Sometimes yourself and an artist are on vastly different tracks in your journey, but somehow meet up at an intersection before continuing on your own merry ways. Seattle's Posies are like that; a band whose earlier work had done nothing for me and whose later work wouldn't either, but we happily found ourselves in the same headspace for brief but glorious time.
The Posies' Frosting On the Beater drilled a hole through the center of my skull like a laser beam, at a time when I was so sick of fake corporate grunge my brains hurt. My exposure to Frosting also coincided with a majorly mind-rending synchronistic eruption of signs and wonders that changed the course of my life forever, starting on September 5, 1993. It's no accident that The X-Files would hit the airwaves later that week.
The lyrics on this album are enigmatically charged with mystical ambiguity. They mix cosmic references with poignant memories of the dreams of childhood, seemingly at random. They also seem to have both double meanings and ambiguous pronunciations, even (is he saying "crown of thorns" or "crowd or thorns?" Is it "everyone is laughing, all expensive painful" or "everyone is laughing, all expenses paid for?"). Were they just MADlibbing are their lyrics or were they encoding secret esoteric messages into their ostensible word salads?
The first single was about dreaming all day. One tells of a time "when mute tongues can speak," another warns of a "definite door to another dimension." This album helped take me to one, for sure. When I play this record I can still smell the crisp morning air of the early September Sunday that my last remaining shred of belief in consensus reality melted away.
I think every paradigm shift needs a musical soundtrack to help imprint it onto your consciousness, don't you?
Here's a beautiful acoustic version. I've always said that the best hard rock songs are the ones that still work in this context, and the capos and the harmonies add a nice trad folk dimension to the proceedings.
Tell me about your happy place in the comments.
Don't forget The Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism, now holding classes in the highly strange. There's a ton of exclusive material up already and so much more on the way.
