I try to avoid many a common trope in music writing. But I’ll admit, the whole extended metaphor that likens musicians to sorcerers—and ergo, songs as spells—is one I employ all the time. Why not? No art can really qualify as such until an audience can see it and feel some tangible reaction—or, in this current context, until the artist can work some sort of magic over the crowd.
However, when I think back to the incantations that Matthew Goethe casted over us as Double Vanities at the Bakery, I realize that the power of reactions rests not solely in the wizard. At the time, as Goethe unfurled chords on the keyboard, I was thinking about how someone more accustomed to melodies might doubt the skill or artistry involved in this semi-improvised ritual. Yet, the folks who sat on the floor cross-legged during the first song certainly embraced a sense of reverie, even as our narrator moaned about projecting a missing person onto the likeness of a stranger.
To that end, then, the dulcimer currents of “Bird Water Thief” can stir the adept listener any number of ways. The novice may summon a gentle breeze, and the whimsy of wind chimes. A more skilled diviner, on the other hand (particularly one who has trekked through the grain and the graves with Current 93), could frighten themselves with glimpses into unseeing eyes, bodies as shells, and/or the single silent tree that flails like a person in the unrelenting wind. The amorphic powers from Goethe ensure that both visions can occur, side by side; we the apprentices awaken what the sleeping masses cannot hear.
Double Vanities next album, Bannister, materializes on Mar. 1.
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