Light and Love for Benjamin

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 58: Painting A Memory

It's my absolute sweet spot, that place where electronic music meets dronerock, neither techno nor rock, but that one-note symphony of build and release. That long, slow, steady intro, a single note, throbbing like a heartbeat, with an odd, creaking loop in the background, crackling with the edge of distortion like a speaker cone about to blow. The way it shimmers and shifts slightly, and the whole thing turns on its axis when the pulse of the kick drum comes in, never quite on the beat you expect. The filter sweep which might resolve into a hi-hat, or might just stay a bit of sonic electronic texture, hissing like a cloudburst of rain sweeping down a tin roof. That burbling, chattering tremolo sound I love so much, deviating from the drone note, just a single step down to build the tension before resolving back to that omnipresent cosmic hum of a root note. The way it doesn't transition right on the downbeat, but hangs there for that thrilling extra half a heartbeat that feels like flying.

Again, the way the vocals build up. The double-tracked lead, the way the voices fan out into close harmony then fold back together again. The "ah-ee-ah ah-ee-ah" wordless soundshapes caught and looped into baroque textures in the background. The way every piece of percussion fits together perfectly, like interlocking bits of clockwork. Those little details like the way the delay on the backing vocals doubles its range to catch and hold a single syllable just before the drumbreak. And then at 4 minutes in, the 2-part harmony gives way to a spangled technicolour burst of multi-part polyphony as the whole song kicks up a gear, and my breath always catches in the back of my throat. And that high, cyclical superstring-sound, circling round and round, like the wings of giant birds carrying the song aloft. The soft phase-shifting, like you're flying at supersonic speeds, watching the world slide away below. From here on, the swagger is golden, and if anyone wants a dictionary definition of what "imperial phase" means, I will refer them to the chord structures of the final vocal harmonies this song. It is perfection. I do not know how SVIIB are going to top this, and yet I have every confidence that they will.

Did you ever have the feeling that a song was written just for you? Like it's not just clever words or universal sentiments, but lyrics that resonate exactly with your specific emotional frequency? That someone knew what was lacking in your life, knew the message that you needed to hear at that exact moment, and put it in a song, just for you. Yeah, I know, this is one of the signs of madness, of being genuinely delusional, as I learned in my teenage years, when I used to tell my shrinks that Bernard Sumner was sending me secret messages through lyrics and dreams and the brands of certain trucks passing on the street (I know, it sounds crazy now, it made perfect sense at the time. That's what madness is like, when you lose that uncertainty that this might sound a bit mad. Experiencing doubt is a sign of sanity.) So does it mean I'm going a bit purple-crayon-fan if I say that Benjamin Curtis has sending me secret messages through the web and twitter? No, actually, for real, he does that occasionally, and I'm left trying to piece together what's real and what isn't. (No, that isn't really him appearing in my dreams, but it is him, on the internet, laughing at my descriptions of what he gets up to in my dreams. It does my head in sometimes, trying to work out which is reality and which is the dream, and when my lucid dreaming teacher sends reminder emails asking "Are you dreaming?" I have to answer "I... don't... know?") OK, let's be clear. This song wasn't written for me. But the message, again, is something I needed to be told.

Because this is what it feels like I've been doing on this blog, locked in the past, trapped in a fever, sifting through prizes and recollections, painting memories, again and again. I don't know that it's particularly good for me, though my shrink seems to think that it is somehow necessary. I feel like I've come unstuck, in time, digging up these memories. That I'm going over and over the same tiny patch of time, trying to make it make sense, instead of moving forward, getting on with mine own life. This compulsive-love-thing I've developped (it's not a crush, it's OCD with a cute haircut) this obsession with a lost album (is blaming Interpol for the great lost TSM album a way of not-dealing with the problems that killed the release of the Shimura Curves album still sitting on my hard drive?) this desire to want to replay the past of a particular band during a particular period that I loved them - it's not actually about that band, or those musicians, it's about my brain constantly circling back to the last time that I felt whole. Not even because 2007 was such a great time in my life (it wasn't) but it was the last time that I felt energised and hopeful and obsessing about how much better things were going to be in the future. And now all I can do is reminisce about how much better things were in my own past - whether that's the recent past of SC in 2006 or the deep past of forgotten nameless suit bands on Ludlow St in 1995.

I'm doing on this blog, exactly what Alley is describing in this song. Painting memories. This is the sign of a great piece of art: that you watch, or listen, or read, and you think "hang, on, this is about me! You are separated from me by a gulf of time or distance or culture, but this, this thing you have made, this could be me."

And this is the end of this blog - for now. I've run out of songs, at least until the new material recorded at the BookRoom is released. (When those come out, be prepared for a new onslaught of "OMG, this is the best SVIIB track yet!") And from internet messages, I gather Benjamin is out of hospital. (Though until they find a bone marrow donor, I don't know if he's out of the woods.) And I've been putting off writing the last entries like there's something totemic about "finishing" this blog. This was supposed to be all about Secret Machines and School of Seven Bells. It's been all about me, instead, and I'm sorry for that.

