1. Breadcrumb Trail
2. Nosferatu Man
3. Don, Aman
4. Washer
5. For Dinner…
6. Good Morning, Captain
First of all, I haven’t written anything on here for a while, and I’m not really sure why. Lack of inspiration, I guess. But I’ve got a few hours to kill before class so I figured, why not.
Second of all, I was positive I had already written about this album. Like, I could almost remember what I had written, which song I had uploaded, all that. But it looks like I never did, not here or anywhere else, which is kind of bizarre. It’s good, though, because I really wanted to, and if I already had that would be kind of redundant.
Just to get it out of the way, this is one of my favorite albums ever. I feel like I always end up writing about those, which I’m worried will make this blog a bit one-sided (though I did write about that Cursive album I disliked, so I may have thrown the curve a bit, and I can’t say that Black Angels album or even that Six Organs of Admittance album are really among my favorites either), but I feel like this album is probably an exception.
See, a lot of times I’ll throw this on and wonder what I was thinking loving it so much. It will feel cold and stale and repetetive and boring, and I’ll turn it off before it’s finished, or else just skip through to the last track and mentally file it away under “albums that are good that I’ll say are good but that I don’t really care to listen to much anymore” along with, say, the majority of Isis’ catalog, or Opeth’s catalog, or Black Sheep Boy, or In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, or De-Loused in the Comatorium. It’s either good but I’ve listened to it too much to still get anything out of it more than once or twice a year, or else I don’t really like it anymore, but I have a nostalgic attachment to it and I’m not willing to let it go. I’d rather have enjoyed it, leave it in the past tense and let it linger into the present, than listen to it and decide I don’t really like it. Because I love music, and I love loving music. Something has to be almost offensively bad to me and have a fan base I want to actively distance myself from, like Dream Theater, before I’m actually willing to admit that my opinion has changed and that I dislike it.
And, with Dream Theater, even after I decided I didn’t like them, I still had it in the back of my mind that Scenes from a Memory and Images and Words were good albums. It took me forever to actually re-evaluate them and change my mind, and even then I was full of excuses for them. Why? Because it’s hard to admit that I had bad taste. Because it means maybe in the future I’ll look back at myself and think the same thing. And nobody wants to think their taste is anything less that perfect.
Which is stupid, because taste is completely subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with liking bands I don’t like now, even Dream Theater. I can base my taste on objective things, but whether or not those things are important is entirely subjective. Maybe you think the most important criteria of good music is how technically impressive it is. In that case, Dream Theater is awesome! The frustrating thing is deluding yourself into believing that music fits your criteria when it clearly does not. Then it becomes a guilty pleasure, which is another way of saying a contradiction, and I don’t know about you, but contradictions are not satisfying to me. To me, having a guilty pleasure means you like a certain style of music but, for whatever reason, you’re loathe to admit it, and you’re even willing to pretend you don’t like other music in the same style just to fit in with some preconceived notions you have of what “good taste” is, or to try to stay on top of whatever it’s fashionable to like and dislike.
Anyway, huge tangent there. To bring it back, yeah, sometimes this album does nothing for me.
But other times…other times it pulls me in from the beginning and captivates me through the whole thing. Other times it’s such an emotional rush that by the time it’s finished I’m out of breath. Other times it’s like I’m listening to it for the first time, when it was everything I ever wanted music to be but couldn’t articulate (I’m experiencing this right now with a different band, maybe I’ll write about them soon). Other times it’s like every single note, every second, every moment of silence (and there is a lot of silence here) is a work of art.
This is simultaneously the heaviest and also the quietest album you’ll ever listen to. The guitars are rarely distorted, the singer’s voice, the majority of the time, has a talking-quietly-during-dinner-in-a-restaurant sort of tone to it. Everything is enveloped by a stifling atmosphere of silence. Consequently, there’s power and deliberation and unbelievable tension behind every moment of sound. The emotion, when it comes, is in contrast, not to some base level of normality and contentment, but to blank emptiness. If emotion is defined by contrast, say, E=x/y, where x is the present state and y is the default state, then as y approaches zero, E approaches infinity. Everything is crucial beyond words.
It’s the opposite of the existential nightmare of insignificance. The realization that, in the midst of ceaseless oblivion, the actions of all of mankind even out to zero. The big picture is inconceivably bleak. But on the smaller scale? We may just be blips in the graph, but we’re blips that stretch upwards towards infinity. Our very existence is a two-dimensional anomaly in a one dimensional universe. In a world of ceaseless darkness, how significant would a single, all-illuminating flash of lightning be? We would lack the vocabulary to even begin to understand it.
The lyrics mirror these existential themes. The songs are stories that lead nowhere, or else they’re static moments in time devoid of content. They lead you along with slow precision to enjoy each second as a single, fleeting, sublime, impossible moment in time, disappearing into oblivion as soon as it’s come. And when it does break out into something more stable and melodic with a bit more presence, it’s heavenly.
Maybe if I was willing to appreciate all the music I used to like as single points in the past that moved me once in an incomparable way, maybe I’ll stop being so loathe to admit they do nothing for me now. Maybe I should be more content with what they offered, and not so concerned with what they continue to offer.
If all this sounds far too abstract for you, don’t worry. As much as I romanticize it, it’s music, and it makes sense as music. It has melody and structure. It has punk influences and post-punk influences and hardcore influences and no-wave influences and noise-rock influences and grunge influences (as a contemporary, not as a successor), though it isn’t recognizable as any of those. It had an undeniable influence on post-rock and post-hardcore, though it isn’t recognizable as any of those either. It’s an anamoly, something that screams early 90s without actually sounding like anything that came before or after it. But it’s still music, it isn’t so artsy that it isn’t easy to listen to and understand.
I’m going to post two tracks from this album, like last time, because it can’t really be summed up in just one. The first, Washer, is probably the most accessible and melodic track on the album. But for all its beauty, it’s pretty different than the rest in a lot of ways and if you were to buy this album based on that track alone, you might very well be disappointed. So I’ll also upload Good Morning, Captain, which is the final and probably most powerful track on the album, while staying closer to the feel of the album as a whole.
I’ll edit this later and add them in, since I’m on a lab computer right now that, obviously, doesn’t have them, and would rather not run the risks associated with downloading music on a public machine over a monitored connection.
Thanks for reading, I’ll probably talk about Swans next time (and I promise it won’t take as long as this one did!)
