and the implications that your implicated
on Lotto by tagabow and spoilers for Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I am a terrible flyer. Before my first flight, on a school trip to Washington D.C. the summer after 8th grade, I was shaking with fear. I was nervous because I just knew the plane would explode. My history teacher’s husband took my aside and told me that he gets nervous flying as well, but that whenever he boards a plane, he touches the metal exterior and it calms his nerves. I’ve done that every flight since, I try to dig my fingers into the metal and it hasn’t helped. But I’ve kept doing it out of fear of what will happen if I stop. I’m worried what Doug Dulgarian describes on the closer of They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s new album Lotto will happen. That the pilot will come over the radio and announce we aren’t guaranteed to land. That I’ll be forced to talk to a God I can’t decide if I believe in and beg him to let me return safely to the ground.
That song is called “herpim,” which I can only assume is an intentional misspelling after googling it to find out if I was missing a reference to scripture and only being shown results for heroin. I imagine Dulgarian named it that because he’s had too many experiences that feel like a jet crash while on the drug. He describes as much on the album opener, “the chase,” where we find him stealing razors to fuel his high and gazing at his high body through his girlfriends eyes seeing “the me she remembers.”
Lotto is bookended by moments of absolute destitution. It reminds me of the beginning and ending of Martyr! by Kevah Akbar. The book opens with Cyrus on his bed, covered in piss, staring at a light that just flickered, begging God to do it one more time to convince him the first flicker was the sign he’d been asking for. Cyrus doesn’t get that sign in the moment, but gets clean anyways and spends the book reckoning with the fact that he has survived when so many he deems more deserving haven’t. The book ends on what I believe to be that second sign Cyrus was asking for, confirmation that he is alive for a reason. That’s what the plane graciously landing on “herpim” reads to me as, a reminder at the end of a record full of doubts and struggles with believing this is worth it, we’re here for a reason.
The rest of Lotto is achy music. The kind of ache like when I yearned to touch my girlfriend’s pair of leather pumps but fought it because I didn’t want to admit that I just wanted to feel a scrap of femininity. This music is full of that kind of sad, desperate yearning for something else than numbness in the face of life. That’s all I feel from the moment the guitar starts playing that mournful melody on “sour diesel” through the end when layers of Dulgarian’s vocals pile on top of each other begging to “let me love you like I don’t” and to “sing a song in cursive slowly.” The same feeling comes to me during “american food,” when the vocals of “tell me there’s a better one / and I’ll go get my gun” are tuned to the point of being nondescript, just murmurs of need over acoustic guitar and record scratches. Then there is “rl stine” where Dulgarian sings of routine, of stopping in the bodega and seeing the man he buys cigarettes for.
It takes a lot to recontextualize Fugazi, it takes a lot for a band to pluck something from the D.C. heroes and make it their own, but TAGABOW do it here with a cover of the demo “slo crostic.1” Following “rl stine,” the song lumbers around the bassline, like working through the rest of the day after the trip to the bodega. It’s a moment of getting caught up in the day and it’s gorgeous.
I don’t really have a conclusion. Lotto has just, very quickly, become one of my favorite records of the year because in Dulgarian’s specificities there is a well2. Please give it a spin and see what you can draw from it.
this one is huge for a bitch like me.
Shallowater mentioned.