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Elvis Perkins :: Ash Wednesday

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Months ago, I received a phone call from my friend Laura, and she said "Oh my god!" (or, rather, as Laura is more apt to say "OMG!") "have you heard Elvis Perkins?!!" There followed a debate about Elvis' parentage, and his paternal lineage as relates to his father, the actor Anthony Perkins; most often connected with not only his role in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" but his identity as a gay man (who died of AIDS in 1992)-- a fact that led me to (ignorantly) proclaim "nuh'uh!" This led to an over the telephone search of wikipedia ("no, no, cross reference THIS!"), which revealed that Mr. Perkins' father was indeed Anthony Perkins, and his mother was the photographer Berry Berenson, who was a passenger on one of the flights flown into the World Trade Center September 11, 2001.

That out of the way, and the almost mythological (in the scope of it's tragedy) tale of his birth and eventual and current life as an orphan ttroubador told, we may focus on the beauty; the dare I say, genius, that is Elvis Perkins. While Mr. Perkins may not do anything exceptionally new or stunningly different, what he does, he does well. What he does breaks hearts, holds the capacity to change lives (oh, if only you listen closely enough!); what he does is create what just may be your new favorite record.

Perkin's voice is a marriage of Jeff Mangum of the Neutral Milk Hotel, and Rufus Wainwright; the music stripped of fuzz and pretention, pure emotion and beauty crying out from the strains of an acoustic guitar, backed by the sparest percussion. I am reminded of Mangum's acoustic record/bootleg "Live At Jittery Joe's", yet the songs are much more accessible and less obtuse; my heart breaks without having to think to myself "yes, but what does it MEAN?" I want to curl up in the refrains, I want to lose myself in these plaintive vocals, I want to cry when he tells me that "It worries me, it worries me, that there's someone on my mind who i don't see/ i close my eyes to disappear, into the fields of stars between my ears." i don't debate that I tend towards the sappy (oh, but don't say saccharine!), and that my heart may break at the drop of a hat, the drop of a shoe, but, conversely, how can your heart not break? How is it possible not to break into a million pieces; how is it not possible unless you've not bothered to listen?

Elvis Perkins is a must listen for those who love the Neutral Milk Hotel, for those who have shuddered along with Rufus Wainwright, for those who have hidden their faces behind hands as Sebadoh forced tears to bloom, bright and wet, at the corners of their eyes. Love him, embrace him; feel, feel, feel.

Elvis Perkins
Ash Wednesday

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