CAM071CD - Patrick Porter - "Lisha Kill" Review

it is only in isolate flecks
that something
is given off

no one
to witness and adjust
no one to drive the car.

Patrick Porter's music is one of those "isolate flecks" that William Carlos Williams may have been referring to when he wrote 'To Elsie', a poem that begins with the line:

Porter, from the beginning of Lisha Kill, senses this danger, in a song titled with hilarious accuracy in regard to those "pure products": 'Good People with Bad Credit'. The song rides on relentlessly pretty strums of guitar, and the lyrics consist mostly of a creepily soothing repetition of the word "crazy", except for a section that goes like this:

new day dawning like a haunting
growing habit we have had it
just forget it with bad credit

The effect of these spare words within the larger context that the music itself creates is to lower the attentive listener into their grief and helplessness, then release them from it into a paradoxical renewal. A realization that the alienation caused by living in an irrational, crazily mixed economy where mediocrity now sells better than innovation, thereby paralysing the mind, has also given us the space and freedom in our intellectual isolation to seek, and occasionally find, an agonizing but worthwhile release. What presents itself as a fall becomes a spiritual doorway of sorts into a better world, even if that world is found more in the mind than in one's surroundings. A man who can make an album as upliftingly pretty as "Lisha Kill" has obviously not given in to the grimness of his surroundings, and any reviewer of this album who concentrated on the misery herein, and took it as the defining message, would not be worthy to comment on music any longer, or on any human art-form. People who give in to misery and let go of hope become dull, commercialised drones or patients in mental hospitals--not creators of cathartic, heartfelt art such as this music.

Sadness in art is the furthest thing from futile; it provides a kind of necessary drain for the flood of emotions ignored in the rush of everyday life. It is not even sadness; mere "sadness" or "happiness" are too simplistic as, words, to describe the yearning music sparks. Sadness turned into art is no longer sadness. For example, 'End Badly' is a beautiful song about the temptation to drown one's sufferings in a bottle of whiskey, and the chorus begs humorously "come on babe, let's end badly". Then the lyrics explode in a kind of ravaged drunken glory:

aim me to points of light
doesn't matter what may be
artificial family tree
come on babe, let's end badly

in a room where no one can get to me
in a room where I can be a fucking drag

But I don't feel depressed at the impact of the song; I feel stronger, because someone has spoken intimately to my quietest and most truthful moments. "Lisha Kill" is redemptive art not only because it starts from a humorous, dark-humoured admission of the self's imperfection, like John Berryman's "Dream Songs"--not only because it uses its desperation to rocket itself into a stratosphere of beauty rather than a trench of despair; but also because the music is a surge of energy, even when the lyrics are at their most desolate and deathly, as in 'Hospital', which starts by quoting in song a Christian greeting card that Porter discovered at a bus stop: "dear god/be good to me/the sea is so wide and my boat is so small" before breaking into a repeated request:

go to the hospital
get me a doctor quick
go to the hospital
tell them I'm feeling sick

The song was inspired by Porter's witness of the aftermath of a hit-and-run in which a twenty-year-old "Schenectady no-hoper" (his words) purposely laid himself down in the middle of the street and was run over by a passing car. The arcing sounds of guitar droning throughout the song are at first evocative of an atmosphere where blood has just been shed, where something irreversibly terrible has happened. Yet it leaves a sweet taste, as if the 'small boat' quaintly captured on the Christian greeting card has come and floated the spirit of the dead man into a peaceful eternity.

