Mull It Over 052: Careerist - Silver Birch Lodge

Belfast cult heroes Careerist return after a six year hiatus; with Ulster-coded existentialism on their sophomore album, Silver Birch Lodge.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on”

- Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953)

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This line, taken from Beckett’s postmodernist landmark The Unnamable, echoes throughout Silver Birch Lodge - the anxious and enlightening second album from Belfast cult heroes Careerist, who find themselves adrift here, staring down the realities of an existence that is anything but what was promised.

Six years removed from their remarkable debut Weird Hill, Carl Eccles, Conor Ellison and Nathan Rodgers return with a new album that is all of a sudden the talk of all the weird and wonderful corners of the city. Across a ten day stretch, the band had released - lead single “Walk Away”, it’s glam(glum?)-stomping follow up “Sicko” and then, before we could snap up tickets for the headline Ulster Sports Club show that was deftly announced, the full album dropped. Six years fallen away in an instant, one gets the feeling this was a heavy weight that the band was eager to finally be unloading; lumbered for years by the unrelenting machinery of life, both personal and professional. It certainly comes across that way here in the music. Whether it is successful or not, I doubt they care.

Lifting its name from a nursing home the band passed each day on their way to rehearsals on the outskirts of Belfast, Silver Birch Lodge from the outset must contend with heavy themes of mortality, vulnerability and existential drift. And of what comes next.

Although this certainly colours the listening experience of Silver Birch Lodge, the lyricism from Carl Eccles often crosses the rubicon from the oblique to the acute in ways that can cut through cold. Lines like “Stitch another line and you’re weaving a tapestry, Flame atop the shrine, Though you’re hardly a Kennedy” on album opener “Spirit of the Lake” offers up images so vivid and shimmering that it is a hard-sought landing when you’re faced with the stark nihilism of “Not Bad”, where our exasperated narrator confides: “We must be nearing death, I’m sick of seeing sights and shaking hands, Or was it obvious? I wanna be around but not like this”. This to and fro style is evident not only in the written word, but in the actual, mechanical sequencing of the album. Not quite content in their own existential dread, Careerist are determined to pull you into their world, the world of the Silver Birch Lodge, which, as it moves uneasily through each track is beginning to appear more like some kind of Ulster-coded Hotel California, where instead of a dark desert highway it is the Crossgar Road in Saintfield.

This is no more evidenced than on the fantastic single “Sicko”. A romp semi-indebted to the British glam rockers of the 1970s, which, at the midway point of the album offers up a glimmer of hope in its rock n’ roll fantasy. However, any Sweet the listener is pining for quickly turns sour. Of course we should not have trusted a band like this, on an album like this. The fantasy of the music here again gives way to larger ideas of death and defeat as our broken host now finds himself entirely beat down out in the universe, when on the humbling album closer, “When I Lose” he sings, “You pull the wool down when I lose, Reveal the trapdoor and I lose Twist the knife in when I lose, Come up swinging When I lose”. Words that close out an album of contradictions and confusions. And of a melancholy glamour reminiscent of late-period Bryan Ferry, who mastered this feeling.

Here’s the rub though. Silver Birch Lodge is not about life at all. It is about love. It was about love. And what comes next.