Westelaken | I am Steaming Mushrooms | Self-released | May 2023
Ozzy’s Palace is dead and, outside of Toronto’s Westelaken and, optimistically, a couple hundred locals max, forgotten. Run a browser search on the former Ossington Avenue house venue where Jordan Seccareccia first discovered independent music: you’ll likely find nothing but entirely too many incomprehensive listicles on blogTO and Indie88 detailing the many area venues that have fallen over the past several years. There are no lingering social pages and public mentions are scarce. When the “Ask a Punk” place dies, who will remember it? I am Steaming Mushrooms, the “post-country” band’s third album, opens on a nearly 14-minute eulogy for this house. It’s a forlorn, dusty crawl through sparse, pummeling drum smacks, lingering notes, and empty space, a portrait with crushing gaps that we’ll never fill, a memory desperately stretched thin as it can go without disappearing entirely because we can never truly go back now and we want to make our imperfect memories last longer.
It’s not that Westelaken hasn’t wrestled with existentialism, death, or, more broadly, endings since their inception. They opened their 2018 debut album with “The Lord Comes Home to Me,” where Seccareccia, indie rock’s most compelling lyricist ever since, hyperfixates on a dying fish that has washed up on the shore, its surroundings entirely indifferent to its plight. When not absorbed by literal biological death, he’ll lament social death (failed relationships and collapsed institutions) or ruminate on seasonal cycles, i.e., natural death and eventual rebirth. Half a decade later, Seccareccia still has plenty of brilliant, willfully obtuse ways to think really hard about how everything and everyone will disappear and what that means for us, the “souls” waiting to poof out of existence. “Pear Tree,” the most delicate and transparent of the songs on I am Steaming Mushrooms, takes the core conceit of Stand by Me and replaces all of the kids with new kids who happen to be amateur philosophers, who then debate what to do with the corpse they’ve discovered while using Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions as a basis of argument. The children talk in circles among the gentle interplay of Seccareccia’s acoustic guitar and Lucas Temor’s piano; one’s named Jen, another Shane, another Chris. They found the body on the beach while kiting. Seccareccia describes the lichen on the rocks, as it symbolizes the symbiotic relationship between all creatures in the circle of life. The kids never decide what to do. There is no “conclusion,” just a final remark from Jen: “The universe / Fundamentally / Is a knowable place / There’s some good / And there’s some evil / But there’s mostly empty space.”
The space within “Pear Tree” may be narrower or more figurative than on “Ozzy’s Palace,” but the “empty space” is still ultimately the point. It’s where all death leads the mind; it’s where all pondering before expression occurs. And so death, ends, time, and how we use it are all just vessel concepts. Seccareccia is asking us to think about thought: to contemplate being swallowed in the maw of a baby bird and then consider what that doesn’t mean. Again, this is the simplest that I am Steaming Mushrooms gets. From a purely literary perspective, Westelaken pushes beyond the preconceived limitations of narrative storytelling in music.
The thing is, they do the same musically. It’d be easiest to call Westelaken an alt-country band: Seccareccia develops these songs as country songs before bringing them to his band, who then mangle them into new forms. Seccareccia has said that “Ozzy’s Palace” could’ve been a “psychedelic egg hardcore ripper,” which sounds like a joke until you listen to the tongue-in-cheek rager “Staring at Americans” from their debut album, or the woozy, nightmarish psychedelic blues of “Polar Bears.” Seccareccia, who sings as though he is legitimately having the worst drug trip of all time as his voice cracks and wanes and warps and mumbles with the occasional shrieked outburst, describes a lucid dream where polar bears treat a schoolyard as a hunting ground. Generally, Westelaken’s early hardcore punk leanings don’t surface on I am Steaming Mushrooms, but the band has only gotten stranger and more ambitious. Short, primitive banjo pieces about abuse (“Ribcage”) follow eight-minute love songs that can’t escape the “delicate abyss,” “tombs,” deep-seated trauma, and mood stabilizers (“Annex Clinic & Pharmacy”). “Fixed Up by Orange Light” is a honky tonk bar rocker (with some stellar viola courtesy of Rachael Cardiello) where Seccareccia recalls getting high as shit on shrooms and finding the spinal column of a deer in the woods. “Every nerve ending / Like that carcass lying / Collapsed and decomposed among the pines / Still, I swear I see myself in you,” he sings, projecting himself upon the remains of this dead animal and then finding kinship with it in a bizarre form of dissociative self-love.
On “I Can Hear the Highway,” he speaks of moving forward just as “Ozzy’s Palace” said, “Too slow is the slowing down.” “Last year, you said that you’d quit / Go back to school and build a new life for yourself / Five years from now, you’ll say the same thing about four years from now.” How do we honor all we’ve lost while looking towards the future? What is slow enough to appreciate our moments but too slow that we’re wasting our limited time? There’s no real answer, only the highway: we drive with the end out of sight but in mind, and we must go somewhere. Even if it’s just empty space.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others.
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