Alan Scheurman - Old Patterns - ...clambered thoughts and retracing inspiration

I got another taste today…
another bitter, medicine-y taste of the cold, fast world of the internet and what kind of cynical, fatalistic shade it’s draped upon the profession (delusion?) of modern music journalism…I reminded my editor that we still needed to run a print review of the new Alan Scheurman album, Old Patterns.

“It’s kinda late at this point,” he said, dissuasively.
Late? I said…
I took a moment to qualify my then-slight outrage…because the album had only come out a week ago and that didn’t seem like much in the grand scheme of music rags. But, this record (featuring the earnest and mystic singer/songwriter-spill-outs of former Rescue front man Scheurman, combined with the producing influence of His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever), didn’t come out in stores, it was available online. And not for sale, but for free download. Free!
The unspoken suggestion hanging between me and my editor in the stale air silence was - that everyone who would want to have it, has it…and what’s the point of paying any mind to your zealous roll-around-ramblings…

Now, I can tell myself that I’ve just been taking my time with this record…and that that’s why I’m only writing about it now…but it would only be half-true. The other side of it is that this erratic reality of music as an appreciated art form was eating away at me and keeping me from getting started by instilling a debilitating fill of second-guessing.

I’m all of a sudden filled with questions…A movie comes out and varying comments like “Oh, I don’t know about that one, I’ve heard mixed reviews” or, “I’d really like to see that, it got 4 stars from the Free Press guy…” But new music is written and released and discourse seems to flow more closely to, “Oh, have you heard this album yet? No? I’ll burn it for you, you’d love it…” Thus, your friend in the diner, or in the bar, or on the street whom you’ve just snipped a few sentences from has already given you a trustworthy review – and on top of that, he/she’s already burning you a copy and you’ll be listening to it in a matter of days…

“…but I’m living a lie…I have not decided….”
Lyrically, questions persist throughout Old Patterns…it feels appropriate to be going through such reflective doubt myself while tapping out a few thoughts while I’m listening to it…
And so, I come back to the melodramatic absolutism of the chorus in the eerie twinkle of Scheurman’s wistful opening track, “…Might as well die…” (and consider applying it to journalism the traditional idea and operation of journalism.)

...there’s questions floating in and out of each track like a ghost flows through the walls of a house, often woozily wailed out in Scheurman’s crooning, wispy nasal in a manner that, even when delivered as 3rd person narrative, seems to always be looking inward “but…I’m living a lie…I have not decided…" And if not inward, then inside others, “And I don’t think that everybody knows what really happens behind the scenes…” “When they found out who you really were…”

Remember, shock of the internet’s speed was only half the reason I’m posting this so late…the rest is that I truly have taken my time with this record - playing it for long drives home, listening to it in the middle of these somber pitch-black early winter nights, listening to it at sunrise. If you really take your time with this record...you’r able to really get cozy with it. Striking senses begin to attach to each song’s distinct fuzzy whirling –

A low roaring feedback wraps the entire record in a fog, dense at some points, but often precious…haunting but somehow comforting. The ambience is that of an empty dark house in a light-wooded area of permanent night, pulsing with echoed memories. A chill wafts in through broken windows and the sad sonorous ring of a neglected piano shunted to a corner mixes with a lonely brass blaring like a lazy wind rolling over the roof, with tightly snapped acoustic strums like the raindrops falling through a network of floorboard cracks rippling the moonlight’s reflection in the basement’s gathered puddles.

Whew…I can’t just spit that shit out after one listen,…I have to spin it through a few times…

On “Starless” a harmonica rises with a screeching guitar bleat before a warm acoustic guitar flushes in and paints a picture of a smoke-swathed sky and a burning house and Scheurman, the dreamer on the hill, looks upward, or maybe just down at his shows and sings, “Wonder why I dream, wonder why I stay awake…”

It’s ripe with this dreamy (pink-)moon-light warbling, the humble singer/songwriter expulsing biting, beautifully-phrased regrets and admonishments upon himself, his past, or the world’s weary ways…but all the while competing (or collaborating) with the churning, sometimes animalistic clamber of the feedback fog ebbing and flowing all around his words and his strumming…A very straight forward approach of guitar, bass n drum…maybe a harmonica and maybe a melancholic trumpet, galvanized in a dark and psychedelic way by the Defever-pushed distortions. This can, yes, at times, lull to an overly-meditative swooning of atmospheric sawing and feedback moans (one track is simply 2 minutes of found-sounds)…but overall it’s a mystifying listen. There’s a poignant delicacy at song’s openings and closings, an intimacy, like feeling Scheurman lean forward into the mic and lick his lips before softly singing, as though he’s careful not to sing out stronger than the acoustic guitar’s golden resonance.

But you don’t need to take my word for it…
You can listen to it right here…right now….

“Might as well die?” Well, what sacredness did music journalism ever hold to me anyhow? Let it die. It doesn’t even matter in the context of this…blog, or whatever the hell you’d call it. This is a dialogue with music…from music…

Life with music.