Came Home Single
Emmy Hennings recently left Melbourne to return to her native New South Wales. This was a loss for Melbourne artists who want their music written about in an informed, passionate and affecting way. Melbs, however, couldn’t let her get away that easy. Here she turns ears back south again, listening to a track from the forthcoming solo album from Marcus Teague (to be issued under his Single Twin moniker). You might be familiar with Emmy’s work from Mess + Noise magazine over its handful of issues, Voiceworks, street press, her zines or her new blog. Oh and it’s worth declaring that one of the core Melbs team (Ben) plays in Deloris with Marcus Teague. But given the number of member rotations in that band over recent years, so has half of Melbourne’s population… so it’s really of little consequence here. –Melbs
The problem with Deloris sometimes is that there’s so much going on musically—complicated tempo shifts here; men’s choir over there; a smattering of guitar effects for extra-added-bonus texture—that the words get rather lost in the mix. And that’s a shame, because as a storyteller Marcus Teague is one of the best lyricists you’re likely to come across. Single Twin is Teague’s new solo project (following on from Chinless Kings), and the starkness of the music allows the listener a welcome focus on the narrative motifs that Teague has been working with for a long time now.
Domestic surrealism is Teague’s forte: like a Magritte painting set in motion as a folk song, “Came Home Dead” is a keyhole view into a space where ordinary details loom foreboding and oversized. Tied to a lullaby-ish arrangement (like the rhyming scheme, the melody repeats and mirrors itself continually), the story is both memorable and genuinely moving.
- Single Twin
- Came Home Dead
The narrator of “Came Home Dead” is precisely that—dead, and arrived home for a final visit. Awaiting the undertaker like a fate that has yet to be decided, the narrator (ghost? remnant? corpse?) takes advantage of a few moments’ grace in order to reanimate the small gestures of everyday life. He/she butters some bread, climbs the staircase, washes their face and—in a moment that gives the song its dramatic conflict—encounters a living loved one in the bedroom.
You were already there
In the space between the bed and dresser light
You said ‘Oh look what you’ve done,
The knot we tied has come undone,
Your dinner’s in the garbage with the worms.’
The reprimand is understated, reading more like a break-up than bereavement, and the suggestion of double meaning is heightened, weirdly enough, by Teague’s double-tracked vocals, which make it sound for a moment as if two different people are telling a similar but possibly conflicting story. The sense of a lover’s tiff only makes the following denouement all the more devastating:
You made a sound and ran
Past the dirty clothes and beads above the door
I tried to grab your hand
To let you know that you were worth dying for
It’s not so much the hint of helpless maytrdom on behalf of the narrator that nails this passage for me; it’s those dirty clothes and beads above the door. As people we don’t often experience profound loss as a meteor-sized wipe-out; we experience it as detail—hmmm, my mouth tastes like peanut butter and my best friend has just died; wow, I make such weird noises when I cry and I really should pay that electricity bill—and it’s in the disconnect between absence (incalculable) and presence (what is left, which is always too much) where grief settles itself. But only a really good writer could manage to suggest that within the comparative brevity of a lyric.
As I’ve said, I think Teague works best as a surrealist, and the real trick of surrealist art is relative dimension and distance: a perfectly-formed universe that is too small to reach into, full of details and just-frozen gestures which threaten to escape their frame. The more you look, the more you find, and the more things seem to depend on a precarious compositional balance. I’ve listened to “Came Home Dead” more times than I care to count in the past few weeks, and it still hasn’t lost its strange lustre. This story of an accidental death is studded with its own accidents: rustles, squeaks, and the disproportionate wwmmmphhh-muffle noise of somebody shifting about while in close proximity to a microphone. (At least, I think that’s what the noise is, but it sounds equally like a ghost breathing on to the tape). At the edges of the mix a woman sings, and there’s some half-buried movie dialogue as if a television was left on in the background. As a home recording (and I’m pretty sure this is one) the intimacy of the sonic space only adds to the domestic atmosphere of the song itself.
Here’s hoping that it doesn’t get re-recorded as a dense, 24-tracked epic any time soon.