All I wanted to say, again and again, was this: I love you. Those are three words I have immense trouble saying, to anyone, and have an even harder time having said to me. (I'll always shrug them off, go yeah, man, you love my art, or my stories, or my songs, but you don't love me - forgetting that I put so much of myself into those things that it is almost the same thing. It just embarrasses me.) So, maybe it's more accurate to say, your music and your stories are the place in my life where I put love. Love that I don't give/get anywhere else. Love that I should have expressed to ex lovers or ex bandmates or ex friends, but that chance is gone. So I put it here, in these songs, so I can feel it again, light it like a little candle and remember. This weird love/hate thing I've developed with Brandon, it's because I have no relationship any more with mine own brother. I need to know that you love one another and are proud of one another, because Ian and me, we can't seem to get it together. Benjamin, I need you to be strong, and survive, and thrive, because I don't always know that I can. I need you and Alley to carry on writing those songs, that explain to me, and let me feel the emotions that I can't understand. This is what art is for, this is what heroes are for. You are my hero; these have been 58 reasons why I love you; can't wait to hear the next 58.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 57: Lovefingers

I'm not sure this counts, since it's a cover, and I haven't done entries for any of the other glorious covers, but mostly because they were only B-sides and one-offs and this is part of part of the PYSD e.p. and ergo it would irritate my perfectionist mind more to not include it than to include it, so here it is.

It's a cover of a track by seminal (LOL) early electronic psychedelic pioneers, Silver Apples (legendary among spacerock types for live soundtracking the Apollo moon landing with a concert in Central Park.) I started listening to them mostly because Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 used to namedrop them constantly back when I was a teenager, so hearing SVIIB do a cover of them was a head-smacking "Of course you like them, too!" moment. (Ain't gonna lie - that whole massive-fuckoff-krautrock-drums plus wibbly-wubbly electronic noises sound was a big part of why I loved Secret Machines.)

It's funny how, when I first heard SVIIB's version, my initial reaction was "OMG, they've captured the spooky folktronica atmosphere of the original so ~perfectly~!" but listening to it in sequence with the original, I realise, they sound nothing alike, except for the spooky medieval atmosphere and pumping bassline. Silver Apples were so sparse, so minimal and spare and haunted-sounding - and of course the SVIIB version is luxuriant and warm and writhing with elegant complexity. Instead of remote organ stabs and blasting squiggles of oscillator noise, they wrap our ears in an enticing blanket of close-woven harmony vocals. It's a perfect fit, Simeon Coxe's lyrical poetry of love and obsession merging with SVIIB's oceanic sound. It's that rare thing, a cover of a song I truly love, which I might love almost more than the original.

I've been thinking about scarcity with regards to cultural capital in music - not as poncey as it sounds - the idea that the generation below mine has a different relationship with the musical past, because it's so easy to find almost anything in the digital universe. I can remember in the Olden Days before the interwebs (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) listening to bands like Spacemen 3 and Loop and the Jesus and Mary Chain musically name-checking Silver Apples or NEU! or Can, and hoary rock crits of old complaining about the shameless pilfering and appropriation. But to me, stranded in a place where it was hard enough to get Spacemen 3 records, let alone Silver Apples, those ~influences~ and namedrops were a musical education in and of themselves. To hear the original, five years later or so, and have that lightbulb moment of "so that's where *that* came from," it was a revelation for which I was exceedingly grateful. It was like admission to a secret club to which Spacemen 3 had given me the key.

I'm not going to over-romanticise the scarcity years and the obscure joys of crate-digging. I think it must be *amazing* for Kids Today (tm) to be able to click a button and hear the original of this song without leaving one's desk. And yet the gaps, the things that fall through the cracks continue to confound me. I can get lost Can tapes on Spotify, but I can't find a working version of a CanPop track that was *massive* in the early 90s, it's just gone. (Though luckily I have the CD at home.) A YouTube glitch reminds me of the transience of art. I'm currently reading a book about lost books (not a Borges story, though really, it should be) and it makes me wonder about MP3 only albums and streaming media, and what happens to our current cultural heritage when we give its curation over to Spotify and YouTube and iTunes. Will there be a time when we have covers but not the originals, again? And is that a bad thing, if the covers are this good?

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 56: Faded Heart

This is possibly the biggest sounding song in the world. It just sounds fucking epic. Like, running down the beach in white shorts in the opening sequence of Chariots of Fire, capital-E Epic. Inspirational. Uplifting. In any other hands, this song might sound corny, ironic even, like the cheesy "training montage" from a sports movie, retold in flashbacks. But that's the thing - SVIIB don't do ironic. They're earnest and endearingly sincere, and though they are fun-loving, and often funny in an adorable way, in their music, they do not fuck around. Irony is too often used as a distancing stance, and they want you to be right there in the moment with them.

