Review: Jim Yoshii Pile Up, It's Winter In Here
This winter was hard. We had a car that leaked for the second winter in a row. I repeatedly took it down into Oakland to get it looked at. They never really fixed the leak but they put a drain in the bottom of the trunk so the water doesn't build up inside and turn the inside of the car into leasable swamp land. Often when I took the car down to get looked at, I had to walk back to the BART station in the early morning in the freezing cold in order to make it to work on time (and since I got laid off only two weeks later, I now realize I shouldn't have bothered).

During every single one of these walks, for some reason, Jim Yoshii Pile Up's It's Winter Here was in my discman. I'd seen JYPU live several times and had the album for months, but it wasn't until my life seemed to teeter on the precipice of despair that I realized how beautiful some of the passages on this album are. The shimmering layer of chords that dusts the middle of "Jetzt Mit Iodine" is the perfect soundtrack to walking into a deserted, run down neighborhood just after dawn, simultaneously pretty and terrifying. The melody of "Hello" builds on a simple bassline that grows in momentum into something almost desperate. Walking beneath an underpass I eerily lived out about half the events described at the beginning of "Monotonologue". As I faced impending unemployment, "Breakdown Championship"'s line "you ask me what's my greatest fear/well darling it's living here/earning 6.50 an hour" suddenly seemed less like a juvenile complaint and more like a distressingly real and valid problem. And anyway, the song includes a line about staring at a poster of Prince. And it's delivered without irony. Or the irony is so heavy that it's not ironic any more, it's just what it is.

There are people who will object to It's Winter Here as too bleak, too emotional, too indicitive of a personality willing to give in to the tightening spiral of desperation and fear wrought by bad luck, but maybe these people need to have more bad shit happen in their lives, and then they'll come around, and then it can be winter over there where they live too.

Labels: jim yoshii pile up, reviews