like an animal in your care

I found a bridge. Or built one. I'm not sure. In two ways. The first is pretty restrained, and if I don't put it here the only other place it will languish is stuck between thing newsprint lying in a stack down the beige corridors of a sinking institution:


It would do to try build a bridge, then, lest the gap widen to the point where Wolf Parade becomes two bands with the same name. You might find it in musical cohesion – unlike the more ragged and disjointed debut, At Mount Zoomer gathers itself into a colourful tapestry of what might be called indie-prog, ornate arrangements, barbed and ringing, but all more lush and defined. Or maybe you pick up the lyric-sheet, noticing that, they’re both tired, preoccupied with radio wires and looking at the same sea. They might have gotten there from different places – Boeckner from within the decaying spires of the modern urban core, Krug, who long since gave up the city, riding horseback from a fantastic forest where he tried searching for some ritual, fantastic place to return to. They reach the edge of the cliff and pick up their tools (the rest of the band pitches in), building a giant, teetering helter skelter on the edge of the waves. It might topple, but we’re on it, and we gotta stay on it. It’s the modern world, baby, and whichever place you might sing and search from, don’t you know that you’re trapped in here. Or maybe not, maybe we can yell “fire in the hole” against this fucked up structure and jump as we sing with Wolf Parade: “Oh follow me / Allow me to play the voyager / Oh take a dive / Take a dive”.

That's pretty restrained I guess. It's not too held in, like it's probably not suitable for the channel it's going to, but whatever. So that's all good, then, but I'd much rather, much rather, build the bridge another way. Oh no, actually, this bridge I found, I didn't have to do anything here, make tenuous connections and mythologise rings around it all.

That bridge is Animal In Your Care. Penultimate track. I love how it's actually lyrically written backwards. It's just the sweetest kind of melancholy, because you never really know whether this will actually happen as he sings at the start:

Time after time

You will forgive me
Like an animal in your care
But give it time
You will outlive me
And take the bow back you put in my hair

Because he sings the end, oh the end, well the whole song sings the end it is like its own undeniable chorus the most amazing first-to-second half song transition I've probably ever experienced (I though My Latest Novel had the monopoly on that, but no) and it's all built around that ivory, no more meandering it all just comes out like glass punches and then he sings:

You let me hang, hang, hang around

You put your ribbons in my hair
It's in this language that I found
I am an animal in your care

An animal in your care
An animal in your care
An animal in your care

So fuck it, Wolf Parade or Spencer Krug or whoever they're all just tags for the music, this is not about the modern world and all that, well maybe it is if 'you' were some kind of structure, but god that's just sad. So I take back my review and I put this song in it's place. This love song. Twisted one, that's for sure.

It's not like this is all mine. Like I'm hoarding Wolf Parade's magic. (I was on their Myspace and I saw someone had just left a comment with a few lines from I'll Believe in Anything - why not say something, I might of thought. But I knew why, it's like those times you just can't say anything - 'hey guys, I love your music' just doesn't cut it. You've just gotta try and reflect that feeling you get from it. And you can't, but the closest you can try is just stamping those lines there like they speak for themselves.) Though I do get that solipsistic feeling sometimes that I'm the only one that knows them - or maybe it's that feeling like me and the music are the only things left in the world. For this song at least. But someone else must be introduced. Another Beast.


made me bolt like a horse

Just to continue the obsession, I stumbled on a cover of Peach, Plum, Pear by Final Fantasy a little while ago, and I've been listening to it pretty regularly. Trying to work out what it's doing, yer, where it's going. Of course, it's all string-filled whimsy and plucking as is his steez, but there's something about the 'levels', umm no, the emphasis he places on the various parts of this song that just brings out a whole other side to it. For one, his vocals never get beyond this sort of mildly disinterested kind of talk-sing from the middle of the room into a tape recorder like it's all just something to be calmly and uniformally recounted, which in turn paradoxically gives the lyric even further desperation. And then like the whole plucking - it's a lot sharper, umm no, cleaner than Newsom's - less urgent, but still quick. Like is this a Disney film or something? Hahaha of course not, it's fruity indie chamber music, complete with strings that come in just where they should but of course are very surprising because you didn't expect them with the almost languid feeling of the song up until now. And that cobbling hooves sound? A tad obvious, but brilliant - just the right kind of discordance this whole thing needs to throw it all off the track it never really walked along anyway. Things stay vocally quiet all through the end, and why not. So what does it all mean Basil? Well, that's just it, it only can ever mean for me something secondary, and I'm not even sure what that is. It's like recently I'm losing some kind of analytic and thematic grip on music and to be really honest I love this. And this.

Final Fantasy - Peach, Plum, Pear