The magical Mega Bogreturns with another fantastical off-world transmission, the most sophisticated, exploratory, and accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter and avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who co-produced, and Zach Burba (iji) among its cast of vibrant players, Life, and Another bristles with painterly technicolor surface textures while plumbing fathomless depths of feeling.
Highlights
- Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty matte board jacket; insert with lyrics and credits; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
- CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica art and insert with lyrics and credits.
- A limited-edition Life, and Another photo and song book (perfect bound, foil-stamped cover, 64 full-color pages, 300 copies only) featuring images, songwriting and studio notes, collages and texts by Erin Birgy, and drawings by Zach Burba, designed by Joel Gregory, is available, while supplies last, exclusively via Paradise of Bachelors.
- Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who also co-produced and engineered the record, as well as Zach Burba (iji) and Meg Duffy (Hand Habits).
- RIYL Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, Slapp Happy, Kevin Ayers, Bridget St John, David Bowie, Cate Le Bon, Aldous Harding, Big Thief, Hand Habits, Yoko Ono, Nico, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, David Wojnarowicz, Wim Wenders
- Artist page/tour dates/links/back catalog
Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.
Tracklist
A1. “Flower” 2:36
A2. “Station to Station” 4:26
A3. “Weight of the Earth, on Paper” 3:13
A4. “Crumb Back” 3:15
A5. “Butterfly” 2:51
A6. “Life, and Another” 4:10
A7. “Maybe You Died” 4:28
B1. “Beagle in the Cloud” 1:42
B2. “Darmok” 3:20
B3. “Adorable” 1:14
B4. “Bull of Heaven” 2:00
B5. “Obsidian Lizard” 2:08
B6. “Before a Black Tea” 3:29
B7. “Ameleon” 5:20
Catalog Number/Release Date
PoB-056 / CD, Digital; PoB-067: Book: July 23, 2021 | LP: August 27, 2021
Purchase from PoB above or support via
- Bandcamp (LP/CD/DL/book)
- Other Options (physical/digital/int’l)
| Weight | N/A |
|---|---|
| FORMAT | Book: $12, CD: $13, CD+book: $23, LP: $22, LP+book: $32, LP+CD: $30, LP+CD+book: $40, MP3: $9, Single MP3 (Station to Station): $1 |
Album Narrative
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- Photo by Jasper McMahon.
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- Video still by Laura Conway.
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- Photo by Adam Gundershiemer.
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- Photo by Jasper McMahon.
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- Photo by Adam Gundershiemer.
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- Photo by Jasper McMahon.
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- Photo by Jasper McMahon.
On Life, and Another, Mega Bog (the world-inhabiting moniker of song-animator Erin Birgy) tends a succulent garden full of plants that the unwitting passerby might mistakenly perceive as extraterrestrial, but which are in fact very much of this Earth. Departing from the humid Holodeck spider plant nursery of previous record Dolphine (2019), Mega Bog’s new album brings us back to our home planet, into the rarefied air pressure of a dried-up desert valley where its fourteen songs were written and scattered like stones in the landscape. But true to Birgy’s alchemical writing practice, these bright stones simply refuse to blend into their arid environment, each one a precious gem chiseled by the anti-capitalist geologist’s hammer to reveal the impossible, dazzling life that inheres under the dusty exteriors of both the northern Nevada of her youth and the rural New Mexico of the album’s birth.
Cohabiting with Life, and Another’s co-producer, engineer, and percussionist James Krivchenia (Big Thief) in a small cabin near the Rio Grande off of NM State Route 68, Birgy found herself often alone, suspended between their separate touring schedules. In these silent time passages, Birgy experienced a complete loss of self amid the expanse. Frequently thinking about death in the middle of nowhere opened a familiar black hole of troubling projections, and any desire to find freedom or remain positive continued to fold back into self-destructive thought and fear. Strange long days were spent pacing the property with a rake, befriending ants and spiders and struggling with the instinct to poison them if they ventured into the home. Comfort was occasionally found in internet reruns of Frasier and Star Trek Deep Space 9, texts on the ethics of terraforming and space colonization, and Ken Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Over time, a budding interest in mindfulness, attachment theory, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and rage gave way to new productive brain processes. These creative juices followed Birgy on the road and into subsequent lonely bedrooms as the songs continued to flow. New, northern landscapes, like the woods and rivers outside of Seattle, Washington, provided further inspiration during odd sublets in the area. Dark as everything may actually be, Birgy always manages to stay with trouble and conjure the extraordinary resulting music.
