East River Pipe - Life and Miracles of a Pop Hermit

For every band born in the underground that goes on to win a Grammy Award, there are still hundreds of songwriters who, without any aspiration to major recognition, keep “oiling the gears” every day, getting by in their craft with patient, stoic acceptance and the consistency of someone who has always regarded making music as both an essential form of self-expression and a meticulous act of craftsmanship. The reference to Fred M. Cornog – the man behind the now nearly thirty-year-old moniker East River Pipe – is hardly accidental, since his figure as a laborer of “bedroom pop” embodies the identity of someone who, more or less unnoticed by the world, carries on his obscure work of weaving in rigorous solitude. The New Jersey songwriter easily counts among the great unsung American artists who sprang up like mushrooms in the indie underbrush at the start of the Nineties, right where the previous decade's alternative rock crossed paths with the new stirrings of lo-fi singer-songwriting – artists who today are effectively an endangered species, resigned to anonymity, swept away by their own excesses, burned out and recycled, or, quite simply, dead and buried. Cornog is not dead, no – in fact, more than almost anyone else, he wears the guise of the true survivor, or of the miracle case, if you prefer.

His life is a novel, the arc of a self-taught musician who plunged headlong into a pit of alcoholism, addiction and vagrancy, ending up begging in a train station. Meeting the most down-to-earth of angels – an admirer of his songs who later became his life partner – reversed the course of an existence that seemed already headed toward the most miserable of endings. Cleaned up, healed and, as much as possible, rebalanced, Cornog found the comfort of a roof over his head and a small studio in which to indulge his true passion, plus a label run by the couple themselves to bring his diy talent to light, first on cassette and then on seven-inch, eventually catching the attention of the legendary Sarah Records (hardly insensitive to that vague resemblance to the label's prize horse, Field Mice), thereby securing a visibility he could never have hoped for. The admiration of an important fan like Kurt Wagner, frontman of Lambchop and a key figure at Merge, served as a passport to artistic peace of mind, with a contract renewed punctually from then on and a rock-solid “home” that allowed him to build a rewarding independent career, however irreducibly anomalous. Fred is no prisoner of the record-industry treadmill – quite the opposite: he writes and records only when the itch strikes him, never takes his songs on tour, and gets by on his honest job as a clerk at a large hardware store, devoting his free time to his wife and young daughter: practically an alien in his disconcerting humanity, a foreign body.

Perhaps the secret of his magic lies precisely in this low profile, which has filtered out, as if on principle, every excess, favoring only the talent that always comes through clearly and with the restraint of someone who, in the meantime, also prefers to live a life built on affection, common sense and concreteness. On one hand, the music: the laboratory in which he explores the many possibilities of the eight-track recorder, layering vocal lines and soaking the humblest of songwriting in reverb that never overwhelms, earning him the label of “Brian Wilson of home-recording”, coined by a New York Times critic. On the other, a gaze that has remained the same as ever, affectionately turned toward the daily, grinding war of attrition waged by a handful of eternal losers. Quietly, Fred has established himself as the chronicler of a lesser, crumbling America, a neon-lit desert populated by a cast of miserable individuals worthy of a Raymond Carver story or the dirty realism of Richard Yates: sketches of ordinary, desolate life drawn with absolute honesty, stories of people defeated by alcohol and drugs, of the deluded, the burned-out, the petty, the drifters, of pimps and whores, of small-time crooks and hustlers. If anything, that gaze has only grown sharper. Like good wine, East River Pipe improves with age, asserting himself far from the spotlight as an ever more faithful mirror of a vast reality generally considered unworthy of attention.

The Misadventures of Kid Colgate

The dream of forming a band stayed with him throughout his adolescence. In his days as a green songwriter, he had even pulled the right name out of a hat – in keeping with not exactly enviable self-esteem – after lingering by a drainage pipe spewing raw sewage into the East River, and thinking: “I am that pipe, the black water is my songs, and the river is the world.” As an actual band, however, East River Pipe would never have a future, taking shape instead as a moniker for Frederick M. Cornog alone, the undisputed protagonist of the story we're telling here.

