By Stephen X Welch
I love a ghost story, one in the classic "haunted house" motif. We've all felt that unsteady prickling of hair on the back of our neck. The cold spot in the living room that never quite warms up no matter how you position the space heater. The creaks and breathing of old wood that's just a little too close to a human sigh. It's not a far step to imagine you've passed into a world just a bit beyond our own.
The Goodbye Party's "Silver Blues" feels like a haunting in the best way possible. The cold loops and spaced out textures mix with warm guitar flushes, while an undercurrent of hissing and bowed guitar strings reach their fingers out to the living. Michael Cantor has managed to capture some of my favorite feelings, of being alive while maintaining a mature emotional outlook, a sensibility too often overlooked by those writing and recording dream pop.
I find when someone talks about dream pop, what they really mean is dreamy pop music, something pastel to stroke across the ears on a spring day's idyll. This album is closer to the confusing but powerful reconstructions of the subconscious in the confines of night. At times hurried and ecstatic, at times freezing and sonorous, this collection isn't so much listened to as experienced.
Lyrically, the songs move between just such reflections on what must remain in the past as we move forward (Heavenly Blues, 27 Times) and the anger we feel in the process of grief, the moments when our strength fails us against the persistence of nature (I'm Not Going To Your Heaven, Disrepair, Crossed Out). Michael has a way of making the most impotent moments of adulthood, the passing of youth, feel like powerful moments of clarity when we're given some secret to the other side. Growing up actually feels less like betrayal. Paired with the undeniable rhythms and hooks, these songs become anthems of maturity and acceptance that take full stock of the impermanence of our lives and manages to make them a cause worth celebrating (Personal Heavens, Louder Than Summer). We don't fear our ghosts. We miss them.
One can't help but feel like the ghosts trapped in these tracks are taking tape loops and twisting them like an auditory Ouija board. This is a record haunted by loss and acceptance, but haunted by spirits strong enough to reach through and resonate with your own buried past. These songs don't leave you. They slowly attach themselves to you. They exercise their influence as you hum them through your day and occasionally brush their lines across your mind. The active act of memory engaging your psyche, forcing you to acknowledge what you've had to leave behind: that's the haunting.