Last week post-rock/alternative rock artist ALIGN IN TIME (alias of John Boles) released his second album, On a Spiral. In this piece, his close friend and former bandmate James Pianka reflects on Bolesβ approach to songwriting and the themes underlying the new album.
I wanted to be a good person, or at least someone who sees more good in the world than this. Itβd be easier if the world were actually good, and I find myself crediting its faceplant with the prickliness of my adult life, but I imagine every era had some take on this excuse, and that βWeβre not going to the stars, so I abandon loveβ is an existential petulance Iβd smack someone for speaking aloud. Optimism β not quite the assertion of benevolence, but at least a humanist affirmation of our value, if only to ourselves and each other β seems like the tether to this ball, the βWhy not?β refusal of suicide given that we exist.
πΌπ π π€ππ¦ π‘βπ ππππ’π ππ π ππππ ππ ππ’ππππ πππππ£πππ, ππ ππ’πβ πππππ¦ ππ ππ₯π’ππ‘ππ‘πππ.
But if optimism is so perforated and frail, why is it so fucking easy for John? Why does he make art as if he saw the world from space and came back gripped by the miracle of home in all that void? Why does tragedy fail in everything he writes, defeated as gently as one pulls a blanket to a chin, welcomed but reformed? Loss is the premise β the trailhead his journeys never leave, and so endemic to their destinations. Itβs an orienting feature in a landscape only navigable by emotional intelligence, where analysis leaves you miserable and convinced of nothing, but where empathy and an interminable, baffling insistence on the goodness of humankind makes you headbang in your kitchen and then later call your mom.
ππ π ππππππ πππππ ππππ ππππ π ππππ π‘βππ πππ π‘-ππππ, πππ£πππ£πππ ππ‘π π‘βππππ π€ππ‘β π‘βπ π πππ πππ‘π’πππ‘π¦ π‘βππ‘ π£πππππ π‘βππ.
On a Spiral speaks in a language that shrivels before facts but outlives them, reaching deep into your gut and pulling upward while some angel of your youth strums, knee up, on a cloud. It presents to you moments of pain β wounds of your cruelty, white-lie cowardice, family lost like wings of a house condemned and blocked away β and interrogates that distress, tunneling away the foundations while holding you above the collapsing floors, then returning to the now-settled ruins to ask its questions another way: βDid you do that right? Were you not loved? Are we not the most magnificent fucking creatures?β In a way the album is a kind of guided grieving, as much elegy as exultation, ringing the church bell of importance as hard as it can above forgiveness β above a peace we donβt deserve. Itβs the teachings of Christ-who-wasnβt-god, the thesis that always was β that primordial acceptance of the unacceptable that answers emptiness with joy. I can measure my failures against its virtue.
Technique-wise On a Spiral feels more film score than post-rock, revolving its themes with the same maturity that voiced them. Its rapturous moments hit when they shouldnβt β early, disciplined and coy with their cutoffs, armed with surprise. The sheer quantity of parts and the pace at which they cycle add a density of ideas that the genre typically declines for contemplative extensions, and in these arrangements the album honors and gains access to the complexity of the problems it asks us to resolve. Interpersonal pain is rarely a meditation β itβs choppy, perennial, and morphing with the context of each experience β and On a Spiral compels through mimicry, through careful and compassionate study of not just the ache of being alive and unsatisfied but of the flutters, the upheavals, the nervous returns to square zero where nothing makes sense but at any moment everything could.
Listen to On a Spiral here and follow Align in Time on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Follow James Pianka on Twitter and Instagram.
