REVIEW: PARIS FALLS - VOLUME ONE

The West as it Was. A Landscape of awe, where only surroundings surround you – nothing that is made, only that which exists as God deposited it there. Mocha mud rivers cut the land, not the paths of men; wind folds the dirt-cum-dust, not the plow and the ox. Roasted red pepper soil courts patches of shade beneath the sage and her skeletons. Things that breathe and scuttle make violence on the beating heart; the fang of the rattlesnake, the mace of the scorpion; the tear of the tarantula. Men and families, prepared and horesdrawn, bring leather and burlap and iron and waste into this desert. A crucible to purify away the weak and unlucky from the caustic powdered success.

And a century and a half later, we sat, riveted, in front of Apple Computers and are enterstructed with glee about the Oregon Trail. And though they have nothing to do with one another, Paris Falls keeps bringing us back, mentally, to a place straddled by the very real blacksmiths and horseshoes of destiny manifesting and the 8-bit typhoid deaths of our youth. It’s as though the entire west needs to be discovered again, with loss, with heartbreak and with struggle, and this is the band that is playing in the wagon behind you. You’re upbeat, but you know that dysentery is killing a child at the trailing end of the caravan. You hear the music and fear in secret that their modest plateau of uplift might be the greatest steppe of joy that life, real deal life, can ever really spit up. You wear their dirges with heavy hooks in the ventricle. What if there is no Kublai Kahn at the end of the forded river? What if you never live to find out?

Nearly every review you will read of this record, Paris Fall’s first, will mention the Beatles. And why not, as there is more than a little rubber in their soul. Indeed, earlier tangents of examination focused particularly on this website’s fondness for Ringo Starr’s drumming, and the similar back-beating pleasure we encounter when listening to PF on record (work handled live until recently by Mikey DeLeon - Matt Tantillo is now filling his kicks and fills). However, a recent discussion on another blog rendered that line of thinking to the day late/dollar short bin. But to us. more than Fab, Volume One sounds dry, and deserting. Of a time when all the psychotrops have long given way to the cracked lake-bed beneath them. Metal hoops sinking into earth not ready to be tamed, but still turning. Forward. Reccomended.

Stream: Paris Falls - Various Tracks