In Medias Res
There is no other album wrapped in so much of my sentimentality, both physical and immaterial, than pmtoday’s final album as a band. In what may be a similar set of feelings to those shared by many about Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 cult classic In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, the enjoyability of this album may not be universal, but in a deeply personal way, it’s perfect. This was the second vinyl record I ever bought, and I didn’t even have a record player at the time. It was part impulse buy as well, because that record is beautiful (see below).
Yet, in the years since I’ve had a player, no album has received as many spins as In Medias Res. Translated to English, the title means “in the middle of things,” and at the risk of over-interpreting, the middle of things, philosophically, chronologically, psychologically, is where we all exist. This album balks and mourns at the overwhelmingness of that weight, being at once completely defeated and somehow exuberantly musical and stylistically effervescent.
My exultant praise is not unique. Many outlets that pay attention to bands like those signed to Rise Records at the time were blown away by this label debut. It was far and away an innovation compared to the work of their peers in its dynamics: seamless combination of gentle, sunny production, and a balanced approach to vocal layering orchestrated over blistering guitar lines. This balance laid a foundation for the final piece of the puzzle, which is the stark lyricism of Connor Brogan. Throughout In Medias Res, motifs are developed around what would be rather drab statements out of context: “People are machines,” “We live in a sad world,” and “I don’t exist” sound like the sort of edgy, nuance-free statements adorning a childish understanding of nihilism.
Thematically, the context of the album as a whole matters. The broad concepts of existence and purpose conflict with life as itself, and this searing conflict is expressed in pieces. The often sunny or nostalgic tone of the music itself keeps the sadness from bogging the album down in the mud. Use of more major-key melodic structures during some broader sections (or the disorienting but not-unwarranted key change during “People Are Machines”) force the listener up for air as the vocals suddenly relay epiphanies:
Maybe I’ll decide to submerge myself
Delete my mind and float along everybody else
We live in a sad world
I’m not a sad man
I’m serene and I accept the things I cannot mend
There’s a light in this world
Clear a path for all my friends
And help me change the things I can
I want to believe there’s more
The broken streams of consciousness continue, as that ending to “Sad World” is followed immediately by “Soma Holiday,” which begins:
When I was a boy I used to ask the sky for things
I lay in bed reciting lines to the ceiling
I made requests as though the clouds were somehow listening
I read a book because somebody said it’d save me
Now I’m old, and I believe only the things I see
The awful news and whatever is on the T.V.,
The sad truth that the world is descending
If miracles exist
Then God is holding out on me
And so the album goes, continuing to recite or contemplate archaic wisdom, to reject it, to acknowledge the mechanistic milieu of modern life and to subsequently question how far into the psyche that construction permeates, both in the self and in others (“I Am Wrong”). The already-hinted literary juxtaposition is also quite obvious: the exultant sadness swings between concerns raised by both Brave New World and the Bible. At the time I discovered this, I was early in my high school career, and I was a bona fide Jesus freak. Only as the listening continued did I realize that the hope and despair of the words I was hearing meant something incalculably more real to me as anything I was singing from my front-row pew.
To what end such an album can express this philosophical dissonance “correctly” misses the ends of the album. “This is me dealing with my discontentment and deficiency/ I am handing in my resignation and vulnerability” belts Brogan during the beginnings of “People Are Machines,” setting the framework for what is to come later on. The content of the album, as grave and assertive as it ends up sounding, is not a claim to anything. It is an open question, an exploratory catharsis, tearfully screaming into a void that neither responds nor stares back. Perhaps this lack of closure in a clash of profound sadness and determination leaves a work of art with little value. I’ve no doubt felt this way about other pieces of work. Somehow, In Medias Res elicits something new, something beautiful and cavernous.
Is it this emptiness that doomed this album to obscurity? The timing, the lack of publicity in popular channels? Whatever gave this album cause to languish in the annals of a forgotten discography, it’s lost to me. Having come upon this collection of emotional screeds years after pmtoday had ceased to exist as a band, it is the kind of haunted curio which stands like a ruined building. In Medias Res is a product of human life, anguish, and self-discovery, and the humanity is evident within it even as it is vacated by its architects.
