DREAM SEQUENCE: "HAZY" SQUAREWAVE

"HAZY"

SQUAREWAVE

SQUAREWAVE: 
Patrick Connaughty: Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards
Biff Blumfumgagnage: Violin, Vocals
Jeff Jagielo: Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards
Alivia Kleinfeldt: Bass Guitar, Vocals
Brendan Manley: Drums

All music and lyrics by Jeff Jagielo/Patrick Connaughty

Produced by Jeff Jagielo/Patrick Connaughty
Released September 5, 2020

There has always been a quality that has made Squarewave exist as if completely out of time.

Squarewave, the Madison, WI originated collective made up of longtime friends and primary singers/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Jeff Jagielo and Patrick Connaughty, and built from the ashes of their previous band Ivory Library, is a one-of-a-kind outfit that truly defies classification, especially within our current musical landscape. In actuality, any classifications and descriptives that I could offer to you would never feel to be as expansive as they music they create and the atmosphere they evoke. And in doing so, they do not fit comfortably within any genre, or for that matter, any real time period within these 50 plus years of the rock and roll era. The elements are disparate and can arrive via more traditional and futuristic venues and instruments, yet only appear to serve the needs and dictations of the songs themselves.   

All of that being said, in trying to describe or to give to you the easiest musical comparisons that I could possibly offer in order to deliver somewhat of a picture into Squarewave's musical universe, I would bring up Pink Floyd. Or better yet, Pink Floyd if they merged their sensibilities with Explosions In The Sky perhaps as Squarewave's aesthetics contain qualities that house much introspection and esoteric, ephemeral soundscapes that drift, surround and envelop in warm, yet distinctly unsettling and cavernous domains. 

With "Hazy," the band's fifth release, Squarewave continues upon their fully intoxicating and somnambulistic path but with a collection of songs that feel tighter in construction and more direct in their urgency. But, everything we need to know is set within the album's title as we are hearing the soundtrack of how it feels to view, to experience, to feel as if through a filter, a fog, that inexplicable terrain that exists at the point somewhere between waking, falling asleep and dreaming. Squarewave's "Hazy" is an album that straddles the precarious space between worlds of consciousness. 

Like a shroud falling over the proceedings, Squarewave's "Hazy" opens with the dark slumber of "When I Sleep." With acoustic guitars that sound like eyelids fluttering, and more electric textures that suggest the inevitable heaviness and closure, Squarewave enters like the proverbial Sandman, ominously taking us to never, never land. 

"You want it all to stop, but it won't
Abide by what you ask
'Cause it knows
You can't hold it down 
You can't keep control
And it moves with the same name
And then hides
Deep inside your veins
Is a lie
That you can tell yourself
That you can keep control

When I sleep
I just have the same dream" 

With a combination of blues guitar, spine tingling violin, a drowsy yet insistent beat and Jeff Jagielo's vocals all slowly swirling and fading into the ether, "When I Sleep" makes for a most unsettling album opener made all the more eerie as it does truly approximate the feeling of falling asleep and how we can be aware of our consciousness slipping away, leaving echoes of the waking world behind. 

Lyrically, what struck me was the usage of the subjective "it," a well placed plot hole designed for us to fill. In the case of this song's narrative, is "it" guilt? Or shame? Or some other dark secret we can bury while awake but otherwise takes hold at night? In its own way, the song feels like an update or the sinister cousin of a song like Cheap Trick's "Dream Police" and the effect is just as disturbing as it is intoxicating. 

The nocturnal mood continues with "Quartermoon," a song of a night bathed under the natural light of the titular moon. "Point your headlights to the sea/I'll be there for you/Can you be there for me?" invites Patrick Connaughty. "With no direction to this place, where your tragedy and loss are all erased/The silver moon will shine tonight/I made it here, I'm waiting for its light/Nothing hurts when you're around/If the quartermoon is up and I am coming down."  

For a song that it filled with the emotions of warmth, romanticism and healing, through equal parts fellowship and narcotic enhancements. Squarewave offsets the communion of the proceedings with a sonic palate that is darkly foreboding as it conveys the overwhelming sensation contained in the power of natural awe and being in its presence.

