Reindeer Armies

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

Phosphorescent at Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich (Sunday 5th June 2011)

“They tumble and fight, and they’re beautiful.”

The four of them stand staggered in front of me, watching the band that’s describing them so perfectly.

It’s my last night at university before I return home. I’m watching Phosphorescent with my closest friends. The people who held on. The people who allowed me to hold on.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. We’ve had our differences. We’ve fought and fallen out. But the fire that surrounded us ultimately served to cement our friendship. That one line from the song ‘Wolves’ encapsulates everything I found at university. Everything it means to me.

Intimacy. Struggle. Awe.

And I’m listening to the music, wondering at the symmetry of it all. Life really does move in circles. This has happened before.

I discovered Phosphorescent - the music of Mathew Houck - in my first year at university: winter, returning from a late-afternoon lecture, sun set, sky dark, room cold, homesick, and I’d play the magnificent album Pride louder than I probably should have done in retrospect. Not to dissipate my melancholia, but to blast it. To envelope myself in it, in the hope that it would burn itself out quicker.

Stopping a burning oil well with an explosion. Starving it of oxygen.

And it worked every time. I blanketed the album on my life, and it would map together so perfectly that my anxiety would become more manageable. More cinematic. More stylised. I’d become a finite character I could analyse. I was able to take my troubles with a pinch of salt.

Houck has the heart of a country singer. And it’s just as torn and beat up as the hearts belonging to the greats of the genre. But he’s re-imagined the sound and revivified it, and he plays it with the energy and insight of a young man living in modern times. His music isn’t dusty homage; it simply borrows the best, most visceral subjects and motifs of country music, and whittles them into something more seductive.

So, with the help of Pride, I was able to move on. I become sure of myself and less dependant on Phosphorescent’s melancholy majesty.

But yesterday I wandered into Norwich Arts Centre on a whim – a place I rarely wander into – and the first thing I saw was a poster telling me that I should see a Phosphorescent show the next evening.

Now I find myself standing in a converted church on my last night, and Mathew Houck has returned with a new album. Not returned, he’s been around. But I need assurance once more, and he’s got a map I can borrow. My friends’ silhouettes quiver in the corner of my mind, and I hope I don’t forget this.

“They tumble and fight, and they’re beautiful.”

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