The son of a Colgate/Palmolive sales rep and a part-time clerical worker who moonlighted as a choir singer at a Methodist church, our hero was born in 1966 in Norfolk, Virginia, but grew up in Summit, New Jersey, a town perched on a hill twenty miles from the Big Apple. As a young child, he spent his afternoons listening to WABC's Top 40, the area's go-to radio station. It's the early Seventies, and the future musician's life is shaped by the likes of Elton John, Al Green, Paul McCartney, Sly & The Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, The Carpenters and The Eagles. Later it will be his older brother's vinyl records that get raided to make room for a brand-new set of personal idols, from the Beatles to Lou Reed, from Bowie to Joy Division and from Todd Rundgren to the very earliest R.E.M. Around the age of fourteen, Fred starts teaching himself on the family's battered piano and writes his first songs together with a schoolmate, Dave Woodard, who handles the lyrics exclusively. He will later call their inaugural effort “a complete mess” – a track inspired by the Ramones' “Blitzkrieg Bop” but centered on “furtively spying on girls his age.”

Cornog's only experience in an actual band dates back to the end of high school: the Tom Manley Band, a group fronted by a handsome kid idolized by all the girls in Summit, in which our hero spent some time on keyboards before getting kicked out for adopting a style closer to Neil Young than to the imposed model, Rick Wakeman. Several other attempts to form a band ran aground miserably, so the young man decided to start recording on his own, on a rudimentary Tascam Porta One. It's 1984, and a turning point is in the air, arriving in the shape of Tom Verlaine, frontman of Television, who proves to be something of a revelation for Fred. Carried away by emulation, he buys a replica of his idol's Fender Jazzmaster and, before losing it on a New York City subway car, manages to wear it out properly.

Having dropped out of school before graduating, Cornog moved to San Francisco for a while, where he scraped by working first in a greenhouse, then at a mail-order drug-paraphernalia outlet, and finally in a carpet warehouse. Back in New Jersey, he landed a job in a lightbulb factory, but this too would quickly prove a dead end. Nervous exhaustion and alcohol abuse gradually dragged him into an abyss, and from cheap hotels he soon found himself living like a vagrant on the railway tracks of the Hoboken station, the town of Yo La Tengo, perpetually wasted. Urban legend would later soften the harshness of this period, romanticizing it into the myth of the carefree busker, but the singer would never fail to debunk that story in every interview, hammering home the point: "I never busked. I was too busy trying to destroy myself. I was a one-man self-destruction factory."

His fate, in any case, seemed sealed, until that apparent point of no return opened up in 1988 onto an unforeseen and blessed detour.

A girl, after hearing a couple of his songs on a tape made by a mutual friend, became determined to meet him at all costs. Her name was Barbara Powers, and she turned out to be about as close to a guardian angel as it gets: she pulled him off the street, took him in at her apartment in Queens, and did everything she could to rekindle his enthusiasm for music and personally champion its fruits. "She had the best record collection of any woman I'd ever known," he would later recall, well after the fateful Sonic Youth show they saw together in the city and the inevitable romance that followed, referencing Sonic Youth.

His "organizer of chaos" proved to be a flawless manager, and with a small label set up specifically for the purpose, Hell Gate, she set out to get his songs circulating around New York. She surprised her partner with a home recording studio built for the occasion, equipped with gear that would remain, broadly speaking, unchanged for years to come: a Telecaster, an acoustic Guild, an old Gibson bass, a couple of drum kits, assorted percussion, a synthesizer, a drum machine, and five or six pedals picked up on the cheap. Nothing more expensive or sophisticated than that. Only around 2010, after many years of marriage, would the Cornogs finally allow themselves the "luxury" of retiring the trusty Tascam 388 and replacing it with another mini-studio, the Korg D1600.

The first tape to see the light of day is a red cassette with an eponymous header and just three songs, recorded between 1987 and 1988 but officially released, for what it's worth, on July 15, 1989. The Nineties are right around the corner, and you can feel it, loud and clear. Fred keeps all his copies in a milk crate and occasionally sells them off in search of feedback or, who knows, a review. "New York Of Slime" is a calling card with apocalyptic overtones, delivered via affable guitars and a plush sound somewhere between Smiths and Go-Betweens, already carrying the seeds of a future, easily recognizable style, moving between seemingly ordinary verses and beautifully radiant openings on the refrains. The production is semi-amateurish but careful nonetheless, lo-fi more out of material necessity than any deliberate affectation, and despite a few naive touches, it's rather likable.

"Goin' To Hollywood" favors a tidy jangle-pop, thoroughly enjoyable despite (or maybe thanks to) its slightly bitter inflection, while "At The Bar" stands as the best introduction to the hidden wonders of Cornog's world, a microcosm of human wrecks and losers untouched by the sunlight of grace yet still prone to unexpected flashes of romance. The storytelling in East River Pipe is sparse, unassuming, yet in its own way relentless: kindness cuts through the squalor of the setting and, with grace and patience, manages to reel the listener in.

