A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: Turnover – “Peripheral Vision”

‘The legacy of Peripheral Vision is hopefully still just beginning, because for an album very much of its era, it punches way above the weight class of its contemporaries and deserves more recognition in the annals of sadboi music history.’

– Broc Nelson

Release date: May 4, 2015 | Run for Cover | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Website

This episode of A Scene In Retrospect goes out to former EIN writer Billie, who really loves this record. As far as 2010s emo/indie rock goes, Peripheral Vision by Turnover is about as classic a record as they come. The dream pop-tinged atmospheres add to the emotional heft of the album while keeping the overall sound floaty and mellow. Turnover would later pivot further into that dreaminess; here, it’s preserved within the angst and inner turmoil of their early releases.

Virginia Beach is about a four hour drive from D.C. down an interstate that splits the state apart like an open wound, either side surrounded by sprawling suburbs and strip malls. By the time you reach Hampton Roads, you get the sense that there’s nothing to the East but the endless Atlantic ocean and you can finally take a breath, but this is fleeting. Virginia Beach becomes an endless barrage of Targets and Wal-Marts; corner gas stations and CVS pharmacies; the ubiquitous orange cones of never-ending roadwork; and new housing developments, all of it sucking whatever thrill the water brought you right away. Like most of suburban America, the city has paved over whatever soul it may have possessed.

I grew up in the city, and I hated it. I hated the vapid emptiness of the place. I hated the intimidating nature of a lily-white high school that served the upper middle class children of a conservative, military town. I hated the way that every house, every apartment building, every single store looked as if it was carved from the same template. It was a place devoid of beauty, so I thought.  And this made growing up there fucking miserable.

But then there’s the beach. It’s a place I took for granted, really. Spending summer evenings on the Chesapeake Bay using the ocean water for our bong. Throwing the frisbee, glassy eyed and content while Steel Pulse blasted from my friend’s boom box. Playing volleyball down at 72nd street on a Sunday morning, hiding our beer in a hole dug out in the sand. Working at Wild Water Rapids, sitting at the top of the slides looking out for heat lightning and telling people they couldn’t go down headfirst. I used to rent out the floats for the wave machine and listen to Black Flag and the Circle Jerks as I pocketed every fifth five-dollar bill I got.

And this is where I finally get to Turnover‘s glorious tribute to those summer evenings Peripheral Vision. What the Beach band did so well on Peripheral Vision is capture those summer feelings with such accuracy that each song has become a classic. I’m sure it wasn’t the band’s intention to capture this strange suburban hell-hole in song, or how much of the area is implicitly expressed in the band’s music. But there’s no doubt that this music may as well be emanating from the well-worn tiles of Lynnhaven Mall or the run-down Tinee Giants and vape shops that line Virginia Beach Boulevard. There’s a joyous feeling of escape, being trapped in the few moments of beauty the city can elicit: the bald cypress trees draped in Spanish moss in First Landing State Park; the setting sun cutting through these same trees as you barrell down Shore Drive to the North End. On “Hello Euphoria”, the band repeatedly sings ‘I’m just so far away, I’m just so far…’ and there are moments of this in Virginia Beach, where the natural beauty just whisks you away from all the strip malls, Taco Bells and office parks.

While lyrically the album is about lost love and the struggle with one’s own personal demons, musically the songs transcend this apparent misery. There’s joy and beauty in the shimmering guitars and the tasteful economics of the rhythm section. The music is downright celebratory in the same way feeling the sand between your toes as the sun goes down indicates you made it through another day. One of life’s purest joys is finding yourself two hundred meters out from shore at six in the afternoon, the water glassy and cold, as you wait for another wave to carry you back to terra firma. It’s as simple as that: Turnover managed to capture the setting sun casting its beam across the ocean, and that reason alone makes Peripheral Vision a thing of timeless beauty.

I was late to the party on this one. I first heard Peripheral Vision maybe three or four years ago. I was working as a bartender and eventual manager of a punk rock pizza place. It was a great job, not just for the pizza and tequila-forward cocktail menu, but also for the friends and music. I have loved punk music for a long time, but as the punk landscape seemed to shift into more emo-focused territory, I took a long journey away from most any pop-punk or emo after like 2006, missing loads of music that I would have written off as disposable anyway. My new coworkers and regulars started to catch me up with what I had missed.

As the twisted roots of Yggdrasil would have it, my time working there would coincide with the worst break-up of my life. So, lost and on a several-year bender, when Peripheral Vision finally crossed my path, I wasn’t ready for it. “Cutting My Fingers Off” hit far too close to home. There were times where I felt I had lost more than my fingers. The emo was emoting too hard, but like Jimmy Eat World, American Football, Thursday, or Death Cab For Cutie, something about the yearning yet hopeful vocals and the interlocking melodies drew me in. This record also has atmosphere; the shoegaze-inspired guitar work and background synths and sprightly rhythm section draw you in.

