Giraffes? Giraffes! – Memory Lame (2018)

Guitarist Joseph Andreoli explained the concept of Memory Lame to me.

There was no “ah-ha!” moment after we said goodbye. A few listens later, and the album did not suddenly make complete sense, even after I’d digested the cyclical, tangent-laden dissertation, but rather, the need for it to make sense or even objectively mean anything became irrelevant.

Memory Lame is the return of Giraffes? Giraffes! – a triumphant, often introspective and self-referential reawakening of the stream of consciousness sound arrangement that has been a signature of the band for more than a decade.

It feels like the culmination of a decade’s work. And in a way, that’s the concept of Memory Lame, but not in the way you might think.

There are motifs that allude to previous Giraffes? Giraffes! works blended with wholly novel ones, reconstituted ideas and nearly arcane callbacks, which is to say that the album sometimes sounds like a song from – which album was it? – that you’ve misremembered or conjured from an unrelated amalgam of electrified gray matter beneath a nonspecific wrinkle of your temporal lobe. Like having a dream about the time you and your family drove to the beach and years later, erroneously file away as the actual memory, regardless of the anachronisms.

If you’re wondering whether the novella-length song titles create an intentional narrative, they do, but it’s not one that was written for you. Or maybe it was. Likely, it wouldn’t make sense if you heard it. But that’s not the point. The point is that somewhere, locked in your subconscious, is the experience of Giraffes? Giraffes!, mingling and marinating in some heterogenous mixture of lived experience and fictions of synaptic construct based on inaccessible hard truths that, together, form a kind of mythos that is written only for you, by you, unable to be understood by any other consciousness. The only matter of importance is the higher fiction that’s created by the sum of this colored experience – auditory, literary, visual, kinetic, and otherwise.

In another sense, the dissolution of authorial intent is the issue at hand. What Giraffes? Giraffes! wants you to take away from Memory Lame, what they had in mind during the assemblage of this 37 chapter odyssey and folded into each crease, craftsmanlike, is not only beside the point, it is unknowable.

But that’s just my take.

What I can say for sure is that it has something to do with Eddie Money.