Colloquialisms
Nothing Remarkable
colloquialisms.bandcamp.com
You may know the man behind Colloquialisms, Joe McNertney, if you shop at the New Pioneer Food Co-op, as the beardy guy behind the meat counter. He’s also Eric Rohn’s collaborator in Noble Octopus, and the two albums share similar silk-screened recycled cardboard covers. But despite some similar gestures, Colloquialisms is looser and veers off in strange directions. The first track, Mille Regretz, is McNertney’s setting of a sixteenth-century chanson for distorted guitar, as a prelude to “Unfabled,” a quiet, pretty song, made strange by Joe running his voice through an octave doubler effect and what sounds like a dog snoring through a distortion pedal. Add to that pizzicato violin and a fluttering recorder and you have something at the same time familiar and unusual.
“There’s always the problem of dynastic succession,” he sings in “You’re Not Blinking.” Then the song trails off into a reflective interlude of echoing guitar harmonics, toy xylophone and banjo. It’s clear that it’s deliberately unclear, but it’s enjoyable to just go with it and let him do what he wants.
Which I guess is the charm of Colloquialisms. McNertney has some engaging musical ideas, but he resists conventionally professional ways to arrange them. For him, bringing them to heel would diminish them somehow, better to let them wander off into the underbrush and see where they end up.
“I never would’ve thought I’d evaporate into your arms” McNertney sings in “The Flower I’d Forgotten,” turning a love song into something strange and dreamlike. His voice on this song is what I can only describe as pleasantly lugubrious. Nothing Remarkable, as a title, is false advertising, a bit of self-effacing misdirection. It can be hermetically isolated at times, and at others warm and inviting, a hatful of paradoxes, with a side order of stuttering, barely controlled synthesizer muttering, lovely and unsettling.
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