Benjamin Shaw: I Got The Pox, The Pox Is What I Got

Thanks For All The Biscuits mp3 I Got The Pox, The Pox Is What I Got, Benjamin Shaw…. buy it

I’ve been meaning to review this little lo-fi EP for months now and I’ve had this weirdo album art in my file for ages and I had no idea what it went with until today. I got an email from Jamie over at “Audio Antihero: Specialists in Commercial Suicide…and A New kind of Awesome” (which frankly, is an especially cool little phrase) today reminding me about Benjamin Shaw. And ok, I’ll say it here and instantly regret it, but yes… those reminder emails do actually work because my mail box is so totally overrun with stuff and if it were a physical thing it would look like a tarpaper shack with holes in the walls and vermin running out and in and piles of rusted out, twisted, once-useful things making the tin roof bulge at weird angles. Because I have almost abandoned it to that degree, shamefully, it’s true.

But, Benjamin Shaw, … he is anything but abandoned and rusty. He is gorgeously simple and lovely and makes these little songs that you can sing along to and well, I’m smitten with this EP. Because like anyone who makes lo-fi music, he makes it appear so simple, but you all know what I’m going to say next, it’s not, of course. It’s the addition of the vibrating hum on “The Carpeteer” that takes that little ditty and makes it all the more interesting. Other tracks like the title one, “I Got The Pox, The Pox Is What I Got” rely on “interesting” lyrics, set to more typical folk music to catch our attention: “Sunday night, 11 o’clock and I don’t want to think of tomorrow. Grinding of teeth and a bottle of red that I’m pushing down sick with each swallow. I’m tired, I”m sick, and I want to go home and throw up all night for good reasons. I’ll turn up at night and say that I’m fine while picturing  your limbs in the freezer.” Well then….

Benjamin Shaw is one of the contributors on Filthy Little Angels’ Pavement cover album, Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement, I told  you about it here.  But it’s “Thanks For All The Biscuits” that catches my imagination. Perhaps it’s the dreamy, soundscapy intro. It might be the entrance of the kick drum at that perfect moment. I could be how the whole thing unwinds and unravels, gathering momentum until it picks up enough speed to simply collapse into itself: tambourine, guitar, drum, organ and back into that static/dreamscape again. You know me, I like the full-circle things of life, xoxo