It starts with an aching arpeggio (if arpeggios can ache - or maybe it's the aaah-eee voice sample which sounds so bereft) into which Alley's voice bursts like a plea. I love Alley's voice so much, especially how she's grown since she's stepped into the lead role, I love the beauty and strength of it, how she manages to nail every interval, and every harmony, no matter how tricky, and still keep exactly the right amount of emotion. And yet, on this song, for the first time I've heard on record, she breaks. That little leap on "please believe..." at 0:55, her voice just gives out, as if fading away into tears. And it's heartbreaking. Because although I know it's technique, I know that she's a brilliant enough singer that it's left there on purpose, as an aesthetic statement, it just sounds so overloaded with loss that it hits me every time.

And what's so moving about this song is the way that just as Alley is at her most vulnerable, the music reaches its most triumphant - the sweep of filtered noise and explosive reverb-embiggened drums at 0:33 that heralds the beginning of the heartbeat bassline, and then that massive pounding 808 kick that comes in when she loses her breath. Alley's voice starts out so forsaken, so I don't know if I can do this without you, and the music rises and rises in the background, like the coach's voice in your head saying yes, you can do it, keep going, and by the end of the song, the tone of her voice is as full of conviction as the music, even through the poignancy of the lyrics. The emotion of the words and the music are in perfect synergy, each feeding on the other and building as the song hurtles along, gaining momentum, as the tangle of backing vocals weave themselves into a cradle of love.

I wonder who the you in the song is - it sounds as if it's directed at a frustrated lover on the point of walking out the door, or maybe who has already gone. Like, "I screwed up, I know it, the fault is mine if my own preoccupation made it looks like I'd forgotten you, cause I didn't, or made it look like I didn't love you, cause I do." I don't know if this relationships is ending or if it's already ended, if it's a lost cause, or if it's a love that might come back to life if the other person only believed in it again. And then at other times, it doesn't sound like the beloved is a lover at all, like she's pleading with a mentor or even a much-missed family member, a protecting spirit beyond the grave. (Or maybe the haunted Lafaye has just stayed too long in my head, but it reminds me of that third death a person dies, when someone says their name for the last time. It is one's belief in ghosts that makes them real, and sometimes the narrator reminds me of a ghost, willing the living to say her name, and breathe her back to life. Though that's probably my imagination. It's only love, that's all, just faded lines.)

But mostly it's the driving pace of this song that gets me every time, that gets my heart racing and my blood pounding. That utterly open and vulnerable "please, believe, in me" wrapped in a great big hug of a song, as invigorating as a brisk walk in the woods, as restorative as a hot cup of tea on a cold day. The shuddering triplets of double-time tremolo-synth are so propulsive, cutting through the enveloping layers of snippets of ghostly backwards vocals. And the weirdest thing is, maybe because of Benjamin's reputation as a guitarist, or maybe because of the photo on the cover, it took me until today to notice - correct me if I'm wrong - but there isn't a smidgeon of guitar on this track. (And even weirder, I didn't miss it at all.)

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 55: Secret Days

From one extreme to the other. After the baroque everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink luxury of Put Your Sad Down's epic symphony, Secret Days is an exercise in restraint, almost minimalism, an experiment in exactly how much space one can let into a song just by clearing everything else out. And the space breathes, as they say.

It starts with a rolling, hypnotic tribal drumbeat, crouched down low over a tense drum machine. And a big, fat slippery-slidey wibbly-wubbly arpeggiated bass sequence which oozes up and down octaves, but never deviates from its single-minded drone-toned sub-bass EQ range. There are occasional blasts of reverb that turn cymbal crashes into explosions, and one white noise filter, I think. But every other noise I can hear on this track, is Alley. The melody, and the harmony, and the counterpoint - all interwoven vocals. The staccato percussive hits of "wut?" punctuating the chorus? That's Alley, too. The jaunty riff where you'd expect a big guitar lead, or perhaps a chattering 80s synth? Yup, it's sung, too. Johnny Marr always used to say that the very best guitar solos were the ones you could sing, and Alley, despite being a fantastic guitar player live, decides to take him at his word. It's infernally catchy, and if you don't catch yourself singing "oh-o-oh, woah-oh-o-oh, all of those secret days" on the bus, you have ears of cloth.

There's something of the playground chant about it, the same kind of skipping jump-rope rhythm that informed the flow of rappers like J.J. Fad and L'Trimm. That knowing space somewhere between the end of ignorance and the beginning of womanhood - but don't ever make the mistake that children are innocent in the Edenic sense of the word, rather than the legal. Kids are innocent because they have not yet learned the difference between right or wrong, not because they are incapable. We are all wild things, before we're civilised into adulthood, riddled with secrets and strange narratives and inchoate desires, impenetrable to adults. "Running across the green, through the fence, into freedom..." encapsulates that sense of wildness and escape, freed from adult rules and parental control.

