As anyone even remotely familiar with this band knows, the album that this song closes is all of a piece, conceptually differs wildly from the (sole) album that preceded it by three years (pretty great, but it took me a while), and was never followed up, numerous press releases and reunion tours notwithstanding. But nothing encapsulates the full-bore weirdness of Loveless like its coda. The one tune with a dance rhythm, but it is the obverse of what contemporaneous dance music was turning into as it perfected itself by dispensing with live drummers. “Soon” has a “live” drummer, but Colm Ó Cíosóig is rarely more than just audible under a hyper-sampled onslaught that is deafening no matter how low the volume goes. It is deafening because the guitar is so overdriven that it engulfs the available sonic space and pushes every other detail to the periphery, denuding the music of any physical reference point – like Jupiter: massive but nothing to stand on even if you could get there – and makes even Bilinda Butcher’s cooed vocals sound menacing. Which they are. Either a lover or an opiate tells you: “Someone like you can find the reason / Of what I did to you."
Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
No comments:
Post a Comment