise and drag tangible feelings from long-passed and isolated moments of joy. His drawl, usually shaken by terrors, is wistful here, accompanied for the only time on the record by a disembodied female voice. Both feeling as dead stars must when they look at their old photographs. Sadly observing a past brilliance that is difficult to recall in the present darkness.

There’s an ache in my heart
Tracing all the lines
Trying to get back to the start…
Here’s the town where I live
There’s our old tire swing
Ghosts of my brother and I
Lost somewhere up on that hill
Falling into the void

Or white sheets exploding between your fingers like remnants of a crushed orchid. The hospital bearing down, its unmarked whiteness making all foreign bodies seem more worn and browned in comparison. All the lines in our mouth corners taking darker weight, like Monet’s accidents.

Ebben cannot leave me here, shuffling through the exploded parts, trying to piece together a single unmarred moment in the fiery hush. So the music, as though following a necessary impulse identical to mine, shifts, expands, feels its heart rate increase slightly, for what must now be said is far too important to let stumble out of that previous speed, no, for even if it stumbles now, it must stumble with purpose, it must fall and feel the pavement’s velocity:

Rivers will swell as our bodies will fill
With the joyous sounds of laughter
And all we can do when the water returns
Is never forget what we’re after

“I’ll get a line in my head,” Ebben says of his lyric writing process. “And this is the way I’d write when I wrote poetry or fiction, is I’d sort of get the first line in my head and it’d just sort of grow. By the time I would finally get to write it down, I either forgot it completely so I wrote something different, or else I just let it continue growing.”

We have grown and swelled to the breaking point. To the point where when joy is tended within a space we must remain cognizant of its ability to be snuffed out forever. Attic Songs is the tending.

The Dark Forest is the snuffing out.

(CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)