In my case, it was literal - at the age of 12, my family moved from our earlier tiny sliver of garden in North London, then, briefly, the manicured lawns of Connecticut, to a farmhouse that backed onto mountains in Upstate New York. There was no holding me, the slam of the porch's screen door, footfalls across the lawn, slip through the hedge and I was gone, into wild, wild woods. I imagine it's a rite of passage, pushing the boundaries of known space from your family's orbit, further and further out into the wider world, whether it's the wild woods or the Big City. The desire to be free of the rules of the game is another step on the ladder, another strategy in the game itself. The same wildness that drives little girls to the forest is the same urge that propels young women to write poetry, create songs, paint works of art - the desire to make manifest that freedom, that self-determination that society dictates nice girls must keep hidden and secret.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 54: Put Your Sad Down

Do you remember what I was saying last week about the ~Imperial Phase~? Any ordinary mortal band that had put out an album as amazing as Ghostory would have toured then just rested on their laurels, going "that's it, place in the pantheon assured, off to lie on a beach in Mexico for the foreseeable." Not School of Seven Bells. Not content with putting out the album of 2012, they went and dashed off "just a little tour E.P." a few months later, like, no big deal, it's only 30 minutes of music that might have actually toppled Ghostory from the top of my EOY list had they added When She Was Me and padded it out to make a mini-album. And the lead single is nothing less than a twelve and a half minute spacerock epic with a weirdly beautiful ambient sound-sculpture in the middle.

The release was delayed in the UK, so I had to make do and listen to it at work, on headphones... and holy fucking shit, it nearly took the top of my skull off. I remember just staring at Spotify in astonishment as those drums - those DRUMS - came in. My first thought, honest to god, was "Has he got Josh Garza in again?" They're those kind of drums, the massive, slam you up against the wall, physically move you with the air pressure coming off the kick, kind of drums, and that swaggering, pimp-rolling, telegraphic single-note bass-line that made me fall in love at first sound with songs like Sad and Lonely.

Except the lyrics. This is some weird inverse of Sad and Lonely that I have always heard as a companion piece or even an accidental answer record. Alley's not going to let you get away with that retreat-back-into-the-sleeping-bag shit. "I know you gotta, you gotta be on your own," she ventures, like an acknowledgement, it's OK to want to be by yourself, you're allowed to be single, if it's your power and your choice. "Who left you wanting, wanting to forget love?" She wants a name, a number and location, so she can go kick her sparkly Doc Martens right up their arse. But then she holds out her hand. "That's alright, cause all that I wanna do, is make you forget that you feel so bad." Alejandra de la Deheza, where have you been all my life? There's no judgement, no sneer, no making you feel guilty for being sad and lonely and a bit mopey and burned by love, there is just put your shoes on and grab your coat because we are going dancing. Now.

"Put! Your! Sad! Down! and tonight just feel with your body..." and then an explosion of guitar noise like Benjamin driving the getaway car - who could resist that kind of exhortation? My Black Dog starts capering like a puppy.

This is the kind of music that makes you feel you can leap mountains in a single bound, striding across the earth like a giant, elemental, monumentally scaled music, it makes you feel invincible, the perfect cure for the sads - and the S.A.D.s. It exploded into the darkness of last December like a candle-bomb, I didn't listen to any other music for about a month, until it totally saturated itself into my very being, and I started to dream about it. It's a song I play for my girlfriends, when I know someone needs something to get them through. Hear this. Live again.

Because, y'know, it saunters along for about 6 minutes, this triumphal procession of swaggering drums and the bombast of arc-light Loop guitars and the spangly cathedral-chords of Alley's hallelujah-chorus vocals. And all the time, as you're listening, this layer of sampled, pitch-shifted voice is just slowly building up in the background, quietly at first, then threatening to overwhelm the whole song with its almost malevolent beauty. And I'm used to songs that build up into thrashing orgies of noise that subsume the song entirely, I grew up on Sister Ray and You Made Me Realise and Jenny Ondioline. But PYSD, it does something else entirely. The song fades out. Instead of building up, the bass and drums go away off somewhere else for a while, before dropping out completely. And all that's left is this whiteout sandstorm of feedback and those layers of shifting reverb folding back in on one another. It's like the sound a pop song would make as it was sucked away down a black hole, stretched, compressed, pitch-shifted, elongated to Aphexian proportions, turned inside out like a Moebius Strip of a melody.

And after an impossibly full two minutes down the wormhole, floating about lost in deep space, the vocals start to shiver back into existence in time with a heartbeat drum, quivering, flickering like a film that's come off its alignment - the sort of intense auditory hallucinations I used to get back when I was on Lithium. A filter sweep opens back up somewhere and the song shimmers into view, like a mirage at first, only heard distantly through blue veils and golden sands, hi-hat and handclaps cutting through the rolling dunes of guitar noise - the way the song slides back into view is one of my favourite passages ever put to tape. First the four insistent cymbal strikes at 9.16 heralding in the return of The Bass, and those vocals like trumpets for something like a middle eight, an elegant detour, but this is another mirage itself, as the vocal riff comes back over a throbbing mechanical sequence... oh god that two and a half seconds of casiotone drum machine, a pregnant pause and then BOOM! that utterly MONUMENTAL drum-roll at 10.22 - no matter where I am, I have to stop what I'm doing and play air drums along with that bit (yes, that gets me some very funny looks in the office) as the song blooms back into full flight like the cloudburst at the end of a long, hot afternoon.  It's kind of tangentially related to the filthy dubstep drop or old style Croydon bass music - but it's a three minute drop. Who in their right mind does a three minute drop?

