Not a cure at all

Flesh World - Not A Soul


This song has the most urgent guitar lead I can think of. There's no startle reflex, no door kicked down or sudden violence, it's just there. It rises like panic, perfectly mirrors the alertness described in the lyrics: "Not a soul, not a tear at all/See a kid/Or so it seems/See a sight/Untied/Not a soul." 

All through my childhood we visited my cousins in northern New York. I think their closest neighbor was four miles away. As teenagers we would head up the road a bit until the lights of their house were no longer visible, so we could watch for shooting stars. One time I freaked out and demanded we head back to their house. I felt the absence of people around us, tkept pleading, "what if something happens to us???" knowing that no one would ever hear us call for help. Jessica laughed and said, "what could possibly happen to us!" She grew up in that quiet and knew its safety, but for me it was agitating. "Agitating" feels clumsy and not exactly right, I tried to think of another word for it but "unease" and "dread" are too slow moving. Those feelings sink, they cool, they obscure. This was the opposite: a rattle, an alertness. It's the sound of five or six notes snapped out of a guitar, each one chiseled and gravid, but also nimble enough to skip along on the heels of its predecessor. 

I first heard Flesh World mentioned in that shorthand way we talk about bands when we talk about bands too much: "oh, Jess from Brilliant Colors has a new peace punk band." I love peace punk! Right around that time I was asking friends for recommendations of a band that would make me feel like Zounds. A song like "Demystification" which obviously comes from a place of intense emotion but is sung with a numbness. I don't mean it's tuneless or flat, just a sense of overload. I felt that a lot in 2013, and since I couldn't really articulate it I wanted to hear someone else manifest it. Many friends gave it thought but very few had suggestions! It is how I heard that first Rank/Xerox record, which was close, but I could still feel that rattle, that rising/clenching feeling and was desperate to know someone else had felt it. So I was excited about the possibility I felt in Flesh World. 

Their first 12" was good. "I Lost My Heart In Transit Through the Post" felt like Talulah Gosh playing two blocks away, thoughtful and clever and directed, yet also out of grasp in this really compelling way. But a lot of the guitar parts on the record felt too muscular to me, burly in that way that punk records often feel, those ringing chords filling too much of the air. I was not strong enough to be overwhelmed in that way. 

It was the second record, the 7" for "A Line in Wet Grass" that answered all my hopes. The cobwebs and tight grip of the 12" are cast off in favor of glass-shard feedback and a skittering approach to notes. The drums are way louder. If the first record has a head-hung-low, downcast posture, this one stares you in the eyes, unblinking. "A Line in Wet Grass" has such an incredible momentum, and then lurches in the end, unwinding and losing speed with a very intentional damage. But it was the B side, "Not a Soul," that just destroyed me with its perfection. It conjures these disorienting moments I never could describe, it shoves and shoves but also holds fast in a way that keeps me on my feet. It speaks with the clarity and inevitability of a witness. It is what I imagine peace punk could be - bold and honest, demanding and unflinching. Overloaded yet moving forward.

Their subsequent records are excellent, Wild Animals In My Life in particular a bright and moving development of "Not a Soul," with all shadows cleared and even more breath around the notes. A line in the press release for their 2017 LP, Into the Shroud (that title! what a contradiction of the narrative I've claimed here) mentioned that they "took their name from an XXX magazine," which led me to the image above. Flesh World (as far as I can tell) wasn't a skin mag that existed on newsstands, but instead was created for the first season of Twin Peaks. The website Twin Peaks Props shared an image of an interior spread, and noted that the pictures are all of crew members and their friends. It's a cute bit of trivia. But it also got me thinking about the band Flesh World, and their insight. The potential irresponsibility of making a "peace punk" band in 2013, a moment when a lot of punk bands sound/look like they're participating in historical reenactment, exacting replicas of Detroit in 1982, or Tokyo in 1984. A similar issue was raised on twitter recently by Students of Decay, who noted, "it's a shame that experimental music has more or less ceded its long-standing aim to make work that is new/confrontational/surprising in order to focus on the less admirable goal of making work that sounds correct/expected/true to genre." 

I think this is a key to understanding why Flesh World make such apt, urgent music. If they are looking backwards at all, they are instead looking into a fiction of the past, an uncanny and disorienting world. Nothing glib like, "what if Laura Palmer owned Let The Tribe Increase?" but a strength taken from the secret languages of past subcultures. Hanky codes and band logos, the subtext in personal ads or the books you carry around with you. What if these were shifted just enough that they were no longer direct correspondences with history and all its cemented tyranny, but instead drawn from a recognizable, similarly terrible world where the main difference is all the strangeness is visible and drawn to the surface. Those are the hopes I feel, the panic I engage, the threads that ground me when I hear the song "Not a Soul."