Mega Bog Life, And Another

The magical Mega Bog returns with another fantastical off-world transmission, the most sophisticated, exploratory, and accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter and avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who co-produced, and Zach Burba (iji) among its cast of vibrant players, Life, and Another bristles with painterly technicolor surface textures while plumbing fathomless depths of feeling. Life, and Another stages a semi-fictionalized drama in the community theater of the interior self, with scenes of collective longing at the bowling alley, disputes over a distended memory outside the bar, and the solitary circling on the patio, looking out over the yard in stubborn awe. These memories, from both past and future, bubble up throughout the album and present their characters as new entries into the Mega Bog Book of Symbols. In "Station to Station," an artichoke, the decadent indulgence young Erin learned to steam for herself, is gutted around the spine. In "Weight of the Earth, on Paper," named after the collection of memoir tapes by the artist-warrior David Wojnarowicz, poppies sprout in Birgy's shadow and scare her companion, while harpies circle above Loch Ness. Fantastical visions beget inherited family traumas that taunt withering romantic relationships. A deep faultline connects the record with the work of Wojnarowicz, who, in the years before his death in 1992 (twenty-nine years and one day before the release of Life, and Another), recorded in his tape journals a series of moments of rapturous solitude in the deserts of the American Southwest, carried from dream to dream by real and imagined friendships with human lovers, horses, scorpions, clouds, and the occasion cruiser. Listeners know by now they can trust Mega Bog to continuously lead them into deeper and wilder, spiritual pop territories. Skittering piano glissandos, haunting psychic background voices, and tequila-inspired improvisations creep and crawl over the dark-night-of-the-soul rock and roll dreamscape, before vanishing to make way for invocations of quiet clarity and living-breathing instrumental passages.