Todd

Hope’s on the line.

I’m wondering where my money’s gone. I’m strolling past a takeaway, close to home, rummaging in torn pockets for chump-change enough to purchase some vein-clogging saturated fat-bleeding deep-fried thing; I’m finding two five-pence pieces and nothing more; keys on a ring not currency enough for a breaded chicken snack. And besides, without them where would I eat, let alone sleep and wash and play the pair of records in my left hand. Oh.

If you’re any sort of semi-regular gig-goer, you’ve been here: loaded-up on merchandise and only half regretting the decision to part with a percentage of what limited budget you have for the week in exchange for a record that you might never again have the opportunity to procure. I do this, sometimes; I did this, and now walk silently, passing the neatly trimmed hedges of my neighbours, peeking into their living room windows to see how the better-off arrange their not-from-Ikea furniture, Enablers’ latest split seven-inch a three-pound must-have that I had away without a second thought. Because some bands make a man act irrationally, spontaneously, yet only one single-minded way.

Some bands can wrap you up within their sound, their experience; you can live and breath their words and rolls and beats and strums and crashes and washes and crunches and riffs and amusing asides and cigarette draws and undulated wrists and nicotine trails and arched eyebrows and spittle-flecked lips and piercing eyes and curses and salutations and hallelujahs and half-tired half-inspired encores and second encores and more more more. Living and breathing Enablers is the only way to make sense of their songs, their works of unique modern sonic art, each chapter of an on-the-road, nomadic protagonist novella rising like the final few smoky sighs of a snuffed-out butt in a bar ashtray, its presence all-noticeable – in your nose and your eyes – but fleetingly so.

Yet the smell never quite washes from your clothes, if visits are repeated often enough.

Enablers’ albums to date – 2004’s End Note and this year’s Output Negative Space – are rarely-sighted sons of dog-eared poetry books and well-thumbed LP sleeves: Slint, The Birthday Party, Shellac, you get the intensity-and-control, the balance of, idea perfectly well. Yet when they allow themselves to be seen, and heard, in all their glory, the human senses are duped into adoration and fear, a fight-or-flee sensation from toe to ear lobe via nipple and fingernail; this is a confrontational band, a visceral beast of eight legs and one mouth that never quits, its stream of freeform hang-loose lyricism owing a debt in style, perhaps, to literary forefathers, yet contextually you’ve never felt anything like this.

Don’t look away, you think, or else you’ll feel it that bit closer; breath on your neck, a single digit lightly resting upon your shoulder – the right – beckoning you to spin around and meet a horror face on.

Only these horrors, they’re everyday-isms buried in graphic prose and built upon foundations of vividly intelligent language; they’re you, out for a drink too many, a think-nothing-of-it glance at a stranger a table left of your final chaser certain to have repercussions not even the wildest imagination could accurately visualise without first reaching the delirium felt when the body needs to sleep yet its master refuses to lie still. It’s in this near-dream world where Enablers’ music really lays roots, thick and twisted, fresh as dew yet as gnarled and ancient as the tallest oaks at the central core of the world’s most inhospitable forests; they’re the sounds of detachment and escapism laced with reality enough to anchor them in the waking world. It’s here, where eyes see things that aren’t there – or are they? – that words are seen emanating from that mouth; five senses or more blur into one and, for the duration of a set, all that can be done on the attendee’s part is the letting go. Fall headfirst and Enablers will catch you, off guard or en face.

Regurgitation comes at a price, and once crumpled notes find their way to alien palms, the Average Joe is free to go, to find their own way home rumbling belly in tow. Sleepless nights are a necessary evil of the comedown, that pre-slumber blurred-edges outlook the only view where a sort of salvation from the mediocrity of so much modern music touted as alternative can be successfully found. Enablers are the shadowy figure in the corner of your eye, in the corner of your room; you look at it directly and it vanishes, only to reappear a day later, somewhere else, a spindly spectre of the future you’re yet to be blindsided by. The future you’re sidestepping by darting from bar to bar, leading a hermit lifestyle with your home a hotel and your sole source of nourishment the bright lights of poorly-named fast-food outlets. Temporarily inspired by what you find in the unfocused margins, changing your ways seems so simple.

Yet the smell never quite washes from your clothes, because visits are repeated often enough. The money never lasts. Those rooms will never be yours. May as well take what you can, when you can. Don’t ever get old.

Photograph by Lars Knudson, from Enablers' MySpace page, here