The yellow cassette of Point Of Memory arrives a few months later, in early 1990, with seven brand-new tracks, the first ones recorded on the Tascam 388. With the possible exception of the closer "Million, Trillion," which is really too subdued and ordinary to amount to much more than a flat demo, the songwriter proves he can write effective songs with next to nothing, and already hints at his full potential, despite the endemic fragility and a production that's anything but crystal clear. The gentle "Helmet On" is the main draw this time around, already fittingly melancholy as a ballad – a fine paradigm – and already strikingly sharp in its chorus, a perfect evocation of the American's scorched autumn. "Shop An Attitude" kicks off with a leaden Eighties organ before infecting that funereal mood with the classic bedroom pop that would forever define the man's output: the short-circuit is his modernity even here, where there are no electric guitars and the drum machine enforces a grey mechanical quality, because deep down Fred is already thoroughly himself.

While the echoes of early Rem are very strong on "The Politician's Crippled," derivative and almost Paisley Underground but still a classy imitation, referencing Rem and Paisley Underground, "40 Miles" opens side B still under the spell of a caressing wonder, with a folk-pop grace that might recall 10,000 Maniacs, while the trinkets and carefree guitar of "Fatherland" mark a moment more inclined toward optimism, as much as that's possible; at the other extreme sits the warning of "You Will Never Go Away," a sentence that only the delicacy of the jangle-pop arrangement can soften.

So the music of Point Of Memory belies the sense of despair the lyrics let show through, coming across as luminous, in spite of the recurring themes of unease, loneliness, loss and defeat.

Blue in color and with a tracklist of nine songs, I Used To Be Kid Colgate is the last of the cassettes produced by Fred and Barbara on Hell Gate, released during 1991. The sound already appears decidedly cleaner, while the songwriting sticks to the discipline of the template, with rumpled choruses that play fruitfully with the bittersweet clichés of nostalgia and lay down one of the cornerstones of Cornog's art. "My Life Is Wrong" is rather illuminating when it comes to the expressive peculiarities of the twenty-five-year-old from New Jersey: gentleness and a headlong drive coexist in an intriguing blend, rough and delicate at once, one that doesn't shy away from acidic or subtly unsettled edges.

A champion of understatement, allergic to both hype and insincere theatrics, Fred puts himself into his songs with disarming candor and frankness, honest without ever coming across as raw or melodramatic. The masterpiece of this scruffy phase, of this fruitful self-taught apprenticeship, is "Hit The Ground," a fantastic ride that doesn't hide its wounds or ugliness but instead exalts the clarity of his gaze and an uncommon dignity for someone still so new to the game.

If "Times Square Go-Go Boy" is another little gem of basic, crystalline purity, the five-plus minutes of "We're Going To Nowhere" are also quite striking, beautifully watercolored by a shimmering keyboard that very fittingly offsets another nihilistic inner monologue. The singular voice of the previous subjects is at least replaced here by a first-person plural that softens the harshness of the reflection. A true statement of identity, an anthem for the musician-as-antihero or for the everyman with his stock of miseries and small daily gratifications, "Axl Or Iggy" is perhaps the first underground hit under the East River Pipe name, a fresh, happy interplay of intimacy and warmth that shatters the seals of a proverbial introversion thanks to a simply moving crescendo. Closing things out, "Central Park" lives on fewer exasperations and works in a more impressionistic way, still managing to warm the heart once again.

Make a deal with the… Sarah Records

With the proceeds from the three tapes, Barbara manages to press five hundred copies of the single "Axl or Iggy?/ Helmet On," released on the tiny Ajax label. Three more self-produced seven-inches on Hell Gate ("Make A Deal With The City," "My Life Is Wrong," "Firing Room") help give a bit of a boost to an otherwise invisible songwriter. Approached with a request to keep (and play) a handful of copies for promotional purposes, the owner of the Bar/None record store in Hoboken suggests the couple write a letter to Matt Haynes and Claire Wadd at the legendary Sarah Records, over in Bristol, and quite unexpectedly the two write back saying they'd be glad to offer Fred a deal: Cornog thus becomes the first American artist (after the little-known Springfields) to be able to claim such an honor. The first release on the English label, "Helmet On," becomes single of the week for Melody Maker magazine, and the name East River Pipe starts to circulate among fans. Far more significant, though, is the long EP that follows close behind, still in 1993: Goodbye California.