Life, and Another stages a semi-fictionalized drama in the community theater of the interior self, with scenes of collective longing at the bowling alley, disputes over a distended memory outside the bar, and the solitary circling on the patio, looking out over the yard in stubborn awe. These memories, from both past and future, bubble up throughout the album and present their characters as new entries into the Mega Bog Book of Symbols. In “Station to Station,” an artichoke, the decadent indulgence young Erin learned to steam for herself, is gutted around the spine. In “Weight of the Earth, on Paper,” named after the collection of memoir tapes by the artist-warrior David Wojnarowicz, poppies sprout in Birgy’s shadow and scare her companion, while harpies circle above Loch Ness. Fantastical visions beget inherited family traumas that taunt withering romantic relationships. A deep faultline connects the record with the work of Wojnarowicz, who, in the years before his death in 1992 (twenty-nine years and one day before the release of Life, and Another), recorded in his tape journals a series of moments of rapturous solitude in the deserts of the American Southwest, carried from dream to dream by real and imagined friendships with human lovers, horses, scorpions, clouds, and the occasion cruiser.
Recorded over several sessions in various studios—the Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, Way Out in Woodinville, Washington, and Tropico Beauty in Glendale, California—Life bleeds with instrumental contributions from longtime and new collaborators, including Aaron Otheim, Zach Burba of iji, Will Segerstrom, Matt Bachmann, Andrew Dorset of Lake, James Krivchenia of Big Thief, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Jade Tcimpidis, Alex Liebman, and co-engineers Geoff Treager and Phil Hartunian. The group’s temporary re-imagining of exoplanetary life together carries this collective imagination through its architecture, which, if you try to grasp it too tightly, will only appear to you all at once, afterward, instead of moment to moment, station to station, through the house into which Birgy and her friends have invited us. Listeners know by now they can trust Mega Bog to continuously lead them into deeper and wilder, spiritual pop territories. Skittering piano glissandos, haunting psychic background voices, and tequila-inspired improvisations creep and crawl over the dark-night-of-the-soul rock and roll dreamscape, before vanishing to make way for invocations of quiet clarity and living-breathing instrumental passages.
This is how the record takes on its picaresque, non-anthropomorphic epic story bag shape. Imagine that Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Wim Wenders’s film Until the End of the World, and Bucky Fuller and June Jordan’s speculative architectural redesign of New York City were episodes in some larger, yet-to-be-written Canterbury Tales of imaginative, necessary life on the planet. Mega Bog etches its chapter here, transforming the brutal heaviness of the world into the collective struggle of living.
Videos and Streaming
Acknowledgments
8.0. Erin Birgy’s delightfully freaky sixth album is dense but full of whimsy and romance, pulling in strains of folk, jazz, and chamber pop to marvel at all the odd little wonders of the world. It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic… What is really excellent about Birgy’s work is her emotional registry… [Her] music is joyful… slinky and decadent, like a vintage mink stole draped over a fainting couch.
– Pitchfork
Best Rock Albums of 2021: Erin Birgy, the songwriter and playful deviant behind Mega Bog, has mastered the art of hodgepodge. Her songs, particularly those on Mega Bog’s sixth LP Life, and Another, are crammed with multicolored imagery of floating dogs, beetles housed in jars, and blue-bellied lizards. Birgy sings about them in a soft-spoken mania, stumbling over tightly-packed syllables like Destroyer’s Dan Bejar leading a seance. Her arrangements are weightless, weaving lounge jazz and cosmic soft rock into an otherworldly fabric, but her approach to language is supremely odd. On the dreamy “Station to Station,” she compares the dying, dissolving self to “an artichoke being gutted around its spine.” It is one of Birgy’s greatest gifts: the ability to transform worldly materials into lush psychedelia.
– Pitchfork
8/10. Wonderfully eclectic and strangely uplifting… a dense, fantastical odyssey… a grooving flight of fancy into humid rhythms, unhinged cabaret vocals, furious guitar, and free-jazz skronk.
