Greetings Sugar feat Lydia Lunch - Faulty Fields [review]
“How did it get so late…so soon?” Lydia Lunch asks over a glorious mix of horns and symphonic synths. Her captivating husky voice uncharacteristically vulnerable as she asks that simple question. A question I find myself asking more and more often as the decades pass behind me.
Between grades 11 and 12 I hopped on a train to New York and squatted for several months in the dorm room closets of my friends who were attending NYU film school. The security guards assumed I was just another student and while my studious friends attended their requisite classes I was free to run around the city and explore. It was during this time I discovered Lydia Lunch’s album with her first band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. It confused and fascinated me. I wasn’t ever sure if I liked it but I couldn’t stop playing it. A few years later when I was on another extended stay in New York I was at a party and Lydia Lunch was there. By this time I’d seen the movies she’d made with Nick Zedd and Richard Kern. I’d heard the collaborations with Rowland S. Howard, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Sonic Youth. I’d listened to her spoken word pieces and read her book “Fingered”. I wanted desperately to talk to her but I was too high and generally messed up to form words much less construct a complete sentence. In retrospect, it might have been a good thing because I undoubtedly would’ve said something awkward and embarrassing.
I was presented with this song and I agreed to review it on the basis of her name alone. When I read that Greetings Sugar were a band from Bucharest I had no idea what to expect but I figured anything she was involved with was going to be interesting. I was completely unprepared for something as beautiful and heart-wrenching as this. “Faulty Fields” feels like a dreamscape. Something otherworldly and immersive. It’s like hearing the call of an entirely new animal from the darkness and trying to imagine what it looks like. Singer Stefan Eremia’s commanding voice mesmerizes with a deep purity of sadness and yearning over perfectly orchestrated trumpets. The production on this song is flawless and it moves in continual waves that push and pull in rhythmic swells. When he sings, “The tide took all of your houses” I can see the wreckage on the beach.
And then, “How did it get so late…” It feels like T.S. Eliot perfectly tired voice reading his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. The weight of that haunting question imprints itself into the quick fading images of the past. The inevitable hastening of time exponentially accelerating with every passing day. The four minutes and fifteen seconds of “Faulty Fields” has been repeated over and over within the tall walls of my dimly lit apartment and should the untenable tomorrow arrive it will be repeated again.