Sober intimacy barely weighed down by a thin veil of sadness, arrangements stripped to the bone ahead of the usual flourishes or the fantastic reverbed twilights: this first mini-release for the Bristol label only deepens the conversation begun with the forty-fives the couple put out on their own. At times melancholic but never mannered, a chronicler of simple yet genuine emotions, Cornog confirms his preference for a craftsmanship devoted to song and attentive to the allure of the marginal. His guitar leaves its mark on tape with serene calm, sketching basic, recurring melodies, in some cases with the same incisiveness as the Kozelek of early Red House Painters ("Dogman"), with zero artifice, just heart and electric flame. Even leaner, seemingly starker moments like "When Will Your Friends All Disappear" are preserved by the clarity of a disillusionment that's sharp but never narrow.

The serene acceptance that comes through in the lyrics does the rest, helping to free these new songs from the vicious circle of a sterile, self-referential despair. "Silhouette Town," as well as the secular prayer of "Bernie Shaw" (backed by a plain, heartening jangle), recovers light and fragrance, standing out as one of the more positive passages in the artist's otherwise slim catalog, while the trotting, slightly acidic "Psychic Whore" seems to serve as a blueprint for the more visceral numbers on later releases, with that "party's over" working like a branding iron for his poetics. The only song salvaged (along with "40 Miles") from the Hell Gate output, "Make A Deal With The City" stands out as the most representative of the new titles and presents a Fred who is already mature and incisive in his reflections, caught between open disillusionment and romanticism.

The Ep Goodbye California, along with some of the best tracks already showcased on cassette and a trio of outtakes, flows a few months later into a collection aiming to leave its mark on the American alternative underground too.

Released on Chicago's Ajax, Shining Hours In A Can would seem to have all the makings of a career-best collection, were it not that the three new tracks drag down the average considerably: "She's A Real Good Time," issued as a single on Sarah, is appropriately anguished but also a touch heavy-handed, and things don't improve much with the limp "Hide My Life Away From You" (the B-side of the new Hell Gate forty-five, "Ah Dictaphone") or with the future seven-inch on Shinkausen, "Miracleland," chilly though caressing.

Here as in previous works, at the center of our man's anything-but-ironic reflections are the people of Astoria, the Queens neighborhood where Fred and Barbara live. Street animals, like the mentally ill woman with her ten dogs in "Dogman," the prostitutes working the strip in front of the Turf Motel, the street hustlers or the macho bikers and their flashy girlfriends who overrun Astoria Park.

Every circus freak with their squalid everyday existence catches the sympathy of the New Jersey singer, and it could hardly be otherwise for the heartbreaking pony Fricky, his coat dyed shocking pink by an unscrupulous owner, whom Fred comes across around Asbury Park: "Fricky was 50 cents a ride. I related to his cheap vaudevillian life. I'm 50 cents a ride too." A perfect subject, in short, to lend its name and its cover snapshot to the first proper East River Pipe Lp, Poor Fricky indeed, released again on Sarah during 1994.

The opener "Bring On The Loser" is enough to recognize that we're in the presence of a full-fledged expressive and identity-defining manifesto, for its blend of gentleness and sparing noisy deviations, a mixture of undeniable charm that recalls Galaxie 500 and effectively dispels that sense of isolation that tended to characterize the project. Time and again Fred will replicate this same model — secluded arrangements with sweet electric glimmers followed by sudden pocket-sized deflagrations, delivered by Cornog the singer with all the heart he can muster — starting with the following "Metal Detector" and the other classic, "Superstar In France," a little gem of melancholic self-deprecation as well as a superlative hymn to disenchantment ("and pretty soon/ the dream is over") set ablaze in a finale that risks an alienated sunshine touch.

With a thicker, deliberately dreamlike sound, heightened by the lightness and vagueness of the label's unmistakable soft focus, tracks like "Keep All Your Windows Tight Tonight" and "Put Down" are a fine example of the New Yorker's minimalist, pastel-toned dream-pop, whose mournful inflection accentuates its homespun feel and once again lays bare the dead-end dreams of a loser, though this skeptical outlook never denies grace its place.

