PREMIERE | Permanent Collection, 'Nothing Good is Normal'

Bay Area pop vanguard Jason Hendardy of Permanent Collection; press photo courtesy of the artist.

The Permanent Collection story is one that began out of a halcyon age for a Bay Area in the grips of flux. The culture was still coasting high off the Web 2.0 buzz, social networks still sort of made sense, smart phones had just hit the scenes and the atrocity exhibition of tech’s international ills were still yet to be realized. It was then when we met Jason Hendardy, who at the time started an offshoot from San Francisco buzzband Young Prisms with the DIY phenomenon that is Permanent Collection. Inspired by the lofty high art bastions of high society coupled with a love of orchestrating guitar-geared dream machines — Hendardy penned sneaker-staring pop hymns of inspiration at a time when the Bay once had a bustling and vast array of eclectic scenes.

Flash forward a decade plus later to 2020 where once again the Bay Area is in the midst of a sea change. A global pandemic has altered the entire world’s way of life, demonstrations and protests against police brutality and injustice toward BIPOC have reached a new fevered pitch, the false prosperity of tech trends and housing market rates remain in question and the scenes are all but gone and splintered on account of an ongoing housing crisis exodus of mass evictions. Rising up from the rubble, ruckus and reinventions is once again our humble hero Jason Hendardy who presents a first listen to an album that reflects our modern era with Nothing Good is Normal. It is a document of what happens when the conventions of what is good falls apart. It is a document of what is happening now, with a frame of reference of everything that has happened before. It is a question of how we define normalcy, along with what values we apply to that notion. It is a document of struggles, triumphs, breakthroughs and more that shatters the business as usual constructs that reaches for new paradigms with brilliant blazes of roaring and whirling riffs.

Nothing Good is Normal is the panacea needed in the now of the overused, ubiquitous and overwrought phrase of the new normal. Hendardy moves the musical lens back to the Bay Area for a consciousness oscillating experience, setting the tone with the fuzzy foundation of "East Bay Rats" where the cacophony of modern life is channeled into the big sledge hammer guitars that slam into a viscous sludge of dissonance that sets the stage and casts the proverbial dye. The path is shown with roaring fiery walls of menacing guitars that refuse to even let up for a moment on "A Way", whose alpha dovetails neatly into the omega angst of gnashed teeth and tornado toned distortion on "In the End". Both tracks bring the audience to a blazing sharp razor’s edge where the connection between essential existence and living is felt in visceral electric brush strokes.

But don't expect any soft and smooth interludes of respite amid the rip roaring turbulence at work. Jason tackles life's ambiguities and confusion with the mountainous "Blurring the Lines" that buries endearing melodic tones beneath a sea of celestial fuzz laden strings. Inescapable cycles cyclone toward the listener on "Routines" that embraces the mundane and ennui of the day to day with a fury of noise complaint fodder. As PC was a prodigious outfit during the aforementioned days of wine, roses, effects pedals and California rock & roll; "West Coast Fever" grinds and growls with an updated aesthetic that brings us back to the warm Pacific sunshine of today's times of incomprehensible tensions and discontent. And in the same way as almost every song feels like a privy painting of facets inspired by the human id ⁠— "Breakaway" is an anthem for smashing outdated systems that propel obsolete models like an explosive core meltdown of fractured and frayed nuclear family values. Followed by the uncompromising desire of "Nothing Else", this track, along with many others on Nothing Good is Normal prove themselves as worthy of being featured and licensed on all upcoming skateboard showcase extravaganzas.

Jason Hendardy, patron saint of guitar pop; press photo courtesy of the artist.

The pure genius at work on the record is how clever Hendardy is at embedding, burrowing and burying melodic hooks and progressions with some of the artist's heaviest and loudest works to date (which also calls back all those wild and defiantly noisy live Bay Area shows from over a decade ago). The album arrives at the conclusion of "For a Minute" that leaves the audience with mighty percussive waves of ineffable expressions as Jason brings the song cycle to a close with reiterations of there's nothing left to say anymore that seeks those elusive semantic terms and definitions to describe our current era that defies reductive descriptions and reviles the complicity of apathetic silence.

