Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Lungfish’s The Unanimous Hour. Stream samples from the album and download it on iTunes and read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.
I saw Lungfish once years ago. It was my friend’s birthday. She sat next to the speaker. I bought her a book about art. Wilderness played before Lungfish. They sounded like Lungfish. Daniel Higgs, Lungfish’s singer, is a wildly bearded man with pierced, warm eyes. He has tattoos on the backs of his hands. He continually wrapped the microphone chord around his body. Then he tripped. I don’t know if he planned that or not. It looked scary undoubtedly he was not scared.
There were four people in Lungfish but he was the center, voice of ancient fire and grandfatherly gin. I have known many men with enormous beards and various tattoos and have found that they are often kindly benign, their shells are hard simply to relay the necessity of gruff business. Higgs, maybe, is just frightening and mean. Except for one line in “Hallucinatorium”, where he mostly speaks mystical hoohah about his family, imaginary or not. My wife has a leg of flame, my mother puts her torch to sleep, my brother’s face is a hexagon, etc. But, strewn just beyond the song’s center, as the guitar coils and the song extends to a raga, My sister’s voice must crush the sun. What a compliment! How blissful!
On Sunday I talked to my sister and she talked to me about Iraqi immigrants in Vermont. It seems like if you are an Iraqi immigrant in the New England winter things could probably be better. Sounds like she is helping them out, though. She is almost finished with her master’s degree in social work. I am proud of her. These are simpler words than My sister’s voice must crush the sun but I imagine them to mean the same thing.
Why do we do things? Why did I give up on my beard? It grows natural from my face. I do not shave the hair on my toes or knuckles and that seems much more offensive. Would the backs of my hands and tops of my feet feel fresher? Why doesn’t Higgs say My daughter fed pieces of bread to geese at the park and I was simultaneously filled with a sense of renewable life and inevitable expiration both for myself and her? Is it necessary to be oblique? Who was it that hated art and only liked things? Sophocles maybe? I had the biggest philosophy book freshman year of college. I read it there. A grad school student was my teacher. I wanted her to like me more than she did. I was so new. I don’t remember how I did. Right now would be the important time to have learned. Or maybe it’s better that I’m vaguely correct.
I heard Lungfish broke up. A year ago I saw Higgs play solo. He had a Jew’s harp and a banjo. People talked over him. Inside, in his heart of heart’s, did that trouble him? It would bother me. He traveled so far. I have difficulty picturing that. He is not the type of man who should have to switch lanes, pay tolls. I saw him drinking something, I don’t remember what, and it shocked me enough that he would have even some vaguely human desire to do anything.
My sister and I are twins. She was born a minute after and so she lives one minute behind me. It’s always felt cosmic on our birthdays, my small jump on life. When I was little I used to think there were infinite versions of time parallel to my present. A split second before me, a split second after me, all mimicking. It never occurred to me, though, that I wasn’t all the versions’ fulcrum. I’d probably like to think that’s a hefty responsibility but maybe it’s just self-centered.
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