If with its splashes of accordion "Here We Go" is on the surface a more carefree track, certainly less weighed down by the norm of ulcer-inducing introspection, "Ah Dictaphone" is another smooth, rounded passage that lulls the listener with a melodicism as simple as it is contagious, and this elegy to normality, a chimera pursued by pushing through the common miseries of daily life, resurfaces in "Walking The Dog" with the reemergence of his past working at an animal shelter.

The record doesn't fully deliver on the promises of a truly striking first side and tends to gradually lower its profile, toward an even more sparse and marginal dimension, though no less enchanting for it (just listen to the lovely airborne gallop, open to turbulence, of "Marty"). Diligent in his little vignettes, Fred takes care never to come across as too raw, and indulges in effects and reverb like a set of slightly worn-out fluorescent highlighters ("Hey, Where's Your Girl?"). His humanism finds in Poor Fricky one of its most sincere and, however paradoxical it may sound, luminous expressions. It can even sound tamed; certainly yesterday's inner rage appears defused by a diplomacy that's new for him, a clarity that allows small gems like the closing of "Powerful Man" to shine through regardless.

Four of the tracks from Poor Fricky return — along with a couple of outtakes (including the anemic B-side "Sleeping With Tallboy") and a "Fan The Flames" dredged up all the way from I Used To Be Kid Colgate — on East River Pipe's final release on Sarah, the Ep Even The Sun Was Afraid, a small collection that essentially adds nothing to what had already been said over the previous two years.

The Brian Wilson of home recording

Meanwhile, something important is stirring. Still something of a surprise, East River Pipe signs with a prestigious label, Merge, thanks to the intercession of none other than Kurt Wagner, who a couple of years later would feature no fewer than five covers of our man's songs on Lambchop albums, three from "Thriller" (all from Poor Fricky) and two more from "What Another Man Spills." In the years that followed, many other artists would reinterpret his songs in the studio. Among them David Byrne, Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, For Against and The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. The first album for the Chapel Hill label hits stores in September 1996, titled, simply, Mel.

Stylistically we're still in the same territory, as the instrumental "New York Crown" testifies with its storms in a teacup, as if to ratify the key traits of an already classic signature. Fred, however, seems to deliver his songs with greater concreteness, more anchored in reality and in a less ethereal or suspended dimension, as evidenced by the heightened candor and the ability to come across as visceral without ever sounding truly raw or anguished.

Then, of course, the gaze, however unsparing, remains oriented toward kindness, the phrasing soft, the atmospheres graceful, and at the same time one senses a more pronounced ease, as in "Spotlight," the breezy if not downright serene inflection of someone who has worked to shake off the last traces of shyness, even while staying within a homemade framework that doesn't lend itself to any particular formal overhaul.

There's no shortage of slower, more ecstatic passages like "Beautiful Worn-Out Love," almost tinged with an enchanted sunshine quality, but they remain a minority option. Overall, though, it's fairly undeniable that the mood has grown calmer, regardless of (or perhaps thanks to) the revival of the old "We're Going To Nowhere," a portrait of disorientation but also an expression of a candor that soothes and can even sugarcoat the bitterest pills.

The chronicler of the marginal and the ordinary updates his finest repertoire with a new ballad that's paradigmatic of his poetics and his marbled sound, "Kill The Action," while also choosing not to set aside his superb contemplative streak, the bare-bones stylization that at times recalls that of a Bill Callahan, nor his working-class roots (the strained, crooked lo-fi of "Lonely Line Nowhere," an understated punk track).

In what is, hands down, the collection's best title, the Pavement-esque "Prettiest Whore", the beauty of a prostitute is celebrated, and not by chance. The object of his musings remains a cast of rejects in whom Fred recognizes, beneath a modest dose of noise and crinkled textures, traces of beauty, or at least of purity. On the other side of the scale sit the literal-minded "Guilty As Charged" and the more tormented, (forcedly) singer-songwriterly "Life Is Born Today", where the author strays a bit from his nature and comes across as less convincing.

Kill The Action also resurfaces a few months later in a self-titled EP, accompanied by the dangling, slightly rough-edged "The Way They Murdered Me" - a Poor Fricky-adjacent rehash with decent melodicism (autopilot notwithstanding) - and a "Mindcracker" that comes across as more evocative only because the twilight-hued outfit remains one of the best looks Fred has ever worn. Fans would have to wait only a couple of years for a worthy long-form follow-up. It's August 1999 when Merge releases The Gasoline Age, East River Pipe's most ambitious record (an adjective to be taken with a grain of salt, of course).

