Jason Urick Husbands

Context is everything. Santa Barbara, where I live, gets scant few decent lightening storms every year, and this most recent one just happened to blow the power out of my block at 12:07 a.m., right when I was watching the climax of some Season Four episode of The Wire. I had a panic during which I realized that my only source of light was my cell phone, and I dug through a swamp of clutter to find the one book of matches to light the one candle in my apartment, which provided not even close to the amount of light necessary to read or doing anything with my eyes. And so it was then that I realized that the only thing in my apartment that would function without any power connection was my iPod, which I had recently charged (thank God) and onto which I had, coincidentally and within the previous half hour, uploaded an album, Husbands by Jason Urick, formerly of noise pop group Wzt Hearts. “Oh well, what the hell,” I figured. And so, with just enough light to untangle the rat’s nest my headphone cables had created seemingly under their own will, I gave Urick a shot.

And, son of a bitch, it was actually good. Before God made light, he might have entertained spirit babies with noise as weird as this. The last track, The Eternal Return, opened with what sounded like a little girl from a cheap horror movie repeating the word “sound,” over and over, as if calling the very concept into existence. Then, there entered the sound of stentorian static, the timbre of which inspired in me some of the most ridiculous comparisons I’ve ever considered. It could have been a canoe-sized harmonica, or it could have been the horn from a lighthouse run through some Line 6 effects-processing monstrosity. OK, fine, I know the dude actually made the whole thing with his damn laptop. For all I really know, he may have taken Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, played it backwards, and slowed it down to Satan speed. But, the point is,  this is music that provokes a workout of the imagination.

That’s the irony, really. In order to appreciate this totally computer-generated music, you should be almost literally cut off from anything electronic. Thoreau had it wrong. We should take our MacBooks into log cabins for as long as their batteries last and just listen to berserk electronic ambience by oil lamp. National Treasure runs seventeen minutes long, and it develops at about the speed of evolution, but it is a hell of a thing to listen to if you have the determination and the complete lack of distractions that modern society offers/thrusts upon us. Let There Be Love, contains a captain’s log full of swells and storms. Some noises sound like church bells. And Urick decorates it with all these ostentatious blips of electronic noise, some of which are to music what clip art is to graphic design, but damned if I didn’t enjoy it. With the power on and ten bajillion web-based distractions at my disposal, I’m sure this album would lose some of its brilliance, but with the lights out, Husbands is a beat-less, lyric-less software symphony. I recommend you try it.