Over a hushed acoustic guitar and Jeff Jagielo's quietly quivering vocal, we are given the fragile beauty of "Lemonade." A delicate portrait of one who is "Ice cream sweet and so naïve" who has "Never met a lie you don't believe" and possesses the ability to transform "All life's lemons" into the glory of the song's title is simultaneously an interior declaration of love to the precarious point where the heart blooms and breaks. 

Again, Squarewave conjures several layers making this transcend the boundaries of a standard love song for we are unsure as to precisely whom the song is being addressed. Is it from parent to child? Lover to lover or even ex-lover. Or it is the idea of a person, a perception or  someone who does not exist? The vulnerability of the song aches to the point where it can feel as if these are private thoughts we should not be privy to. And by the song's final moments, that ache grows to warning for can such guilelessness exist in this world?  

If Squarewave were to ever issue a single, then "Light Of You" would be the obvious contender from this album. This is a magical selection, where guitars, violin and what sounds like a mellotron congeal into a musical form where darkness somehow sounds as bright and as welcoming as the morning sun after a long, dark night. 

Fueled by Biff Blumfumgagnage's Halloween night violin, Squarewave returns to the spooky dreamworld with "Open Wide," where all of the buried thoughts of the day come out to playfully torment during slumber.

"You try to close your eyes and sleep tonight
But you can't tell if your dreams are real
These patterns move across your eyes and form themselves
Into a lie that's yours to keep
And not reveal
You carry it across the sand
Wait until you understand
This desert doesn't care 
If you stay here or make it through
You see it coming but you cannot step aside
You know better but your arms are open wide"    

To close the first half of the album in this manor, essentially just as it began, Squarewave have weaved a disquieting tapestry of themes, emotions and on this track, a gradually enveloping sound that threatens to overtake just before settling down again. Like some recurring dreams, "Open Wide" feels like the shadowy presence of thoughts and deeds wished to be forgotten but the subconscious is clearly not finished with. And so, you march forwards, whether you want to or not to face those awaiting demons.

"Open Wide" feels like being slowly submerged, and then overtaken, in quicksand.

The second half of "Hazy" continues in altered states of confusion with the conceptually turbulent "Turn It Off," where fitful sleep unearths a series of juxtapositions and conundrums that cannot be unwound to building frustration and anxiety, as evidenced in the song's churning rhythm, vocal effects that ping-pong between speakers and a more than appropriate abrupt ending.

"I'm going to Guatemala," announces Jagielo in the surprisingly wintry escapade of "The Other Side." Over chiming guitars, soaring violin and a propulsive synthesizer pattern suggesting movement and then, travel, we are out of the dark and again, vibrantly into the light, slipping and sliding on the snow and ice in a triumphant respite from the agitation and disorder that has preceded it. 

The final stretch of "Hazy" returns to the insular with the meditative "Idiots All," a Brian Wilson/John Lennon-esque lament for a soul out of step with a world that is indifferent at best and intolerant at worst. 

"How come I'm the only one who can understand 
The way I feel today?

Long before the rooster crows at dawn
With stars in the sky
When I was a bright new child
With a brand new ball
Innocent all...

...When will the gun shot drone
Be a wake up call
To say 'Here we go'
100,000,000 kids
Standing around the fire burning black
Screaming America"  

The existential questions and soul sickness conveyed by Patrick Connaughty is palpable in its earnestness and outrage and again, Biff Blumfungagnage's crying violin perfectly accents the plea making this song Squarewave's "I'm Just Not Made For These Times" or "Imagine." 

Internal tensions and the dream world emerge again with the penultimate "Not Asking," where the sensation of finally awakening is just this far out of reach, especially as Jagielo sings of finding himself within a "dark aquarium" upon supposedly waking. And yet, the metaphors all feel to connect to the album's earlier selections of exploring the soul's darker sides at its most insular state of consciousness from frustration to potential acceptance. 

"Hazy" concludes with the mournful "I Can Not Find You," a seven minute plus finale of ethereal longing and loss.

"There is a light on the horizon
That you are always taken to
That never brings you any closer
But always remains in your view

There is a sad eye 
On the high cliff
Keeping watch over the high shore
There is a longing
To its beacon
Whose warning welcomes home

That I can not find you anymore
I can not find you anywhere" 

The summing up of the album's themes and soundscapes arrives at a point where our darkest foibles, mistakes, and fears converge, not in a moment of resolution but of a resounding, seemingly unavoidable loss.  