The album also features one of the best and subtlest love songs I've heard in some time in the slowly swelling 'Free Kittens', which I want to quote from here

I thought of religion
but when death's head came into view
I thought about you 

I thought of the convictions
that reality overthrew
I thought about you 

on the nights light by the sun
we'll just ride like there's no such thing as time

Because at the moment when Patrick sings "there's no such thing as time" all the depression the album may have been created in melts away and evaporates completely, replaced by a quiet but very bold joy, a joy also expressed in the album's closer, 'Toppy':

This is a morning prayer
this is a soul
this is the one time I'm not in control

This is a morning prayer
this is an ode
this is the one time the cup overflowed

This, after having faced an incredible depth of revulsion at the world's strained and corrupt interactions, and the terror of impending mortality in songs like 'Alarm Clock Song' wherein Patrick sings about witnessing an apparent child prostitute being whisked off by a middle-aged man, confesses his conviction that he has cancer, and ends by stating that if he doesn't have cancer he's "scared anyway". Of course, real joy doesn't feed on illusion or ease, and 'Toppy' ends with the simple declaration, not sounding like a threat: "you'd better get away from me". Perhaps the reason the writer wants to be left alone is not to merely brood or to kill himself, but to regain his joy in private, which is where most artists get it in its purest form. But either way, it doesn't matter: if it the album concluded with a self-inflicted gunshot, it would still be an affirmation of the greatness of life; songs with the sweet melancholy of 'Slow Torpedo' are hymns to the soul's ability to overcome hardship, and would remain such whether the artist stayed safe in his body or not.

The songs themselves, of course, are better than my descriptions, as any good music is, which is why I haven't analysed every one of them, though all thirteen of them are good, even 'Mermaid' the one that Porter claims was inspired by "being in love with people on TV", in part by Darlene Conner of 'Roseanne' and in part by Winona Ryder (why the hell do so many songwriters pay tribute to Winona Ryder? Maybe she's got some inimitable muse-magic that I don't yet understand. Nevertheless, the song is gorgeous). So I, as an obsessive and hungry listener writing for other obsessive hungry listeners, will end by stating that Lisha Kill, with the lasting, memorable quality of its melodies and its evocative, intense and intimate atmospheres, is one of my favourite albums of the year so far. It's easily worthy of being ranked with more well-known early high points like Low's "The Great Destroyer" and Bonnie Prince Billy/Matt Sweeney's "Superwolf"--it may take a bit longer to grow on you, but once it does it might stay with you even longer than the records I just mentioned. The manner of its construction makes this all the more inspiring: Porter played, sang (except for the pleasingly crystalline backing vocals by Amber Curtis on the album's only cover, a version of forgotten country singer Bill D. Johnson's 'A wound time can't erase') and recorded the entire album himself, in his bedroom, on porches, in ratty hotel rooms. Much of it's musical augmentation was constructed by instruments Patrick found at the local Salvation Army's parking lot, in a heap of trash that had been left there illegally. Those of us who practice any art-form in this country or elsewhere should take our cue from this. A masterpiece created with so little financial means opens the door for more of the same, and makes other gifted but poverty-stricken artists feel that their greatest visions are within the reach of their ability, the way punk once did. As an added bonus, it also features one of my favourite album covers of all time: a gorgeous, hilarious picture by photographer Lindsey Martin of Patrick wearing a Halloween fright-mask, viciously kicking an acoustic guitar across a fog-shrouded field. He's probably laughing with glee under that mask." - Luke Buckham 28 Apr 05



	Artist: Patrick Porter Release Title: Lisha Kill Catalogue Number: CAM071CD Format: CD Length: 13 tracks, 54:45 mins Release Date: 18 Mar 05 Ordering information