"Shiny Shiny Pimpmobile" is a fitting calling card: there's a dash of minimal electronics that feels like the foam on a beer mug on a sweltering day, while the drum machine trudges along languidly and Fred's melancholy little carousel starts spinning, dishing out solid hooks at nearly every turn. There's nothing shouted or showy about it, but his pocket-sized digest of ethereal easy-listening and bedroom noise-pop decidedly hits the mark. A flattering result, soon matched by the startling mood of open disillusionment that the more decadent "Hell Is An Open Door" transforms and distills into drops of limping, cathartic poetry, not to mention that other top-shelf pop number (Pavement or Sebadoh in miniature) that is "Wholesale Lies".

At the center of the scene once again is the composed beauty behind the stories of desperation of other esteemed nobodies, sketched with a few exemplary strokes by that guitar set alight, almost gently. The alternation of more charged episodes with gentle autumnal ballads like "My Little Rainbow" heightens the chiaroscuro quality peculiar to his songwriting, and proves pretty convincing either way.

Here and there Cornog adopts a depressive inflection and strips his songs down into blunt karaoke ballads, before decorating them with modest electric abrasions and a few melodic flourishes, mostly organ-led: East River Pipe's frugality shines in these moments as if under cover of darkness, with their relentless emotional crescendos ("Cybercar", "Party Drive") or a hushed, chilly luminosity, like artificial lights in bare, enclosed rooms ("14th Street Boys Stolen Car Club", the dim sonic wallpaper of a shabby, dimly lit setting on the bitter closer, "Don't Hurry"). Then, of course, Fred gives his best in noisier or more reverb-laden passages like "King Of Nothing Never", yet another vignette of gentle nihilism painted on a dirty, necessarily ordinary wall, as in the long, rarefied Sparklehorse-à-la stream of consciousness of "Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Trillion Tonight)", a classic snowball that turns into a full-blown avalanche thanks to its memorable refrain.

While the tart "Down 42th Street To The Light" sketches, without embarrassing itself, a cocky epic worthy of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed, and the lush sunshine-pop choral sweep of "All You Little Suckers" carves out an unusual corner of his catalogue, finding him daring - albeit with some disguise - far more than usual, the atmospheric, twilit "Astrofarm" edges close to the sweet enchantment of Notwist, skillfully slicing out a rosy serenity that seasoned listeners know is, of course, about as far as it gets from the author's actual feelings. Less inclined toward electro tinkering than Grandaddy, less murky and dark than Magnetic Fields in his take on the pop art form, Cornog nonetheless remains a top-tier figure right alongside them.

This is the moment of peak visibility for the New Jersey songwriter, greeted by something like a critical ovation. The Gasoline Age is named album of the year by both the New York Times and the Independent, while Rolling Stone calls Fred one of the greatest and most eccentric songwriters of his generation. His response is to leave the Big Apple and move back to Summit after fifteen years, rather disappointed by reports of sales that remain, in effect, negligible.

I'm a realist painter, living in an abstract world

With the move to the suburbs, the birth of his daughter and a now-stable job at a Home Depot, his activity as an artist tapers off. The new album, Garbageheads On Endless Stun, hits stores in September 2003, by which point those glimmers of visibility secured by good reviews are now a distant memory. The sound has grown ever more refined over the years, simple but crystal clear, like these increasingly loose-limbed, orderly, rounded ballads, which nonetheless never silence that undercurrent of dry sadness, the bitter aftertaste typical of the East River Pipe brand. Likewise, as "The Long Black Cloud" confirms, the house melodicism has grown ever more worn and decadent, but also enchanted. The record really does seem to want to shape up as Fred's most musically upbeat and lively work.

Even without outside guests, there's a noticeably livelier percussive feel, airier flourishes, and fairly elaborate call-and-response vocals, all of which add depth and make up for a slight loss of pathos or urgency compared to his scrappier early days. Now it's as if the musician were splitting in two, indulging in an increasingly methodical, meticulous craftsmanship, experimenting when needed with bolder solutions but never betraying his aesthetic, which remains allergic to adulteration or insincere emphasis.