I had to listen to the whole thing, but It took me several attempts to take it seriously, my brain wanting to write off anything that made me feel and replace it with the most extreme and obscure metal I could find. It wasn’t conducive to music like this, but eventually I took the plunge. Inside I found a vignette of a relationship that ran its course. The sweet courting tune, “Dizzy On The Comedown” balances the line between child-like pursuit and cynicism from experience, as if able to capture excitement and nostalgia at once. “Like Slow Disappearing” captures the all-encompassing feeling of losing yourself in a relationship, and songs like “Hello Euphoria” and “I Would Hate You If I Could” explore the mixed emotions of letting go.

“New Scream” remarkably captures the feeling of getting older and realizing there are no more milestones, just slow and tedious attempts to make things a little bit better. “Take My Head” is one of my favorite kinds of song, where grimly depressing or fucked up lyrics are told through upbeat, bouncy pop hooks. ‘I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things,’ Tom Waits is said to have said. I completely agree, and Turnover’s Peripheral Vision is a record full of those damn things.

Nowadays, half of the break-ups I see online feature these songs in the stories. The legacy of Peripheral Vision is hopefully still just beginning, because for an album very much of its era, it punches way above the weight class of its contemporaries and deserves more recognition in the annals of sadboi music history. It won’t fix your heartbreak; you have to do that yourself. It will, however, be a nonjudgemental companion on that journey.

I really don’t say this very often at all, but Peripheral Vision is a perfect album. Almost 40 minutes of the rawest emotions ever, a true lizard brain album, but not in an aggressive way. It’s feelings with no limiters, a complete abandonment of logic and reason so everything cuts deep and speaks to you in the clearest voice possible.

I like to think that, for better or worse… mostly worse, we’ve all been where Turnover were at when they wrote this album, and I assume strongly that these were songs written with all the heart and experience they convey to me. There’s no way someone writes “New Scream” without first-hand dealing with the depressive malaise that sends young people into tailspins of bed rot and forgetting to eat while dreaming of better for themselves.

It’s so easy to say that music is relatable when it refers to the self in that way, love with another, or broken-up connections between people in your past – we all experience things like that, even the aromantic among us. But Peripheral Vision is genuinely different. There’s something arcane about its specificity, the use of words, language, and timing that breaks you down.

The burning desire of love at the core of “Humming” and “Dizzy on the Comedown” is relatable to those times when I was waaaaaay too invested in other people, crushing hard on others enough to derail my own life to some degree because I thought getting and having a girlfriend was the pinnacle of human experience, valued above all else. All the very ignorant decisions I ever made can be traced to the collapsing star-like intensity that’s housed in songs like those. You will legitimately not hear love and connection sung like this in ‘those happy songs on the radio’, not now, not ever probably. Hopefully, you will never feel the urge to naively and dangerously dive into the pursuit of someone as fiercely as that either.

Even when Peripheral Vision is at its happiest, when it has the girl and a glint of hope in its eye, there’s still this unshakeable tinge of inevitable death of goodness at its core, like the music is aware that all things will, must, come to an end, if not now, then soon enough. You will lose, and you will either move on or you won’t. You will taste the blunted edge of vulnerability when something massively important to you is ripped from your curled fingers either from your own doing or time’s lurching decay.

For as powerful as the lyrics are, I attribute the former to the instrumentation. It’s delicate like ourselves and the experiences we have. Everything can turn so quickly, but when the guitars paint an autumnal, dreamy sepia swathe across the whole album with very little deviation, the fall is much less shocking. It’s almost euphoric, gripping onto the rush of the ground disappearing under you before your fragile body crashes into whatever’s below. You can hear absolutely every aspect of each song, like when deafening silence we’re not used to experiencing as suburbanites or city folk is broken by a rustling brush or reverberating rap against a hard surface far in the distance.

Peripheral Vision is not an example of how to live your life, but it’s a stark reflection of how many people do or did live. It’s about how lost we get in others or ourselves, forgetting to hold onto the rail as we reach out to touch something we shouldn’t be. If there’s something I’ve learned over the years, it’s that the juice is rarely worth the squeeze. Maybe I’m not a real lover like that anymore, or maybe my emotions just normalized, dulled from their extremes after decades of being jaded and learning what life’s really all about. The fact is that I don’t see my current self so clearly represented in Peripheral Vision and thank fuck for that, but there’s hardly ever a time where I listen to it and don’t tear up because of the immense piece of work that it is. It’s forever tethered to me in a way that I can’t even fully explain in these 800 words or more.

Even though I’ve only known about this album for around seven years, it’s supremely nostalgic for me because it aligns much better with who I was and reminds me of where I’m at now. It allows me to go back to my past with a healthy distance and a newfound grace for my younger self and how silly he was at the time. Did I stop caring as much or did I just start caring about myself more? I don’t think I know anymore, but Peripheral Vision has enough guidance within it to bring comfort regardless.

‘This life is controlled confusion
It’s just a grand illusion’