PEGASISSY - UNION This album is named for a song that didn't make the final cut, a Peggy Seeger tune called "If You Want A Better Life", about poor factory conditions and workers' rights. The Pegasissy version failed to add anything new or interesting to the Seeger one, so it went unfinished. So, what is an album named for a phantom title track? Why, an album full of ghosts, of course, and on this front, UNION doesn't disappoint. Some of these ghosts are literal--take Thelma Taylor, subject of a clap-along a-capella singalong, a young girl abducted from a bus stop, raped and killed in North Portland, Oregon, in the late 1940's, whose ghost can allegedly be heard shreiking in Cathedral Park on warm summer nights, or The Empress, a mystical, androgynous, fragile spirit bemoaning her downfall at the center of an acousmatic cyclone of blips and samples. Other "ghosts" are more of the "phantom limb" variety: old lovers hovering in some ungraspable, distant past (or future), enduring bodily scars and callouses that create a connect-the-dots map of one's life, fleeting, floating spectres of insight that tingle and burn but cannot support weight. Beyond these ghosts, and perhaps in a move to transcend the haunted nature of these songs, this album, by and large, does live up to its title: UNION speaks to togetherness and joining, to love and solidarity, to the power of strong bonds between people, albiet from an often wry, jaded point of view. "Marriage Vows," a slow-burning synth number, skewers the typical pomp of "To have and to hold...": "Would you not resist my curse if I were mummified/even if a golden scarab ate up your insides?" "A Ripe Fig", adapted from a Rumi poem of the same name, describes an ecstatic, transformative love, but one that is societally misunderstood: "Intelligence and silence:/what we say is poison to some/and nourishing to others." Tracks that describe harsher facets of coupling--the Shirelles-cum-Bikini Kill live hit "Don't Tell Me" ("Don't tell me you're gonna treat me like a woman/cos you're a misogynist, and you treat women like shit") and "Boys She Barely Knew", a jangly, raw story song detailing a young woman's struggle against rape, drugs, and suicide--call for liberation and strength. The speaker in "Don't Tell Me" rejects a failed, "traditional" union, refusing to fall for the anti-woman lines that have populated love songs for generations. The "noble kid" of "Boys," on the other hand, perserveres through horrifying times by thinking of a kind friend and the possibilities that could await her were she in an environment of mutual respect--"She thought of you/and not that boy she barely knew/She thought, 'Maybe with you and me it could be different.'" The latter song perhaps best synthesizes--through the trademark Pegasissy filter of brash, political sexuality, melodic, reedy vocals, and punch-in-the-gut wordplay--the outtake Peggy Seeger cover that gives the album its name: "If you want a better life/you better make a change/and if you want to make a change/you'll need a union to/and if you want a union, you got to learn to fight/cos when you got a union, you got to make it fight for you." Indeed, this is an album about, and a record of, that fight for such a union, for dignity and support, for all the great and small pleasures that closeness can offer. Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore 1
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