“Fortune Teller”
from the album Survival
2009
iTunes
Ryan Catbird, the mogul behind Catbird Records, has always committed to designing a roster that is never quite kosher, always slightly skewed and maintains the sweetest bit of pop sensibility (no matter the scope of twee within). Forest Fire’s urban folkie Mark Thresher started as the quirky Bowery busking songman — right there in line with the label’s aesthete. His Psychic Star EP was a quick fix of intimate in-jokes, plucked from late-night warbling, and now his first LP, Survival, is progression, even if it is towards a perceived and worshipped cosmic Americana.
Inviting in friends from across the country to his cluttered Brooklyn apartment (seen on the cover), he’s managed to cook up what sounds like a feverish daydream that creeps and crawls around in detritus of country — pedal steels and twanged choruses — and the gritty scorch of the desert (with distant howls and blinding sunbeams). The city, though, keeps his songs grounded and honest, after all there’s a ceiling overhead. “Fortune Teller” is a testament to things getting trapped in small spaces on the third floor and never quite getting the wings to float out the window. It’s inherently pop, only scrapped with closet distortion, slurred with lyrics like “Why can’t I kill someone I hate?” and musty with slacker vision. Later Thresher quips “I’m living for what’s on my mind,” and the way his muse leads him through the pastoral to the haunted-pastoral and back into the alleyways of his neighborhood, you’ve got to believe he’s got one hell of an imagination, even when it’s laid bare.