WMW#1 /// Storefront Church - Ink & Oil

Hello again! The post on the internet that I suggested was forthcoming is...well...still forthcoming, and could take a while to get finished considering I'll be at Evo until Monday. In the meantime, though, I thought this was a good time to start doing something I've been wanting to do for a while: a weekly music recommendation column! Often, when listening to music, I get the irresistible urge to write about it, so this should give me the opportunity to whet that urge a little bit, in a spontaneous way¹, while also hopefully introducing folks to music I think is cool. This won't always be full albums, hence why this is called Weekly Music Writeup instead of, say, Album of the Week—instead, I'll use these posts to talk about whatever's on my mind musically, whether it be songs, albums, trends, weird patterns, album art, and so on. I'm hoping to maintain a pace of one of these every week, at least for now. We'll see what happens if/when I get accepted to grad school. In any case, on the off chance that you're interested in reading far too many words on music, read on!

Ink & Oil starts off relatively auspiciously, with every track from opener "The High Room" to the eight-minute centerpiece "Words in the Rind" featuring lead singer Lukas Frank's gorgeous, slightly listless voice floating over ornate orchestral arrangements. You sit back, relax, and let the music—which, as heavy as it is, goes down quite easy due to the familiarity of the sounds involved—wash over you.

But then, to your surprise, near the end of "Words in the Rind," a wave of noise crashes over the track, jolting you awake—the strings, formerly weepy, begin to wail, ushering in a minute of pure cacophony that after the last few tracks of gorgeous melancholy feels almost endless. What the fuck just happened?

The album never quite recovers from the shock, and from this point on dissonance becomes one of the album's main ingredients, as well as its secret weapon. My eternal fave Ian Cohen introduced this record on Twitter² as Father John Misty's ironic opus Pure Comedy but with a truly apocalyptic sound rather than just lyrics, and I think the shoe fits. As mentioned the production is incredibly thick; I've seen this band's music described as "cinematic," but I think most directors, if handed a soundtrack like this, would send it straight back—it's too dense, and it would overpower any scene to which it's applied. And anyways, this is the sort of record that is a movie in and of itself: each track, from the crazed street-preacher squall of "Coal" to the understated groove of "King Of The Lobby"³, is rendered in lavish, 3D detail, enhancing the late-American millenarianism of Frank's lyrics ("All the walls are grated/With tiny office spaces," "In front of the concentration camps/We've got drive-in movies/Displays of American heroism/Rigid brawn is death's best friend").

As soon as I decided to start this weekly music thing, I figured that I'd start off by talking about a metal record, since I've spent the week listening to Wolves in the Throne Room and Agrimonia and such. Obviously things didn't pan out that way, but I think it makes total sense why this record ended up making sense to me in the context of those bands. At first glance Ink & Oil could not be any further from those bands in terms of mood and sound; I mean Frank is channeling ballroom music and maudlin string-led film soundtracks, and Storefront Church are based in LA (curiously enough, because this scans as a very New York album to me; though I suppose apocalypse fits LA better), which on its face could not be any further from the Cascadian eco-paganism of a band like Wolves. But in its own way this record is just as extreme, both in sound and in lyrics, and I think it rewards your attention in a similar way⁴.

Anyways, if you really like the Artic Monkeys' and/or Mitski's last few records, or want to hear an audio representation of what it'll be like to see the world's most decadent capitals swallowed up by swarms of locusts while GY!BE's F♯ A♯ ∞ plays in some distant town square, then you'll definitely enjoy Ink & Oil.

^{1. Or at least as spontaneous as I'm capable of being. Ironically, though, I decided to start writing this on a whim; so we'll see how long this column lasts, because when I am spontaneous I tend to fizzle out quickly.↩}

^{2. Yeah, I know. The temptations are great...↩}

^{3. (whose lyrics almost remind me of a inverted version of Fontaine D.C.'s "Roy's Tune," with its portrayal of romantic longing frustrated by the endless vicissitudes of work under capitalism)↩}

^{4. This is especially true because these are long songs: the record is over an hour long, and it's twelve tracks deep. Incredibly, it's actually over twelve minutes longer than Wolves's Celestial Lineage, half of whose songs pass the ten-minute mark.↩}