Pastimes by Baseball Gregg

“Pastimes are past times.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

A park bench still in place ten years after that first kiss. The courage of a queer expat editor in Paris in the 1920s, who first dove into the depths of Joyce’s Ulysses. The fear of light, the beauty of the night, the sprawl of a city that stretches out ahead like an infinity of stars. An afternoon game on September 11. The funeral of a friend who took his own life.

Pastimes is about the shadows the past casts on the present, and accordingly, these twenty tracks gestated over nearly a decade, taking form as voice memos and crude ideas before Italian Luca Lovisetto and American Sam Regan spent a year in Bologna shaping them into a lush, sprawling diary of the two artists’ respective odysseys on either side of the Atlantic.

The calm, sophisticated sound of Pastimes is based on acoustic guitar, Mellotron, and recordings of natural sounds. This record is an organic wonderland, a collection of songs that also creates an environment. On first listen, it’s easy to associate this easygoing sound with every Mediterranean cliché in the book: blue beaches, mountain trails, sprawling vineyards.

But this is a calm filled with voices—not just those of the two artists, who take turns singing and writing verses throughout, but those in their heads. The echoes of past relationships, both fulfilling and superficial. The words of the great writers—Joyce, Shelley, Rushdie, Beckett, Bolaño—whose work is extensively referenced in these songs. The ripples of disasters, traumas, atrocities, and acts of violence.

The album opens with “Montese,” with the promise of “better days ahead,” and ends with “Better Days,” fulfilling that promise with a world that spins both “within and without” the individual. But how can you say better days are ahead when the world is on a one-way line to its own destruction? How can you make yourself feel more alive when the world is dying little by little, piece by piece, just like your own body?

Perhaps the best way to deal with the contradictions presented by life is to embrace them: to take love with hate, truth with lies, ambition with humility, and to accept them as part of the very fabric of being. Opposites attract, and on Pastimes, their gravity is impossible to escape. The best thing you can do is to let yourself be pulled in.
(Daniel Bromfield)

Baseball Gregg is a pop duo from Stockton by way of Italy.

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