Owen - The Avalanche Music Album Reviews

Mike Kinsella’s latest is his most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work as Owen to date.

In case you’ve missed out on the past 20-some years of American Football and Owen and are just now checking in with Mike Kinsella for the first time, here’s where he’s at in 2020: “I’ve got friends that don’t know me/A wife that’s disowned me/Here in concept only to miss.” This comes in the middle of “Dead for Days,” a song that begins with memories of his brother Tim finding their father’s unconscious body and ends with Mike imagining himself going out the same way, hoping at least it’ll be deemed an accidental overdose. While The Avalanche is billed as an album of “unraveling marriage and big endings," it’s also, simply, “the next Owen album,” a prophecy self-fulfilled in every brutally candid song and interview acknowledging the effects of porous boundaries between songwriting and real life.
“I can’t believe the lies that my mouth spits/I can’t believe she stayed as long as she did,” Kinsella softly croons, setting the course for an album spent in the most indulgent part of a breakup: plenty of self-examination and admissions of fault, but no hard lessons learned and no real desire to change just yet. It’s hard to blame anyone who lacks the emotional bandwidth to take this all in at the moment. But you don’t send back a piece of cheesecake for tasting a little too rich and you don’t tap out on an Owen album because it’s a little too self-pitying.

The Avalanche wallows, but the realization rather than the anticipation of karmic retribution lends it emotional urgency even as Kinsella works in his familiar modes of meandering melodies, exquisite acoustic arpeggios, and the occasional lapse into cringe-posting that threatens to break the whole spell. When he sings, “I can’t have my cake and fuck it too,” at the top of “I Should’ve Known,” it’s not clever, but an example of how easily he can ruin a moment (“OK, I won’t make another goddamn joke/I know, how rude”). The self-awareness still can’t cancel out a line so awkward that it haunts every subsequent spin like a screenshot of a deleted tweet.

But that tendency has been drastically reduced from previous Owen albums, and The Avalanche is the project’s most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work to date. To the same degree American Football LP3 realized the ambitions of its more tentative predecessor, The Avalanche goes maximalist with the template Kinsella and Bon Iver collaborator S. Carey set on 2016’s The King of Whys. Justin Vernon may have abandoned these winter wonderlands nearly a decade ago, but this is where Kinsella belongs right now. He is frighteningly alone in bustling environments—a sober mind filled with horrifying memories, at a bar an hour outside of town where he won’t be seen indulging his basest desires, and in “The Contours,” sighing “I’m in therapy/She’s in therapy” to relate a heartbreaking side-by-side separateness. Even as banjos, strings, bit-crushed electronics, overdubbed coos, or Now, Now’s KC Dalager wind through the mix, they’re all rendered ghostly by Carey’s see-through sheen.

Even if American Football has become Kinsella’s primary focus, it’s heightened the importance of Owen as a creative outlet, a way to counterbalance the brand with the human being. There’s no question whether the misery or the music came first; the Kinsella brothers have come to understand Cap’n Jazz’s abstract emo as functionally primal scream therapy, an outlet for the trauma they were suffering in an abusive household but couldn’t quite name. Mike Kinsella has covered the same subject far more directly in just about every album he’s made as Owen in the time since. “I’ve got a reputation for fucking up to uphold,” he sings during “On With the Show,” the most straightforward pop song he’s ever written, and one that addresses the central concern for anyone whose personal brand is contingent on being depressed in public. Are such people subliminally drawn to relational chaos as a way to uphold their brand, or is the brand itself the reason for their chaotic life? The Avalanche does not determine where the feedback loop begins, only how destructive—and how difficult to stop—it is once it gets going.
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About Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera

Hey, I'm Perera! I will try to give you technology reviews(mobile,gadgets,smart watch & other technology things), Automobiles, News and entertainment for built up your knowledge.
Owen - The Avalanche Music Album Reviews Owen - The Avalanche Music Album Reviews Reviewed by Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera on July 21, 2020 Rating: 5

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