Bendrix Littleton is Bennett Littlejohn’s recording
moniker. If you’re giving me a double-taked “Huh?!” and wondering how I’m going
to keep that straight as I’m writing this, you’re not crazy for doing either of
those things. In fact, we’re told that Bendrix Littleton is somewhat of an
unreliable narrator, whose name derives from Maurice Bendrix, a character in
Graham Greene’s novel The End of the
Affair, which makes this whole thing even harder on anybody trying to make
any sense of it. Plus, now I’ve got three names to keep straight? Please.
So what kind of dude was Maurice Bendrix, and what
can we expect from Bendrix Littleton? Maurice sounds like kind of a shithead, “consumed
by jealousy, self-pity, self-hatred, and bitterness” – so maybe a self-directed
shithead, but I’m not really sure I want to spend a lot of time with someone
like that. Where Bendrix Littleton comes in on that spectrum is in his depiction
of the endlessly stretching biographies of Deep
Dark South residents crushed by economic disparity and ennui. Residents of
the Deep Dark South are notoriously
unreliable sources of information in real life (trust me), so we, as listeners,
are equally crushed by the disappointment inherent in their lives, manifesting
in a false, fragrant hope that barely conceals the rank spiraling to oblivion those
lives are on. The trajectory is manifest through the transparent lies.
So it’s no surprise that Bendrix Littleton can
barely manage to raise his voice above a whisper, with his acoustic guitar and studio
accoutrements successfully propping it up, but only just. There’s a heavy,
heavy weight on Littleton’s soul, and he struggles to relate the stories of the
people he’s come across, stories of who he was and who he’s terrified of
becoming, and stories of fleeting searchlights of hope in a dense haze of humid
misery. Coupled with the homespun charm of the four-tracky sonics and you’re
rewarded with a heartbreaking document of real, actual life. Turns out it doesn’t
matter if the storyteller is reliable or not, or even if the narration is an
outright lie – we can still all learn something from it, we can teach ourselves
to feel again, for us, for those around us. Fuck, I’m sad now.
https://bendrixlittleton.bandcamp.com/
https://nnatapes.bandcamp.com/
--Ryan
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