Hypatia Lake
w/Nordic, the Terror Sheets, Deborah Bartley
Fri Aug 15, Sunset, 9 pm, $7.
Once upon a time, in a dusty little town named Norman, Oklahoma, there lived a band called Hypatia Lake. The band was mostly happy, but early in the year 2000, it woke up, looked outside, and realized that the vast expanse of prairie rolling out on all sides was oppressive and limited. The three members--singer/guitarist Lance Watkins, drummer Randy Skrasek, and guitarist Jared Hill--packed all their belongings into a van and set out on a quest to find inspiration. They endured many trials along the way, but eventually arrived in Seattle, met up with bassist Shane Browning, and landed softly between the angular pathos of Radiohead, the swirling psychedelia of later-era Mercury Rev, and the hazy guitar distortion of Ride and Slowdive.
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Though it may seem contrived, there is a reason why the text above reads like a second-grade primer. It's actually a way of demonstrating the narrative philosophy that drives Hypatia Lake, the very real band described in the above story. Since releasing its debut full-length, Your Universe, Your Mind, on Sad Robot this past June, Hypatia Lake have created a grand narrative scheme that plays with the dissonance between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and reality. If Watkins, Skrasek, and Browning (Hill recently left the band, citing "lifestyle differences") had their way, all their records would be released on glossy 45 rpm flexi-discs, with pictures, cartoons, and perhaps an animated feature film in an accompanying storybook.
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Speaking via phone from his day job at Buffalo Exchange, Watkins explains that Hypatia Lake is a concept band, based on a fictional town of the same name and the lives of its characters. The idea was partially inspired by Harry Nilsson's 1971 album/comic book/cartoon The Point, an acid-trip-derived oddity ripe with messages about conformity and "the man." In the town Hypatia Lake, the only source of employment is a candy factory (every child's dream). A motley assortment of characters--like the loner cowboy Jeremiah Freud of "Everyone Has a Jeremiah Freud"--wander the streets in search of self-enlightenment and happiness. Logic is nonexistent: The minimal narrative connecting the songs gives little indication of who or what will pop up next. (One track, "The Goddamn Factory and the Cog 'n' Wheel Day," actually finds the workers in the candy factory staging a rebellion.)
Like The Point, Your Universe purports to be a record about childhood. Watkins claims that he is obsessed by "the idea of how peaceful and simplistic life as a child seems and then you grow up and you lose that somewhere."
But as any child psychologist will tell you, the whole idea of returning to a childlike state of innocence is cultural construction. Children have rich and complex emotional lives that are often laden with unfounded anxieties and fears. And children like hearing real life spouted back at them: Before they were sanitized for American audiences, fairy tales were full of gruesome and horrifying details, and kids ate them up.
The irony of Hypatia Lake is that the band has captured this true essence of childhood while it assumed it was working on capturing innocence. As a whole, Your Universe is as strange and disturbing as a child's imagination, full of mystical repeated lyrics and dark, psychedelic imagery. Though Watkins sings, in a fragile and angelic tenor, only a few words on each song, it's possible to discern all the dark and scary creatures that hide in the far recesses of a child's imagination: the monster in the dark, the vicious fights parents have behind closed doors, the loneliness of a recess spent without friends. The storybook that accompanies Your Universe needs to be done on gray paper with a thick charcoal pencil.
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Even as he describes Hypatia Lake's plans to create a real storybook album (for the aforementioned song "The Goddamn Factory..."), Watkins seems unaware of the irony that lurks behind the band's vision. He seems genuinely interested in using music to inspire audiences to follow their own dreams, and there's not even a hint of cynicism.
But just as we are about to end our conversation, I venture to ask about the symbolism of Hypatia Lake's candy factory. "I was trying to think of the most harmless thing I could," he shoots back. "Candy's harmless. Everybody loves candy! Then you start thinking about what it would be like to be in a candy factory, processing candy 40 hours a week on this assembly line, and you'd hate it. This thing that seems like there's no way for it to be horrible would turn into this horrible thing."
So the irony is there. And that feels like a fitting end to this story.