The synth textures bring out the nocturnal soul of his music, a collection of first-person fragments that sets faint electric glimmers against more saturated, neon-lit backdrops. Though not spectacular, the overall effect is captivating, and yesterday's alienation now appears filtered through a stillness that seems induced, sedated, yet not unpleasant ("I Bought A Gun In Irvington", the lullaby of "I Won't Dream About The Girl", soothing like an anxiolytic). The result is an odd, sickly album, but undeniably interesting, devoid of potential hits yet steeped in a languid romanticism that reinforces its cohesion; a work that isn't the easiest to absorb, not immediate and yet lovable, a record that can gently intoxicate and become addictive if approached in the right frame of mind.

But the new East River Pipe is also a candidly impressionistic record in terms of its sound, where the singer pours himself into far more charged performances than his usual standard, and into spontaneous departures from the script, as on "Streetwalkin' Jean", the refined Grant Lee Buffalo-à-la entertainment of "Millionaires Of Doubt", or the spoken word of "Arrival Pad #19", a fairly deranged song.

Except for the hushed ending of "It's Always Been This Way", perfect for recounting, without any moralizing, certain traps of human relationships, the sweet indie-pop lit up by flashes of fire is a distant memory, because on Garbageheads On Endless Stun what prevails is a songwriting style prone to subtle marbling, to delicate nostalgic tangles, to a restlessness that is almost serene and to ecstatic, introspective musings - at times shadowy, but never truly dark.

After another three years spent in complete promotional silence, Merge tries to boost the now rock-bottom standing of this brand with his new effort, What Are You On?.

A tart but easygoing opener like "What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" is instantly deceiving. This will in fact turn out to be an account of particularly painful experiences for Fred, and so it's inevitable that the less straightforward arrangements of its predecessor soon resurface, along with the same organ textures and guitars distilled homeopathically or through damp, watery filters. Behind the quirky, playful shell of the title track emerges the more troubled side of Cornog, still marked by his sweetly estranged vignette-style writing and that faint Beatles-esque inflection (via Elliott Smith). And while "I'll Walk My Robot Home" clumsily plays at young-Bowie poses and sketches out a melodic abyss, filling every space without disavowing his minimalist leanings, the overall impression is confirmed by bare, hazy episodes like "Life Is A Landfill" and "Shut Up And Row", or by a "Trivial Things" that leaves a glimmer of levity while desolation continues to reign in the background.

What Are You On? stands out as yet another multifaceted album that's hardly easy to pigeonhole, a story told in music that leaps between moods and the traits of a style of writing that's as convoluted and twilight-bound as ever.

The prevailing tone is one of obsession, here and there softened but still merciless. On "You Got Played, Little Girl" the vocals are filtered just like on the early Eels records, and a parallel with the treacherous contrasts of "Electro-Shock Blues" doesn't seem so far-fetched, given they share both the sense of emotional abyss and the graceful guise that wraps around it (making it twice as cruel). These hints alone would be enough to make this Cornog's most honest and personal work by far, bleak enough and offering little hope, but the New Jersey songwriter doubles down with the unambiguous "Absolutely Nothing", which replicates the same idea of emptiness and disorientation felt by someone drowning in their own addiction, and above all with "Druglife", one of those manifesto-songs Fred has always delivered at regular intervals with impressive clarity. A sense of stupor is conjured through muffled choruses or a stiffer, more apathetic delivery, and you can literally feel the air running out. The final warning of "Some Dreams Can Kill You" is, however, liberating, cautioning against life's illusory shortcuts and preaching caution as the only compass worth following.

The rented rooms of a true anti-star

After another five years spent in the quiet anonymity of his life as a husband, father and shop clerk, We Live In Rented Rooms arrives like a bolt from the blue to remind us of the greatness of a songwriter so devoted to the marginal, and to absence itself. In one interview, Cornog describes the Eighties/Nineties version of East River Pipe as "a nightmare, brakeless ride on a rollercoaster", contrasting it with a present that's more like "a nightmare ride on a rollercoaster, with brakes that work most of the time, but not always".

The "Rented rooms" of the title carry the knowingly fleeting flavour of a life lived under the radar, out in America's endless suburbs, which Fred recounts with Springsteen-esque clarity, wrapped in a pop sound that doesn't adopt the frayed hallucinations of Daniel Johnston, but borrows his quality of defenceless, sincere confession and his delicate, innocent melodic sensibility. This record feeds on suburban dreams, small and (more or less) harmless perverts, men without qualities, soft-hearted losers, all of them proud, in their own way, of belonging to "the bottom rung of the American ladder", steeping its grooves in a humanity that's complicated but endearing in its own way. Despair and defeat, though present - probably tempered by a lifestyle that today brings the author more satisfaction - are transfigured into a melancholy and, for once, exquisitely political reflection, giving us what can, without fear of contradiction, be called East River Pipe's best album in a long, long time.