Feature Review This mega-review appeared in print in "The Inappropriate" magazine, and is reproduced here by permission: "Patrick Porter's Lisha Kill was recorded in Schenectady, New York, a burned-out industrial town filled to the brim with hopeless factory-worker alcoholics, and many other forms of the degraded who look more at the sidewalk than at the sky. (I know, I used to live there myself). It's a place that celebrates past achievements such as the fact that Thomas Edison's first machine works were established there, yet seems to have no idea of how to continue to use these achievements, or to equal them. But, as with most places, Schenectady should not be over-simplified as a wasteland, a cultural vacuum--it also contains, in its nooks and crannies, odd, valuable creative people, usually very lonely artists spending most of their time trying to escape their surroundings for long enough to create an alternate universe, to purge themselves as fully as possible of this one. An America of dying dreams, whose ghosts can still be sensed fluttering around in the encroaching darkness. Those ghosts can be heard faintly whispering in the background of "Lisha Kill", named after one of Schenectady's filthy rivers. That said, the most important thing about works of art is not how they reflect their time and place, but the fact that (if they're any good) they can help us transcend that time and place for a moment and return to something like a childlike state of first discovery, an ability to look past a landscape of trudging people and tarnished factories and see the world anew within and beyond that landscape. And the most important thing about Patrick Porter, as the maker of this album, is that he's able to haunt us, to gently rattle us out of the trance we often enter when confronted with the commonplace. He does this not with screams or theatrics, but with a quietly devastating sense of melody and a sympathetic knowledge of human pain. "Lisha Kill" doesn't need to yell to get your attention; though it is occasionally furious, it's dominant tone is deceptively quiet and mellow, quite fragile, and though Porter doesn't raise his voice once, he is far from sedate. Lisha is an intimate but slightly fractured picture of a young man beginning in the despondence of a vagrant and ending in a hard-earned joy that contains the recognition of beauty found in that loneliness, which may have been a necessity for creation. It's a portrait of the artist in a cultural landscape that no longer has the intellectual equipment to comprehend or reach him, and where the greatest remaining vision of beauty does not stem from the massive culture itself, but only from those alienated enough to be momentarily unaware of the bogus spectacle of any outside authority: it is only in isolate flecks that something is given off no one to witness and adjust no one to drive the car. Patrick Porter's music is one of those "isolate flecks" that William Carlos Williams may have been referring to when he wrote 'To Elsie', a poem that begins with the line: The pure products of America go crazy. Porter, from the beginning of Lisha Kill, senses this danger, in a song titled with hilarious accuracy in regard to those "pure products": 'Good People with Bad Credit'. The song rides on relentlessly pretty strums of guitar, and the lyrics consist mostly of a creepily soothing repetition of the word "crazy", except for a section that goes like this: new day dawning like a haunting growing habit we have had it just forget it with bad credit The effect of these spare words within the larger context that the music itself creates is to lower the attentive listener into their grief and helplessness, then release them from it into a paradoxical renewal. A realization that the alienation caused by living in an irrational, crazily mixed economy where mediocrity now sells better than innovation, thereby paralysing the mind, has also given us the space and freedom in our intellectual isolation to seek, and occasionally find, an agonizing but worthwhile release. What presents itself as a fall becomes a spiritual doorway of sorts into a better world, even if that world is found more in the mind than in one's surroundings. A man who can make an album as upliftingly pretty as "Lisha Kill" has obviously not given in to the grimness of his surroundings, and any reviewer of this album who concentrated on the misery herein, and took it as the defining message, would not be worthy to comment on music any longer, or on any human art-form. People who give in to misery and let go of hope become dull, commercialised drones or patients in mental hospitals--not creators of cathartic, heartfelt art such as this music. Sadness in art is the furthest thing from futile; it provides a kind of necessary drain for the flood of emotions ignored in the rush of everyday life. It is not even sadness; mere "sadness" or "happiness" are too simplistic as, words, to describe the yearning music sparks. Sadness turned into art is no longer sadness. For example, 'End Badly' is a beautiful song about the temptation to drown one's sufferings in a bottle of whiskey, and the chorus begs humorously "come on babe, let's end badly". Then the lyrics explode in a kind of ravaged drunken glory: aim me to points of light doesn't matter what may be artificial family tree come on babe, let's end badly in a room where no one can get to me in a room where I can be a fucking drag But I don't feel depressed at the impact of the song; I feel stronger, because someone has