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dustedmagazine · 1 year

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2022: Patrick Masterson

Photos by Patrick Masterson

We filter in slowly. Given Sleeping Village is a stroll down the block, it’s inevitable I’m on the early side, but the place is already humming with anticipation by the time I walk in. I order a beer and head to an open booth tucked away in back, where I’m greeted one after the other by guys I call friends and co-workers, an agreeable mix of dudes from two generations. We do some bridge-building as they appear, figure out a couple of us have been to the same shows over the decades and not realized it, y’know, the usual time-killing.

As if this table weren’t proof enough, I look up at one point and note who’s loitering around the bar area: Though a modest youthfulish contingent exists, tonight’s a veritable Post-Punk Dads’ Prom, which in March of 2022 indicates one of two things — and since Wet Leg already came through at the beginning of the month, it could only mean we’re here to see Yard Act play the final date of their first U.S. tour.

Evidently, nothing unites Former Cool Guys on a drizzly night out like a little “angular” guitar and a chatty Loiner with a chip on his shoulder. In a year that would turn out to be studded with top-tier post-punk throwbacks, Yard Act are already ahead of the pack at this point with The Overload’s January release. Coming off a string of Rough Trade-endorsed singles, an EP and a full-length establishing James Smith’s wry, politically minded verbosity over the complementary supporting trio of Ryan Needham’s bass, Jay Russell’s drums and Sam Shjipstone’s guitar, the band is confident rolling into their final stateside set. Just a few days before, they’d played Fallon and announced their arrival to whatever audience still cares about late night TV. I have no idea who that is because I haven’t had cable since 2008 and can’t think of anyone else who does, either, but all the same, it’s sold out.

It comes out in varying degrees depending on the song, but the major takeaway from a live Yard Act set is just how fucking funny they are — more so even than on record. Bands that have decent between-song banter are pretty rare in my experience, usually limited to mumbled thanks or obfuscated in-jokes. Not these guys: Arriving to the stage juiced on whatever the rider offered backstage and clearly fixing to close this tour out in a blaze of minor glory, Smith’s amicable observational prodding immediately endears him to the crowd. Between riffs on deep dish, American candy and overly long, underexplained stories from the road, the band kills, rifling through a grab bag of choons from their limited discography. They’re tight when the music’s going and loose when it’s not. The natural rapport between Needham and Smith is evident as the former keeps the latter — ever more glassy-eyed and garrulous as the set carries on — in check. Years put in with the likes of lesser NME fodder like Post War Glamour Girls and Menace Beach make plain this is not their first rodeo. They can handle us — and do, playing everything everyone wants to hear at just the right levels of volume and sneering, smirking aggression. It’s a thing of beauty. No one leaves unhappy.

I walk home thinking I might’ve just seen my favorite show of the year — and were it not for Yves Tumor the very next night, I’d be correct. I have some spring in my step now, too, and not just on account of the season: I’m about to embark on a massive project at work that got dumped on me the month before and I’m dreading it, but that aside, my personal life slowly feels like it’s crystallizing and I’m having a great week, a great month, fuck, I’m having a great year. How many people can say that in 2022? How many people are riding this kind of high right now? How many people can look up at the sky and feel like the stars are aligned, each one exactly in its right place burning back at them?

It’s hard to be cautious when everything feels like it’s slowly making the sense you always thought was there, but I keep trying to talk myself down from the ledge of this good mood anyway. Still: How real it feels, how unyielding the truth of it seems.

II.

It’s not that I wouldn’t have believed you without seeing it for myself, but there’s something both viscerally funny and viscerally stupid witnessing with your own eyes how we really did fuck it up: Iceland is green and Greenland is ice. That’s what’s running in and out of my head on the second leg of a return journey from Helsinki, where I’ve just been for an extended early August weekend because I’m an idiot who’s wholly incapable of taking a nice, normal, relaxing vacation somewhere with beaches and 500-page books you can read in two nights and big meals wearing bad shirts with bogus floral prints. No, my idea of a good time is winging it in a country where I don’t speak a lick of the language — don’t even pretend to understand how declensions work there, frankly — and all the words on the signs are too long and I don’t like seafood so I’m probably never going to be a good fit for the place even though it may as well be Michigan for how it looks and I realize too late my SIM card doesn’t work but Instagram still does for some dumb reason and what the fuck am I paying T-Mobile, an international conglomerate that recently bought out Sprint and changed my bill but not my capability, all this money for every month, anyway? Why did I have to rely on an old high school acquaintance, who’s really my brother’s friend’s brother, to get around via e-scooter in Estonia? Why can’t I just shut up and take in a scenic mountain or the quiet crash of an ocean view like a normal person?

On this plane, it feels less draining to imagine Iceland and Greenland are called opposite things. That I can handle.

