KCPR has officially turned 40. And while there’s a bunch of nostalgic bullshit we could hash, perhaps the most important thing is the forgotten gems that KCPR holds that inspire a certain cool geekdom. Each week, we add 10 to 20 albums and one or two you find are completely brilliant and you watch as they never catch on and fade into the background. But they always stay in the station, locked up in some back cabinet. In honor of these albums, I have decided to review my first find: Page France’s 2005 release “Hello, Dear Wind.”
“Hello, Dear Wind” is the band’s second release and the first that gave it a modest following that would propel the band to a bigger label for a third and final release. The follow-up “.and the Family Telephone” almost made the band proper “indie famous,” but then they dissolved, with mastermind Michael Nau forming the band “The Cotton Jones Basket Ride.” The band got thrown into the “good” Christian Pop bin with Danielson and Sufjan Stevens, but that was all wrong and always seemed to be a hindrance. “Hello, Dear Wind” is a majestic indie pop album that centers on the end times as a way of penetrating a post-college malaise and providing optimism.
Jesus comes. Bushes burn. And bodies turn to dust and mingle together in finality. The album focuses so heavily on religious symbolism that it moves back and forth between unforgivingly devout to heretical. Like “The Last Temptation of Christ” or Jose Saramago’s “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” it avoids what is acceptable on both sides in favor of greater truths. Nau portrays young held down lovers as the downtrodden faithful looking forward to the apocalypse when they can truly be happy.
On “Jesus,” Nau sings a song of happiness to another person, most likely a lover, that leads to images of religious happiness and perfection as trees song and Jesus dances and drinks wine. In “Dogs,” he sings to a lover about the times after the troubles of the world and the people that treat them like dogs. Rather than promising a house and independent life, Nau dreams bigger saying: “Darling, I don’t know what happens when everything here ends / But I hope it’s like they say and I hope it never ends.” Nau speaks warmly and the production is intimate building on the naked shaky moments of lovers until he declares that they were made out of each other’s dust and will fly out as particles in the wind.
The album works because it extends itself beyond sappy perfect dreams by replacing them with the biggest deus ex machina: the return of Jesus to set everything right and the entry to heaven. It’s endearing because Nau sings with devout love that tells us even if his dreams of the end times aren’t true then at least his religious fervor, for once, proves some kind of love. The album ends with Nau declaring “we will become a happy ending” and it feels warm and gushy rather than severe and misguided as coming from a preacher. Somehow when it’s about our relationships and about love, we all want to believe these things while perhaps on a greater spiritual level we don’t need to.
“Hello, Dear Wind” got a good amount of plays when it came out, but now its abandoned to the back of the bin and the most anybody really knows is its follow-up. Thankfully, KCPR is around to at the least introduce a few DJs to this album for a few weeks and that gives the station more validation as an entity than any other sort of self-righteous ironic hipster shit you might hear.