Timesbold

Do we need sad music in pretty sad times?
I think so and full of joy we are looking forward to the new Timesbold album “Not Still Here”. This is already the fourth album of the New-York-Portland- Connection, but the first since 2008.
Jason Merritt (a.k.a. Whip) has certainly never made it easy for us, but Gabriel Walsh (Your Team Ring) even calls the new work dangerous: “So many songs seem to mediate the suffused and co-mingled woe of depression, co-dependence, loss, and addiction. Merritt never shows us a path to happier states of mind. Instead, he, his band, and the song play out on a frail sheet of ice that has broken from the shore and is slowly drifting away. In “Don’t Want to Live,” we hear their pleading sorrow, “I don’t wanna be just out of reach when you reach down into my gloom.”
If the first three albums were based on Glitterhouse, “Not Still Here” is quasi the debut on DevilDuck, however, we know and love Merrit for a long time and have released both the brilliant Whip album “Blues For Losers” (2008) and the sequel “The Art Of Facts” (2020) under the moniker Miracle Whips.
But now back to the new album, about which Walsh continues:
“So, you take a step toward the doomed drifters as they deliver their following line “I don’t want to live my cannibal urge if it’s going to come back to bite me.” Well, shit, we are now in freezing water, and perhaps a fool to even try to save these poor wretches. They go on, “I don’t want the sun and its idiot sky dictate its light to me. I don’t want to live in a world without your blue.” As you consider what skyless blue sky world Whip would want to live in you sink under the icy waters.”
Merritt has always been a completely underrated song poet, and if you were to take the time to dissect the 14 (!) new songs, you’d discover his own rather dark world. So in ‘You Are a Self’ he sings “You are a self. You are a self-fulfilling prophecy…. [sic]. You’re not a myth. But you are a myth to me.”
The artist reveals little about himself and somehow a certain mysticism also contributed to a certain legend formation in the past. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get more out of him about the new album than the following words, which Jason Merritt tried to sell me as album info:
“Timesbold is a band of two or twenty people depending on who’s counting. Been putting out records for about twenty years depending on who’s counting. It’s been several years since the last Timesbold record depending on who’s counting.”
ot Still HereTo be honest, I always fear for him and the final ‘Now I Lay (me down to rest)` gives little optimism that my worries are unwarranted and I would like to see his music stay with us for a long time to come and maybe even give him some more attention.
“Not Still Here” is a glorious, beautifully melancholic and mystical journey that will capture even the most seasoned singer/songwriter fan and make them sink deeper and deeper…. much fun.