But that's what makes this an Imperial Phase - it's insane, but it works. The arrangement on this song! A sprawling epic, nearly 13 minutes long, and yet there is not a single note, not a single sound or tangled squiggle of guitar noise that is out of place. And as it rides off into the sunset, all champing horses and jingling harnesses, I find myself wishing that it would go on for another 17 minutes. I'm greedy. I now want 17 minute soundworld remixes of every SVIIB song. Hop to it, kids.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 53: When You Sing

It's the last song on the album, which usually means it's going to be the best song on the album, the barnstorming epic that brings down the house. Come on, you've done this pretty much every album since Now Here Is Nowhere, did we really expect anything less? Except, the first time I heard this, I didn't only think "epic album closer" I also thought "OMG, you guys, your My Bloody Valentine fan fiction is sooo adorable!" When You Sing / When You Sleep, yeah, I get it. And it's the giant pillow-lava-formations of Only Shallow guitar erupting over the cut-up early 90s baggy / house beat of Soon. Specifically, the mind-blowingly psychedelic Andrew Weatherall remix of Soon, complete with Claire Hamill's "o-oh o-oh" birdcalls and booming bass drum and miniature eight-minute soundworlds and everything.

This is in no way a criticism! To be honest, I actually thought When You Sing actually managed to capture and update the classic MBV rush-of-sound texture better than this year's actual mbv record. (Ooh! Heresy! Heresy! Burn the witch!) It's hardly a rip-off, it's nowhere near a straight cover (in fact, when SVIIB do actual covers, they're notoriously free-form, expanding and building on the original material like the way John Nash turned a modest farmhouse into the architectural fantasia of the Brighton Pavilion - check out their version of How To Love, for how they turned the bare, stripped-down squiggle of Lil Wayne's original into a multi-layered inspirational anthem.) It's the musical equivalent of fan fiction. It's projecting your own stories and interpretations and desires into someone else's existing universe, just to see what would happen. Just to see what if. And fan fiction is always more about the fan than about the original.

But that's it, isn't it? I don't hear this song and its lyrics as being part of Lafaye's narrative, I hear it as mine own. "When you sing, you love, you light ... the fires around my heart ... you bring love again." That's how I feel, about School of Seven Bells. You haven't just written the songs that describe the dark and shadowy recesses of my heart. You've only gone and written the song that describes exactly how much I love you for doing it. It's disconcerting, and more than a little bit meta, to hear a band whose music restores me, and makes me feel whole, makes me feel inspired and capable and understood, singing about someone whose singing restores them to life and love and light and warmth again. Like, you get it. How can I shine back a tiny reflection of the immense love you bring to me? You already know.

It's the bit in the middle that gets me every time, at about 4:34, where, after an almost cataclysmically loud burst of coruscating, melting guitars, bending under the heat of their own gravitational mass, everything drops out except drums and vocals (and these weird kind of bonk-bonk noises that I don't know if they're part of the kit, or synthesised wooden tones in the sequencer.) And it's those beautiful gender-blended man-woman vocals. I don't know if it's Alley and Benjamin singing in harmony, because it sounds too low for Benjamin's voice, or if it's just Alley, pitch-shifted and stretched to a masculine tonal range. It happens again at 6:21, and this time it's just the girl-voices, stretched out with reverb and delay to a woozy smear of sound, until you can't tell if the bell-like flute tones in the background are actually a synth or just the endlessly captured tail of the sustained echo, repeating to mathematically impossible infinities. The guitars pile on, each layer louder and bigger and more blistering than the last, slip-sliding in the white-hot heat, but it's still the vocals that are where the fireworks happen, soaring up into the sky like a rider on the crest of a wave.

What a way to end an album, as the juggernaut guitars attain escape velocity, and go soaring up into the atmosphere, spinning out into the cosmos, leaving the vocals skimming off into the haze, only to rise again as a morning star, glimmering for a moment in the new dawn.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 52: White Wind

It's funny, to my ears all three SVIIB full-lengths are ridiculously back-loaded. It's kind of the opposite of Secret Machines, and their "thesis statement" opening tracks, to save the best tracks for a 1-2-3 punch at the end. White Wind batters you with those relentless drums, circling the whole time around that repeated drone-chord chant of "white - white wind" like a witches' incantation. The emotion of the lyrics and the emotion of the music so perfectly mirror one another, it's like two headwinds which meet and collide to form a hurricane.

It's another song that reminds me of Cornwall - reminds me of how rough the coast just west of Sennen Cove can get, when there's a force 7 or 8 gale blowing up (merely a ~mild breeze~ by Cornish standards!) I've climbed the cliff to watch the huge North Atlantic waves pounding the rocks - the wind driving them to break over the top of the massive headland of Pedn Men Du, a hundred feet in the air. The breathtaking force and fury of nature at its most elemental, matched by the almost meteorological power of this music.

