An Offbeat by CFUV review
Image via Spotify.
Clay Parton’s project Eiafuawn — pronounced ee-uh-fon, and standing for “Everything is all fucked up and whatnot — put out his newest release Endless Body on streaming platforms at midnight on Sept. 11. The release date reflects the themes of his first self-recorded album, Birds in the Ground (2006), which was self-recorded in Clay Parton’s room over the years following the fall of the Twin Towers in New York with a sense of heartsickness. His post-9/11 melancholy carries into his new project, “call me from the moon / I’m hiding from everything,” his hesitant voice confirms in “Take Me To My Room,” the first track on the EP.
Coming 20 years after Birds in the Ground, the release was announced by The Numero Group to mark Parton’s return to the project a day prior.
Much like his work with the indie rock band, Duster, the album’s sound oozes with slow guitars, hazy vocals, and the kind of slack-jawed feeling of staring at the ceiling with nothing but Parton’s performance permeating the listening experience. While Birds in the Ground played more on with raw acoustics, Endless Body leans into dreamy muted guitars, kicking off the album by stereo panning into the listener’s right ear.
The listening experience shifts away from the bedroom folk sound on Birds in the Ground that placed Eiafuawn alongside the likes of Alex G and Elliott Smith, and into a more distant, shoegazey sound, which fits like a perfect constellation in Duster’s universe.
The Endless Body EP opens with “Take Me to My Room,” where resonant acoustic plucking pulls the listener in before the muted, slow marching overdrive kicks in. Across the four tracks, the instruments feel stripped back, while Parton’s reverberating vocals sound further away, as if recorded in a large, echoing room. In the third track, “Lay Your Head Here in Mine,” the harmonies press close against the chest like a desperate lullaby, while the resonant instrumental sends his call out to space through astral reverberations. The heavy bass especially transports the listener out of the first track’s dense haze to the weightless, lighter tone of the second track, which begins as more uplifting. In “People Talk,” Parton’s voice retains the distant, almost whispering tone that gets swept up by the buzzing overdrive once again, but the lyrics ring most clear, in which he asks the addressee to abandon this dimension. Themes of disappearance, hiding away, escapism, and a heavy hesitancy to speak in his lyrics permeates throughout, mirroring the post-9/11 listlessness in his first project.
Throughout, Parton’s voice reflects the 20-year gap between the last release and change through his other projects.
The standout track is the final one, “Incantation,” which features a heavy, gritty opening, and a muddy tone that interplays with Parton’s distorted vocals. The texture is fuzzy, and his melancholic vocals become harder to hear, cutting out rather than lingering like the previous tracks, leaving the project’s end feeling even more fleeting. The instrumentals crowd and close in on the vocals, crashing with his voice. As the most shoegaze-heavy track on the record, it grounds the EP nicely, pulling the listener back down from orbit.
This updated production places the EP somewhere between outer space and right here on earth. It’s between Duster’s interstellar slowcore and Eiafuawn’s evolved sound. This project celebrates the quiet return of a comfort cult figure that welcomes slowing down to listen and fade in and fade out with Parton’s heavy din.
