Paper The Operator – The Pendulum

“Please Proceed,” the first track on Paper The Operator’s Goodbye God,  sets up the album with only a gently strummed electric guitar and Jon Sebastian’s voice: “I couldn’t remember/that solemn memory/this couldn’t happen to me,” sings Sebastian, in a wash of reverse-reverb. A few jangly notes play over a quiet keyboard, and the song is over in barely two minutes. It’s a subtle yet loaded introduction to Goodbye God.

The album’s title itself plays into Jon’s penchant for understatement. ”I was listening to the Squeeze song ‘Goodbye Girl,’ and I imagined how different it would be if the words were ‘Goodbye God,’ sung over the same music,” he explains. “It would be a very complicated and stark thing to say in an almost throw-away pop song. Sometimes things are so heavy that the only way to state them appropriately is to understate them.”

This concept drives the album which quickly powers through 12 immediately gratifying songs that don’t give up their secrets until a few listens in. In “Days Of Thunder,” a sing-along synth-pop melody all but covers a lyrical mess of divorce and car wrecks. “The Pendulum” with its throbbing bass and heavy beat, the quiet acoustic-and-piano “It’s A Miracle,” and the buzzing lo-fi of “Buddy Baby II” not only explore a creative theme of veiled meaning, but prove Sebastian’s dedication to the craft of songwriting.

It’s a craft Sebastian has been perfecting since the late ’90s, when he first started laying down songs on a four-track cassette recorder. Over the years, he self-released a series of tapes and CD-Rs while playing live with a rotating cast of band members under a variety of different band names. In 2008, his band Paper The Operator released Solemn Boyz EP on Viper Bite Records, followed by the odds-and-ends collection Mount Bounty in 2009.

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Paper The Operator - The Pendulum