If Tim Perry has a secondary pursuit to a music career, it might be gently walking back interviewers who want to describe Ages and Ages’ music as shiny, faultless optimism. An online search will yield at least a dozen examples.
“The assumption is that the purpose is to be uplifting, but that’s not always the case,” Perry says, noting the simple prevalence of major chords in the Portland act’s music might contribute to that impression as well.
“Overall, what [the music] cuts at is that, within this sense of convicted triumph, there’s still disfunction and disharmony.”
Ages and Ages plays tonight at Duffy’s Tavern for Lincoln Calling. It’s a 10:30 p.m. set.
In fact, to look at the big picture of Ages and Ages’ two albums (and a barely-underway third), struggle is the incitement of all of it. Feelings political, societal and personal confusion and disenfranchisement have sparked two different on-album responses thus far, even if the band’s driving and choral acoustic pop invokes a strong feeling of overcoming.
“The take-home is one of optimism, but the songs themselves are a grappling of hardship.”
The first, Alright You Restless, depicted an album-long escape to a distant utopia, a veritable throwing up of the hands and fleeing. As in, if a young idealistic person can’t find a home in this world, let’s make one elsewhere. Looking back, Perry acknowledges the deliberate youthfulness of this outlook, knowing always that a second album would have to exist more in the real world.
“It was intended to be very idealistic, to the point of naivety,” he says. “It’s that sort of loose, general feeling you have when you know things can be better, but you haven’t looked into the details.”
Enter, then, Divisionary, released earlier this year on Partisan Records.
It finds the seven-piece stretching out over conflicted messages, mantras like the title track’s chant of “do the right thing.”
The change from the first album is summed up well with a lyric from “Light Goes Out”: At some point I found myself wondering if I was even running or just running away.
Perry says the band’s second album tries to push past ideology toward posing some fundamental and universal questions, how to actually live in a world that can appear unlivable. And yet, the album trades mostly in questions, not dictums, despite a few misconceptions about “do the right thing.” Perry says those sometimes show up in emails or YouTube comments.
“They assume I’m telling you to do something and I’m not,” he says. “They also think I’m not recognizing the inherent contradiction in that. What’s the right thing? We spend our whole lives trying to figure that out. Or we do and then a year later we change our minds and do the opposite.”
But in a way, that minor blowback is par for the album’s course. “Divisionary,” the word, is meant to acknowledge the idea that in making real, lifebound choices, disagreement is imminent. So too, probably, is misinterpretation.
Perry says the writing of a third album is slowly progressing, though he can’t yet identify the exact existential qualities that’ll come to define the final act of this planned three-record suite. But those should come about on their own, anyhow.
“You have to let real life color how it’s going end,” Perry says. “Or else it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or delusional, insisting the world is this way when it’s actually happening around you.”