Cyrus Gengras
Cyrus Gengras, CEO at Waste Management music, has released three albums. 2016’s Fuckin’ up My Name 2018’s Sight Unseen and 2020’s Love Never Dies. He also plays in the Los Angeles based Rock n’ Roll outfit Street Fruit.
Good God
“Good God” can be said as a curse of frustration, an exasperated shock or as a meditation of acceptance. And like its title, the album itself avoids easy categorization. It’s not wrapped in a neat bow; to be filed under “breakup album” or “album about touring”.
Instead, it mirrors a collection of short stories; windows into other lives that illuminate oneself in the reflection of the glass.
Gengras fills the songs with the characters he’s encountered through his life and what he’s learned from all of them. From the haunting words of the fellow addicts he met on his arduous path to sobriety (“1970 Something”, “Deal”) to a nuanced portrait of his beloved but troubled father, who passed away in 2016 (“Leatherman”) to an elegy for David Berman (“Somebody’s Calling”), who Gengras got to know in the final days of the poet’s life, Good God finds Gengras as a reporter, writing on the joy and wreckage of a life spent seeking out fellow outsiders, then sending his dispatches into the ether for all who might relate or benefit.
In the end, he grows closer to knowing himself, finding peace among the tortured people he’s been lucky enough to know and love, despite the pain that love may have wrought.
And the result is Good God: the most realized statement yet from a true lifer, forever on the path of pursuing his visions and chronicling the human experience.
-Justin Sullivan
