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

Team Dresch
Team Dresch 30th - Tote

Chainsaw Records
Donna Dresch - Tour Journal

The Third Sex
The Third Sex - Greatest Hits

The Third Sex
The Third Sex - Back To Go

Team Dresch
Team Dresch Hoodie

Califone
The Villagers Companion

The Delines
Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom

Team Dresch
Team Dresch Wrist Band Set

SticklerPhonics
Technicolor Ghost Parade

Mikaela Davis & Circles Around The Sun
After Sunrise

Old Unconscious
The Circular Ruins

Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld
Save It For Later

Eyelids
No Jigsaw

Jealous Butcher Records
Jealous Butcher Records "Cursive" T

The Hoom
On Gabadon

Boxhead Ensemble
Ancient Music

Blue Cranes
My Only Secret

Johanna Samuels
Bystander

Califone
villagers

Jenny Conlee
Tides: Pieces For Accordion And Piano

The Hackles
What a beautiful thing I have made

Team Dresch
Team Dresch "Ghost Coyote" T

Fruit Bats
Tripper (Deluxe Reissue)

Jon Brion
Meaningless

Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld
Last Stars First Light

No. 2
First Love

José Medeles
Railroad Cadences & Melancholic Anthems

Dave Depper
Moon Safari

The Delines
The Sea Drift

Motrik
MØØN: The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK

Eyelids
Eyelids Dubble Live!

Red Red Meat
Red Red Meat T

Chris Funk
Songs For Dog Fitness

Candy-Ass Records
Candy-Ass Records Hoodie

Chainsaw Records
Chainsaw Records T Shirt

Infinite X's
Infinite X's

Longstocking
Once Upon A Time Called Now

Dave Depper
Europa

Motrik
Artificial Head

Slanted Floors
Pink Heaven

Chris Funk
The Painted Porch

Eyelids
The Accidental Falls

John Cameron Mitchell & Eyelids
Turning Time Around EP

Califone
Echo Mine

The Hackles
A Dobritch Did As A Dobritch Should

Federale
No Justice

Defective AI
A Book Of Coherent Warnings
