Part of the joy of Bad Gardening Advice is spending an inordinate amount of time examining the minutiae — intended or not — of a song, with the expectation that if one stares at it long enough then hidden themes — almost like a magic eye painting — will begin to emerge.
For example, what are we to make of the fact that some of the dice on the cover art for Tired Cossack’s Crusher could not exist in reality. On any six-sided die, the numbers 3 and 4 are at opposite ends, so clearly dice No. 4 (from the left) and dice No. 6 are fakes. Further, the pips of the 2 on dice No. 1 are in the wrong direction; likewise the pips of the 3 on dice No. 5. That leaves, as far as I can tell, dies 2, 3, 7 and 8 as the only accurate ones — half of them. And, given that we can only see half of those dice, all we can say is that a quarter of the information we are given is verifiably correct. What are we to make of that? Only that we acknowledge that we are rarely given the whole picture and that assumptions are unavoidable.
Thusly, with our pockets full of skepticism, do we tweeze, layer by layer, the song itself. Having assessed the cover art, let us move along to the song title. What does the title, Crusher, tell us? It could be a contraction of ‘crush’ and ‘her’. It brings to mind words like destruction, mangled, pulverized. Rebellions are crushed, often violently. Car crashes. Overwhelming disappointment. Does Tired Cossack get joy out of stomping on us like empty pop cans? To fully decipher these hidden meanings, we must continue to the lyrics.
Tired Cossack describes three scenes, each of which occurs in the accompaniment of another person; the first is a snow-covered road down which they (Tired Cossack and the unnamed person) walk; the second has them entering a house party and dancing; and the third has them running back into the street, although seemingly in separate directions. Let us take each scene in turn.
Although we could assume that Tired Cossack is speaking for himself, is this a safe assumption? I’ll leave that question to the side. What we do know is that this song involves two people. They walk down a road, but not necessarily together. Each could be walking their own “dark corridor of the night.” Tired Cossack tells us that both of them were blind. Not literally blind, of course, but rather that each was blind unto the other: one did not know that the other existed. They were also blind as to what fate has in mind for them; they did not know that they would meet the other that night. The imagery in this scene is dark and cold and silent. Or, if not silent, then each one ‘talks to themselves’, which further lends credence to the hypothesis that the two are coming from two different directions. It is imagery that says: “I am all alone in this world and I will forever be alone.”
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
