Out there looking for me

Kate + Anna McGarrigle - Heartbeats Accelerating


Been thinking a lot about context lately, about the expectations and immediate history that surround a record. What does it do to the songs once all that stuff has passed? I remember first hearing Big Pun (who at the time went by Big Dog Punisher) on Fat Joe's second LP. He was menacing and bloodthirsty, and fit right in with Joe's violence. Which felt totally normal, a stop on the trajectory laid out by that Method Man/Raekwon interlude, any Kool G Rap song, or "stab your brain with your nose bone." When "I'm Not a Player" came out I remember thinking it was so funny and unexpected, a delightful turn of persona. But that became the persona! And now the scary lyrics are the outliers, the surprise. People don't really even believe them.

Or I always bound the late 70s Factory Records bands together, picking up records by, like, A Certain Ratio and Section 25 as I wore out the Joy Division ones. That wasn't an unusual position; here's a 1982 review of The Plateau Phase by Crispy Ambulance that's just brutal: "Slavish imitation of Joy Division doth not good music make. All the trade-marks are there—relentless inverted drumming, ominous bass lines, dramatic flanged guitar, bleak synth washes and a lone desperate voice." I liked the sharp edges and haunted vocals of "Deaf" by Crispy Ambulance a lot, but thought The Plateau Phase was too erratic and unfocused, every song too long. I resold the LP just a year after buying it, but heard it recently by accident and was knocked over by its totality. It's an epic, indivisible piece, it feels like a movie. Of course there was no "Transmission" to play at our living room dance parties, no "Colony" to startle a mixtape tracklist. It didn't work like a Joy Division record because it isn't one. I wonder if the guy who wrote that mean review ever heard The Plateau Phase again and reached a new way to think about it.

My parents played Kate + Anna McGarrigle a ton when we were kids. Those first two LPs just all the time. Jordana could do a hilariously mean impression of the slight vocal tremolo during "Heart Like a Wheel" from a very young age. The songs were intimate and conversational, they sang "you" and "me" and "tell my sister/to tell my mother" so regularly that they quickly felt like people you knew. The songs also felt like they belonged to everyone. We went to a lot of folk festivals when I was a kid and someone would always end up singing "Foolish You" or "Come a Long Way." Like the end of the night when anyone who was still around and had an instrument at hand would make it to the stage to play along, the audience singing as loud as the people with mics. 

The other record we heard a lot during that time was Loudon Wainwright's Attempted Mustache, particularly "The Swimming Song." Wainwright, we knew, was married to and divorced from Kate McGarrigle, and there was a bitterness to the McGarrigles' version of "The Swimming Song" which you might not recognize until two songs later when you heard Kate sing "Go, leave/She's better than me/Or at least she is stronger/She will make it last longer/That's nice for you." That song is the least ornamented on the record, and you can hear her fingertips raise and settle on the guitar strings, the deep humanity and age of the instrument itself.

"Heartbeats Accelerating" came out on the 1990 Kate + Anna McGarrigle LP of the same name. It had been eight years since their last record, and obviously was entering a different world than the one that had preceded it. My earliest memories of the song are hearing it in my mom's first apartment after my parents divorced. The McGarrigles' voices are accompanied here by synthesizers, not acoustic guitars. There are accents from accordion but they're fragmented and snapped in with a precision that feels more like samples. The sisters sing the way we're used to hearing them, but the tremolo feels spectral, their voices powerful but sounding like they're sinking down from the attic, or calling from across the woods. It's scary and exquisite, making incredible use of the negative, inhuman connotations of keyboards to create a haunting distance. "Love, love where can you be?" they implore, "Are you out there looking for me?" It's so far from the conversational admissions of "Go Leave" or "Heart Like a Wheel."

A Los Angeles Times review from 1991 sets this transformation in a trajectory laid by Peter Gabriel and Suzanne Vega, mentioning the record's "atmospheric production touches and rhythmic embellishments." The New York Times described this decision as "a bold and successful acknowledgment of contemporary developments by introducing computerized elements into their music." Both reviews make really resonant observations about the record: "It is an overridingly dark and ghostly album" and "The record's special achievement is its suggestion of the physical and psychic space where that question reverberates and assumes a metaphysical weight." But both reviews ultimately consider the addition of keyboards to be a product of the era, and not fundamental to the songs. For the LA Times: 

"There's nothing on 'Heartbeats Accelerating' that couldn't be sung in a parlor, after all. But the loneliness and chill in the songs might make that parlor audience want to throw an extra log or two on the hearth." 

and the NY Times conclusion is even more airy and romanticized: 

"one is transported northward to a barely furnished house on a chilly Canadian night... sitting side by side in rocking chairs, in front of a small fire crackling in the hearth, two women do needlework."

I like that they both involve fire, acknowledge coldness. But I feel like it's so reductive. The songs on this record, and in particular, "Heartbeats Accelerating" do something that none of their other songs have ever done. For a group that's lauded for their honesty and openness, there's something more vulnerable about this song than anything they did, a clearer version of the human experience that's entirely reliant on the synthetic distance created by the instrumentation. To frame it as a product of the era, a result of the success of "Book of Dreams" or "Don't Give Up" ignores the decisions made by the McGarrigles, their understanding of what these songs needed.




The same year that Heartbeats Accelerating was released, there was a television special about the McGarrigles that included this clip of them playing the song "Heartbeats Accelerating" in a style similar to their old records, with guitar, violin, mandolin, and accordion. There's a part about 90 seconds in where they show a tapping foot in a red sock. It feels like being at home. I played this clip a few times in a row and wondered if the reviewers were right, if the song did the same thing without the synthesizers. But I keep going back to those eerie notes that open the album version. You could loop them, put a bass tone underneath and slip it onto one of the Aphex Twin ambient records. They're disorienting but close sounding, the sound cue for a kindly spirit in a Miyazaki film. The acoustic version is very nice, and probably a preferred version for my parents, for the singers at the Mariposa Folk Festival. But it can't communicate the same thing as the keyboard version. There's a line in the song where they sing, "Will it come on a Saturday night?" and it's nearly jarring on the album. Because this disembodied future spirit shouldn't even know the days of the week, to be honest. 

Around the time that we were listening to this CD in my mom's apartment, Mick Harris was getting ready to leave one of my then-favorite bands, Napalm Death. He invented the blast beat, but he was sick of it, and wanted to experiment. He ended up making this lurking, low-end electronic dub music in the band Scorn. My friends and I were scandalized that our favorite drummer was instead using a drum machine, but there's a scratchy, mournful humanity on those records you couldn't find on Harmony Corruption. A year later I heard Godflesh's Pure in an Ottawa record store and bought it immediately, listened to the cassette on a walkman and missed the entire ferry tour we took that afternoon. Up until that point, drum machines felt like a hack, like a way to streamline. Like that Henry Rollins side project, Wartime, or the Malhavoc records which felt like a guy who didn't know how to collaborate with other people. When I think of those years, of the path to Skinny Puppy and Laibach, it feels like it was Scorn and Godflesh that showed me how electronic instruments could create a new way to indicate anxiety, weightlessness, and yearning. But in retrospect, it was probably two Canadian folksingers in their 40s who made this visible for me.