Mystery Pills :: "Anti-Pattern"

Only a noticeable minority, at least outside the old Confederacy, refuses to embrace the triumph of science and reason. This is progress, even in the anti-intellectual bastion of the United States. Still, this inexorable march toward truth is kills a bit of the mystery. It kind of sucks to know how the transfiguration works; the inexplicable ends up becoming the banal. Bedroom jammer Mystery Pills, the work of Raj Dawson, embraces a bit of this duality, a plea for the strange, that which isn't beholden to an algorithm or a matrix of outcomes. In some sense, he flat rejects it in the blipping chorus of "Anti-Pattern", shouting, "Hey, we never needed you anyway," at the assortment of "mathematicians" who couldn't grasp the temple he was building. It is all playful to be sure. Dawson embraces numbers and predictive validity as much as the next person with a high school education. But in an age of definites, Mystery Pills, like the implications of their very name, embrace amorphous aesthetics, the beauty in the unknown.

Mystery Pills :: "The Glass Traditions"

Even on the most dilated summer evenings of my youth I had little desire to take mysterious, unnamed pharmaceuticals. I did, however, want to make ridiculous any common structures of authority, and I assuredly did so in the most obvious, inept way possible. So the concept of Mystery Pills, the moniker of Raj Dawson, and his title single, "The Glass Traditions" seem inexorably linked. They both suggest a darkness, a youthful disdain for established norms and social mores, the kind that reads, "Do not operate heavy machinery" with excitement not trepidation, and that this brand of blind, thoughtless immortality is what always changes the world. This is the spectral absurd in this youthful bit of lo-fi from Rapid City.  At its biggest, it is small. The drum machine could easily be by necessity, not choice. The aesthetic is a less syrupy Youth Lagoon, but the dare, the one from the beginning, is the important one. Dawson confides in the chorus, "I don't want to ask forgiveness", a line that will end up rhyming with the title lyric. In essence, give me whatever is in your hand, we're going out to break anything that can be broken.

Listen :: Mystery Pills - "The Glass Traditions"