Friday, March 25, 2022

• Ken Vandermark / Klaus Kugel / Mark Tokar, Escalator
• Wire, 154

The older I get the better I like 154 (and I always liked it a lot).

There are several excellent Colin Newman songs here, including the immortal, gorgeously vague “The 15th”.

But my recent obsession with the album is centered more on the Graham Lewis songs: “A Mutual Friend”, “A Touching Display”, “I Should Have Known Better”. They’re literary in their length, in their language, and (more importantly) in their emotional complexity. The length and elevated language are just tools for achieving that.

“A Mutual Friend” was difficult for me to relate to when I first heard it, during college. The song’s narrator is concerned for his friend, and that friend is in turn concerned for his or her teenage son. Already this is an adult situation — if your friend has a teenage son, you’re probably both at least 40. And what teenager even bothers imagining what their parents and their parents’ friends say to each other?

“I Should Have Known Better” is a song of regret, an adult emotion that takes years to pile up. The narrator regrets treating a romantic partner badly, but the anger that must have led him to behave that way is still there, between the lines. There’s a lot of water under the bridge in this song — everything seems complicated by the (unstated, only implied) couple's complicated history together. If this is an excerpt from a novel, it’s from a late chapter.

Graham Lewis, who wrote the lyrics to these songs, was only 26 in 1979, so go figure. At 26 I was only partway to being able to fully wrap my head around this material.