BEST CLOCKMAKER ON MARS FULL

He’s angstier than ever on Sound and Fury, plagued by his public platform, preoccupied with the way he’s been misunderstood and boxed in by an unforgiving music industry. When Simpson does sing, much of what he has to say is similarly self-referential. “Think it’s time to change up the sound,” as Simpson puts it. The most thrilling moment on the record, and perhaps in Simpson’s entire catalog, comes nearly two minutes into “Make Art Not Friends,” the album’s shimmering creative introvert anthem centerpiece, when Bobby Emmett’s hypnotic keyboard pattern gives way to a booming staccato guitar riff.

BEST CLOCKMAKER ON MARS FULL

As a guitarist, Simpson is uninterested in conventional guitar god shredding his playing is curious, fluid and full of wonder. Establishing the tone on the four minute instrumental “Ronin,” Simpson is smart enough to cede much of the narrative storytelling of Sound & Fury to his guitar. Sound and Fury begins much in the same way as Simpson’s recent live set: with an exploratory psych-blues jam. “A sleazy synth-rock dance record,” he’s called it.

Over ten songs, Simpson leads his tight-knit rock quartet through a super-charged flow of indignant Southern Rock (“Fastest Horse in Town”), strutting disco-boogie (“Sing Along”), and pulsing modern blues (“Best Clockmaker on Mars”) that do away with the typical melodic, structural conventions of country and folk. That litany of iconoclastic gestures have, of course, only ended up bolstering the very image of old-school Nashville dissident that Simpson says he’s been trying so hard to walk away from in the first place. Enter Sound & Fury, which is simultaneously the most left-field, decisively non-country offering of Simpson’s career and precisely the record anyone who has been paying any attention to his career over the last several years would have expected him to make. Simpson followed up that career-making record with 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, an idiosyncratic Elvis/soul-hybrid song cycle about his son, opened for Guns N’ Roses, livestreamed a performance of himself busking outside the CMA awards, and most recently, convinced his label to help finance a million-plus dollar anime film.

The only way to organize timekeeping between all these disparate worlds is metric time, which can be easily corrected for relativistic effects, for instance the 8 billionths of a second difference between a Clarke orbit and Earth's surface.STURGILL SIMPSON, Sound & Fury (CD/red vinyl LP)Įver since Sturgill Simpson was anointed the second coming of Seventies country with his 2014 release, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the 41-year-old Kentucky Navy vet has spent the past half-decade making a show of his discomfort with any such label. Honestly I'm sympathetic to the more radical ideas about time reform because 1) what we got now is some bullshit and 2) Earth traditional timekeeping is utterly incompatible with what Mars has going on and 3) Mars is easy mode, do you really want to try to make Luna/Venus/Ceres/Europa/Mercury/random ass asteroid and moon colonies and interplanetary spacecraft use a timekeeping system that dates to the fucking Sumerians of 4000 BC? We don't use the Sumerian 'cubits' and 'spans' anymore now do we? Like I'm glad they invented the stick but we have better technology than the stick now.

There's also the idea of getting rid of the rest of the calendar and just using seconds for everything, like if you're 30 years old you're about 1 billion seconds old. For instance some people want to abolish time zones and having everyone using UTC time, but get up and clock in at different UTC times, since obviously forcing half the planet to work in the middle of their local night is ridiculous. This bleeds into time reforms for this planet. 'Months' as moons are impossible what with having two of them and the fact they're so close they buzz by so quickly, but arranging the calendar around what constellation you're passing through is fair, though the month-equivalents would be on average twice as long, though due to the less circular orbit of Mars the longest would be like 3 times as long as the shortest. NASA scientists and engineers operating surface rovers are on Martian 'sol' time already, so every day they show up to the office 37 minutes later than the next day, which gets inconvenient real fast. Kim Stanley Robinson likes the idea of programming Martian clocks to stop running at midnight for 37 minutes every night. Mad Doc Zubrin has recommended lengthening the time of the Martian second so that 24 Mars hours equals one Mars day, which is possibly the most insane of all ideas.

Best clockmaker on mars