It's one of the few songs on Ghostory that is actually sung as a duet all the way through, rather than lead vocal and billowing clouds of textural vocals, an echo of earlier incarnations of SVIIB. But it's not a duet between two different people, it's a duet between two aspects of the same woman, between her calmer, sleeping, silent side, and the violence and restlessness that rise within her like a storm can blow out of the bluest skies.

I love the contrast between that rolling octave-note guitar riff, low and heavy against the pounding of the drums - and that constant chattering sequence woven throughout the song. I can't even hear the bass until it starts to move, like a treacherous undertow pulling the song down into the depths, but I can sure as feel it, pulling me to motion like the tide pulls Lafaye to life.

It's that reckless streak of restlessness that haunts some people, unable to settle down, unable to accept Contentment when it comes their way. Because Contentment and Happiness are not the same thing - in fact, in some ways they are direct opposites, far more than Happiness and Unhappiness. Boredom is the killer, and the acceptance of changelessness - and change - is at the heart of Contentment. Happiness and its sister Joy are brief, intense emotions which can slice right through the heart of Contentment. Joy is akin to that restlessness, that love of the chase, the call of the sea, of the open road, which destroys stasis, but drives one to greater heights, creative or otherwise. But creativity is an inherently dangerous act, as creation and destruction are two halves of the same thing. The wind heralds the changing of the seasons, and the coming of Spring. Let the wind claim you, and blow the cobwebs from your mind.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 51: Scavenger

Jesus Christ, the bass on this album! ::licks EQ knobs on mixing desk:: Here's another furious, growling bassline chugging back and forth, with that huge, vicious sound you get from striking chords high up the neck. It's mean and angry and wants to go drinking and pick a fight. Which is precisely the mood that is needed for these lyrics. It's like Lafaye took all the love and acceptance and validation that she poured into the protagonist of Show Me Love and turned it inside out and stood it on its head, as all that emotion curdled and turned into hatred and betrayal and even revulsion.

This is an angry fucking song, and the music bristles with fury, tense and accusatory, pacing back and forth, that swinging rhythm like a lion in a cage, waiting only to be released to pounce and rip its captor to shreds. The bright guitar riff, when it comes in on the chorus, is as jagged as a knife, slicing through the soft clouds of vocal aaahs billowing up underneath. The waves of the rhythmic synth sequence underneath are totally square, violent and sharp, not the hint of a rounded sinewave or even a sawtooth. It's not a soft heartbeat, like SVIIB's tremolo pulses usually are, it's a pounding headache. And those clattering drums on the verse, sound like sheet metal buckling under the force of someone's furious fists.

This song hurts - because I've been on both sides of it. It's so familiar, that sense of anger, when you've poured your life and your soul and your energy into trying to pull someone out of a hole, when they don't actually want to climb up out of that hole, they want to pull you down in as well. And yet I've also been the person down in that hole, completely bereft and hopeless and yes, scared. That's the operative concept in this story - fear. Fear of life, fear of love, fear of other people, fear of being found out as a fake. And when someone throws you down a rope, you pull on it because it's all you have. And you're not even trying to pull that person off their balance, it's just that you don't actually know how strong your own darkness is, or how weak their strength is. You think you've found the elixir of life, that spark of understanding that means you won't have to be alone any more. Except you haven't, you've met a fixer.

It's all too easy for me to take the role of the "scavenger" in this song, to sympathise with the bad guy. Shout back at Lafaye, "I'm not a scavenger, you just have a white knight complex, and you got angry at me for having problems that were more than you could save." It's you that decided I was not enough on my own, and you decided that you were the one who could complete me, then got angry at me for not being completed. You're right, I didn't say I didn't want it. But by the same token, you didn't say you couldn't spare it.

Where's this anger coming from? I know that's not what the song's about. I've been placed unwillingly, myself, in the saviour role, many times in the past, by people who wanted my attention, my energy, my audience for their drama and their problems, always on their terms, often when I had the least energy to spare - but god forbid I needed some attention from them. And being treated in that way hardens you, makes you more suspicious of ever giving energy or attention or love, ever again. What if the next person is an emotional vampire, as well? Better not to get over involved. Take, but protect yourself from having to give. And so the cycle of fear and emotional exploitation perpetuates itself.

So the moral of the story is, neither a fixer nor a fixee be. Love is something to be shared, not to be just taken or given.

Edit: Thanks to blowtorchbaby or the perfect video!

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 50: Show Me Love

It's the tiny details that get me on this song: it's not actually the massive chugging distorto-guitar which forms the backbone that I love most. It's tiny sonic flourishes like the step delay on the "Hey! (hey... hey... hey... hey...)" of the chorus that comes in at 1:54, and the 3 spangly, silver-toned tambourine hits just before the splashy, reverb-laden ... what is that? A really squishy snare? An open hi-hat? A cabasa compressed to sound like a dropped bicycle chain? That shiny sound that comes in at 3:14.

