so after a month of sudden and strange reconnections with the past, i am posting my first "stuff i like" entry. i am trying to do this in the least self-indulgent and cheaply anecdotal way, so i'll thank you ahead of time for your patience and understanding as a solidly mid-twenty year old male tries to take stock of his contributions to humanity so far.
some random ruminations prompted me to stumble onto a phrase that reminded me of some lyrics from a choral piece that i performed with my high school chamber choir. this lead me to play a few rounds of "i wonder what happened to..." with some of my friends that came and went before i entered the land of car payments and mortgages. i began tacitly wagering on who of my group of friends from chamber choir may have done something noteworthy enough to be searchable on the internet and figured that adam arcuragi must be a musician somewhere and wouldn't be cool if he was still in the philadelphia area, and wouldn't also be cool if i could go to a concert. so i did what most of my demographic would do and began to google. page one brought immediate satisfaction. and a link to a record label's site that just released adam arcuragi's self titled full length album. wow. good wagering. a quick trip to itunes brought me adam's album in all of it's soaring, swooping glory.
this music is stunning. the poetry is arresting and does what poetry should. words that we use every day (well most of them - not "bacterialite"), rearranged in a way that turns your everyday experiences into transcendent moments of beauty, loss, yearning, and redemption. the diction is striking in they way that it is simple enough not to patronize but subtle enough to provide layers of meaning that pull a little deeper every time you get lost in a track. (also, i think that he was in a contest to write as many songs as he could that had the word throat in it.)
the instrumentation and arrangements are also deceivingly simple and never feel over produced or contrived. always the songs extrapolate themselves in a way that is steeped in the feeling of authenticity. each song feels like watching rough, knowing hands making a ceramic tile, or turning a piece of fine wood. there is something that feels craftsmanlike about the album as a whole. could i gush anymore. maybe.
the content of the songs comes from a place that seems neither slick and urbane, nor raw and rural. that places it in a space that's clearly of a suburban origin, but not "banal, strip mall" suburban, or "ostentatious, consumptive" suburban. maybe "everyman" suburban. that's something that i can respond to.
i guess that i'm shocked by my own fascination with this music. am i fascinated because i feel like i know adam, even though i haven't spoken with him in almost a decade? i'm not sure. whatever it is, i really like this music. you might too.
www.adamarcuragi.net
