Caitríona Walsh reviews Record Player Life
In 'Record Player Life', Rachel Turney achieves a completely compelling and utterly unpretentious collection whose voice is unaffected and sincere, and whose eclectic exploits span a swathe of sites, themes, and multi-sensory experiences. Delightfully curious accounts of monkeys, meat, and grey matter co-mingle with cherished memories from Manhattan and Mount Fuji, and tender musings on love, lust, mortal illness, and all that it means to be a warm-blooded mammal in this world.
Stand-out lines are in steady supply, throughout. These materialise by way of alliterative lyricism and deliciously sensuous descriptors of ‘hot rain in Tennessee’, ‘cherry juice over a tongue’, and the vapoured ‘hydrogen and helium’ of an outer-space nebula. Elsewhere, profoundly relatable experiences of personal loss and terse familial dynamics are more dryly, wryly captured: ‘there is a lot of sitting when someone is dying’; ‘at least my mother would be wrong’; ‘I do not need deliverance’.
The book’s parenthesised ‘b-side’ subtitle speaks to the concept of unencumbered creative licence, even second-act obscurity; deep cuts as opposed to obvious hits. Accordingly, its stylus sets about ‘tracing the grooves’ through a series of esoteric, iconoclastic musical nods—REM, Radiohead, Tina Turner, The Cranberries—all definitively situating the reader in time, space, and song.
In complement to these specific acts, Rachel’s prose boasts a more broad-registered polyphony, from the hammering of nails to the thrumming of lawnmowers and the trilling of kettles; cumulative machinations of suburban mundanity. Moving from micro to macro spheres, these pitch alongside the charming cosmic murmuration of interstellar entities when the moon whispers about the sun while dawn approaches.
An ancient piano is unmuted and granted voice in the last pages as a pointed closing act of this sonic celebration. As such, the collection fully commits to its own gloried cacophony as a poetic catalogue of the author’s ‘Favorite Sounds’, per its inclusion of a specific piece so titled.
I heartily recommend that ‘Record Player Life’ be read—and read aloud—revelling, as it does, in the exalted rattle, hiss, and hum of its own exuberant aliveness.
