"The Wheel Is Spinning In My Head" Maxwell Cumberland, IV – Village Vox
Jamison Wake is, allegedly and until recently, a former priest and heroic drinker. His one-man performance piece, The Wheel, which he calls an “album experience,” is a strange mix of the recorded music from his forthcoming album, projected companion visualizers, personal Super 8 footage, and prepared monologues. For the audience at his first preview in Manhattan, it was perhaps the most amateur, earnest, possibly manipulative, certainly complicated, and emotionally powerful experience – and I do mean experience – I’ve had in music in a decade. I don’t know what I witnessed, but I can’t stop revisiting it. Was it the music, operatic indie rock? The album sounds good and he's currently only playing the rough pre-mixed version, in media res, Life of Pablo style. The songs are earworms with the occasional auteur reach. But it’s the performance I can’t shake. The kinetic quaking energy of Jamison in the room. Was this Knausgaard transmuted into punkish auto-fiction theater as a poor replacement for therapy? The monologues recall Spaulding Gray less neurotic and polished, more sincere like a wounded Fred Rogers in your living room. They filled out the musical story and themes of the album but have a powerful life on their own: storytelling in the analog oral tradition. Was it the story of Jamison Wake’s hero’s journey through late capitalism and conquest Christianity, in the belly of the beast of Mammon, NYC? Or of his father, the Peter Pan at the Pentagon, the military's Top Lawyer? Was it the primal cycle of birth and aspiration, boys and fathers, dreamers and pirates, decay and death? Or was it in fact Jamison Wayne Galt, the man behind Jamison Wake, vowing to leave the parish and return to the last place he was a child in a gamble to be born again? And which was the persona? The playacting rock star, the performer, the reluctant priest, or the reluctant showboat? I didn’t know. I still don’t know. And I’m fairly certain neither does Jamison Wake. I can’t stop thinking about it. And feeling it. Blink, and you’ll miss it. but don't. It’s spinning around and around in my head, like a wheel.
ON BINDS
“…80’s new wave mixed with Kanye mixed with a heaping dose of hopeless romanticism, BINDS revels in its beautiful, seething melancholy. It tells a love story too, yes, but one that couldn’t be further from the bubblegum pop of Top 40s, one that throbs with longing and infatuation and then spins out into something harsher, truer, darker, deeper, something that captures the pain and beauty of spending decades lying next to a body you may never truly know…”
“BINDS tells the tale ‘of a lifelong relationship from beginning to end’—all in 32 minutes. As one might expect, it’s one hell of a ride, a story segmented into seven tracks with one-word titles, each varying in vibe but all sonically rich, enjoyable a la carte but even better when digested together, in sequence, as they combine to create a full-on listening experience—one we’ve gotten more and more out of with every listen.”
