I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for London-based artist, frYars (real name: Ben Garrett) to release a full proper album. His two EPs, The Ides and The Perfidy (the latter of which I reviewed here), were fantastically dark and odd, and so I waited patiently for the debut album, Dark Young Hearts, which just released a few weeks ago, and like Patrick Wolf’s latest, was financially supported through Bandstocks. Half of the tracks on the record are actually ones I’ve heard before whether as part of EPs, or in the case of Visitors, as a free download earlier this year. Despite this pre-emption, I still really appreciate frYars’ brand of melodramatic and wonky narratives, especially since his voice is a rich, heady mixture of red wine and rohypnol, pleasantly beguiling and dangerous. And often as mad as a bag of obtuse angles. Sure, frYars could be accused of overproduction on this album, giving some of his older material a studio gloss, but I don’t think his music is of the lo-fi sort in the first place; independent should never be equated with lo-fi. His songs have always been on the pop side of the fence (perhaps pop as warped in a baroque funhouse mirror, but pop nonetheless), and the beauty of frYars’ music is where he takes you via the seemingly accessible chamber-electropop. Identities and motives are fluid and sometimes amoral, but the lyrics are captivating, and definitely not something you would find in regular, mainstream pop music. There’s a revelling in the macabre and the strange, which reminds me of the attraction of stories like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, a place where the rules are nonsensical, but necessary.
The album opens with Jerusalem, a track that features a wobbly, singsong chorus about moving in circles and causing a desert storm. It very well might be about Middle Eastern conflict, but then again, lines like “I say no to hitchhikers, but all the same I’ll love my neighbour” points to a more abstract set of ambivalent moral codes or criticism of moral relativism. The next song, The Ides, is the one that initially got me into frYars; it is an incredibly catchy plinking piano tune full of bizarre betrayals and near murders, sounding like a possessed music box. In fact, perfidy, ambiguous good/evil dynamics, death and militarism permeate the whole album with an inky fog, a darkness that is occasionally broken with the blinding light of maniacal musings. The unsettling surreality continues with Lakehouse, in which heavy, bassy synths bolster a tale of a lakehouse “built by the mighty for the weary and the hungry.” Though frYars sings lightly about a “gold country sun,” it, along with the lakehouse, feel like an enticing mirage as the music sucks you into its icy depths of numb forgetfulness. With lyrics like “You can sleep here with your soft drinks,” it becomes a Hansel and Gretel story for the twenty-first century.
Earlier this year, the following track, Visitors, and its music video were revealed as was the fact that Dave Gahan was involved. It skips along like laser double dutch as frYars’ high, wispy falsetto crashes into the gloom of Gahan’s lower register during the chorus: “I’ve got a sickness/I think I need your help tonight.” Something sinister is still afoot, but never explicit as he sings, “for the price of a human heart/it’s not that bad.” With another nod to The Ides, Of March is a frantic piece with quick, swishing guitars and persistent piano. fryars’ vocals match the frenetic atmosphere with his warbly, vicious tones throughout the verses, and as he belts out the line “I will go down with this ship tonight,” he sounds vindicated in some skewed sense of honour and blood-mist. And the object of his song doesn’t fare much better as he asks him/her to remember him as he/she commits suicide. The album takes an acoustic, Latin turn with A Last Resort, a track that uses the gentler, croony side of his voice to sing a twisted love song. Lyrics like “When your vessel’s going nowhere, it’s time to forget the sea/when the mind is a mushroom, but the words come easily” make the song seem like a psychedelic breakdown. A couple of minutes into it, the overdubbed vocals form a chorus that sounds like a host of delirious cherubim, and in the end, it’s rather soothing.
Then former Perfidy EP track, Novelist’s Wife, slips in with another soft vocal performance that adds to the taunting madness of the song. As I’ve noted in a previous post, this song is about a wife that bakes her husband’s Hungarian mistress in a pie and feeds it to him. Narrating from the point of view of the wife, frYars sounds quite glib as he tells the husband to stay in his k-hole while the wife would rather stick to ethanol. Leaving the drug-addled world of the novelist behind, the sound of falling bombs, funhouse organ, and a grungy bassline signal the beginning of Ananas Trunk Railway. The lyrics’ gleeful expectation of death is eventually extinguished by what sounds like a control panel going bezerk in a shower of beeps and squeals.
There’s another return to the Perfidy EP with Olive Eyes, one of the most unlikely dance tracks ever composed. Its groovy synth line creates a New Wave hit out of a strange story of incest and murder. The mini-drama ostensibly ends with the green-eyed son stabbing his father/uncle with mirth. However, I dare you not to sing along with it. Reaching further back to The Ides EP, Happy features loads of distant rambling vocals, like the babbling of an overloaded mind, as the music neatly matches with an ambling, shambolic mess of drumbeats and banging keys. Some scrambled vocals that sound like burbling, insane Daleks complete the disorientation. Amidst the stream-of-consciousness verses, some of my favourite lyrics about societal moral expectations and arbitrary rules can be found:
We wage wars like Pascal waged wagers,
and its on Pascal’s wager we send sergeant majors to fight,
it would be nice if we took his triangle,
and we could find new angles more violent and wonderful,
I was thinking of saving the animals,
but first we save people (not animals),
just ’cause they’re almost as rare as love through marriage,
do you sometimes wish that your siblings were miscarried?
And people made evil,
we decide what it is and decide what it’s not,
if you do things illegal,
you can be pretty sure that it would be allowed somewhere else,
but we’re happy people,
so there’s nothing wrong with the state of things,
if it’s making you happy,
then there’s nothing wrong with the state you’re in.
Anyone who can combine the mathematical and philosophical work of Blaise Pascal with commentary on moral relativity in a pop song is truly impressive. More betrayal and older material with the next track, Benedict Arnold. The bubbling synths and crisp snare make a rather dreamy ballad of the traitor who was “bad when backs were turned.” The record concludes with the soulful Morning, which surges like stars poking through twilight. Pushing like a delicate lullaby, frYars sings, “This is all we have time for.” From time to time, the song turns into a wailing gospel tune as he groans, “Get mama help/A babe is born,” and all the gloom becomes a spiritual re-birth.
Dark Young Hearts is a potentially bewildering pop record, but the deeper you fall into it, the more it comes to follow its own set of rules, a point about caprcious ethics well-made. The music can be as unpredictable as the lyrics, but also weirdly satisfying in its genre-bending. fryars is one of those artists with a perverse sense of storytelling and the ability to create a shadowy, self-contained world with a cast of odd, but memorable characters so well-defined that they make sense. In a modern world of uncertainty and irrationality, frYars has crafted his own Gormenghast-like island, which is secure in its own methodical madness.
CONDEMNED TO ROCK 'N ROLL 