I've often wondered about the sequencing on this album, how Show My Love (the most altruistic, loving, kind lyrics) segues straight into Scavenger (the most bitter, angry, accusatory lyrics) - as if this is two halves of the same situation. Sometimes I wonder if it's Lafaye/Alley looking at a couple in the throes of a bitter row and saying to the injured party "you could do so much better than him!" and saying to the offending party "you utter shitbag, you do not deserve the love you are taking for granted." And sometimes I wonder if it's the narrator's relationship with the same person at opposite ends of their friendship. Because what can start as unconditional love, and wanting to rescue someone, can turn into that awful pitfall of the White Knight - if the rescuee becomes a real drag for either refusing to be saved, or worse, becomes the type of emotional vampire that can no longer live without that support - it takes energy to perpetually hold another person up.

There's a real tension, both in the lyrics and the music, between that cotton candy sweetness of the pillows of guitar and the affinity and empathy that the narrator feels for the wounded lover - and the sublimated frustration in the singer's voice (why can't they see what the nameless "he" is doing to them?) and the glimpses of dissonance in the arching synth-tone behind the riff. (It sounds like a synth, but because it bends as if guided by a tremolo arm, I suspect it might be a guitar run through a POG or some other tone generator.)

See here I am getting caught up in the minutiae of the production, guitar pedals and effects processors, because I want to ignore the emotional meat of the track. Is it that message of age-old wisdom that I never want to hear - you can never find real love in others until you learn to love yourself? (In which case, well, I guess I'm fucked. But "love" has never functioned properly in me.) For me it's the other way around, that I'm only able to love in strangers and pop stars, those things I cannot accept in myself.

But the reason I love this song, despite my resistance to its message, is that it sounds to me like that rare beast: A song written by a woman, for another woman. (Then again, don't be so heteronormative, maybe it's a song for an unhappy brother or son, or a gay BFF?) But a song for another woman which is not a cat fight, or a call-out, but a song which promises unconditional acceptance, even when she can't - or won't - heed its advice.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 49: Reappear

Album version (Official Video) Ridiculous ~chillstep~ version I secretly kinda like

Like the calm after the storm, the tense, ambient chords wash out like the first pale glimmers of light after a cloudburst, or the feeling of emotional exhaustion and utter depletion after a massive blow-out fight. Again, another bass-lead melody riding up high over the swirling cloud-like landscape, the aftermath of something that has destroyed you so completely that there is not even the energy for a beat, just the gentle suggestion of a pulse in the background of the electronics. And towards the end, distant horns growing ever nearer through the fog, like an alarm or a wakeup call you're not quite ready to hear.

There are two people in this song, one stumbling around in fog, so lost, blind to their own heart, unable to even recognise where they are, let alone how to find their way back. And the other person hovers up above the clouds like Our Lady of Guadalupe, her light shimmering and shining through like a beacon. (But that might be because the atmospherics of the song remind me sometimes of Madonna's Frozen, another song directed from a christ-like goddess to an emotionally stilted person who needs to rediscover their own heart.)

Sometimes I think they are the same person, an externalised vision of a part of yourself that you've forgotten even existed, appearing clad in the guise of a deity to deliver a pep talk from beyond. There's an episode of Babylon 5 (yeah, I know, I'm a geek, shut up) where one of the characters, suffering from a life-destroying addiction, follows the principals of his (made-up for the show) religion in order to cure himself. The idea is that if you have made choices which take you so far away from your (core) self that you no longer recognise yourself, you have to go on walkabout, and walk in a straight line until you meet yourself and have a long, honest talk with you. That character's lost self is nowhere near as gentle and forgiving as Lafaye's, (Warning: Spoilers!) but the idea is an intriguing one. All unsolicited advice says more about the person giving the advice than the person receiving it, but there's a peculiar thing that I've found about songwriting - that point where I have been trying to write a song about another, specific, person, has always been the place I've found myself writing the songs that *I* needed to hear.

Or perhaps I'm projecting again because this is (like For Kalaja Mari) one of those songs I wish someone had written for me, during my dark years. The person in the song has been destroyed by love, trying to escape their own pain by losing themselves in someone else's drama. But there are other ways of letting yourself be destroyed, other ways of absenting yourself from your life. Fear of getting hurt can lock you into your own isolated world as sure as never leaving the house - and becoming that isolated will actually hurt you more than interacting with others. Reminder to self: be present in your own life. It's less damaging than the alternative.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 48: Low Times

Yes! Yes! Oh my god! Low Times! See, this was the one thing I'd gleaned from reading that music messageboard. One by one, every person who listened to an advance copy just stopped whatever they were doing to run instantly to the SVIIB thread and just go "Oh my god, Low Times! Low, low, low, low, low, low TIMES!" My friend Alex would actually stop mid-chat and start chanting "P! R! E! D! A! T! O! R!" if it came up on iTunes. I knew before I ever heard it, that the song was a monster, and yet. Still. I was not prepared.

I just remember staring at the stereo speakers, my jaw flopping about like a fish on a line. Whatever I'd been imagining, this song had surpassed it. It was low. It was sinuous. That bassline - that muthafucking BASSLINE - and that gated snare (aaah, sorry, I'm having another "lick the production" moment) it swaggered, it stalked, it prowled, like a motherfucking panther.

