Paul Bergmann - The Other Side - Édition numérotée

Paul Bergmann’s latest record swoops in with triumphal mourning, those first, fist-swinging slide-guitar chords and splashy, spaced-out drums courtesy of guitarist Stephen Heath (LA Takedown, Weyes Blood) and drummer Dylan Ryan (Ether Feather, Man Man). With smoke hanging in the air, sweet sorrowful notes descend into the album’s title track— The Other Side—a deathmask of a song that mournfully laments how “No one’s perfect / I wish they were / I need them to be / but they aren’t…”

For some time, Paul has been writing and singing as if from a vantage point far into the future; as though uncovering rather than composing his own body of work. To date, his twelve releases have ranged broadly across the landscape of the indie singer-songwriter. Early work in folk-pop, recorded while signed with Fairfax Recordings, has found its way into TV and film, but to dip into Paul’s work at random is to discover many different versions of the same artist. This scruffy folk punk, electro-piano torch crooner, analog psychedelian, and, occasionally, strident Neil Young disciple par excellence has crisscrossed the country in concert in support of one project or another, opening for the likes of Angel Olsen and Lou Barlow, selling out the historic Cairo Jazz Club in Egypt. Such peregrinations have concretized Paul’s thematic obsessions over the years: the life, and death, of the creative type; human desire; aging; the follies and false promises of stature and fame. In his relentless œuvre-building, Paul has amassed an especially articulate kind of existentialism: what it means to persist, and to create, in a world which dies in the near distance. In The Other Side, his latest reckoning with life and imminent dissolution, he forces a truce with our collective lack of an afterlife.