This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad’s inevitable meltdown when one of the old-skool style lights burned out, and he ‘had’ to find and replace it (did he?). Even when we upgraded to the more modern kind, it seemed every year had its disaster: the year we all got sick but still had to go to fucking mass anyway was pretty bad, but the year my maternal grandfather died and all my grieving mother could manage to feed us was pizza rolls and other freezer party food was its own kind of weird. After that, we shit-canned the traditional roast from thence on, and no doubt became the cause of endless extended family judgement and gossip. Ralphie’s victorious receipt of a Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time, couldn’t have been further from my reality.
So I can’t help but associate the fag-end of the calendar year with forced jollity and unacknowledged mourning. When every day is painfully shorter than the last, the urge to hibernate is strong, but that’s not an option, so I’ve prescribed myself a SAD lamp and a soundtrack of reassuring tunes. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus is exactly the kind of instrumental comfort blanket I’m looking for right now. Personnel is very foundational-Mars Volta-adjacent, with Omar Rodríguez-López on most instruments, Blake Fleming and Marcel Rodríguez-López on drums / percussion, and in addition to house saxophonist Adrián Terrazas-González, Sara Christina Gross beefs up the woodwind corner.
Although strictly not a memorial, Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus is something of a love letter to the late Jeremy Ward. While he didn’t contribute his sound manipulation / engineering skills to this album, he was present at the recording. The cover features his photo, though I am not sure if that is somewhere in the texture of the black square that I’m not able to see digitally; regardless the artwork is obviously funereal. But the music itself is a life-affirming three-quarters of an hour of delightful shred capably supported with noodly sax that never becomes too shrill or overwhelming and some of the dopest drumming this side of Jon Theodore.
Contemporaneous reviews tended to be positive, with a few grumbles about random samples and effect choices on “Mood Swings” and “Seeth Of Cloudless Hymstone”; personally I found that for the most part, these moments were deployed to good effect and never became overwhelming. I also really enjoyed a full tracklist of the kind of titles that scream Volta. And indeed, the opening track “Hands Tied to the Roots of a Hemorrhage” later appeared as the middle section of “Eriatarka” from De-loused in the Comatorium. This version, while a full-on tasty jam and my favourite way to start an ORL joint, is just as intense but not quite as compressed. “City Dreams Inside a Truck” is a pulsing link between the thrash of the two songs it sits between. For such a short interlude, it still interjects a growling menace.
I first heard “Sex, Consolation For Misery” via the Telesterion compilation and immediately awarded 10 out of 10 for the kind of title that is both funny and also incredibly sad, but mainly quite funny. From the very first note, a story is told of resigned desolation. Despite being a tight four and a half minutes, the jam is given space to ponder itself, somewhat pompously, through shivery reverb that lends a kind of drunken twanginess. It’s a slower jam, but not a slow song, with repetition that knows when to step aside. It’s also one of the sax-free tracks, and while I’m not totally averse, and my tolerance for the squeakfest on The Bedlam in Goliath notwithstanding, this definitely lent weight to my selection of it as a featured track.
I’m always searching for the narrative in songs, even when there are no lyrics, and the title “A Story Teeth Rotted For” would appear to lend credence to this practice. This song would heavily inspire “Teflon” from Octahedron, which is pretty obvious in the melody, although this version lacks the dense claustrophobia heard on that iteration, although it is no less haunting. And yet, the spacey effects and slant-dischord inject a kind of clarifying air: vast and cold, but also beautiful. It’s no surprise this was the template for what became a song whose lyrics considered the horror of a potential McCain administration. While that now seems positively quaint, Cedric’s warning is more apt than ever (the dates, they change with each new phase / I’m anxious bouts of nervous…one driver in your motorcade / is all it takes / is all it takes).
Further Mars Volta inspiration appears on “Tied Prom Digs on the Docks”, elements of which would be used on the extended instrumental section of Frances the Mute, in particular the taffy-stretched wibbly parts of “Cassandra Gemini”. There are similar explosions of quiet-loud-quiet, with some intense drumming and a boiling-frog buildup of sax that pushes me to my limits and ends right on time. And while I know as much about jazz as I do country or electronic (or anything that isn’t pop that makes me grin or rock that makes me giddy), this is the kind of loungey, accessible fun I can get behind. Lately, my go-to reaction gif has been Louis Balfour taking a drag off his weedy roll-up and mouthing ‘nice’, and that, too, seems to fit the vibe: earnest people playing music for sheer delight. Even the weird, distorted background dialogue is nested in the layers deep enough not to intrude and blends in as an instrument, as it did on Old Money. The result is an underlying scratchiness under the jazzy smoothness that puts me in mind of savoury ice cream; on paper it shouldn’t work, but in reality, some kind of flavour magic is scrambling my brain.
Even the lopsided weirdness of proto-sea shanty “Of Ankles to Stone” and its clutch of pass-agg effects petering out to a whoompy squeak just plain make sense for this record. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus has all I could ask for: Mars Volta easter eggs, a saxophone experience that keeps a lid on the shriller explosions, and enough shred to keep me engaged. During a time when I can’t control much, and after a long year of dread, I’ve had this record on high rotation, second only to Old Money itself, and considering that OM is the OG, this is no mean feat.
Track listing:
Hands Tied to the Roots of a Hemorrhage
City Dreams Inside a Truck
Sex, Consolation for Misery
Tied Prom Digs on the Docks
Seeth of Cloudless Hymstone
Mood Swings
An Ancient Shrewdness in the Veins
A Story Teeth Rotted For
Of Ankles to Stone