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International Dateline

by Darke County

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1.
International Dateline 03:15
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International dateline International dateline Far out over the Pacific Out over the nebulous sea On the other side of the globe You'll arrive In some other tomorrow Tuesday came You did not Your parents said you made a call You quit your job You caught a plane Set your aim on better stock In the jet stream floats a dream Far out over the dateline In yet another Tuesday You'll arrive For some other lover For some other lover For some other lover Some other lover Some other lover In a calmer world if the wind blows Stretching your tether Compressing your heart In a calmer world if the wind blows Then it blows International dateline International dateline International dateline
2.
Oh the Places We Will Go 01:29
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(instrumental)
3.
The Purest Atmosphere 03:19
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One last announcement As a final precaution Please extinguish all smoking And fasten your seat belts Low and tight across your hips Into the cloud bank And plucked from the air Was it random chance Was it circumstance The air coach never landed? And the crew I never knew Became eternal confessors It was just as I suspected Just as I might have thought I really did love you I really did care Taste the tips of granite We are the snow floating through branches We are blessed by the evergreen fir And the pure, pure, purest atmosphere The purest atmosphere In the dead of night No siren cries She's the upper hand At all times

about

Darke County’s music, a product of the late-80s-early-90s songwriting partnership between ex-Pleasures Pale front man Jeffrey Bright and fellow Ohio native Eric “E-Bone” Schulz (now Goner Records artist Harlan T Bobo), has been described as “a tilted landscape of tall tales and mysteries of the heart.” For sure, it was a cinematized construction of 20th Century Americana, pivoting from rustic to urbane, perpetually cloaked in a gothic fog, and more often than not tinged with the unsettling undercurrents of film noir. But DC’s irony-charged nostalgia also served to set a stage where the props and players included more modern antiheroes and physic phenomena that, upon close examination, foreshadows a new era and its ills.

Continuing the leak of tracks from the forthcoming “Edge of Night” LP, “Oh the Places We Will Go” features three pieces of a kind — all dealing variously with the attendant anticipations and anxieties of travel and relocation — and can potentially be seen as metaphor for the duo’s own transplantation and disassociation from the relative certainty of middle America to the chancy enticements of the West Coast underground.

“International Dateline” is a taught, waltz-time dirge, riding on Schulz’s steadily mounting guitar figure and ending in resolute crescendo. Bright opens and closes the piece chanting the song’s prosaic title, as if attempting to (vainly) exercise the doom from the pun implied. Between is a wistful, if paranoid, narrative of love lost in real time — where the demarcation between today and tomorrow — between love and despair — is an abstract line drawn capriciously, beyond sight and tactile meaning, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Finishing the set is “The Purest Atmosphere,” a spacious composition that would feature early in the band’s 1991-1993 Myself a Living Torch incarnation, and would aptly represent that effort’s far-reaching, and often high-flying, surrealistic themes. Notable for its use of 6-string bass and trumpet, “Purest Atmosphere” details what presumably is regretful retrospection in the free fall of a fatal air crash; but could also be viewed on another level as what might today, as we approach 2020, be described as a kind of Dark Mountain, “naturocentric” environmentalism, where the failing aircraft stands in for man’s hubris and mistreatment of planet Earth. “In the dead of night, no siren cries. She’s the upper hand at all times.” However interpreted, the song, written in 1989 or ’90, speaks of a time when smoking was freely permitted on commercial flights — in hindsight, a stunning anachronism and symbol of industrial-era human folly — and plays out as a harbinger of even less certain times to come, foreboding and unsettling in its possible prescience.

Bridging the two lyric songs is a curious instrumental. “Oh the Places We Will Go,” showcases Schulz/Bobo’s talent as a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger. E-Bone plays all instruments on the “sketch” and crafts an off-handed, compelling tableau of exotica. The piece represents the innocent, intoxicating promise against which the other two songs play out in uneasy contrast.

Remain on standby for more thrilling turbulence from Darke County and, eventually, far out over the horizon, the full “Edge of Night” LP.

credits

released July 23, 2020

voice – jeffrey bright
electric guitar & 6-string bass, electric bass, acoustic double bass, mandolin, marimba, accordion, drums – e-bone schulz
additional sounds – jeffrey bright

initial recording:
minna mansion
san francisco, california
1990–1991
​
additional recording:
san francisco, california
2019

cover photo & design – jeffrey bright

c) 1991 Darke County
p) 2020 JABMA
Fugitive Music Publishing / BMI

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Darke County San Francisco, California

An actual place in rural Ohio, Darke County is also the shadowy dream state of American gothic & noir created by the late 1980s / early 1990s songwriting partnership of ex-Pleasures Pale vocalist Jeffrey Bright and the artist now known as Harlan T Bobo. DarCo performed regularly in the San Francisco underground before reincarnation in late 1991 as surrealist indie act Myself a Living Torch. ... more

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