by Jeff Laughlin
Wandering around the neighborhood in the new world order shakes some belief into me. Maybe it’s the cold, maybe it’s the discomfort of future lockdowns or the news or whatever cascade of worries I must navigate. The matter at hand is gloomy, decrepit and somewhat condensed as we wait for good times.
These waiting moments comprise an overwhelming majority of Allegra Kreiger’s The Joys of Forgetting. Awaiting good times sounds pretty terrific - so long as you ignore the desolation around you and the wreckage of the near and far past. For some of us, that is impossible. Call us empaths, downers, and/or annoying but, at least these days, it’s tough to call us wrong.
“You can carve something nice, or dismantle what you find, but you’re the one, the only — how you make it is how it will be.”
Overwrought, heavy lines hang in the margins of most records; premises earned by telling heartache stories. Instead, The Joys of Forgetting hinges on lines like this — they more than litter the landscape. They are no less earned because Kreiger uses vague descriptions of objects and humans. We don’t get the failures and heartbreaks too often. We get the aftermath and the unfurling rather than the erstwhile. Joys recalls with a Damien Jurado-eye yet the precise instrumentation creates a path through the destruction rather than point-blank existentialism.
What we’re given, then, are meandering tunes that often feel both newly breathless and worn-in. Stumbling-yet-effective music that if not so precise would be easy to ignore. That precision, though, burns heavy.
“What is a song without love, lasting, longing and through every chord it’s indulgence strung-out and bored?”
The threadbare songs - like “It’s Nice To Believe” or “Where” - feel more personal and purposeful than those whose stories demand larger instrumentation - “Rot” comes to mind. It’s as if loneliness wrings the very worst thoughts and songs while other folks demand bombast. I empathize there, so maybe that’s why I love this record so much.
The most evident mysticism of Joys presents openly and brashly and this creates my favorite paradox on the record: the one ever-prevalent message of all the thinking and judging and understanding in this incredible art? Knowledge is not that big of a deal. Possessing the overwhelming gift of value judgement can come off as selfish or disingenuous. The most effective way to quell those perceptions is to make sure everyone knows that an arrival point is really just a series of observations.
Joys shines brightest when it admits that despite constantly being surrounded by ineluctable weight and inescapable sadness, “It’s going well, it’s going well, it’s going well.” Take “Forgot” - a song so enveloped by love and lust that the song admits: I will forget about me to please the one I love. It does so in a haze of Punch Drunk Love-ian admittance. Even when the song finds a way back to the fault and fracture of lovelessness, Kreiger forgives. It’s fine to get lost in someone else because there will be that moment where we realize we are human.
“What’s the point in making a point? What’s the problem with laying low?”
Bringing it all back home - the neighborhood swells in the accidental heat of new, mild winters but wanes with disease - it truly doesn’t matter if we do this wrong; with ardor or laziness or if we sound disingenuous. Emotions process and we do what we will with them. This is how we live to die, as the excellent closer “Where” tells us. Beyond existentialism, maybe not even that far beyond, there are palm trees and painlessness. Doesn’t really matter how you get there and who impedes your progress so long as you study the path to see where it leads. Joys leads those here to be led - maybe without intending to lead at all - but remember not to worry too much lest you ignore the journey. That’s where belief is lost.
“How beautiful, the push and the pull of a human race. And how delicate, the heart desolate, gone without a trace.”