spoken intimately to my quietest and most truthful moments. "Lisha Kill" is redemptive art not only because it starts from a humorous, dark-humoured admission of the self's imperfection, like John Berryman's "Dream Songs"--not only because it uses its desperation to rocket itself into a stratosphere of beauty rather than a trench of despair; but also because the music is a surge of energy, even when the lyrics are at their most desolate and deathly, as in 'Hospital', which starts by quoting in song a Christian greeting card that Porter discovered at a bus stop: "dear god/be good to me/the sea is so wide and my boat is so small" before breaking into a repeated request: go to the hospital get me a doctor quick go to the hospital tell them I'm feeling sick The song was inspired by Porter's witness of the aftermath of a hit-and-run in which a twenty-year-old "Schenectady no-hoper" (his words) purposely laid himself down in the middle of the street and was run over by a passing car. The arcing sounds of guitar droning throughout the song are at first evocative of an atmosphere where blood has just been shed, where something irreversibly terrible has happened. Yet it leaves a sweet taste, as if the 'small boat' quaintly captured on the Christian greeting card has come and floated the spirit of the dead man into a peaceful eternity. The album also features one of the best and subtlest love songs I've heard in some time in the slowly swelling 'Free Kittens', which I want to quote from here I thought of religion but when death's head came into view I thought about you I thought of the convictions that reality overthrew I thought about you on the nights light by the sun we'll just ride like there's no such thing as time Because at the moment when Patrick sings "there's no such thing as time" all the depression the album may have been created in melts away and evaporates completely, replaced by a quiet but very bold joy, a joy also expressed in the album's closer, 'Toppy': This is a morning prayer this is a soul this is the one time I'm not in control This is a morning prayer this is an ode this is the one time the cup overflowed This, after having faced an incredible depth of revulsion at the world's strained and corrupt interactions, and the terror of impending mortality in songs like 'Alarm Clock Song' wherein Patrick sings about witnessing an apparent child prostitute being whisked off by a middle-aged man, confesses his conviction that he has cancer, and ends by stating that if he doesn't have cancer he's "scared anyway". Of course, real joy doesn't feed on illusion or ease, and 'Toppy' ends with the simple declaration, not sounding like a threat: "you'd better get away from me". Perhaps the reason the writer wants to be left alone is not to merely brood or to kill himself, but to regain his joy in private, which is where most artists get it in its purest form. But either way, it doesn't matter: if it the album concluded with a self-inflicted gunshot, it would still be an affirmation of the greatness of life; songs with the sweet melancholy of 'Slow Torpedo' are hymns to the soul's ability to overcome hardship, and would remain such whether the artist stayed safe in his body or not. The songs themselves, of course, are better than my descriptions, as any good music is, which is why I haven't analysed every one of them, though all thirteen of them are good, even 'Mermaid' the one that Porter claims was inspired by "being in love with people on TV", in part by Darlene Conner of 'Roseanne' and in part by Winona Ryder (why the hell do so many songwriters pay tribute to Winona Ryder? Maybe she's got some inimitable muse-magic that I don't yet understand. Nevertheless, the song is gorgeous). So I, as an obsessive and hungry listener writing for other obsessive hungry listeners, will end by stating that Lisha Kill, with the lasting, memorable quality of its melodies and its evocative, intense and intimate atmospheres, is one of my favourite albums of the year so far. It's easily worthy of being ranked with more well-known early high points like Low's "The Great Destroyer" and Bonnie Prince Billy/Matt Sweeney's "Superwolf"--it may take a bit longer to grow on you, but once it does it might stay with you even longer than the records I just mentioned. The manner of its construction makes this all the more inspiring: Porter played, sang (except for the pleasingly crystalline backing vocals by Amber Curtis on the album's only cover, a version of forgotten country singer Bill D. Johnson's 'A wound time can't erase') and recorded the entire album himself, in his bedroom, on porches, in ratty hotel rooms. Much of it's musical augmentation was constructed by instruments Patrick found at the local Salvation Army's parking lot, in a heap of trash that had been left there illegally. Those of us who practice any art-form in this country or elsewhere should take our cue from this. A masterpiece created with so little financial means opens the door for more of the same, and makes other gifted but poverty-stricken artists feel that their greatest visions are within the reach of their ability, the way punk once did. As an added bonus, it also features one of my favourite album covers of all time: a gorgeous, hilarious picture by photographer Lindsey Martin of Patrick wearing a Halloween fright-mask, viciously kicking an acoustic guitar across a fog-shrouded field. He's probably laughing with glee under that mask." - Luke Buckham 28 Apr 05

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