Gossamer

by Passion Pit

i already had a little story for this album, but stories sometimes double upon stories, and now i have a doubled-upon story for this album.

yesterday: i am tidying my bedroom while listening to a new release by a band i have never heard of before, and by some leaps of association, i am reminded of this album. i put it on, thinking i can give it a fresh listen and maybe even log it here on record dot club. i am also coming up against my own stubbornness while tidying, so i break to take a shower.

here are some words i've sure other people have used to describe Gossamer: exuberant. frenetic. exultant. devastating. it doesn't devastate me now, i'm through the part of my life where it got me through my own devastation. the grooves went deep during that particular era, but it's mostly stayed confined to that era. i still very much appreciate this album to this day, even though i rarely revisit it.

when an album makes a lasting impression on me, i mean that quite literally: that impression takes the form of affective moments that are deeply embedded in memory. the memory that i most strongly associate with this album is: i am washing dishes in the studio apartment where i lived with the person i was dating at the time, coming to a slow awareness that much of this album, especially the bits about drinking as an escape from one's own problems, tucked into the surface optimism of the music itself, felt particularly resonant — a cognizance of my own deeply masked sorrow assembling in real time. i am thinking about this as the water runs over my body in the shower, vaguely parallel to the water running over the plates i was rinsing as some (but not all… never all) things began clicking into place for me way back then.

i finish my shower. the album is on the second to last track, my bedroom is still in disarray. i turn my attention to a box of old notebooks is in the corner — mostly journals, but also a few small notebooks that i used just for "jotting things down". i scoop the small notebooks out of the box and i start flipping through them. it's kind of interesting to see the traces of whatever occupied my mind at these various points, not to mention a clever strategy to continue avoiding the actual tidying.

i am on the third notebook. this is the oldest one yet, from 2018. six years ago. i've reached the last song on the album. i am going page by page and suddenly i am confronted by this:

What's this album from six years ago doing with me right now? Why this visitation?

I am thrown back to an evening in 2012 or 2013 and washing dishes in the studio on S—— St, in our first apartment, back when there was an "our" in that sense…

there is a little but not much more of the memory there — i've been much more prolix this time around. i never named the album, because why would i? that would only have detracted from the precision and specificity. the gesture toward the image is enough to know.

i message a friend about this Weird Thing that just happened to me and joke that it's exactly the sort of coincidence that film director Krzysztof Kieślowski would get off on. this is light misdirection: i'm the actual pervert for synchronicity here. the album has ended. i put the notebooks away.