East River Pipe - What Are You On

Sex, drugs… and the Home Depot?!?! Sounds more like a PR nightmare or bad theatre than pieces of a musical puzzle. Yet for F.M. Cornog this, more or less, is actually the case. Once a vagrant whose alcoholism had him sleeping in a train station in Hoboken, he’s now a full time employee of the home improvement chain, is married with an adopted child, and (perhaps most importantly for our present purposes) also releases records under the moniker East River Pipe. Any mention of a major corporation will probably send any indie fan running for cover, but thankfully Cornog’s music is anything but commercial. It harkens more to the isolation and desperation of his past than the routine stability implied by his present. Peopled with drug addicts, intellectual poseurs, and loners, in many ways it’s the dirty underbelly of the American dream - a country full of clutter, framed in static and set to the measured indolence of pneumatic guitars and keyboards, whose inhabitants feel more at ease with things than each other. At its worst, What Are You On? retreats into juvenile high-mindedness. The Dylanesque “what does T.S. Eliot know about you” has him sounding as pretentious as the pseudo-intellectuals he rails against, and “shut up and row” is a clumsy poke at the machinery of the modern Christian movement, describing its god as a glorified slave driver surrounded by nuclear bombs, dollar bills, and beautiful girls. At his best, however, Cornog invests his observations of the ordinary with a undeniable elegance. “Life is a Landfill” takes a goofy metaphor and sends it skyward with “black dove filled memories” that whisper “Come back, darlin,’" making for an effect that is simultaneously ludicrous and enchanting, so that you don’t know whether to smile or sigh. In “trivial things” he lumps college girls on cell phones with a rat with a chicken wing, and “some dreams can kill you” has children running “down cobblestone streets/ with light-up sneakers on their feet/ next to suicide cases/ and thumbtack schemes.” These tunes are like watching everyday life unfold before you in slow motion, its imperfections intact in all their smutty, granular glory. They’re also proof positive that, whatever else he might be on these days, music has become Cornog’s main fix. [www.mergerecords.com]