Jason Hendardy of Permanent Collection graciously shared the following historical recounting of the long road to the making of Nothing Good is Normal with anecdotes galore:

Prior to Permanent Collection I was always recording one-off songs, starting a new Myspace band page, and putting up songs. They were pretty lofi and often recorded straight to tape starting on a boombox, then a Marantz recorder, then Mbox, then Digi002 rack. I often didn’t really promote any of it. I didn’t feel like I needed to since it was just a way to capture an idea or moment. I was also playing in a really active band during the time, which felt like more of the main focus. That was probably around 2009.

That band, Young Prisms, was pretty active and we were always touring, probably because it was better than being home. One thing I learned pretty fast though is that if you’re constantly touring you’re going to have a hard time finding a job and when you do you’ll probably be fired when you tell them you’re going on tour. I’d get back home from a tour, get a shitty job, like at a gas station, pizza place, or random warehouse, work there for a bit before and then get fired because I was going to leave for a tour again. Young Prisms was pretty bittersweet for me. We were all friends in the same places in our lives, living in a house together, and eventually all had different ideas on what we wanted for that band. Ironically I left that band after we released an album called Friends For Now and sadly I don’t think anyone from that band even plays music anymore.

After Young Prisms I was finishing up a temp job at the de Young Museum. On days when I didn’t have lunch or had money for food I would just walk around the permanent collection. I remember thinking that it would be cool to just start a project called Permanent Collection and just keep putting things out under that instead of just one off projects. That’s kind of how the name came to stick. That got me going and recorded the first EP, Delirium, in a small closet of my apartment and then eventually brought that to Monte Vallier to mix and reamp a bunch of stuff. I put that record out and started to play as a one man band.

Parking lot sessions with Permanent Collection's Jason Hendardy; courtesy of the artist.

At that time as well I started to see friends who were not playing music start to get their lives together. People were getting real jobs so I followed that path and got a job at a music distributor called Revolver. I was still making music under Permanent Collection but I was limited on how much I could tour. I would use my two week vacation, along with long weekends, to do solo tours. Playing the solo shows helped with finding people to play music with and eventually PC became a full band. The first LP, Newly Wed Nearly Dead, was a departure in sound since it was pretty much recorded live.

I should also maybe mention that at this time I was trying to pay off a bunch of student loans accrued from going to school at the California College of the Arts, which I never finished since I couldn’t pay for my senior year. I think this added stress pushed me to focus more on getting myself out of a hole and led to me putting music on a slower track for a bit. Permanent Collection just finished up another EP, No Void, now as a three piece and I transitioned into working a more demanding job at a creative agency. It eventually got to a point where I was mainly working and just making music on the side. I kind of fell back into recording songs and putting them up on Bandcamp under different names like Sick Era and Inn.

I lost track of things for a bit and was so focused on getting myself out of a hole that I let working a job take over. It was in early 2019 when I was a video producer for a online publisher focusing on food content that I started to get burnt out on working. I was working 60-70 hour weeks and felt like I was losing myself just to prove that a college degree wasn’t that important. This made me step back. I ended up leaving that job to just freelance and that’s how I started to write Nothing Good Is Normal. It was everything I was feeling, all the frustration, everything about music politics, and wanting to just make something to encapsulate the moment. That’s in sense what Nothing Good Is Normal is. I feel like it’s definitely part of what I think Permanent Collection is for and why I started the project like ten years ago. I’m more focused again on what I think matters.

Nothing Good is Normal will be available June 19 with all digital download sales for the month of June donated to the Anti Police Terror Project.

Album cover for Nothing Good is Normal courtesy of Tobin Yelland.