When it comes to artists I love that nobody has ever heard of, Emperor X may win the “Most Obscure” award. It’s rare to meet someone who hangs Okkervil River tour posters or someone who wears Airborne Toxic Event t-shirts, but I’ve managed to bump into a few fellow fans scattered around. But never Emperor X, which is why I feel compelled to write about the gem that is the 2011 LP Western Teleport.
On Western Teleport, Emperor X engages in a rich form of lyrical world-building. In a 31 minute running time, more is achieved than some films manage in hours. Fictional and factual elements are weaved throughout. We travel from L.A. to Detroit, make a quick stop in rural Pakistan, and are finally delivered by the closer to the Matthews Bridge in Jacksonville, FL. Allahu Akbar invokes Islam and the Chechen Wars in the same breath as the Arakeen, a fictional people from the Dune series by Frank Herbert. The brief snippets give us insight into what seems to be a society, or perhaps a whole world, unraveling. Rebellion, anger, and confusion fill these scenes, from “blowing isotopes on the Harbor Freeway” in Sig Alert and “[throwing] a brick with a note through the ticket counter window” in Canada Day, to the bloody aftermath of it all with “broken hands reaching out through the stones” in the penultimate track, Sincerely, H. C. Pregerson.
The dark overtone is often contrasted by the music itself, which tends to be energetic and even upbeat in the face of most of the lyrics. The opener, Erica Western Teleport, greets us with a fun synth riff, “oohs” and “aahs”, claps and stomps, all while our narrator pleads with us repeatedly in desperation: “don’t think of her.” This is one of the more light-hearted songs on the album. The purposefully lo-fi mix gives the whole experience an air of “unintentionality”, almost like a movie in the “found-film” genre. It’s as if these songs were discovered raw in the ruins (maybe the ones where our narrator’s “her” has lost her taser); the songs themselves, a message from a destroyed world.
In Sig Alert, the chaos begins to unfold. The aggressive, jangling, syncopated intro preps us for a lyrical whirlwind where we’re deployed, knock out street lights, throw grenades, and debate whether to blow up the Harbor Freeway with those aforementioned isotopes – though doing so, we note, would form counter-productive debris. Like on Erica Western Teleport, part of what makes Emperor X’s approach to lyrics so engaging is the willingness to pivot on a dime between the macro, the political, the global – and then suddenly the personal. This destructive anthem ends abruptly with the line: “Your girlfriend laughs at the tag on your sleeve.”
The next few tracks proceed in kind (not to imply they ever become boring or “samey” because that is certainly not the case). Canada Day was my initial introduction to this album (and artist), ironically probably sometime around Canada Day 2017. It finds us smashing ticket counter windows and running from the cops. By the end, we are screaming because they are draining the lakes and turning our fountains off. A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp and The Magnetic Media Storage Practices of Rural Pakistan are both very short songs with very long titles, and they continue this pattern of massive events contrasted with the intimately personal. Landslides, poverty, bent kickstands, roof collapses, friends with tuberculosis, natural disasters - and an elderly loved one whose “voice is gone.”
Allahu Akbar is a purposefully provocative title for a song about unwavering belief. Breaking his standard silence on the meaning of his own songs, Emperor X’s Chad Matheny has gone in-depth about what he was trying to convey with this song: “the persistence of faith and of virtue and of kindness as acts of quiet, relentless defiance in a world so fractured.” The full comment is linked below. Compressor Repair is possibly the weakest track of the bunch. It’s a slower song and its location on the tracklist serves to cool some of the energy like a valve letting off steam, but it also feels a bit like it gets in the way of the album’s momentum. The fully acoustic take of it on the 2013 release Nineteen Live Recordings possibly suits the song better, but I still wouldn’t skip it here.
Eventually we find ourselves at Sincerely, H. C. Pregerson which is nothing short of a masterpiece and exemplifies this style of songwriting, this combination of micro and macro.
