Coming three years after the band’s second album, 1-800-SUCCEED, The Sublime Sculpture of Being Alive is the fullest realization yet of Media Jeweler’s unorthodox sound, the seeds they planted upon their founding in Orange County in 2013 come to fruit. He’s talking about the thematic scope of his band’s new album The Sublime Sculpture of Being Alive, which is out August 13th on Fire Talk Records, but he may as well be talking about how Media Jeweler has managed to hone their knotty, rhythmic, and ultimately jubilant music into something strong enough to carry real emotional weight-to do justice to what it feels like to live in the world Benjamin describes.

Or, as bassist Thom Lucero puts it, we can forge “an acceptance of self and an acceptance of all the fucked-up shit we’re around all the time.” But consider its inverse: If there’s no escaping this influence, we’re free to come to terms with it, and to locate ourselves within it. It’s a claustrophobic thought, suggesting as it does that we might not be as in control of who we are as we believe ourselves to be. In his classic 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German critic observed that our understanding of our lives and our experience of reality is moderated by the dominant technologies, politics, events, and advertising messages of our day we cannot see our way around them. Behind the clatter and clang of his band, behind the inexhaustible roll of melodies, behind the rhythms that seem to occupy three-dimensional space, Walter Benjamin lurks in the head of Media Jeweler’s Sam Farzin.

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