the paper chase: now you are one of us

dear john congleton,

please stop scaring me.

you know the george romero film the crazies, where everybody goes, well, crazy and you can’t tell who’s infected and who’s hysterical and all the sweaty paranoia and necessary violence that comes with this ugly scenario?  well that’s the inside of congelton’s head.  now you are one of us* is another fifty one minutes of personal apocalypse.  the cover is a lonely suicide hanging in the corner of a room, with a television passive in the corner.  the song titles go like ‘it’s out there and it’s gonna get you’ or ‘we know where you sleep’ or ‘you will never take me alive’ or ‘we will make you one of us’.  get the picture?

actually the film parallels aren’t that far out – recurring themes, concepts, musical strands and motifs, sampled dialogue.  this album is house of leaves reimagined as a disonnant musical.  this album is jeff waynes war of the worlds by chuck palahniuk.  that line came to me in a dream: quote it to your friends.  musically?  musically it’s got the stuttering jagged rhythm of broken bones playing on skin. it’s got the grim melody of child rhymes about long forgotten plagues and death picked out, discordant, on piano keys and squealing strings

the sound, panicky and breathless, of existential fear and struggle.

“lets set our house on fire.  lets cast a mirror right back at fear.  let’s show this world we were here.”

paperchase / chasespace / papershop

* yeah i realise this came out about a hundred or so nme band-of-the-weeks ago but i’ve only just got it and there’s not been much else interested me enough recently to pick up a goddam pen and maybe i’m going through my own existential struggle just now and you heartless bastards don’t care none while i’m sitting in pointless fucking meetings with people so far removed from reality they’re actually convinced by their own insidious vague mutterings about not-very-much and i’m thinking one push in the wrong direction and i’d kill all you motherfuckers with an unfolded paperclip and nary a second thought….. jeebus bless my public sector paymasters.  hey hey hey brand new misanthropy-free stuff coming soon kids.  promise.