Poe - Haunted

You ever read any Poe?

No, but i like her 2nd album a lot.

Wanna hear an hour and 15 minutes of existential torture that'll have you running for you safe room but too afraid to walk down the unlit hallway to get there? Here's Haunted, the companion to her brother Mark's book House of Leaves. What do you mean you haven't read it? Were you raised in a forest talking to tay-tays? It's Jodie Foster movies, hurrah! Useless Jodie Foster, as my dad used to call her. That's not fair, she was a legitimate multi-lingual child prodigy and deserved to go to Yale. Silence the bleating. Put on your hazmat suit, be the brave one, and make contact with your local purveyor of ergodic literature. I'll run up to the attic and fetch my copy while i wait for you...

... suitably terrified? Let's go.

The samples on this album are mostly from Daddy Danielewski's audio diaries that they found after he died.

We start off with the creepiest answering machine message ever created. Edgar would be impressed, assuming he got past the initial astonishment of telephones and answering machines (he died 27 years before telephones existed).

Now, as far as magazine criticism goes, yes this album is too long. Every album from 1995 to 2015 is too long, but this is all you're ever gonna get from Poe, so hit pause and walk a lap or two every 20 minutes.

The business/legal side of Poe's career chewed her up and spat her out, preventing her from doing pretty much anything except charity work. It's a fascinating horror story, but i'll let you read about it on your own.

She's all over the place, musically speaking, but if you need to compare her to something it's unquestionably Garbage meets Solex.

Lyrically, the album is a fascinating blend of autobiographical ideas through the lens of the characters in the book. You get an interesting double sided perspective of the subject matter that Mark actually used for the structure of his next novel Only Revolutions. For House of Leaves/Haunted, though, the most obvious connection is Tad/Zampano leaving behind a difficult to understand body of quasi-fictional work for everyone else to decipher.

Imagine what she could have accomplished if a couple of rich people just paid for it in good faith instead of using her as a bargaining chip in a pointless profit war. But nope, we get a bunch of already rich people complaining that we don't have enough money to buy their stuff, so they just pass their stuff and money back and forth to each other and tell us we're the lazy ones.

At least we got this masterpiece of grungy alternative hip-pop. 4 thumbs up. It's even bigger on the inside.

https://youtu.be/VEsXbqUeJpQ

Next

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way