Pony and Rider

        ROBEDOOR  ROBEDOOR  ROBEDOOR

There are many and frequent times in a day when I’m left with an assaulted mind.  When my calm meditated ego, secure in its choice of clothes and therefore cool with being cool, is disturbed by the belligerence of bad style and bad culture.   When my vision for good taste is choked by the fumes of a lecherous red ogre, four wheel drive turbo diesel toy truck, accelerating at bucking speed to the next stop sign a hundred metres away, my soul lets out another long sigh, further deflating its drafty fortifications.

Today I picked up my daughters from their day care.  While loading them into the bike trailer, a father I had not met before picked up his kid- her: typical mall dressed four year old.  Him: cage fighting chic with a long goatee beard that aged thrash metal men grow in place of their balding barnets.  Christ, I thought.  He probably braids that shit.  And somewhere deep inside of me a single solitary strand of microscopic compassion peeled away, exfoliating from my soul.  I wheeled my bike and trailer passed his accountant grey 2012 Kia sports utility vehicle and stood up to weight the right pedal.  I got going and took a look behind me to check the kids and then a slab of my humanitarian faith came carving away like a solemn collapsing serac.  On the rear window of this guy’s realtor/yoga mom/lawyer/by-law officer, mediocrity styled vehicle, taking up one quarter of the whole thing, was a decal of a skull wearing a wehrmacht helmet, a nazi helmet.  And when that automatic transmission, driven with an ineffectual dream-punch anger, throttled with the gusto of a man hug passed me by, it sang a song of a crashing culture and a confused people.

I have been (for most of my life) entertaining the jeering inclination to write a novel.  Lately, I’ve thought of writing a book about pure happiness.  I’m led to believe this has not been done.  The pursuit of happiness, yes.  But pure beginning to end bliss, apparently not.  I think in my novel the protagonist will exercise something like a militant dada scourge on the world.  He will take branches from felled trees, cleared to let the passing motorist see the new chain hotel off the highway and attempt to trash vehicles sitting at stop lights that assault his sense of style.  I’m guessing goatee guy will be giving my protagonist, a right fucking shit-kicking.  At least that’s what he’ll tell the boys over the barbecue.   Is this what art is increasingly for?  Is art now more than ever, a battle cry against the cultural rot that has set in?  Who the fuck knows.  But it might well be the case for me.  And others.  Perhaps, Robedoor.

So, I play records.  I’m no DJ (although I would be into it).  But, I buy and play vinyl.  Often DJ’ing to myself when the kids are in bed, some red wine, or chilled tequila (like now), sometimes a spliff.  We are living in a golden age for music.  The record companies are done dictating what we can get.  The world is open for business and with the torrents of shite coating us, come tiny sparkling flecks of beauty and purity. 

Robedoor!  Enter the fucking saviour that all ye cannot yet tell tis thy golden balled medium to universal openings in yer miiiinds.  Robedoor exist, framed for me by the north american grotesque gullet.  They are an antidote (for a few) to the poison that drips in rivulets of pollution down the walls of our cheaply constructed homes, in through the architecture of turn-around profits, the brightly coloured litter on the streets and the dog owners, faithfully picking up their pet’s shit, to surreptitiously leave the bagged and nasally silent crap in a blackberry bush.  Fuckers.

Hey, I’m on board with goatee guy about Slayer circa 1986.  That shit sound-tracked my affected teenage fight for anything that cleared up my zits.  And I revisit those sounds on occasion.  I can even plot a course between Slayer and Robedoor.  But as I approach the not quite reality of being forty (I am my parents), and my musical consumption becomes constant, I have discovered in Robedoor a band that I cannot claim to be the best that you or I have ever heard.  But what Robedoor have done, is made some music that has shot glowing, radiant tendrils of noise through my ears and into my spinal core.

Parallel Wanderer off their Too Down to Die record is a single side of tar that eviscerates my person and brings me along (when the kids are in bed) into their quest for flight.  There are so many non essential things to say about this record because it JUST IS.  Robedoor for me are a commitment.  When I flick through the records, sometimes I often skip the Robedoor, because once I start, like good Welsh mushrooms, I know I’m in for a little while.

And, when you take Welsh mushrooms, you see the world as it should be seen-  On an ancient coastal hill, with the Irish Sea drawn out below, blustering and foaming, staring at the green of the early autumn grass thinking, that you’ve never seen something so beautiful as that pulsing emerald life force.  As you know it should be seen everyday that you walk.

MARYMARY.