Written by: Dave Cantrell
It’s a curious strain of déjà vu, hearing a record for the first time that sounds for everything like a lost dream found even as said dream wasn’t being looked for but nonetheless found you. As convoluted as it is straightforward, that opening gambit speaks – if with a twisted clarity – to this listener’s overall response to a spanking new(ish) release from Bar None as part of their 40th (!!) anniversary that was initially released via Delmore Recordings/Extra Strength thirty years ago and thus simultaneously presents with a sheen that derives from a brand new bottle that was actually bottled during the second Clinton administration and yet shows not a whiff of age as it pours through one’s speakers with a distilled lucidity that simply puts paid to that whole ‘aging’ thing. Welcome, then, to the time-defying, somewhat era-defining Reseda Spleen by the then LA-based Ventilator, a singular piece of recovered history that doesn’t simply deserve its resuscitation but speaks with some prowess to the power inherent in that early-to-mid-nineties era (think Th’ Faith Healers, Pavement, JAMC, MBV et al) that took the dying spark of the fading 80’s and breathed it back to life as if with, yes, a ventilator. And the cool thing, in a sort of geeky trainspotter kind of way? Band founder Matt Devine, being an ardent Stones fan, divined (shall we say) the project’s name from the Exile on Main Street track “Ventilator Blues” which, context-wise, could not present as a more essential crux.
As is so often the case in the aesthetic trajectory of a truly fervent musician, the formation of Ventilator came on the heels of a character- (and chops-?) building stint in a fairly highly regarded outfit, in this case the Michael Querico-helmed Permanent Green Light (itself responsible for more than a handful of indie gems), and while Devine’s time in said band wasn’t anything but positve with the usual caveats (“when you’re in a band where it’s two singers and songwriters, there are always comprises”) he reached a point where moving on evolved from ‘maybe’ to ‘definitely,’ a shift made all the more inevitably imminent by the purchase of a Tascam 388 eight-track tape recorder, an arrival that precipitated a realization that, having recently moved in to a rather spacious North Hollywood apartment with his then-girlfriend-now-wife Linda, that pretty much unrelenting cycle of rehearsing/performing/hanging out in nightclubs lost the last remnants of its fleeting charm and thus was born the new project with a new crew of musician mates¹, a birth that, even as it (re)arrives thirty (!) years later is one worth rejoicing.
Kicking off with an instantaneous flourish of said mid-90s era noise pop supreme, heavy-chorded yet nimble and wholly absorbing from the off, “The Tailor’s Lament” will pull you in to the album with a like-it-or-not [you will – ed.] charm that speaks, um, volumes to the prospects lying ahead and there ain’t even half a chance you’ll be able to pull away. That that promise is dutifully upheld by a second track that, rather daringly we must admit, gently slows proceedings with the dusky reflective “Landsdowne” that, interest-wise, due the deeply human resonance that’s always a far more challenging prospect than it may seem (which is why so many such efforts lead so quickly to the ‘skip’ button), beckons one further on and by that point one’s full engagement is guaranteed.
From the busy-fied wah-wah fault zone of rock’n’roll classicism that is “Earthquake” to the warmly beguiling “Happy New Year” to “Jericho’s Pool” with its haunting glow of fatalism reflecting off its surface, “Schadenfreude”‘s slow build ‘n’ burn towards a kind of avant-singer/songwriter ‘psychotherapy with a (rather haunted) beat’ down to ‘album highlight’ candidate – though, c’mon, Dave, there’s a bloody dozen of ’em here – “Titanic” that, through its multi-phased (purely instrumental) evolution, not only refuses to sink but instead rises to heights most lyric-less tracks dare dream of, to finale “Winter Song” wherein one finds the ache of always aspiring mortal hope still resilient even in the face of the cold and the shadows of this perplexing existence, its final, somewhat mortally resonant chord in itself enough to recommend the record and, no, that ain’t in any way an exaggeration.
Also not an exaggeration? How startlingly present Reseda Spleen² sounds forty fucking years past its original release date, to the point it’s a challenge to cite even one more example without including the entire dozen tracks so we’re not going to try and instead just hit the ‘play’ button again.
[1 – Byron Reynolds from Possum Dixon, Jeff Caruana, Brad Laner from Medicine etc] [2 – that title, by the way, as per the press sheet, is a winking nod to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen repurposed as a tribute of sorts to Devine’s roots in the San Fernando Valley]