I’m encased in your numb arms
In the clutch of tollway sludge
I’m infected and you’re not
We know immediately that something is deeply wrong on multiple levels. A hallucinatory phrase like “the clutch of tollway sludge” prevents us from getting an exact mental picture, but it evokes decay and rubble – infrastructure collapsing. And then it is capped with a deeply personal situation, which unfortunately hits far closer to home post-2020 than it could’ve hoped to in 2011. The song slowly builds until it crescendos with the National Guard patrolling through downtown while we hold our phones in the air, “deflated and powerless.” Sincerely, H. C. Pregerson is the climax of the album, distilling its essence into three minutes of sonic perfection. In fact, the album’s cover art is an abstract rendering of the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange in LA.
The final track, Erica Western Geiger Counter, serves as the denouement of the album. The drum machine marches towards the album’s end and the lyrics take a turn towards the abstract, leaving the listener to imagine their own ending to this story. It doesn’t really give us closure in the strictest sense, leaving us only with going back home, “return[ing] to bed and get[ting] breathed on.” Life goes on. The world keeps spinning. Disaster averted? Maybe, it’s hard to say. But one thing’s for sure: individual lives and individual stories will continue, all totally unique but simultaneously all so shared and connected.
In our current times, even more so than in 2011, it feels as if the threat of collapse is constantly biting at our heels. Western Teleport knows that things don’t look too good right now. We may be facing natural disasters and societal injustices. We may need to riot. We may need to scream. But we’re not in it alone; we have our allies, our family, our friends. Others have felt and are feeling the same anger, the same helplessness, and – in moments of victory, even the small ones – the same relief and joy. Emperor X wants us to remember that, no matter how bad the chaos gets, we are still here together. Even in the doom and gloom there is still love. There are still human connections and, yes, there may even still be hope.
I want to put the whole album here (it’s only half an hour!), but if I really had to narrow it down, these are the three most important tracks:
What to do when you hear ‘allahu akbar’ - Adriano Massou @ Extra Newsfeed
And I thought, chapeau my brother, you did it. Through your art you’ve got me facing up to my prejudices, questioning my values, and pondering society’s big questions. You’re being daring and thought-provoking, and doing it at a free concert in one of NYC’s lesser-known boroughs. So in the end I cleared my throat and out of solidarity — with Muslims, with anyone who wants peace in the world, but mostly with this low-key ballsy dude named Chad Matheny who goes by the name Emperor X — I sang.
Emperor X, Music Scientist Ph.D and Transdimensional Explorer - Lee Stepien @ The Bomber Jacket
What emerge from [Chad] Matheny are major social, political and economic issues as filtered through an “affluent westerner in the 21st century.” Issues like massive protests, oppressive governments, revolutionaries, terrorism, child soldiers and natural disasters. In simply writing about all of the things Matheny has absorbed over time, he captures a genuine moment in history and the society of our modern age, filtered through the lens of a very unique personality. The lyrics provide the perspective on the current state of global culture and how it affects people. The music becomes the emotional resonance of those effects.
Emperor X is absurdly authentic - Trevor Whitestone @ Campus Times
When Emperor X tells us, “Let’s send a message they’ll hear… let’s… scream,” we scream with him, since we assume this man ripped straight from an L.L.Bean catalog doesn’t get this yelpy over nothing. […] It’s not that I feel like I know Chad personally. I’ve never met Chad. But I identify with him, and his music adds color and meaning to the obscure thoughts I’ve had, or the odd things my friends do.
Emperor X’s Chad Matheny’s comments on the meaning of Allahu Akbar
It’s meant sincerely and used here as an allusion to all senses of the Takbir, nothing more or less than the praise song of a confused but hopeful agnostic, sputtering fragments of terrified thoughts and trying to see through them towards hope for the inherent goodness of the world. If it’s a mockery of anything it’s of those of us, myself included, in privileged societies who too easily congratulate ourselves on our supposedly-progressive atheist morality and cease asking important spiritual questions and lose a big part of our humanity in the process. It’s also by extension disdainful of western Christians who tend to see Islam as nothing more than a threatening Other, thereby totally missing the fact that they worship the same God and the fact that “Allahu Akbar” means, simply, “God is great,” something they sing every Sunday.