Larkin Grimm: Parplar

Dear Larkin,

Your latest album has been on some seriously heavy rotation lately (in more ways than one), but I already posted one song off Parplar, so this time I’ll only spread the words:

It’s funny how a privileged son so freely inflicts pain
How those who’ve known no suffering are carrying the stains
Of bitter, nihilistic hate, indifference and disdain
Long ago, I trusted you, I never will again
I’ve turned my little head against the wicked world you’re in

So there you are, I hope that you are suffering and lost
I hope you feel the hopelessness and you can’t bear the cost
Of being an ungrateful shit who never had a cause
Who never starved and never hid, ain’t never felt the frost
Of cold winds blowing on your face and you don’t have a coat
Of love that offers no escape and tightens around your throat

Your friends have all forgot your name, your lovers all denied
That you were ever part of them when they gave up and died
I hope you’re feeling powerless inside their grinding jaws
I hope you’re feeling helpless and I hope you feel their claws
I hope the wind has marked your face and you don’t have a hope
You’re drifting free above the ground gently stretching out your rope

Yes! Punish me! Rain your righteousness down upon me… wipe my conscience clean…

It’s often said that music is a healer. It’s not. But when you’ve been scraping the bottom with your teeth for a couple of years, the crushing weight of the idea of love straddling your back as your heart, a limp and impotently flaccid muscle, refuses to give as much as a flutter, a strong and confident woman singing and clapping the defiantly joyous refrain, «You’ll never get to Heaven when you die!» lifts you up, just for a moment. But a moment is all you need.



Not even after years of collecting transsexual tart cards did I question my heterosexuality like the first time I was in a room to witness Devendra Banhart
play—that most beautiful creature on Earth, his alien and inaccessible flow of mystic creativity hidden beneath that angelic face and inviting beard (just made for foetal nesting)… For the first time, I appreciated all the women dreaming of laying bare and laying down before the stars.

Then I heard you, Larkin, and I was unable to resist your calm intrusion. Just look at that photo at the top—across those vengeful Medusa locks and into those eyes, «psychotic» only because there’s no bottom as you fall into their dark wells, and people who fear a lack of boundaries take such endlessness to be psychotic.

But you and I know it’s divine. «Don't you pluck me out of your dear eye where I am curling up to die…» Who are you, Larkin, with your petty, devouring rage indiscernible from your magnanimous, enveloping love?

And I wonder, did I hang out with the same whores who you befriended, down in Bangkok? Did they protect you from violence? Did they turn on you and attack? Did they show you their secret places? Did they shed tears as they mumbled about being nothing?

Larkin, did you ever have to wait for some stranger to finally bring reality home to you—to feel at last the embrace of having the brutal truth, delivered so tenderly:

Who told you you’re going to be alright?
Who said that thing to you,
«You’re going to be all right?»
Well, they were wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong
In my mind you are already gone

Could it really be? A woman to finally see through me?

And so I take all my hurts and dysfunctions, the lifelong rage and incurable loneliness, and I place them in the warm and clammy, filthy feral fist that is your paw, for you to crush, pitilessly and irreversibly—or do as you like. Then I’ll giddy-up and ride that cyclone all alone while you break my bones, ride it through the crack while you ride my back, ride it with love while you boil my blood… We’re all going to die anyway, so I’ll let you kill me nice, the music that your words take the shape of gently stretching out my rope.

And if anyone ever asks me why I've written this creepy review—because they've yet to appreciate what makes you stand apart, and miles above, all these other «creative people» dabbling in song—I'll just point out to them that none other could ever rhyme «Little Mother Mary riding on your unicorn» with «it's getting kind of hairy wishing that you'd never been born». Every strike of the hammer dulcimer is like the golden light that hammered truth into my head, showing me—in the sounds of strings and bells, desire and revenge that lures me into your universe—reality at last, only to find it's all a fantasy.

O mama, be my host!

Larkin Grimm, I love you like no other.



Which is why I’m strongly urging anyone who’s read this far to go and purchase your masterpiece, Parplar, right this minute.