In the Middle of the Song No One Is in Sight

Albums discussed and where to buy them:
The Dandelion Method - The Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes
Glowworm - The Coachlight Woods
Pacific UV - Longplay 2

There was something oppressive about Sunday afternoons in the basement, whichever basement we were inhabiting at the time, even though it was there that the Dandelion Method made some of the most beautiful music I've yet heard. When the tape wasn't rolling, interminable conversations (about purpose, aesthetics, and things as simple as the name of our band) threatened to derail all possibility and promise, and sometimes gave me a kind of despair about my existence.

Because the truth was, I didn't have anything better to do with my life than to wonder if more reverb and cooler album artwork would get us a gig at the Showbox. I sat behind my drums looking sullen, in my standard-issue indie-rock uniform (vintage jacket, 70s flat front pants, black Converse, gaunt torso), and picked inconsequential fights about rock music.

"Do you guys like singing?" Kevin asked during one of these conversations.

Yeah, we pretty much all agreed, we do like singing.

"I don't."

It wasn't that we immediately became a hamfisted powerpop band when Kevin left. (That took another few months.) It was that even as we piled on the heartfelt lyrics and harmonies, we lost a sense of the grandiose. We still wrote long, weird, twisting instrumentals, but they weren't imbued with the gravity and mystery that his songs had been, somehow.

*

"About to fall apart, you leave the West and become the blessed one," Kevin sings on "Halo," the last song he wrote for the Dandelion Method. "It's been a bloody good time, but I've got run..."

Did he know he'd become the subject of that sentence? We sensed he was always moving forward, tolerating (at times suggesting) the Phish and Weezer covers at shows, and the bouncy pop tunes our friends wanted to hear sometimes, but pushing himself in directions we weren't prepared to go. On his 4-track demos like the funereal "Ballad of Joseph Goode," or ambient tracks like "The Engineers" from the first Glowworm CD-r -- 20 minutes of sound collage, laptop blips, and film clips -- the Kevin Davis I'd gotten to know, the earnest kid who once played in an acoustic band called God's Own Fools, shrank into the shadow of the sounds he created.

We finished writing our last record without Kevin; he'd moved to Portland and started disappearing into other things: a Glowworm full-length, and a shoegaze band called Pacific UV. Within the last few weeks, after what has felt like decades, both bands put out full-length albums.

The Coachlight Woods is pretty and spooky, opening with a holy instrumental from the Sigur Ros playbook, cracking itself open with Appleseed Cast drum tricks and screaming distortion in the Utah desert, interrupted by crickets, and culminating in a guitar liturgy, "Glow Scraped from the Earth."

Longplay 2 meanders; two or three tracks feel like the band that made Pacific UV (LP1), but mostly the album swims lazy circles around musical ideas, like "Something Told Us," where Kevin's gentle, insistent guitar line plods along, fading in and out, only becoming a song when it feels like it. This is a lullaby album, even at the chaotic, feedback-soaked parts.

These are a couple of carefully, lovingly made records. Accessories for listening, I think, might include: porches, basements, headphones, empty swimming pools, bottles of wine. By the way, Kevin does not sing anymore, and I think has achieved something he's been aiming at for some time: he has disappeared into the music.

(The title of this post comes from a 2003 painting by Wan Qingli. The photo was taken by Nina Boe a thousand years ago on September 24, 2004.)