Why You’ll Never Get To Heaven Rules by Gavin Frazer (2016)
You’ll Never Get To Heaven
I’d spent the day in London, deep in my parents basement, digging through a mountain of boxes. A former life was told back to me through postcards from deceased relatives, letters of lost romances and mix-tapes made by friends long since moved away, through pages of lyrics and early sketches, broken instruments and toys, photographs and dust. Memento after memento of a previous life.
You’ll never Get To Heaven is the soundtrack tonight as my secret loves and fears and hopes and dreams are retold to me through these scraps of personal history.
Chuck Blazevic & Alice Hansen’s songs are as much a ghostly assemblage of sounds, of creaks and of shadows, of record crackles and of dark things, as they are of sweetness, of beauty and of optimism. There’s mystery, there’s anticipation. What will be around the next corner? These ghosts have secrets to whisper.
Listening to their Adorn record, I’m reminded of the old hissy VHS dubs of Twin Peaks episodes I found today and of piles of unlabelled cassette tapes collecting impossibly slow pop songs and dark lo-fi dreamscapes.
I was crushed today, not only by the physical amount of work before me but by all of those heavy things from the past that were opened up with the boxes. Yet as overwhelming as those memories are, the joy and fondness came back to me too.
You’ll Never Get To Heaven rule because they conjure exactly these feelings. Their music is like a ghost’s whisper, compelling us to walk forward in anticipation and wonder through the dark things.
Gavin Frazer is a member of Kazoo! Fest 2014 band, BSHC.
