These Are Not Fall Colors 🍁 🍂

and the loneliness of unrequited desire

77 degrees for a high this past weekend in Coastal Pennsylvania — and fall is upon us. Pushing up into November. Head down. Full speed into the brick wall of winter. Shoulder to the wheel. Pull start the leaf blower. These are not fall colors.

Last week my Gmail promotions tab was blessed with another installment of Sam Hockley Smith’s wonderful newsletter, Gross Life. In it Sam discussed a record that is making the rounds with those who care about the delicate side of life, less the numbers, more the feeling — These Are Not Fall Colors, the first and only studio album by Lync.

Here’s Sam, on These Are Not Fall Colors, from a 2016 piece in Pitchfork: 50 Best Pacific Northwest Indie Albums

In 1994, the Olympia-based trio Lync released These Are Not Fall Colors, their one and only studio album. Co-produced by Calvin Johnson and released on his K Records, it feels out of step with the label’s significantly less dark output; to hear music similar to Lync’s, you’d have to look to Tumwater, the next town over, where Unwound were also excavating emotional turmoil from scraping feedback. This was the Northwest in the mid-’90s, after all. Anguish was plentiful.

These Are Not Fall Colors unspools like a collection of song sketches, half-formed ideas that members Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider pummeled into working shape. Bertram’s bass sounds like it’s being piped through a wet cardboard box, and his and Jayne’s lyrics are repetitive sentence fragments, endlessly spiraling toward a nonexistent conclusion. It all hangs together beautifully. Album opener “B” begins mid-sentence: “And you’ve proved once again/In the bubble that you only need your own air to breathe/And a knife in the bubble says/It’s not killing unless the killing is serial.” Jayne and Bertram repeat slight variations of this until the song fades away. It’s a shame that These Are Not Fall Colors is currently out of print, but it makes sense, too; an album this insular was designed to be discovered and passed around covertly, forever a hidden gem.

“Excavating emotional turmoil from scraping feedback” - damn. I haven’t been so taken with a record in a bit. It feels good. I suggest everyone stop listening to podcasts and get back into music. That feels like another newsletter topic. Onwards.

I’ve had this record going for the past few weeks while I worked my way through The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek — this book is fall colors. Listening to loose, DIY, Pacific Northwest Emo while reading a book set in the cold harshness of an elite music conservatory in Austria may seem incongruous, but it worked for me.

I thought about pulling the old Dark Side of the Moon + The Wizard of Oz trick to see if there was any synchronicity of hidden meaning but I figured that may be a stretch. Maybe these two pieces of work were meant to be together. Created in unison halfway across the globe from one another and decades apart. Maybe not. But for one reason or another, they paired nicely together.

The Piano Teacher is about the derailment of a brief romantic entanglement, the loneliness of unrequited desire, and what happens when it all goes to shit. The tone is somber and sharp — like nothing i’ve ever read before. The perfect companion to the downward spiral into shortened days and the crunch of snow underfoot, or the cold blade of a knife right to the shoulder blade.

If you are more for the sparknotes, you can always take in the Michael Haneke film adaptation. It is a perfect movie. Full stop. Isabelle Huppert is some sort of angel. You could listen to These Are Not Fall Colors with the film on mute. You will need the subtitles anyway. Give it a shot and report back. Peace and love. I hope to hear from you.