A Week With Swan Lake's "Beast Moans": Day 5
22 November 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abigail Bruley
Seek what you will with Beast Moans. It’s all on your heads after today, that’s if you’ve even been following me this far. What five days of listening have taught us about this record is that we still don’t know a thing about it. There’s a reason that they make whiskey barrels out of certain kinds of wood—to coax vanilla and caramel flavors out of them. And there’s a reason that everything in those barrels is stored in a humongous barn for years. It’s because the barrel’s contents would taste like skid marks and Sharpie markers if tested too early. Beast Moans can be sipped. It can be sampled and nodded to. It can make you say, “It’s good,” right now, right now it can do that, but time will fill out the rest of the picture. What I’m going to do is now not listen to this record for a very long time (not because I don’t like it, but rather because I think I’ll like it more later) and bring it back out next summer, or maybe on that first criminally cool day of the autumn that spooks us into a sweater and a stocking hat. It will be missed then. We’ll have heard a new Wolf Parade record, maybe, just maybe another Sunset Rubdown disc, a new Frog Eyes for sure and maybe they’ll even be something new revealed by Destroyer and all of these things will add luster and a proper grammar for these songs. They’ll say different things, whisper to us sweeter, numbing our napes and probably make us feel foolish for not having taken to them sooner. We’ll never be able to get that time back, but these songs will be better if we give that time to them, just give it away. Expectations are horrible things to have for people you respect the shit out of. Unfortunately, one of the ways to make this record immediately substantiated would be hearing them performed in person (it might do it) and it sounds like a tour is about as far-fetched as wishing for your own private moon, one that you could boss around and make orbit you any way you saw fit. It would help the argument that these aren’t just glorified personal recordings made for private pleasure, but noteworthy and drooled over enough that they couldn’t stay that way. There are many books published that only collect the correspondences from famous literary figures to their sisters and to the local grocer or their mistresses. These are only valuable or necessary because that writer happened to craft magnificent fiction. They lend a telescope, however leisure or misguided, deeper into that person, exposing more of their character, but the letters were of no great concern but to the addressee and the addressed at the time they were written. These songs serve a purpose to Krug, Mercer and Bejar. They’re friends and they wanted to make something with their friends. I suppose you could say that same thing about every band. Every record they make is done because they want to make another record with their friends. But Beast Moans must have been different. It’s as if it was stolen from them. It is a lovely record and one that we’ll cherish in time as a letter from Krug to Bejar to Mercer, while they were all in the same room.
Jagjaguwar Records—Swan Lake’s label
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