FM Cornog has put out many albums under the East River Pipe name, and will doubtless continue to do so; but 1999’s The Gasoline Age is the one which has stuck with me. It is the record I have turned to for those especially lonesome, auburn-lit journeys; at the time, Thursday mornings on the 400 bus to Headington, walking the last ten minutes to the John Radcliffe Hospital for my weekly physiotherapy, cars slow, no one really about, or lunchtime Oxford Tubes back home, not in a rush, but the mind in a mess; ominous sunny mornings in Abingdon, Saturday lunchtime bus rides to unfathomable places like Tolworth. Or the number 11 bus, cruising through the nearly empty City before coming to rest at the temporarily abandoned Liverpool Street terminal. Times when you’ve no real places to go and you’re looking to grasp something but as yet haven’t quite worked out what.
The Gasoline Age is like that; 45 minutes of sedate, secluded cruising through electroindie dreams of motion, coming to a wasted but gracious halt in some unspecified bypass within walking distance of time. The nearly ten-minute delicate climax of “Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Million Tonight)” is the record’s probable masterpiece, an ineffable arch of sadness; but “Party Drive” has remained my personal favourite (though really the album needs to be experienced as a whole, continuous entity). With lugubrious synthesisers and drum machines which recall nothing so much as the Springsteen of Tunnel Of Love – simultaneously his sleekest and most desolate record – Cornog sings, in an unsteady bass croon rising to a slightly more confident contralto, about driving away, driving anywhere, as the music proceeds in a stately manner behind him with intensely moving chord changes while the lyric systematically debunks Motley Crue-type concepts of “partying”; he sings words like “Cigarettes, cans of beer/Piled up in the rear,” “Route 26? Or 22?/A joint for me, pills for you” and “Summer nights, no cops in sight” but he sings of a wounded retreat rather than triumphalist Porkyisms. They’re off somewhere, or perhaps to nowhere, the destination less feared than the starting point – “You can break my bones, but don’t take me home!” he pleads repeatedly, “Just drive – the party drive.” He sounds as though he is being driven to the edge of the world, afraid of what he might see if he dares to peer over. A beautiful study of solitude which reminds me why I never want to be alone again.
The Gasoline Age is like that; 45 minutes of sedate, secluded cruising through electroindie dreams of motion, coming to a wasted but gracious halt in some unspecified bypass within walking distance of time. The nearly ten-minute delicate climax of “Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Million Tonight)” is the record’s probable masterpiece, an ineffable arch of sadness; but “Party Drive” has remained my personal favourite (though really the album needs to be experienced as a whole, continuous entity). With lugubrious synthesisers and drum machines which recall nothing so much as the Springsteen of Tunnel Of Love – simultaneously his sleekest and most desolate record – Cornog sings, in an unsteady bass croon rising to a slightly more confident contralto, about driving away, driving anywhere, as the music proceeds in a stately manner behind him with intensely moving chord changes while the lyric systematically debunks Motley Crue-type concepts of “partying”; he sings words like “Cigarettes, cans of beer/Piled up in the rear,” “Route 26? Or 22?/A joint for me, pills for you” and “Summer nights, no cops in sight” but he sings of a wounded retreat rather than triumphalist Porkyisms. They’re off somewhere, or perhaps to nowhere, the destination less feared than the starting point – “You can break my bones, but don’t take me home!” he pleads repeatedly, “Just drive – the party drive.” He sounds as though he is being driven to the edge of the world, afraid of what he might see if he dares to peer over. A beautiful study of solitude which reminds me why I never want to be alone again.