Before I boarded back in Finland, where I managed one last European pint at the airport bar that was alarmingly close to my gate, I sent one of the longest text messages I’ve ever written, one I spent practically the whole summer composing. Through visits to new breweries, a jaunt to Indiana to check out the Bob Ross museum and set a Guinness record applying a new coat to the world’s largest ball of paint, discovering I hate driving Teslas, Wisconsin, wherever, there it sat idling on my phone — fully formed coming out of my dreams every morning, unfinished in new and unique ways every night before bed. I’d read the fragments over and over again, sleeping on hidden arcs and previously unconsidered angles, gradually edging toward some kind of conclusion, if not resolution. You can’t know what happens after you push send, but I’d been here before; I’d sent almost this exact same message before, in fact. A hideous Hail Mary, a prayer to God, the best I can offer. What I had the moment I sent it were my words.

The weekend before I was slated to leave for this trip, I took it upon myself to sneak in some internal reviews for the radio station I’ve been volunteering at as long as I’ve been in Chicago, 15 years, Jesus, who knew I’d last that long in any capacity as an adult? There’s no great mystery to it: An enormous Google spreadsheet lists all the records we’ve imported but don’t have a review and FCC profanity notes on. It sounds silly and it’s invisible work to a listener, but these short blurbs help DJs sound more informed on air and guide them on what (and more importantly, what not) to play, a system founded in college radio and still alive in the select places they still allow for this kind of thing.

I chance upon TV Priest’s My Other People on account of some very hasty notes from whomever imported it, throw it on, let it run for a bit. I leave it through “Slideshow,” through “Bury Me in My Shoes,” both of which I find pleasantly catchy on a cursory listen. I leave it on some more as I catch up on the news. I leave it on so long, in fact, that I finish the record and immediately feel the urge to play it again from the top, something I’d been missing in music for large chunks of 2022. I think to myself after a first run through that, hey, this is pretty good; I think halfway through a second spin, listening much closer now, that, hey, this is really good; and by the time I’m finished with it again, I think this is improbably my favorite album of the year. I check to see when they’re touring next and practically burst out laughing when I see they’re in town at Beat Kitchen down the street the very next night. In less than 48 hours, I’ve gone from never having heard of this band before to enthusiastically walking out the door of their first Chicago tour date.

Here’s a theory I turned over in my mind that weekend: TV Priest is the band everyone thinks Idles is. I don’t mean any disrespect to the latter; they’re a fine band and if that’s your thing, good on you and them both. But there’s an element of gravitas to the London quartet — an almost Morrissey-like flair for the dramatic in Charlie Drinkwater’s soaring-and-roaring baritone, Nic Bueth’s leaden bass and Ed Kelland’s drumwork that may as well be actual anchors, and the tones Alex Sprogis takes with his guitars — that to me feels more weathered, more adult, a brusque tenderness shaved off in Idles’ more pitched punk. (Not for nothing, but I also saw four guys separately walk into Beat Kitchen behind me with Idles shirts on.) It’s a perfect blend of Associates and Fugazi, brutal and beautiful post-punk elegance ensuing from the end of an empire. I must’ve played “House of York” 200 times if I played it once in the days following the show and that one didn’t even make an album. Many are working in this vein right now, but hardly anyone did it better in 2022.

I am thinking that as “Sunland” plays again and the shine of the real thing above off the white expanse below blinds me. Who’d have thought I’d end up directly next to a guy who was also meeting his brother from New York City in Helsinki for the weekend? Incredible odds. Life is funny like that sometimes. A weekend fueled by croissants and a free upgrade to an automatic-equipped Volkswagen Passat and sun, always the fucking sun up there, they weren’t kidding about that, either, there were more than a few times during this trip when I thought maybe I just wouldn’t come back. Fuck a SIM card, anyway. It’s all just reformed elements, it’s all just numbers on numbers, it’s all just someone else’s profit, right? It’s all just some pointless collapsing star.

Slumped toward sunlight with my head against the fuselage watching infinite white topography shimmer as it passes — Greenland is ice, I promise you that really is it, there’s nothing else down there — I’m playing TV Priest on a busted old iPod and making mental preparations to be apart for an unknown period of time again, stuck in a familiar loop with the voices in my head rolling over the same old questions years long from different angles, chewing on emotional errata and heated fragments past, phrasing the most basic mysteries in different ways and pointlessly expecting some kind of clarity to fall from the flaring, to rise from the ice and reveal itself. The self-interrogation never stops: When do I finally stop being so stubborn about everything that matters, stop taking the harder road, stop thinking too much and feeling too much more? Why am I like this, why can’t I ever see the answers until I’ve asked the right questions a fraction too late? Why am I too slow to understand the truth when it’s not explained to me? Why do I bother believing in anything?

I shut my eyes for a moment, the skin of my lids carry a familiar heft. Honestly, I’m tired of thinking and I’m ready to leave all of this; I’ve never been more ready, maybe. The plane never shudders skeptically, but still I’m there in my seat alone in a metal tube suspended 30,000-plus feet in the air hurtling through space, through life, at 500 mph wondering: What if this is it, what if this is all there was? What happens back home, back there, that place I don’t love enough to want to return to but can’t seem to leave? What am I going to do when my words finally, inevitably fall short, when the best I offer is rotting roses and garbled prayer and a Hail Mary read all wrong? And what if I settle for what happens after that, what if this isn’t all there was? What if good enough is good enough?

Patrick Masterson

#dusted magazine #yearend 2022 #yard act #tv priest #post-punk #patrick masterson

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