#endoftheworldparty

Fresh Listen - Medeski Martin & Wood, End of the World Party (Just in Case) (Blue Note Records, 2004)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

 I was gifted a copy of Medeski Martin & Wood’s End of the World Party (Just in Case) right after Christmas. I spent and hour or so on New Year’s Day 2019 absorbing the album onto my brain material, synching the regulated rhythms of my circulations to its beats, while taking a run up the Valley of the Temples in Kaneohe. In those green hills, where gravestones in the short grass reflected dull sunlight and sepulchers and tombs stood forlorn behind gates and at the end of paved walkways, I felt that the record, through its instrumental soul-funk numbers, sought to reiterate the impending collective mortality that all of us, including the animal life and vegetation that propagate just on the periphery of our attention, must embrace--the covering over of eyes and mouths with rust and dust, the withering of appendages into basic molecular structures to float forever. Running past cars and families and graves and flowers on plastic stands stuck into the ground, I was surrounded by the living and the dead. 

On that New Year's Day I was moved, as I had been in New Year’s past, by the pitiless sweep of existence, that wave that pushes spirits out from bodies and transforms bodies into useless, dumb matter. I like to think that I caught just the edge of that wave, some brush of it against my calf as I ran, but I know such awareness is only granted to those who have linked hands with the Death Angel and allowed themselves to be led away. I stopped for a moment at the edge of Ocean View Terrace, an elevated monument to the dead a the foothills of the majestically ridged Ko’olaus, from which, through the trees far beyond, sightless, buried eyes might look upon the distant water. I put my hands on my knees and breathed as if I’d never tasted the air before.

“Anonymous Skulls” is all we can expect to be when our ruins are discovered by subsequent civilizations, those peoples or beings who will undoubtedly be bewildered by out bizarre ways--our preoccupation with money and status, our obsession with youth, our language that is communicated with such a degree of subjectivity as to be meaningless from occasion to occasion. Medeski Martin & Wood’s first track from End of the World Party throws vocoder-ized synths, layered as grieving voices of women, over a backbeat of marked time pushing forward into that narrowing portal of the future. End of the World Party is a more cleanly produced record, overall, than the group’s 2006 release with John Scofield, Out Louder, most of the smeared textures of Scofield’s electric work absent. “Toxic,” the Britney Spears hit that released a year prior to End of the World Party, informs the opening to the album’s title track, maybe a reference to the commercial music of the period, which would seemingly soundtrack the inevitable armageddon. With its drenched keyboards evoking guitar tones, I thought “Reflector” more accurately fit the mold of a party track--a mirror image of our wasted time in oblivion rendered in sound, all of it without the benefit of a memento mori to foretell our doom.

In order to fully understand the context of “Bloody Oil”, the rumbling stand-up bass dirge led by Chris Wood, you have to transport your consciousness back to 2004. The Bush/Cheney era, the disruption of the Middle East, Halliburton, Black Water, oil fields on fire in the deserts of Iraq. In 2004, much like the present moment, it seemed we were near the end of a polluted world, its core honey-combed by ceaseless drilling, its air and water saturated with the by-products of oil consumption. All of us then were acutely aware of the visible symptoms of a sick environment, over-peopled by bad actors.

Contrasted to “Bloody Oil” is “New Planet,” an optimistic, upbeat number that counters the dour gravitas of the preceding track. For a few minutes sonic space textures and synth beeps engage the listener in the excitement of an undiscovered frontier, a place to populate with our imaginations. Toward the end, though, the grows somber, desolate, as if the planet we found to inhabit grows small in our vision as we pull away from it, its crust collapsing upon itself, its resources all sucked out, a lifeless husk.

The second half of End of the World Part (Just in Case) veers away from the themes implied by its title, though the band carries forward the continuity of the overall sound. “Mami Gato” is a technically proficient exercise on piano, a workout lacking in the aural sweatiness of Out Louder. Like many other songs on the record, the song’s coda over the last few minutes is a departure--in this case, the song transitions to a kind of nouveau old-world cocktail jazz, that sound that arises behind your head when you think upon cigarettes in holders and women in hats and carefully parted and combed hair and spats and absinthe fountains. “Shine It” is boilerplate blues-funk, while “Curtis” is refreshingly the dirtiest sounding the band gets, all distorted wah-wah's and uptight bass. “Sasa” could be a Beastie Boys instrumental from The In Sound from Way Out!, except Medeski Martin & Wood are less nasty in the pocket, and really know how to hang int there. With its dreamy, noir-ish beginnings, “Midnight Poppies/Crooked Birds” emerges from an electric slumber to an askew melody with backwards bass loops and sqauwkbox keyboards.