Experiencing the new Fractal Cat album The Eye in the Dawn is a lot like… … well, it’s a lot like…
… like sneaking off to that old house on the corner – the one with the huge backyard that opens up on a disused perfume factory. The beautifully wizened, peeling, painted lady with the overgrown lawn, the neglected topiary, the eclectic, treasure-filled yard. (Maybe there is an Edsel; a tractor wheel prolapsed and turned into a planter; one of the six wheeled amphibious carts formerly driven by the Banana Splits; a small catamaran claimed by the weeds, heaving stoically out of a mound of fill dirt; and an ejection seat from an F-104 Starfighter off to the side).
An old parachute fluttering in the wind provides shade for a workbench.
As you approach the gate, you begin hearing something remarkable. At once familiar, strange, new and unabashedly earnest, it wafts through the cracked casement surrounding a thoroughly dirty basement window.
It waits for you. It calls you.
You approach. Looking through that dirty window, straining to see and hear, you witness something:
A band.
A band of believers.
A band of true believers.
A fantastic band of young (though, honestly not really that young) people, singing playing their hearts out in a dirt floor basement.
You listen and you say to yourself, “I know this! This is love. I am bearing witness to love. I get it now: love is a time machine. The real mechanics of time travel are based in emotion, not motion. Love is the catalyst.”
You are moved.
And then you go deeper. This is MUSIC. These are SONGS. Each one is different gem, or a different facet of the same gem, unabashedly influenced by a past which they paradoxically co-inhabit. This is music you’ve never heard triggering memories you’ve never had. Everything is old, new, and re-imagined all at once.
Time stands still.
There is sturm und drang here, but the sturm is a sun-shower and the drang is as heavy as using your facial muscles to smile.
And it’s interesting: these aren’t forgeries. They aren’t homages. They are re-livings – re-tellings of stories untold. You get the sense that these are people from the past who just happen to be alive now. They are displaced people, yet wholly fine with that.
In the poem Peter Quince at the Clavier, poet Wallace Stevens writes:
“Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;”
Listening to “The Eye in the Dawn” speaks directly to this. Music is feeling, not sound, but paradoxically neither exists without the other and both are found in full abundance on this record. It is simply a lovely and beautiful thing.
If you enjoy fearlessness, tunefulness and joy, this is the record for you.
I leave you with this lovely sentiment from “Some Angel”
“And nobody knows what it’s for
But everyone knows how to smile
It’s easy to do” “Some Angel”
It is easy to do. I’m smiling right now as I listen. You will too.
