Good morning Vietnam. Don’t ask me why but that phrase often comes to my head whenI start blogging or recording Gord’s Gold. The other thing I want to say is. “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea.” That is from way before my time but people were riffing on it when I was a kid so it’s embedded in my so-called brain. I’ve been avoiding the circumlocutions when blogging in an attempt to not hide the lede but sometimes I have to let one out. When I wrote “circumlocutions” I thought about what I told my class today. “When you use a big word it doesn’t make you sound smart, it makes you sound like someone that wants other people to think you’re smart.” So far this entry is a demonstration of how not to write an effective essay, but like me, it’s cute so it can get away with it.
On Saturday night I saw the half accurately named band, Charming Disaster. The disaster is not accurate. The charming is an understatement. This is a band designed with me in mind, which is amazing as Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris never met me until Saturday night. I still have not met Jeff, I just saw him perform. I have played their music before from their previous album, Our Lady of Radium. Saturday night was the release show for their new album, Supernatural History. I am playing Manta Rays on this week’s show and I’m planning on playing Grimoire on the show after. If you know me you know that even those titles would get me excited. Other fun titles are: Bat Song, Disembodied Head, and Monsters. They dredged up a memory from my childhood with Paris Green which is a pigment made from arsenic. I remember a mystery movie or TV show where someone was slowly poisoned from a room painted with Paris Green. It’s not just the titles, it’s the subject matter of the song, and the songs themselves. Ellia said that their songs are like 4th grade book reports. They read up on poison plants to write Hellebore. They even look like a band that I’d love.
They are a band that I’d be comfortable taking Wednesday Addams to see. That is high praise indeed. People send me music everyday. When I listen to most of them my reaction is, “same old, same old.” If it isn’t going to excite me I don’t need to hear it. Charming Disaster gives me something new. They make me think about things I don’t often think about. That is priceless. On Gord’s Gold I played Manta Rays with What Makes the Sun Shine by They Might Be Giants. It’s not that they sound similar, it’s that they appeal to the same geeky part of my brain. I also played I’m a Tardigrade by Danny Tieger. I want to meet Danny, he’s in the same club with Charming Disaster and me. The people that don’t see the world as flat. They don’t see it as round. They see it for what it is, a fractal.
I heard about Charming Disaster from two friends that don’t know each 0ther and know the band via different routes. Katherine knows them from the Brooklyn music scene. Carey knows them through the weird music scene. They are the Platonic ideal of a Gordon-Carey band. If she still lived in Baltimore we’d be traveling to see them with each other. Perhaps the thing I miss most since Carey moved to Chicago is someone to share obsessions with. It’s how we met. I don’t have anyone like that in my life now.
Charming Disaster was joined onstage for some songs by Susan Hwang from the band Lusterlit. Though I only met her once, she was on the same bill as some musician I know, we are Facebook friends. Why did I friend her? Her music was delightful and weird too. She’s in the club.
I didn’t catch an entire song on video but here’s one of Grimoire. It’s based on the book Waking the Witch.
Wise Madness 