52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #2

The Paper Chase – Hide The Kitchen Knives

(Southern Records, 2002)

Buy the album here

This is somehow the most twisted and the most musical moment in this entire blog. The Paper Chase was a band that revelled in distorting and choking notes until they died in front of you, yet celebrated melody with unbridled joy and delivered perfectly timed hooks as second nature. The domestic darkness at this record’s core is more frightening for all the catchiness and lush instrumentation, but it is the theme pulling the music towards a unifying central line that makes Hide The Kitchen Knives the band’s best work. While other albums, especially the band’s final release Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol.1, proved their musical ability and their acute vision of everyday demons, none of these works had such focus and single-minded intent. Hide The Kitchen Knives magnifies minute domestic details until they burst through their own cells, splattering the listener with emotional gore and aural distortion that will never wash off.

John Congleton is, simply put, the maestro behind this madness. For most people, he’s more likely to be known to them through his vast catalogue of work as a producer with acts as disparate as Saint Vincent and Baroness. His attention to detail as a producer clearly plays into the flow of this album and the richness of its sounds. Take “A Little Place Called Trust” as an example. Scraping into existence along the sharpening blades of the title’s kitchen knives and bolstered by the mumbles of what sounds like sampled news reports, this song displays all the diverse architecture of a John Congleton song where angles, curves, wood, stone, and glass clash repeatedly but somehow unify to create a powerful yet fragile family home. The distorted guitars jump over and are then swamped by discordant piano and bleating lambs (really). Behind this madness the deep percussion and thick bass provide steadier ground for the overly sweet melodies of Congleton’s voice, allowing their insidious hooks to take hold and making his cries of “you are not the innocent” unavoidable and frightening.

And “frightening” is the word needed to describe the portentous atmosphere and sickening rhythm section of “AliverAlungAkidneyAthumb”. Its opening repetition of a spoken word sample recounts the hypnotic power of cntrl-alt-delete-u but The Paper Chase aren’t hanging around on this one. Even with the gut-churning constancy of those plodding toms and bass, the pace is frantic once Congleton breaks his silence with, “how could you let it in your house and let it in your bed”. The lyrical flow is astounding and takes you on another tour of domestic terror replete with spiritual and physical metaphors yet always grounded in a grim reality. Signing off with the darkest delivery possible of the line, “drive carefully dear” transports us seamlessly into the song of the same name with its jammed out opening and pained vocals. These songs also share the lyrics, “my little nest of vipers”, a recurring technique in The Paper Chase’s songwriting drawing the listener into this dirty world of minute details and gigantic emotions. In fact, while there are amazing standalone songs, the impact of listening to the album as a single entity exponentially magnifies the intensity of each song, so as we drift into album closer “Out come the knives” we are hanging on every single word of the worrying and evocative tale Congleton tells:

did sweet daddy die square on your birthday

in some macabre-ish attempt to see you’d rue the day.

or appear in the end and be happy he made it back,

to be just in time to cut the cake and watch you

boil alive in your own butterscotch

Congleton’s expertise as a producer and performer creates the impression that the band simply stood mic’d up in a room for roughly an hour and just jammed this out in one take. And that’s an incredible feat when you consider the thick layers of instrumentation that make this production so lively and re-listenable. It also makes a mockery of trying to explain the greatness of this record one track at a time. There is only so much we can learn from isolating these tracks when the relationship they have with their neighbouring material is important and strong. I think the best I can do is to describe the sensations I have experienced while sitting/standing/dancing and listening to Hide The Kitchen Knives. Initially I felt the imagery of the lyrics pulling me in to the titular kitchen scene imagining my own stories of familial or romantic turmoil, while the live feeling of the production pulled me to the centre of the band’s rehearsal room. But more recently the record has felt like the soundtrack to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I feel myself being drawn near to delicate and detailed characters while the fear of a horrible crime lingers behind me at all times. And much like Capote’s novel, it is the attention paid to the extended reality of these stories that holds this power over the listener and made such an important record in my musical life.