"You can go ahead, take your leave / I won’t even turn my head around / I won’t even help you pack your things / I’ll just stand there and not weep..."
The amazingly magnetic singer-songwriter Wallace Field is from Greenfield, Massachusetts. That is less than 2 hours from Boston, hallowed ground, the place were The Pixies formed in 1986 but more on that later. When I was little there was a cool family at the end of the street. All the homes, including my parent's backed up against a city aqueduct that the neighborhood kids called 'the ditch' and that cool family lived at the end of the block right were a foot bridge across 'the ditch' was located. Since that bridge lead to the ditch and it's 4 tunnels that snaked under Telegraph Road everyone passed that house and knew of that family and the old man who was out on the lawn quite a bit working on a small boat that literally never left that yard. I think his name was Randall and he had a way with words. One of his saying was that close is only good when it came to hand grenades and horse shit. I didn't understand what he meant until I got older and realized that when he said horse shit he was really saying bull shit, falsehoods.
Close is good, of course, when it comes to other things as well like love, like friendship and especially when it comes to music. Close is fine with me, in fact, the more dead on you hit a note the less soulful it feels. Maybe that is why I hate the precision of classical music, at least classical music that aficionados of the genre only consider beautiful, impactful when it is played as it was written. I shunned that kind of musical aesthetic a long time ago when I discovered art punk, fusions of jazz and rock and dissonance.
When I first heard the throttled tom toms and warbled bending guitar lines of "Weep" by the aforementioned Wallace Field I thought of David Lovering and Joey Santiago and the busker folk punk of Black Francis. When Field's brash potent wail spat out the words, "You can go ahead, take your leave / I won’t even turn my head around / I won’t even help you pack your things / I’ll just stand there and not weep... I won't weep!" I thought of the 80's and of 90's college radio. I love the close fisted defiance, of not giving someone the satisfaction of tears. "Weep" is from Wallace Field's debut album "All Costs" which revolves around a house fire after heartbreak.
God, I do love Wallace Field's vocal countenance here and the pushed atmospheres of this track. Like an amalgam of The Pixies, Cyndi Lauper and Hope Sandoval (all during their halcyon days), "Weep" is an art installation constructed out of bohemian folk, 50's doo wop heartbreak songs, 90's jangle pop, punkified twee and more (I say more when it really means that is all I have to say).
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://twitter.com/wallacefield_
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3emrZrwn7awoxAuiXZ2IUq
https://www.youtube.com/@wallacefield_/featured
https://wallacefield.bandcamp.com/album/all-costs
https://www.instagram.com/wallacefield_/
Wallace Field
Debut album "All Costs" dropped March 27, 2023.
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