Who are you? I think it's a question that most people try not to ask themselves while brushing their teeth, or catching their reflection in a car window during their commute, or while making eye contact with themselves, starring back from the void of a computer monitor, before the CPU powers up, and the display activates. Most people aren't entirely happy with their lives, and confronting who life has lead you to become can be as severely painful as stepping on an upright nail. It's also not necessarily productive to think about how your life could have been different while you have a deadline you're trying to meet. Other times alternative universes where you are the protagonist can be fun to dive into as a kind of escapist fantasy, where your musing are set free from the fetters of reality. Errant mental detours considering how much better one's life would have been had you married someone else or chosen a different major, maybe the closest things you have to any sense of control over your lives. These flights from reality can be destructive as well. Heightening feelings of entrapment and looking for a culprit to blame and externalize your self-loathing (usually dear old Mom and Dad will do in this regard, but a spouse is just as good). The game is usually up though, once you realize that the person who you are now, literally would not exist had your past self made different decisions. The you that is reading this now would be effectively dead. And then there would be some other you, some other version of you reading a blog post wondering how much better their life would have been had they made different, presumably better life choices. The truth is that there is no other version of you. You are the direct product of a series of choices made by you, your parents, and their parents, acting in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics (or whatever governs the churn of the cosmos), and neither you nor the universe as we know it now would have existed had anything in the past played out in any other way then it did. The other you is a fantasy. A phantasmagorical unreality. A ghost that plagues your conscious mind.
Wrestling with that other you, who does not, and could not exist, is the central struggle that animates Chicago experimental duo Ohmme's third LP, Fantasize Your Ghost. This struggle is most apparent on the lovingly pop-forward track "Ghost," which confronts the claustrophobic rush of being that emerges when examining this other, this fantasy of yourself, that looms over your head like a twisted chandelier. The solution that the band offers for winning your battle with this agonizing apparition is essentially telling it to take a hike. Once free of your own mind-prison and no longer haunted by your mirror image minotaur, you should be free to explore the fertile and lushly reedy guitar pop prattle of "The Limit" as well as the lush, rejuvenating embrace and alternative rock reverb wash of "Some Kind of Calm." At least in theory.
In reality, vanquishing the poltergeist of your false-self doesn't ultimately cure you of the existential sickness acquired through living. A fact made clearly illustrated by the calamity channel haint of the self-immolating Bunnyman-esque "Sturgeon Moon" that appears on the back end of the album. In other words, life doesn't stop coming at you just because you're in a healthier headspace. There are still dishes to be done, both literal and figurative ("Spell It Out"). Obligations to warily wade through, playing our assigned roles society, and keeping its machinery, inexorably winding forward ("Twitch"). You can look back on the person you used to be, but that person was just someone you passed through to become who you are now ("3 2 4 3"). As the remarkably fluid and captivating "Selling Candy," alludes, as it cuts through ribbons of spill-over fuzz with surfy subversion, maybe you'll always be putting your best foot forward, only to have it stepped on. Or, as it's put more starkly, while nestled in the winding coil of a nutritious Nivrvana-esque groove of "Flood Your Gut," "[y]our whole vision's not enough," implying that you'll never have the foresight possible to realize all your goals or even see yourself clear enough to actualize fully. A chilling thought to start an album with.
I'm very glad that Fantasize Your Ghost ends where it does, with a healing acoustic stroll, accompanied by caressing violin strings and a sunny Pacific inspired melody, all of which combine with the lyrics to goad you to enjoy the small things in life, and stop to smell (or rather plant) the roses every once in a while. Honestly, you have to take small victories where you find them and let the rest go. It's necessary to have some ambition to live in this world. But after all, what is the drive to achieve worth, if it only ever leads to you wishing you were someone else. Every once in a while, you need a reminder that the you that is here, not the you who you fantasize about, but the one who inhabits the body that is sitting there reading this, is enough. In this universe, and every other conceivable one.
