Paper Chase - Young Bodies Heal Quickly You Know

  by David McNamee

published: 8 / 5 / 2003

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Review

"Love is kitty cats and puppy dogs and shit. Love is heroin as sweet and available as candy. …it is cracking your skin open and drawing someone into that fleshy, bloody embrace and sealing yourselves in together…" But John Congleton, like so many lesser specimens of the male species, just wasn’t born with enough skin… Photo evidence exhibits #1 & 2 : Close up of shredded Valentine’s card on floor showing puppy dog and kitty cat snuggling up against the backdrop of a big heart. Extreme close up of three ‘Love Heart’ sweets in someone’s palm. The messages on the sweets read: ‘Fuck With My Heart’, ‘Break Me’, ‘If You Should Ever Leave Me Then Stave My Chest In With A Flagpole’. 2000’s “Young Bodies Heal Quickly, You Know” is the missing file in his case notes that explains the incidence of obscenity and psychological violence documented in last year’s breakdown – an attempt at hospital music therapy made by a man with defribulator pads stuck to his ears like headphones, driven over the edge by frenzied and desperate attempts to interpret his own Rorschach inkblot bodily fluids – episode,'Hide The Kitchen Knives'”. Ansaphone message, February 14 2000. Angel-Ekk Congleton: “I didn’t want to do this over the phone…I need some time to myself... I don’t think we can be together anymore. I think we should just concentrate on being friends... you need to love yourself before you can love anyone else. I just can’t go on.” There’s a weird supercharged energy to emotional headfuck. It gives your mangled, broken brain a jumpstart of clarity and intent… the confused compunction to throw a hate fuck into your beloved manifesting itself in ugly faux-misogyny and laughably pathetic putdowns that could best be described as "withering"; like flowers and erections. Found carved across the walls of the Congleton residence with a knife and a pot of tar: “Oh God get this out of me/And oh oh oh slowly but surely he screams, don’t bat your eyes at me/And goddamn these hands I let them touch you… I thought we had a deal/I don’t see men and women I see animals sniffing each other to see how much they’re worth/Just hurry up and get in me.” Oh you, with your words and your petty recriminations, you think you can scream the damage undone, unpick it with lines that keep snagging on the skin. You play the piano like it’s an ACME crashing down on 'her'.You think you’re destroying something beautiful. You think you’re spitting in the eye of the Gods. You’re fate’s toy, boy! Just another one of Cupid’s bitches hauled off the line and traded in for a smarter model. The real horror of it, of course, is the lack of closure, the absence of redemption… THERE IS NO GETTING OVER IT. We already know for sure, even if he doesn’t, that in two years time he will be yowling ”I’m a SWINGING AXE! I’m a BASEBALL BAT!!”and begging his betrothed to hide the pointy stuff. Photo evidence exhibit #9 : Close up of piano keyboard. On the music stand is the blood-spattered sheet music to''Five Years'by David Bowie. On top of the piano, where it looks suspiciously like someone has been gnawing into the wood, are human teeth.> 'Young Bodies…' sounds like all of Fugazi’s psychological defences TOPPLING IN ON THEIR HEADS, it shoots silvery strands of adrenaline and god knows what – piss probably – through your veins that burns and sharpens and focuses the mind wonderfully. It calibrates your emotional tripwires to a superhuman state of emergency. The tools of its creation - fragile and broken guitars that warp out of tune at a touch; a ravenous cannibalistic piano (every removal man’s worst nightmare) used almost purely as percussion; a delirious choir of crazy people, sampled, multitracked and gibbering invocations and hymns and accusations – may sound like they’ve been rotting (or more likely, chained up and whacked out on the crazy drugs) in some music locker for an age, but there’s an obsessive, almost religious attention to detail. '“Young Bodies…' may unload like three “'The Stomach', 'The Eye' and, 'Congleton, “The Arm' of The Paper Chase) rat-faced and really not-very-hard young men attempting to chew their way through Henry Rollins’ thighs but this is also supremely melodic, lovingly crafted music. The closest you’re going to get to a hug from men with scorpions in their skulls. 'Neat, Manageable Piles' could even be described as a power ballad of sorts – or at least, the sort of power ballad a 'Faster'-era Richey Manic would have made if he had been born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1980 to the Oberst family – that tick-tock timebomb refrain of ”Anything can happen/Anything can go wrong”melting into an oblique, if oddly-consoling, anthemic chorus: “Solder me like a wire that breathes", "Your carbon copy fibre optic plea/Why should we communicate sans technology?/You’re no prize like me!/Young bodies always heal quickly…” "…It is knucklecracks and teethmarks and you’re dust waiting to happen… Love is piano lids slamming shut on already-broken fingers. Love is piano wire threaded through your arteries." Photo evidence exhibit #11: Piano hood open… viewpoint is looking straight down. Tangled up in the strings, in the centre of the piano, is a human heart. It’s like Marilyn said… if you pick at the wound it will never heal.

Track Listing:-

1 This May Be The Last Song You Ever Hear
2 These Things Happen
3 Ever Since The Turn
4 Apple Pies And Alibis
5 Neat;Managable:Piles
6 Can I Pour You Another Drink, Lover?
7 Lenny Whats Gotten Into You?
8 Goddamn These Hands (I Let Them Touch You)
9 A Face That Could Launch A Thousand Ships
10 Throw Your Body On The Apparatus
11 Off With Their Heads!
12 Daddys Got Your Nose
13 Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork
14 When You Least Expect It
15 When (And If) The Big One Hits... I'll Just Meet You There