Ribbons
Candle Arms And Sloping Shoulders In The Darkness
Oct 31, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
-
Welcome to Daytrotter
-
Deathlist
unreleased
I was thinking about a plan my older brother had written out for killing our father. We were pretty young, not even in high school yet, but much library research and backyard secret meeting had gone into the plan; we took the mission very seriously. Although we never carried it out, we spent a season or two collecting bits of poisonous plants and hiding them in jars, and just having the idea of the death list got us through some tough times. It's a song about family.
-
Total Loss
unreleased
Well, the title of this song I stole from an individually packaged chocolate-covered cookie I bought outside of Amsterdam at a train station. It was called "Total Loss" and had a flying saucer on the wrapper. The song itself is a sort of sarcastic examination of the idea of having a second chance, and also having the sense to be forgetful of people and places in order to keep on living.
-
No Clouds
original version appears on Surprise Attacks
I wrote this after spending a weekend touring MA with another band, hiking around with some friends on off-days. It was August or September. My friend's dad had an old white bull-dog who was uneasy around females and quietly trotted up behind me and clamped its jaws around the back of my left leg just above my knee. I think the song is me trying to capture the weird calm and clarity of loneliness, which tends to get drawn out into extremes when you suffer a terrible pain like that. I still have a faint little constellation of toothmarks.
-
Love Is Mysterious
unreleased
Believe it.
There is a light about the songs that Jenny Logan and Sam Roudman make as the Brooklyn-based band Ribbons. It's a soft light, as if the glow could be made less from power generators, turbines or windmills, but more as if it could be made upon the touch of a heavy, coated arm laying itself across your slumped shoulders and pulling you closer. As soon as the arm falls down across those sloped bones, butting against the back of the neck and curving slightly around it, like a staple, that's when there's a sudden surge in wattage and it sends some kind of shiver that escapes through the pores and hair follicles. It's a light of subtle tones, streaking out like loud penlights popping off in the dark night - one here and one there, both gone and then back with reinforcements. It's as if those penlights aren't run on batteries and bulbs though, but wick and fire - tiny candlelights, easily manipulated and able to produce more of a richer, feltier orangey yellow color. Logan and Roudman set down this generally consistent feeling of foreboding, or a tepid world closing in for a shove or a jab, leaning in to breath eerily upon the back of your head, messing up your combing temporarily, giving the sensation that the microwave exhaust were blowing out against you. It's as if there's a feeling out, like no one's going to make the first move until seeing those whites of those eyes or until thoroughly provoked to protect. There is so much calm in the stressfulness that lurks in the words that Logan writes, coming to the faces of all the frightening pictures that she finds herself running through collage style, one after another, creating a wall of darkened, brooding sound that doesn't go away when someone closes their eyes tightly. It's inside Ribbons music where we feel comfortable to find ourselves new ways of survival, maybe taking some of Logan's suggestions, like this one in the beautiful and haunting (well, they all are like that) song, "Love Is Mysterious." She sings, "We'll survive/Cause we know how to hide," and it's clear that there is an aversion to some of the drama that is the spine of the dramatic effect that Logan packs into the band's sometimes depressing, but brutally honest and relatable songs - relatable in the way that we all sometimes think, while crossing a bridge, what it would actually be like to fall off of it, or what it would be like to just drive your car into a hulking boulder or building. There are characters who leave each other to die - or not die, is more likely - and at that point there needs to be some new kind of acceptance, some digestion of the lights and the things seen by those lights in the midst of such dark times. What we see and what we hear there is are a host and hostess who will sever all of their ties if they need to. They will do all of the things that they must do to make it to the next mysterious and scary situation, also likely to involve a couple of people just not understanding one another, making the relationship harder than it needs to be and finding protection in the arms of those candled arms, laid upon their sloping shoulders.
Ribbons MySpace Page