Looking closely between the lines of "Payback Time" or "When You Were Doing Cocaine", it's not hard to find traces of Cornog's thoroughly dignified songwriting candour or his singular authenticity. The former is a stunning, dust-caked, "veteran's" lament, built on blazing guitars but free of any anguished residue or grandiose temptation; the latter, inspired by Jimmy Webb, is a velvety voice-and-piano piece in which his reflections come across as direct and unflinching without ever betraying the underlying calm - that mature artistic awareness that needs no dramatic devices or forced gestures to reach the listener's heart.

Fred's atypical American indie-pop doesn't hide its own fragility, carving out an aura of nostalgic intimacy that's never affected and, in its sheer simplicity, can recall the domesticated, late-period Lennon ("Summer Boy"). Even in its rigorous cleanliness, in the piano's frequent softening touches, in its unwavering faith(fulness) to good old pastel tones ("I Don't Care About Your Blue Wings"), the New Jersey songwriter is remarkably skilled at sparing himself the easy hypocrisy of mawkishness, sidestepping it with a tasteful variety of solutions.

While the already-mentioned "Payback Time" reveals curious affinities with the (harmless) Mercury Rev of "Secret Migration", "Three Ships" evokes the conquistadores' brutality with the same melancholy as Alun Woodward, "Conman" dusts off a certain atmospheric voice-and-guitar sound reminiscent of a more ecstatic, less roguish Wayne Coyne, while the languid, narcotic "Tommy Made A Movie" betrays more than one similarity with Destroyer through a comparable reclaiming of Eighties pop stylistic traits (albeit with more warmth). It's also hard not to think back to the sensitive soul of the artist who, perhaps more than any other, showed a clear kinship with Fred's musical creature, losing himself in its enchantment, its stretched-out dynamics, its filtered vocals and the gorgeous, blazing coda of "Cold Ground": Mark Linkous, aka Sparklehorse. But if you want to find East River Pipe alone, with no other reference points, among the most direct touchstones, the suggestion is to turn to what can reasonably be considered the latest in a long line of classics: "The Flames Are Coming Back", an ironic nod to his own turbulent past, now a storm weathered and happily filed away, whose refrain breaks free of the usual introspective hesitation to give voice to an author's need for openness - an author who, once again, proves as communicative and moving as few others around today.

Seven years on, We Live In Rented Rooms remains the last piece of a discography whose releases have, along the way, become increasingly sparse. The commendable vinyl reissue of what is perhaps Fred's most beloved work, The Gasoline Age, at least allowed listeners to enjoy a handful of other songs that, until the album's fifteenth anniversary, seemed destined to stay locked away in the Cornog household archive or, at best, in Merge's vault. In this belated reissue, the record that cemented his reputation is enriched with no fewer than nine outtakes of real quality, ranging from the wonderfully mood-worn edges of "How's It Feel To Pass It All Away" to the sandpaper-rough ballad "The Handsome Cruel-Eyed Man": what emerges is the rougher, more bristly and proudly maladjusted side of the man, sour and prickly, a touch over the top, yet never tipping into outright weirdness. You'd have to go back a good fifteen years to find the electric guitars playing such a leading role in one of his records, even though - as "Golden Hate" makes plain - East River Pipe's proverbial disenchantment still, in the end, draws from the well of kindness.

Cornog proves once again to be a pessimist as incisive as they come, yet anything but harsh, managing to be exquisitely delicate even with despair (the sparse, Lennon-esque vignette of "Flyin, Lyin, Dyin" speaks volumes). While "Here Comes The Hurricane" still draws on Mark Linkous's intimate sketch-like style, its fraternal twin "Here Comes The Pill Armies" recounts the struggles of depression with total honesty, free of sugar-coating but also of convenient cynicism.

On "Let's Kill The Matador" a little sunlight filters through, along with something that resembles a smile. Not an isolated case, judging by the closing "Easy To Forget". A bare, stripped tree beginning to dot itself with buds: this is the key image to hold onto after listening, a mirror of maturity and of a prodigious normalcy, long pursued and then won, step by step, with admirable patience. Essentially, the portrait of an artist who has managed to defeat all his demons.

(Thanks to Lorenzo Righetto and Francesco Amoroso for their insights in the review of "We Live In Rented Rooms")

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