Squarewave's "Hazy" is a dark ride unquestionably but it is also one that is elegant, involving, immersive, enveloping and enriching to experience. For all of its troubling themes and commentary, it is an album of supreme warmth, from the manner in which the music itself has been realized and presented to the empathy contained within its content. 

As for the aforementioned comparison to Pink Floyd, again, it is not as if Squarewave have somehow conjured the now iconic sound of that band for themselves (although, it is truly eerie at how much Jeff Jagielo's vocals evokes Pink Floyd's David Gilmour at times) but it is really more in the approach to their specific aesthetic. 

With Squarewave, what amazes me as I listen, especially as I have seen the band perform live on one occasion, is how they have formulated the ability to take the various instrumentations of guitars, basses, drums, keyboards, from acoustic to electric and synthetic, and merge everything until all that arrives is a certain voluminous sound where it is often difficult to fully discern precisely what you are hearing. These are songs that are meticulously designed and constructed yet adhere themselves to the lyrical content and thematic concept of the band in a fashion that is intentionally murky. Sounds phase into each other and back again. Instruments begin in one place and phase into another region entirely, often giving one a feeling of being displaced or lost in an aural fog or even a dream.

With "Hazy," Squarewave has delivered an experience that indeed feels like a song cycle that approximates a night of fitful sleep and being overtaken by one long dark dream or a series of dreams within dreams...and rarely, any of the good ones. The effect is eerie, to say the least, and more truthfully, it also does feel perfectly aligned with our current times, when our collective mental health is relentlessly taking a beating due to the mounting stress and anxiety of this year. Constantly affecting us during our waking hours, playing out in our subconscious during our dreaming hours, Squarewave's "Hazy" finds itself disturbingly attached to this moment in time. This is not only music for introverts or the empathic. This is music to have a pandemic by. 

As with the band's previous albums, the songs of "Hazy" are all deliberately paced, succulently created to surround the listener. What has changed for me this time around is somewhat akin to what several progressive rock bands of the 1970's achieved as they advanced into the 1980's, especially the likes of Genesis and King Crimson (with whom violinist Biff Blumfumgagnage has toured as a guitar tech--what?!). 

Without sacrificing the aesthetic and atmosphere, the songs of Squarewave's "Hazy" are, perhaps, less elongated and considerably more direct in their songwriting and construction. Every sound exists in its precisely determined place and miraculously sound just loose enough to showcase the seemingly effortless ebb and flow--like the patterns of flowing raindrops as illustrated upon the album's striking cover art. 

The performances throughout the album are stellar and frankly should serve as a tutorial of how to utilize the recording studio as an instrument, because it is jaw dropping to realize that a sound this voluminous emerged from the efforts of largely three people. Blumfumgagnage's violin adds superlative mood and tension in its more arcane approach while what Jagielo and Connaughty have constructed are shifting soundscapes in which the elements of folk, country, blues, art rock and electronica flow within and around each other. 

It should be noted that Bassist Alivia Kleinfeldt and Drummer Brendan Manley, who themselves comprise the band Dash Hounds, do not appear on this album essentially due to geographical logistics as they do not reside in the same cities as their bandmates. And yet, what Jagielo and Connaughty have devised truly feels as if the two are present in the same room as the rhythm section upon the album undeniably contains their influence. 

In fact, the drum tracks throughout, all of which are achieved through samples and programming, provides a MASTER CLASS lesson in how to create synthetic drums that feel as if there is a living, breathing drummer in the room. I often felt, and still feel, as if Manley was actually present in the recordings, so much so that I have asked Jagielo repeatedly how the drum sound of the album was created, to which he expressed that their times together performing live fully informed how the tracks were born, thus cementing the connections forged and the essential nature of Kleinfeldt and Manley's presence as official band members. 

Furthermore, all of the displacement and shifting sands completely serve the fullness of the album as a whole. Squarewave's "Hazy" is a collection that embraces everything that we can see, touch and feel whether if it is there or not, valid or imagined, yet all of it is undoubtedly, emphatically, incontrovertibly real.