DETAILS
TRACKS
Side A
- Motet
- God's Guts
- Utopia In Blue
- Fire Can Flow
- If The Spirit
Side B
- Mist
- Buster-Jangle
- How Royal the Jelly
- Carriers
- I Am The Cosmos
RELEASE DATE
07/26/2019
“Eamon Fogarty has no guile. He is as true as a bird singing in the trees. His music, like life itself, contains the beautiful and the grotesque. Some artists demand love from their audience. I don’t know how or why it works but I love Eamon’s music. I feel protective of it. When something that powerful calls out... you should pick up the phone." − Chris Schlarb, Psychic Temple
If someone were to present disturbing news to you in a smooth and dazzling way, you’d expect the effect to be jarring. But that’s not the case with the music of New Hampshire-born composer, lyricist, and singer Eamon Fogarty. As he delivers lyrics imbued with equal parts humor and dread, the rich timbre and sureness of his baritone belie the dark things he’s often singing about.
That tension—between beauty and destruction, humor and dread—is the driving force behind Fogarty’s new album, Blue Values, offering an oddly elegant expression of the way we’re all muddling through such tensions all the time.
Largely recorded in Long Beach, California, in the confusing, bracing days following the 2016 election, Blue Values is alternately serene and frenetic - composed interludes intermingling with improvised band arrangements. Declassified Department of Energy nuclear test films provided one of the album’s guiding images: Fogarty found himself compulsively watching the films, which show the mundanity and logistics that underlie the atomic enterprise, after a trip to the one-time uranium boomtown of Moab, Utah. We know how the scientists behind the first nuclear weapons regarded their creation—think of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous invocation of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—but what about what’s happened since? How can such destruction come to seem quotidian? How long can you rehearse for apocalypse before you forget there might someday be an opening night?
The songs on this album are tinged with such questions about the tenuousness of being human in the 21st century, but they’re also playful and intimate, languorous yet richly orchestrated. The slightly twisted logic of Chad Taylor’s (Chicago Underground Duo, Marc Ribot, Sam Prekop) drumming complements Devon Hoff’s (Nels Cline, Xiu Xiu) bass-playing, which—like Fogarty’s words—swings between metallic ferocity and extreme gentleness. Recalling at moments the expansive jazz-tinged excursions of Tim Buckley, Blue Values was inspired in part by Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz approach to group improvisation, while the album’s instrumentation—especially the prominence of clarinet and bass clarinet—bears the influence of Mark Hollis of Talk Talk’s lone solo album. The record closes with a fiery reworking of Chris Bell’s lovelorn cult anthem “I Am The Cosmos.”
The overall effect is of something barely contained, the rhythms of the everyday haunted by the constant threat of explosion. If the apocalypse comes, you’ll want Fogarty’s steady and sincere voice to show you flashes of beauty and guide you through the chaos.
EXPLORE

Federale
Reverb & Seduction

The Third Sex
The Third Sex - Back To Go

Califone
The Villagers Companion

The Delines
Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom

Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld
Save It For Later

The Hoom
On Gabadon

Boxhead Ensemble
Ancient Music

Blue Cranes
My Only Secret

Califone
Califone CD Reissues

Johanna Samuels
Bystander

Califone
villagers

Jenny Conlee
Tides: Pieces For Accordion And Piano

The Hackles
What a beautiful thing I have made

The Hackles
Song For The Fool

Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld
Last Stars First Light

No. 2
First Love

José Medeles
Railroad Cadences & Melancholic Anthems

Federale
Our Side Of Their Story

The Delines
The Sea Drift

Motrik
MØØN: The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK

Dave Depper
Europa

Motrik
Artificial Head

Eyelids
The Accidental Falls

Califone
Echo Mine

The Hackles
A Dobritch Did As A Dobritch Should

Federale
No Justice

Team Dresch
Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000

Team Dresch
Captain My Captain

Team Dresch
Personal Best

Martha Scanlan
The West Was Burning

Martha Scanlan
Tongue River Stories: Autumn

The Hackles
The Twilight's Calling It Quits

1939 Ensemble
New Cinema

Eyelids
Maybe More

Corrina Repp
How A Fantasy Will Kill Us All

Tim Rutili & Craig Ross
10 Seconds To Collapse

Motrik
Safety Copy

Eyelids
or

Sin Ropas
Mirror Bride

Annalisa Tornfelt
Search Zero

Luke Ydstie
Collected Essential Works

Jenny Conlee with Steve Drizos
French Kayaking Music

Kind of Like Spitting
You Secretly Want Me Dead

The Valiant Arms
Swallow The Sea: The Songs of The Crabs

Annalisa Tornfelt
The Number 8

Hook & Anchor
Hook & Anchor

Eyelids
854

Motrik
Motrik
