It's a long time between posts, but music that opens the periphery in our musical landscape doesn't come along readily, even in our active music scene.
Sometimes a lot of good creative work gets held behind the palisades of cultural immaturity. Sometimes it takes a while for things to evolve, ripen and manifest.
When I first met Romy Vager, she assumed a different monicker. Her band was smaller, the first time I saw it. Since then a lot has changed. RVG has come out with more than a first album.
Listen to it here.
A Quality of Mercy (AQoM) is a long time coming. Compassion, forgiveness and forbearance take a long time to find their place in everyday lives. That is what Vager brings to us in final overview, but not without the evidence of the bitter trail. These condemnations are foisted by fear, intolerance and prejudices. They are often a sordid vilification of gang mentality. Sometimes we spend time in dark landscapes imposed by others to understand that the root of their intention is more closely allied to their own deficit, rather than our own. This time, in the shadow of death, also lets us demarcate who we are, if to no-one else but ourselves - to whom, of course, it is most important. But great art is an elucidation. Vager shares hers with us, so we can follow her journey through the heinous spaces into the light that she is rightfully owed. Hers is a pathway that fewer have to travel. The way she describes it fearlessly, but with the understanding that comes with having to endure rancid testimonies of humanity, provides us with a desperate, keening narrative. Vager's song-lines also express penetrating sensitivity of uncomplicated desire that vouchsafes true intimacy.
The title track, 'A Quality of Mercy', opens on a five second aural streetscape, which is taken over by the echo of surfing guitar. This brilliant song reveals the psychotic trammelling of small-mindedness that tampers reason, and is compounded by fear to whitewall the perception of difference. The brilliance comes through the questioning and investigation of hegemonic condemnation, and opens like a catharsis of self realisation and self-justification to rend strappings asunder at 2:50. At 2:00, I am reminded of the renegade guitar work and vocals of Jeffrey Lee Pearce. As Pearce did with The Gun Club, so does Vager: She defines new territory.
'Cause and Effect' (CaE) has some intelligent lyric twists. It could almost be 'Cause and Affect'. It opens with "You're gonna have to lose somebody else's mind", reclaiming the space Vager heralded in AQoM, and expanded through that imagery recurring in "You're gonna have to turn off someone else's life". But she knows the fight is not over yet, and language like "it won't be pretty" are so apt for the ground she intends to make her own through the inversion of sensibility, and the inversion of love which can "destroy a fellow life". The wry humour in the dearth of its wake lifts the song with the lyrics, "And my love ... you know you're the only one ... that I ever despised ... in the whole of my life. I used to wish you would die. Cause and effect." After this, at 2:00, the music breaks through in redemption, and similar lyrics change their meaning with intonation to demonstrate the inversion, and evincing the reclamation of identity.
IBM changes the tone set by AQoM and CaE to anthropomorphise a lover and digital hardware. The humour again belies poignant observations, which can be interpreted across the evolution of the digital landscape from the 1980s (reflected in the retro computer sound effects) to the present. This seems relevant too, to Vager's deep interest in the music of this time, and how it concatenates in her music.
'Heart Paste' follows the lighter musical theme of IBM, but which belies the darker lyrical intentions.
The "personal charm" of Vager is evident. Wanted and attained. We all know the conflict of austerity and luxury. For some, what is socially-rited can seem almost unattainable to another. Vager tells us about those irreversible actions we feel compelled to take to accord us space and distance. The stark alienation that comes with that, but then how that space can be refilled with the reclamation of identity, as Vager does so beautifully at 1:45. Vager doesn't care about common sense, but who would when the sense of the common majority is warped or myopic.
'The Eggshell World' again crosses liminality and contrasts diametrical opposites. The want to be two people to fulfil incompatible desire effectively shows the protagonist's conflict, but also her awareness of the sensibilities of both extremes. What seems to be so exclusive of the other is a strange but apt metaphor in the eggshell - the fragility of persona when neither of those states, nor anything between them can be inhabited; and the thin and brittle membrane set to protect the vulnerable.
'Vincent van Gogh' reiterates the themes of opposition, and of cause and effect. It's about disillusionment with what we have emulated, and the resultant faux martyrdom.
'Feral Beach' follows on similar themes, albeit on a more personal and carnal level; where intimacy becomes perverted, noxious and unrecognisable.
'That's All' is beautiful closure on the dark themes of this album. It has that naive intimacy that has import: we bring so many of the feelings and sentiments Vager deftly describes into our adulthood. But they have come without name because perhaps we didn't know how to, or were too embarrassed to give them a monicker.
And here we come full circle. Back to Vager, back to all she has achieved, and all that she can name because she has travelled and mapped that road that so few of us know. This is what makes her work seminal - these places we have not been, but are so important to understand.
This is RVG's first release. It is only a few months old, but they have already returned in the studio to make their second album. If you follow RVG on social media, you know they promise it will be even better than their inaugural release. As we know, it is about the journey. This is a fine premise and a worthy edition to have as part of the pending RVG catalogue.
You can download your copy here.
Photos from the Quality of Mercy launch at the Tote - March, 2017.
© JoAnne Frances
© JoAnne Frances
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