Current Joys - Me Oh My Mirror (2015)

The road from the West Coast to New York does not seem to end. You drive and you drive, through sharp-edged mountains until they are just waves in the distance. To yellowing-cornfield-nowhere, a place without a horizon in either direction, you teeter back and forth between the feeling that “I’ll never die”, and that “I will fall off the earth at any moment now”. Then there are rivers and trees and city-lights building this familiar feeling of loneliness in a country so vastly indifferent. You look up at the stars thinking about how you must have passed millions of people in hundreds of places all of whom you will never meet, and finally you are there. Death. Adulthood. New York. Whatever you want to call it.

Nick Rattigan, the drummer and vocalist of garage-punk band Surf Curse, went on this journey moving from his hometown of Reno, Nevada to New York, New York. Writing alone, recording alone, and working alone, finally producing this seamless epic-poem of an album, Me Oh My Mirror (see Facebook posts like, “New album is almost done. Should be out soon. Working that day job. I love you all”). Rattigan’s solo project, Current Joys is fueled by themes of growing up and fearing mental instability, woven into a record that feels far more akin to “The Great American Novel” in its depiction of the raw emotions of getting chewed up as a Sour-Patch kid, and spat out an adult all while traveling across the great continent of America.

The layered-minimalist sound that many a lo-fi band tries to accomplish echoes throughout this release. However, every stream-of-consciousness scratchy vocal and heavy bassline is accompanied by beautifully clear guitar riffs. The album begins “Home Pt. 1 & 2” a long eerie soundscape introduction that develops into his proclamation, “The world is so big now / It’s hard not to feel alone / Without no direction / I don’t know where I’ll go,” as he leaves the town where he grew up.

The third track “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in reference to Czech author Milan Kundera’s existential novel of the same name, infuses a fast-paced backing drum beat and Cure inspired guitar layers with his continually literary inspired lyrics. “Never let me change my mind again / Cause I don’t ever think I’ll love again,” is his lonesome contemplation driving through the night pondering past-partners he painfully loved.

“My Motorcycle” is the highlight and centerpiece of the record, opening with a spoken-word piece leading into a two minute build up of delicate guitar riffs before exploding into tight power chords and the biting refrain, “On my motorcycle / there’s this feeling I might / Go insane before I / Reach the places I wanna go!”

This album’s greatest strength is its cohesiveness; each song seems like it is bleeding into the next, leading up to the final empty breath of youth that is exhaled in the last two tracks. “don’t be consumed” is an eleven minute, lingering tension-building epic, and “In and Out of Love,” driven by a drudgingly dark and distorted piano. There is some haziness concerning which song is the official last song (“don’t be consumed” is last on Soundcloud, and “In and Out of Love” is last on bandcamp), completing the ambiguous epic-poem motif whether Rattigan wants it to or not.

Either way, one always meets their abrupt ending to childhood, a roadtrip, or life. Rattigan has made it to New York. It is as heavy, distorted, and unforgiving as any place along the way. This journey and this country, it does not comfortably fade off giving you hints of what is coming, it just, sort of, ends.