Wow that does suck for you, Richard
I know what you’re thinking, “What kind of a loser and coward openly admits their impermanence in their album title? Is it not the words of a worm to concede defeat to the passage of time, to not defy that your memory will ever be forgotten? Demand your bones to remain full, and at a constant level of calcium-enrichment into perpetuity! REFUSE TO LET YOUR SKIN FALL TO THE DUST PATH AND INSIST YOUR NAME BE ETCHED UPON THE ROOF OF YOUR ANCESTORS’ EVER-DRYING MOUTHS!”
I think you need to take things a bit easy, and consider breathing-exercises. Yes, Richard Russell is in fact temporary, but frankly he seems to be living the dream. As the owner of the goliath XL Recordings label, Russell is three albums-deep into his Everything Is Recorded project, wherein he scrapes together his address book, alongside the wobbling stack of his employee’s contract copies, and exacts his production whims upon the lot.
And, unlike most other staff-parties, the underlings aren’t just pretending to have a good time for their boss’ benefit. Russell’s been around the block, and his production is a celebration of the recent history of UK music, exemplifying clear touchstones of dub, soul, and garage across tracks which balance artist-first production, and having a bit of a general show-off production. With the transience of love and life centred on this occasion, peeking through the curtains reveals a more sombre dress-code this time around.
Ephemeral horror (Shout-out to thesauruses) is explored with warmth across the opening, a moody sunglow of My and Me, and the country fittings of Porcupine Tattoo. Everything is Recorded regular Sampha pulls through golden in Never Felt Better, a choral defiance of misery. The boy brings further highlights to this album in Losing You, where the tone of Sampha’s voice pushed through a distortion is proven to be a very simple formula for beauty.
Seeing a track titled Norm creeping ever closer, a thought suddenly appeared of “Hey, what if that’s a song about Norm MacDonald?”. I shrugged this off as a symptom of how much his ghost continues to haunt my Youtube recommendations, but this suspicion ever increased as I heard Lo-fi country darling Bill Callahan declare “Norm is gone” repeatedly, as the track opened. From there, my suspicions that this was a song about Norm MacDonald only increased, when I heard Norm MacDonald’s voice on the track declaring “When the fuckin’ sickle of death is over my goddamn neck, I’m gonna be so cowardly”.
Now if I were writing a music review, I might be bold enough to claim that this track is an off-kilter, yet frank ode to Norm MacDonald’s selfless commitment to laughter right until the end, “Stone-faced through the gut laughs, Smiling through the pain”. Well, for me at least, that does remind me of that tragedy.
For an album where the lyric-writing task is pulled together by a dozen or so artists, a killer job has been done in keeping theme coherence. Tracks like Swamp Dream #3 brings sparse, blunt poetry from mary in the junkyard, while uniting with the far more confessional tone across Firelight. The many personal contributions across breakups and deaths stack up, and whether we’re talking about one or the other starts to become ambiguous across the runtime. Or rather, death and breakups become one and the same.
As touching as the meditations on impermanence remain through and through, some tracks fail to hit their mark in slight but ruinous manners. Ether presents a beautiful piece, which is let down by just how pokey the loud and clicking snare sample used throughout becomes after a full three minutes. Further production gripes in the closer Goodbye (Hell of a Time), where a hands-off, raw approach to Nourished by Time’s vocals just tips the tonal scales to scraping. Light manicure needed.
Elsewhere and overall, the touching reflections of death shifts the album’s focus away from the innovative style-moshing and groove which Everything Is Recorded projects have previously pushed. Suppose a funeral wake having a dancefloor is a hard thing for anyone to pull off, but it’s Richard Russell’s artist-first production which drove my hope to believe it could be tried. All touching, but what more can we feel?
A 7/10 for me here.