– Uncut
Life, and Another, the forthcoming album from Erin Birgy’s shapeshifting group Mega Bog, is so dense with information that it could conceivably come with its own volume of CliffsNotes. Inspired in part by an extended period of solitude, it’s a firehose of cryptic metaphors, veiled allusions, and seemingly disconnected thoughts sprayed against a bright, skeletal frame of jagged jazz-prog. At every turn lies a surfeit of detail that is thrilling and bewildering in equal measure. “Maybe You Died,” though, is different. Where songs like “Weight of the Earth, on Paper” and “Crumb Back” are wiry and spry, this one is subdued: a sullen, minor-key slow burn led by the synths and guitars reminiscent of ’80s Springsteen in his elegiac mode. Birgy begins with a narrative setup whose economy could rival that of the world’s most famous six-word story: “Smell of wintergreen/Chewing gum/In a Coach leather bag/You gave me/Mom found/Curb sale/What an amazing/Two dollars,” she murmurs, covering four of the five senses in her first three lines alone.
– Pitchfork
4 stars. As Life, and Another finishes, the lingering feeling is that it exists beyond definable time and space. Audaciously, it all coheres. The vision is precise and the execution meticulous.
– MOJO
Chamber-popper Erin Birgy unveils her gem of a new album with a synth-pop ballad that wafts through with all the poignancy and loveliness of Prefab Sprout.
– The Guardian
5 stars. Erin Birgy is one of today’s finest, most unique singer-songwriters. Her new album Life, and Another is a sensual jewel, an invitation to get lost in richly detailed sounds and words that calls for repeated visits. It’s more adventurous—and even more effortlessly sophisticated than 2019’s exquisite Dolphine. With its prismatic jazzy leanings, Birgy’s avant-pop has shades of Joni circa Hejira… Superb.
– Shindig!
8/10. By this point, the most we can hope for with originality in songwriting is old forms twisted into previously unseen shapes, or so many different ideas crammed into one that we lose sight of the sources. Erin Birgy is clearly unaware of such limitations. Life, and Another (Birgy’s sixth album as Meg Bog) seems untethered to not just any audible forebears or genres, but often also the codes and conventions of our planet.
– The Line of Best Fit
Here, she moves about in prismatic, somber synths, reflecting on transformations of the soul.
– Aquarium Drunkard
There is something so addicting about the way Mega Bog’s Erin Birgy uses her voice within her music. Spacious and wide-reaching without feeling disjointed or disconnected, Mega Bog’s talent for wrapping the listener up and swallowing them in a cavern of emotion has never felt more tangible.
– Paste
“Station to Station” is an earthy, mysterious creation inhabited by thick layers of synthesizer, fluid bass and Birgy’s breathy vocals.
– Brooklyn Vegan
Life, and Another is more expansive, more colorful, and more engrossing than its predecessor. It’s everything that made previous Mega Bog releases enjoyable, but invested with an additional degree of ambition, creativity and craftsmanship that draws you in irresistibly. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.
– Dusted
It’s the glorious idiosyncratic performances and avant-pop soundscapes unique to Erin Birgy that utterly envelops the listener on her new Mega Bog album, Life, and Another. Here, her artistry is vibrant and explosive…
– The Quietus
Do you want to find some nice background music, or do you want to blow your mind? If it’s the latter, dive in. The water’s warm—if a bit weird.
– The Sunday Times
Prismatic avant-pop.
– NPR
Which each phrase, Mega Bog builds something distinct, a willful invitation to a new place to land.
– Audiofemme
Yet another spectacular artistic statement from Erin Birgy.
– The Quietus
Sonic fantasia from a poetic mind … a whimsical and devastating cosmic journey through loss and healing.
– Uncut
Life, and Another traverses an otherworldly musical landscape, culminating in fourteen songs of tender and disruptive sonic mastery. Birgy’s songwriting expertise is evident in each track as she investigates a certain mercurial tension through lyrical and a jazz-like erraticism.
– Audiofemme
A shimmering chiaroscuro [of] fully fledged delicious pop.
– The Wire
As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.
– Pitchfork
Jazzy, skronking, and when a chorus of voice chime in, surprising.
– Brooklyn Vegan
It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.
– Pitchfork
Confident in its lack of convention, the album exists as its own living entity, shifting in form and feeling, sighing and swaying in and out of each individual track.
