The Glad Fact is romantic idealism in its disappointed, hibernating plumage. It is burrowing-in, closing-eyes, feathers-ruffled, self-doubting type stuff: nihilism, by turns melancholy and hedonist! The album is a reply, a year and a half later, to The Graceful Fallen Mango, an album Dave made about a breakup with his high school girlfriend. It was a classic breakup album: with that arc of brokenness and then healing. Hope. He made it believing in it. But a year and a half later, the promise of the cyclic nature of the world -- that love will come again! that the sensitive one will be rewarded with secret delights! -- has not been fulfilled. The music that results is at once tender and aggressive.
The album cover is made from the same colors as the cover of The Graceful Fallen Mango, but in their soiled, sallow shades. It is a painting Dave made on a 6x4' piece of corrugated cardboard. It was his emblem for a while; he took it back and forth to shows in Brooklyn from New Haven in the back of his truck, and played with it hung up behind him. The Obese Man embodies a sort of self-aware depravity. "Behold, I am disease!" he seems to say — that is his honesty, his glad fact. |
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