The urban ghost songs of Arrival of Fawn - by N.L. Belardes

It's Tuesday night at Riley's. Ty Elam tells dark urban tales of loathing, of spent spirits who curse the living in vivid reflections of haunting; his songs are musical tales from a writer who sings his prose; who feels the dark words of urban vampiricism in the very water he drinks, in the people who stumble across his path, in the family who has trodden him, sucked life, and cast the remaining residue of it in a mythical shadow, dark like a Transylvanian sunset onto his modern day high-tech music. He has to scream his vocals. That’s the only way this Bakersfield rocker can spill his blood-prose onto the souls of his listeners; listeners who feel his vocals and the music accompanying like a stone-in-hand chill. That’s Arrival of Fawn, a hardcore experimental band with a lyrical prose twist. Ty sings as if he is an aged vampire, left over from a lyncanthrope/vampire brawl. He sits in a dark corner telling you all about it, and why such a surreal path is so violent and so... real. That is reality isn’t it? The heartaches, the drugs of many a past, the beer in the veins, the senseless death of loved ones, the stories wanting to pour drunken over the dark wooden floor of an Irish pub… the normality of it to many a soul…





I saw Ty before Arrival of Fawn’s set. We talked about urban vampires crawling from the bowels of a modern day Boston-like setting; 8th Century beasts forced to move like a gypsy enclave from home to home, wherever that is. Does Ty relate? I don’t know Ty. We just met. But I do see the stories in his eyes, the delicate sentences thrown out in a smooth questioning of the human spirit, of resilience in surviving the day-to-day in this modern urban world… even in a rural-urban setting like Bakersfield. This was Ty Elam last night: screaming in the darkness, ignoring as best he could the drunken stare and screams of those who tried to ruin the show but couldn’t… there was pity in Ty’s eyes. He understood the drunkenness that could be so bloodless… another victim of today’s vampiric society. And Ty running away, misunderstood, leaving the music floating behind him as if he had just for a moment run from the ghost of his father and bolted the door behind him. I can still hear his laughter as he passed by where I stood, so ghostly and sweating into the darkness of the adjoining room…

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Wednesday, April 20, 2005. You can leave your response.