– Audiofemme
Slinky and decadent.
– Pitchfork
Like Aldous Harding, Cate Le Bon, and Dan Bejar, Birgy exists in a universe both familiar but foreign. I do not always understand what her songs are about but I am drawn to them all the same and find myself quoting lines.
– Brooklyn Vegan
A primordial marsh of sound that morphs in kaleidoscopic fashion—a trick of the light diffracted by the fog rising from its surface. Underneath it all, Life, and Another teems with, well, life.
– Under The Radar
It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.
– Pitchfork
Excellent sixth album.
– Pitchfork
Wading into dark pool of enigmatic sonic depths, an air of mystery and ever-present anxiety lies within the pall of vague obscurity that is Life, and Another.
– SLUG
Life, and Another is spooky, yet very much alive in its strangeness.
– SLUG
Life, And Another functions as a brilliant, daring and fulfilling tour de force through the indie pop wonderland of MEGA BOG.
– Musik Review
Life, and Another continues Birgy’s boundless curiosity and exploration of both self and the universe writ large, again shifting on a whim from one colorful mode to the next within the framework of a cohesive larger statement.
– AllMusic
By this point, the most we can hope for with originality in songwriting is old forms twisted into previously unseen shapes, or so many different ideas crammed into one that we lose sight of the sources. Erin Birgy is clearly unaware of such limitations. Life, and Another (Birgy’s sixth album as Meg Bog) seems untethered to not just any audible forebears or genres, but often also the codes and conventions of our planet.
– The Line of Best Fit
Birgy’s latest Life, and Another expands her palette tenfold with different hues and tones that would typically go unnoticed on an experimental record. The result is her most engaging work yet.
– Beats Per Minute
This new album of Mega Bog is nothing less than a masterpiece.
– OOR
Life, And Another astonishes, touches and brings the listener into trance. It’s not a record for the masses; it’s one to listen to on your own. To surrender yourself completely and to take you on an interstellar journey.
– Muziscene
Z2021 marked the return of Mega Bog—the art-pop playground of Erin Birgy. This latest statement is at once sleek, weird, and playful, awash in varying strains of nocturnal jazz and pop. A grower in the very best sense, this sixth record is further proof that Birgy is nothing if not original.
– Aquarium Drunkard
“Take me for the music, take me for a human,” Erin Birgy sings on “Flower,” the opening cut on Mega Bog’s Life, and Another. “Any fool who sleeps or dreams can find me.” Mega Bog’s songs exist in the realm between sleep and waking, deep with meaning — and jazzy melody — even if you struggle to decipher it the next morning. It’s rewarding to try, though.
– Brooklyn Vegan
The detail and complexity of Life, and Another are no surprise coming from the long line of thoughtfully constructed albums that Birgy has made on the way to this one. It’s a new and fantastic chapter in an ongoing body of uncontainable work, one where Birgy has never hesitated to dive into her own psyche and wrestle what she finds there back up to the surface for all to see.
– AllMusic
If Steely Dan is the sound of the room you do coke in, then “The Weight of the Earth, on Paper” is the sound of the coke itself. It’s frantic, like a classic Becker and Fagen jaunt is running a marathon. Every instrument struggles to keep up with Mega Bog’s Erin Birgy, who moves through words and sentences like they couldn’t mean a thing to her, even as they unspool a strange cosmological theory of meaning. Her surreal images—harpies screaming, grass licking, water sneering—don’t make much literal sense, but they make sense in the measure, filling up bars with perfectly balanced phrases. The thrill is in if she can pull it off, if she can keep up with this forward motion that she began. In the end, it’s the carefully constructed irony that gets the best of her: Birgy sings out “where are my girls” and a men’s chorus responds. A piano plays them offstage.
– Treble
Across the 14 songs on new album Life, and Another, Birgy and her merry band of Mega Boggers craft a verdant wetland of sound. They reject linear songwriting and instead weave together guitars, synths, and drums until they are tangled up like mangrove roots, as horns and congas swoop through like little birds. All the while, Birgy talk-croons about flowers and butterflies and lizards and a beagle in the clouds, sometimes cryptically. In most swamps, getting lost can be a death sentence, but Mega Bog encourages you to relinquish your grip on logic and sink into the intoxicating ooze.
– Pitchfork
