Well that’s it from us for this week, and we leave you dear reader with a track from the new album by Great Lakes, Fear of the Fear, a band we have been big fans of over the years here at AUK. The longstanding musical project of Ben Crum, the album was recorded following the death of Crum’s close friend, Ryan Trammel. Commenting on the record he says: “As such, it deals thematically with loss and grief. A very personal album, it touches on feelings of anxiety, brokenness, and the role of the subconscious in our lives – be it subconscious memory or subconsciousknowledge/wisdom (“there is a truth we have known without knowing it” is how I put it in the album opener). This is an idea I find especially potent. Maria Montessori wrote that as babies we are as smart as we are ever going to be. When I read that in one of her books, it immediately felt self-evident to me. As we age, of course we all also come to realise, and most of us all too well, that wisdom and knowledge are wholly different from intelligence. That’s another theme of the record: ”you don’t get smarter with age” is how I put it in one song.”
One of the many highlights of the record is Why Did My Love Go Away, of which Crum says: “This song could go out to pretty much anyone who has ever been left or dumped. It started out being a song specifically about my father-in-law, whose love left him utterly alone. The worst thing about that whole situation was that he had it coming. The line, “things are, sadly, exactly as they seem,” is the one that, for me, feels heaviest. The experience of feeling like a stranger to yourself is one that maybe everyone who has ever experienced intensely shocking, sudden tragedy knows. The instrumentation on this song benefits from John Whittemore’s jangly Byrds-influenced guitar parts and Petter Folkedal’s uniquely inspired piano.”
It’s a terrific album and one we’ll be covering with a full review in due course, made all the more special to me by the photo on the cover he took himself of an illegal Israeli settlement under construction in Beit Jalalin, the West Bank, Palestine. As Crum noted, “The image seemed to me to be appropriate to the overarching theme of these songs.” Take care, don’t forget Palestine and keep fighting those fascists. See you next week.
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