Holy "Hans Christian Andersen's original represssed-homosexuality version of The Little Mermaid in which Ariel feels like she's dancing on knives," Pitchfork does not pay me enough to listen to this album one more time. Corrina Repp went and recruited members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help make one of the most intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" albums of this herky-jerk decade, for Mark "Professionally Sad" Kozelek's all-but private label. I planned a half-dozen detached ways to navigate this review. I considered typing about this one time at the beach when females were suddenly honest about the peanut butter & canine cunnlingus urban legend (admitting "girls are sick fucks"), which hopefully would have tapped into this album's "wouldn't-you-like-to-know" Virgin Suicides mystique. Or maybe about how one of this album's most why-people-cut-themselves anthems, "All", is named after the most grandiose of the whole insane range of grandiose names for laundry detergent. But The Absent and the Distant will not let me dodge its "emo"-- okay, rebuke cutesyness, I mean "emotional"-- tractor beam.
Every song on this album, even (perhaps especially) the instrumentals, is a magic, killer, killer bullet that might only work on a small percentage of the shopster populazzi. You have to be prayerfully anticipating the last time that you fail someone. You have to have recently been accused of masturbating with a towel lying atop your computer even though it was for navelgazer tears and snot. You have to have imagined that corpse-bog from Lord of the Rings filled with your exes. You have to be so consumed with a decision about a partner that all other decisions got left unmade; you have to have once felt so "fixed" by a significant other that all else in your life fell into disrepair, even as your brain scrambled "disrepair" to spell "diaper, sir."
I've used the weak, unvivid verb combo "has/have" eight times so far in this review, but only because Corrina Repp uses it so sharply, in re: not being able to be "had" or to "have" someone else. She recklessly examines the point at which wanting to "have" another person lapses into a tyrannical ownership fantasy, which then lapses into an existential realization about how we barely have ourselves. Repp also menacingly abuses the pronoun "it" without letting it modify anything in particular. She does so most violently during the monogamy-shuffling "Anyone's It," which I can't continue to talk about.
Repp's recipe involves a churchy minimalist piano pattern overlaid with cold-chill trilling at the chorus from either a mandolin or another piano track or epically reverbed percussion. Her directness is disarming during this cultural moment that places such a high premium on gimmicks and obfuscation. Her huge vocals take up so much space in the mix that they'll remind you of the days when horror movies weren't about the body. Repp's a better balladeer than many of the bearded boys imagined to own the mode, and the songs often opt out of an easy sad/happy dynamic to shoot for double-edged truthiness: "What if that safe place has secrets no one understands?" "You hurt because you love someone." Friends of a new couple "wonder why we're both a little gone." Every conventionally sweet moment collides with a line measuring the loneliness love causes: "Wait for me/ I'll wait for you/ O the things that we have lost." The stately pose of Repp's used-to-be-human delivery prevents the lyrical sincerity from embarrassing itself, perhaps too often.
Again, you probably have to doff your savvy consumer-armor and sit around in your sentimental fishnets to truly experience this album's captivating stillness, its relaxing sense of risk, its Broadcast-and-Patsy-Cline-make-a-folk-album-with-This-Mortal-Coil scope, and its portraits of lovers who anchor each more deeply in direct proportion to their insistence on remaining adrift. If you already sit around in sentimental fishnets all day, trust that you will not be able to handle The Absent And The Distant; it will have dismantled you long before the hymnic "That Which Has No Remorse" visits pews kept warm by 1970s Bob Dylan and 1990s Daniel Johnston. As a distraction from this disc's power, maybe shout "deez nuts" once per track, and keep CSS or something similarly silly-assed handy on your iTunes playlist.
