A Fan's Perspective
Gretel
by Jonny Walls
I have a secret. Believe it or not, life is full of magic. Well, magical moments anyway. These moments are such concentrated pleasure that they are almost too good to be true, and are literally too good to last. They are by very nature fleeting. They are the mere suggestion of something too great to be perceived; yet there is no denying the feeling when it strikes.
This feeling often comes in the form of nostalgia, when the heart and mind converge at last and pine after some lost era or instant. Sometimes it comes in dreams, a shapeless feeling too great for words, cruelly gone like steam the instant we wake.
Another harbinger of real life fantasy is music. This mysterious gift is King in the realm of the enigmatic. In this arena, it cannot be matched. Sometimes it is a song that immediately puts you back in 1996, or a key change that hits just as you burst onto an open stretch of road on the first warm day of the year.
The important point here, though, is that these are feelings. They cannot be created, concocted or contrived. At best we may smartly put ourselves in situations where these feelings are likely to strike, and wait. This is all we can do.
And so I find myself in a noisy dive bar on nine o’clock on a Sunday night. The neon sign out front is mostly gone and there are bars on the windows. Half of the crowd is either preoccupied with the pool table or drowning in some cheap domestic. But the band is in another world. They are spinning magic gold for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
And then it happens. The guitars and the drums stop. There is no music now but the bass line, slow and rich and full of sorrow. And suddenly, unexpectedly, the drunks and the rabble shut the fuck up. No sound lives now between the cracks of this sweet and sad song but silence. And everyone is united. We are one under the song of the two angels who float and sing over the melancholy bass and the lives of the damned who watch and listen.
No one speaks for the remainder of the song, and I find myself once again thrust into this ethereal place that I cannot find my own way into or out of. But it has come for me now and it is like being born, or waking up from a dreamless sleep. And as always, I am thankful. This marks the second time that Gretel, the banjo playing, saw bending, bucket-beating trio for whom this piece is written have helped to carry me there.
I could spend twice as long describing Reva’s nearly inhuman and impossibly soulful voice, or the sweet, soaring and almost playful harmonies from Melissa, or the brooding and unassuming presence of Phil and his half-rhythm, half-lead bass lines. I could marvel at how the aforementioned saws, buckets and banjo are somehow crafted into heartbreaking and joyful tunes that feel like both the fire and the snow. I could go in depth about the band’s acoustic guitar driven, folk reminiscences and the way the songs ebb and flow so naturally that the band may as well have been standing on stage bleeding, but I won’t.
Gretel is a band that must be experienced, live preferably, but any way will do. Look them up online, catch a show in your area, order a CD, do something. This band carries magic with them, and it shouldn’t be kept secret.
It is worth noting that these feelings can technically be simulated illegally, but these are mere imitations.
