You keep hitting the button on your remote but the channel won't change. Or maybe it's the same thing on every channel? Life feels that way sometimes. Or at least, this is a common experience of living right now. Something is always happening, but nothing seems to change, resolve, or evolve. Every day feels like a rerun, but somehow the script keeps changing, and you don't find out until three seconds after you've flubbed your line or lost track of the plot. This strange sense of inertia finds a living kind of reenactment on the latest album a hAon from Irish duo Cathal Coughlan & Jacknife Lee for their collaborative project Telefís (which means Television... do get the schtick now?). The album is apparently a deep reflection of life in Ireland over the past forty years and its chaotic transition from a fringe, European backwater to collapsed society, that is totally difunctional despite drowning in FDI due to its ballooning tech sector. I know next to nothing about Irish history and yet it all feels too familiar to me. The sense of alienation and estrangement that burdens Cathal's reedy melodramatic voice and the discontented romanticism of his lyrics leave me with the impression that the country has broken loose from its anchor, floated out to sea and capsized over the falls at the edge of the world. Jacknife's production helps keep the sinking feeling of Cathal's words from getting stuck in their own morose malaise providing a bed of nippy, thorny synth blossoms and blushing funk furrows on which the singer can perform his revenant like firewalk. They entwined this dead man's dance, in partnership, in solidarity, in perpetual damnation, until their bodies become effigies of dried clay, so dry and combustible that a stiff breeze could cause them to fragment into twin dust devils, whereupon they continue their ritual motion, unimpeded, for eternity- like the static on your TV while it searches for a signal from a tower that had been collateralized, sold and dismantled decades prior. There is no place like the home where you find yourself a stranger.
