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LP
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HTE 001LP
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This is the first release from the Halatern, Etc. label, run by Keith Connolly (of NNCK/No Neck Blues Band fame). "Is it the sight of death, the thought of saying? What sinks us deeper into melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? What brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief... each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lip that meets our lip is always one-half of our own. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; that our passing was... well -- sad -- still -- doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear)" --William Gass, from On Being Blue. Kyle Clyd is of an orphaned ascendancy, more Geeshie Wiley or Anne Gillis than any of her visible peers. In talking about Pale Dawn Creeps, her debut full-length, she refers a kind of blues, itself perhaps a mercurial essence resigned to antiquity: "To believe that the bits of paper in your pocket have real value or to take the word for the thing itself is the 'unpardonable sin' of the New Testament. Those guilty are condemned to blackness. Black manifests in the instant the accusatory finger is lifted, or guilty hand raised, but blue is not so easily won. Blue is not a second coming, but its denial -- our shortcomings hovering in the dead air of judgment's lag." While certainly not blues in the traditional (read: idiomatic) sense, Pale Dawn Creeps' depth-of-shallows abstraction belies an unmistakable lyricism and almost sing-song vacancy that is something of a cipher, asking where, when it has all been said, do songs really come from? Edition of 300 copies.
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