There are some albums that just pick you apart at the seams. Sonically and thematically, music that makes you fold in on yourself, shining a light towards the dark corners of your soul. Distant Reader’s Place of Words Now Gone is one of those albums.
The brainchild of Berkeley, California songwriter, Emmerich Anklam, under the Distant Reader moniker, the wordsmith has gone completely under the radar over the last decade with several releases under his belt.
Utilising his well-read knowledge through song, Anklam’s rich, tender brand of songcraft is unlike many in this space, somehow managing to sound both skeletal and wholesome at the same time. It’s uncanny, but on Place of Words Now Gone, Anklam executes these ideas to reach maximum results.
Place of Words Now Gone is all about space. Conjuring up the same kind of atmospheres the likes of Willy Vlautin and Richard Ford have engineered through many a downtrodden character, Anklam’s latest set of songs are underpinned by a narrative of loss and pain and the destruction it leaves for those left behind.
Like a collection of short stories bound together by nagging spirits, Anklam’s tales are raw and graphic, and it begins with Emergency. A tender, finger-pinking concern that is centred on a single parent barely keeping their head above water through the death march of nine-to-five (“The power’s going out, I have to sign out now”).
That march comes to an end on Landscape With No Near End. Pulsating with panic as guitars build like the tremors Anklam references through the song, it’s just the first moment where image and story entwine. Later, mountains masquerade the community that is the main focus of this album. That community, crumbling under the weight of despair from the loss of one of their own (“Who says the past is all there is?“).
Distant Reader - Place of Words Now GoneThe protagonist’s tears drip into Outpost. Emotionally unmoored, Anklam uses environment and landscape as foils to unravel pain between two people communicating from different worlds. (“I feel my voice fade every time I breathe”). For those who have lost a close one, this kind of borderless, haunted transmission is deeply relatable.
That same “grey vapor” contaminates Ten Houses. Accompanied by lush lap steel arrangements from producer Andrew Weathers, Ten Houses finds the protagonist assessing abandoned buildings within said community while spirits weave in and out, ultimately leaving their mark.
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Delicately arranged, Porch Light echoes similar sentiments. At the belly of sadcore’s vortex, it’s a brand of melancholy that bites and suffocates to unlistenable proportions. Meanwhile, From High Remove involves another faint pulse of a life from another world, this time passing through the lead character like an electric shock.
As devastating as Emergency, closing track One Day sees Anklam engineer the bookends of complete emotive devastation. With inflections of lap steel and soft synths creating the kind of poignant backdrops such themes command, One Day is a moment that frames inexplicable loss. Those left behind, too trauma-damaged to tackle the heaviest burden of all.
It’s these moments that change a person, and through his cast of characters, Anklam’s beautifully fragile stories somehow manage to mirror these events in deep, unsettling ways, making Place of Words Now Gone something likened to a scab being ripped from a healing wound.
Place of Words Now Gone is out now via Lily Tapes and Discs. Purchase from Bandcamp.
