Lilly's Days
The first thing you notice about Unsung Stories from Lilly's Days as a Solar Astronaut is its distinctive packaging, a cryptic collage overlaying a backdrop the color of faded parchment paper: ragged, Ralph Steadman-esque lettering interspersed with distressed typefaces, washed-out snapshots of a 1980s-era sedan and an unidentifiable action figure, aimless doodles, a gray cluster of evocative text clippings, and an image of a pair of open scissors. If your guess is that Unsung wouldn't be all sweetness and light—that its aching, emotional longing runs deep—award yourself a gold star.
This melancholic, mosaic record—the second from Baltimore-based aural alchemist Jonathan Badger—looks like a tragic scrapbook, and it sounds like one, too, even as its song titles splits the difference between blunt utilitarianism ("Aria 7") and desperate, depressive delusion ("They Searched for Each Other in the Shelter of Mercury"). Unsung shuffles nimbly between extremes of darkness and light the way an Olympic figure skater transitions from twirls and spins to highest-degree-of-difficulty Lutzes and axles, a suite of fluid, involving instrumentals that draws from disparate genres to arrive at a sort of post-ambient survey.
Badger's sonic palette can definitely inspire tinnitus: "Lucius" forces effects-driven, contact-mic'd-wasps-in-a-jar chicanery to play nice with Mogwai-lite gloaming, while "The Vessel Megalo" is all orchestral, noise-metal swing. "Aria 7" gently stipples downcast classical harmonies with static and micromorphed bongo-beat samples, then drops all of that in favor of starched electric ax sandblasts. A few tracks—namely the aforementioned "Mercury," which cries out to be set to an interpretive dance piece, and the hiccupping hospital-monitor drear of "Beat 1"—generate the kind of dissonant cross-currents that fool you into thinking that your cell phone is ringing near by.
Unsung is at its best when Badger really gets his Siberian-winter-of-our-discontent on. "His Face Like Glass to the Touch"—a modernist tone poem for piano, mellotron, and guitar that peers deeply into its own cracked mirror image—paints a spellbinding portrait of baroque-cum-prog unease, and "vocals" that have been drained of all humanity lend the piece an operatic cast. "The First Time I Dreamt of the Surface There Was No-One To Hold" shoves burbling, opaque electronics and sewing-machine stitched riffs through pregnant silences and gusts of string-section anguish that are abruptly cut short.
Raymond Cummings, Baltimore City Paper, March 4, 2010
Aside from having one of the best titles in recent memory, Jonathan Badger’s Unsung Stories from Lily’s Days as a Solar Astronaut is a challenging but ultimately rewarding disc that slams together an avant-rock mindset equipped with weapons-grade guitar bursts, an intriguing electronic setup and a compositional sensibility that’s largely improvisation-based. Badger has developed a system that augments his live guitar structures with laptop-selected sound samples and loops triggered not just by what he’s playing, but how it’s being played. Mellotron tape loops are also controlled by the guitar’s MIDI output.
It’s easy to overlook the electronic side of things, however, when the first angry, feral guitar chords of “The Vessel Megalo” rip the air wide open in front of you and drums slam out an angry backbeat. At that point it feels almost like it’s going to be a straightforward, hard instrumental CD. That’s one of the draws of Unsung Stories… for me: the way Badger manages to maintain the structural familiarity of that rock feel while crashing it at speed into the forward-thinking subversion of a compositional approach unfettered by convention.
Throughout the disc, Badger uses that subversion to unseat the comfort we take in a melody by twisting and roughening it. It makes us stop listening passively and start looking actively at what’s being done so that we can try to understand. Listen to the way an established rhythm breaks down, regroups and rebuilds over and over in “Beat 1? as fingerboarded guitar squares off against a chipset-like riff that mimics it. Or the way Badger takes the almost-baroque simplicity of a piano and flute duet in “His Face Like Glass to the Touch” and drops in a wayward fuzzy guitar, disjointed snipped vocal samples and a battery of processing and filtering changes, forcing the basic tune to continually work to return to its original state. “Surface” is about the most straight-up track here, boasting a guitar riff that fell out of a Sergio Leone western, but even here Badger runs a serratred electric wire around and through it to try to draw focus away while at the same time requiring the listener to focus more. In each track, while the intent of the thing remains, its appearance is in near-constant flux, bending toward unrecognizability and thus our perception of and understanding of it changes as well.
At time the higher concepts at work in Unsung Stories… can leave me a little cold–or just feeling like I don’t get it. For example, I get lost in the piano tangle in “The Insight That Comes From Repeated Time Dilations” (which, by the way, is a great title) and find myself moving on. But it’s the exception rather than the rule. Badger’s complexity makes me want to listen deeper to more fully take in the experience.
The packaging of this disc is also worth calling out. The inside of the case is strewn with what appear to be random old clippings from books and newspapers. Look at them carefully, though–the text on each pertains in some way to the titular Lily and her days as…well, you get it. It’s an interesting way to add a depth of narrative that goes beyond the music. It serves to invest you a bit more in the concept. Well done.
When you’re ready to think about your music, listen to Unsung Stories from Lily’s Days As A Solar Astronaut. The reward is very much worth the effort.
John Shanahan, Hypnagogue, August 10, 2010
the greatness on this album comes from the synthesis of structures and sounds that Badger manages to achieve. This is an album sans genre, one that is good enough to stand alone on the mountaintop. . . . in the finest traditions of modern composing.
Jon Worley, Aiding and Abetting, March 2010
Intricate yet dreamy compositions.
Scott Jones, Performer Magazine, February 2010
Splendid . . . engaging . . . entertaining . . .
Disagreement, March 2010