People thought they knew what School of Seven Bells were about. They were shoegazers*. They were ethereal and otherworldly, dream-music, sometimes strange and twisted, but basically... SVIIB were Light! And Love! And Peace! And Joy! And harmony, lots of pretty, angel-sigh, heavenly harmonies. But... but... now Alley is snarling like a goddamn tigress. Like when someone you think you know gets caught in a tight situation, and reveals a side of themselves you've never seen before. And you fucking love it, with that fierce, protective love you know you'd take a bullet for. This is not the flippant, taunting girls of Connjur, or the sighing, regretful leaving lover of ILU, this is not even the smack-talking spirits of Camarilla. This is a woman you would want on your side in a knife-fight, battling for her very life.

*Yeah, I know Benjamin used to give the smackdown on the whole shoegazer/"ethereal" thing. "I mean, if there was a Chapterhouse record that sounded like School of Seven Bells then I’d wanna buy it, but I don’t think that exists," quoth Mr Curtis, well syrra, did we never introduce you to a little record called "Pentamerous Metamorphosis"? But this is an argument for another day.

This is the song that I listened to, on repeat, over and over, trying to get over the sense of anger and betrayal and wasted time for those two and a half fucking years I spent losing my light to a crook, a criminal, a fucking con artist. Predator, that is what you were.

The urgency of the build-up, the tautness of the interplay between the swaggering, magnificent drums (the only thing I can think of that even comes near is Stephen Morris on True Faith, racing against the drum machine like John Henry fighting the steam engine for his very life) and that growling, hollowbody bass. (I've seen that black Hagstrom somewhere before, haven't I, does your brother know you "borrowed" it?) It sweeps you up in its stride and carries you off, like a stampede of horses galloping towards the inevitable cliff edge. Even the teasing Blue Monday false breakdown at 2:19 does nothing to slow the momentum. I'll argue endlessly about dancefloor dynamics vs drone dynamics, but it's that orgiastic, physical and emotional cycle of build and release.

And when the breakdown finally comes at 4:07, the impossible happens. The stampeding horses gallop over the edge of the cliff, with you clinging hopelessly to a mane... and for twenty seconds, you are weightless, not even falling, but floating, borne up into the breeze by a burbling arpeggiated sequencer (whether you want to compare this to Tangerine Dream or Orbital or Audion reveals nothing but your age.) The horses make the impossible, scary jump and you land on the opposite shore, still caught up in this terrifying Wild Hunt.

This song was a kind of gateway moment of realising that SVIIB were going through another metamorphosis - one that would be completed by the time of the Put Your Sad Down (e.p.? mini-album?)  released later that same year. And the kind of aesthetic leap that Benjamin made between TSM and SVIIB was about to happen again. School of Seven Bells had just entered their Imperial Phase.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 47: Lafaye

This is the only song where the musical nostalgia threatens to overwhelm the propulsive forward-motion of the album. If I close my eyes, I'm still in high school, staying up late to catch the debut of the new Siouxsie and the Banshees or Cure video on 120 Minutes. That exotic air of mysterious strangeness, the chiming 80s chorus on the guitars, the heavily gated drums. I can even see the imaginary video in my head, perhaps filmed in the Palm House at Kew, Alley flipping her hair around as the camera goes all kaleidoscope, and as the verse gives way to chorus, the band's outfits change from all-black to all-white, and then back again... (The actual video is really quite goth enough, to be honest.)

There's a part of me that wants to say "come on, you guys were kids, you can't remember this music." I was a teenager when that stuff came out, so you two... you couldn't even have been double digits. It would be like me getting all nostalgic for the dim memories of my far distant early youth, getting excited about Hawkwind or Harmonia records I can't possibly remember actually being released in about 1976 and... Oh. Wait. I see your point, never mind.

Yeah, alright, it's a banger, it would have been a total floor-filler at the nightclub where I was a mopey 18 year old goth. The dramatic flourishes on the guitar during the verses, all sweeping drama and minor Russian intervals and intrigue, giving way to the major key for a stomping chorus. And all the cooing "Oohs" and the swooping "La-a-a-aaa-fayes" - I am a sucker for a good la-la-la singalong on a chorus, I grew up on my parents' Small Faces records. OK, so that "ooh-oooh-ooh" riff is actually Happy House (Siouxsie, not The Juan MacLean, though there is a total House vibe to that four-on-the-floor kick drum, and again with the double-time hi-hat work, seriously, is Chris Colley half human and half 808, or is he just produced to sound that way?) but you did acknowledge the debt with a stonking great cover of Kiss Them For Me so I'll let you get away with it this time. (That song will now remind me forever of running up the beach at Sennen. God, the memories associated with this album and its accompanying releases are so stupidly happy!)

But mostly what strikes me about this song is how, despite the esoteric subject matter and the spooky air of danger to the lyrics (Lafaye, with her ghosts and her spirit world surrounding her, always reminds me of Arthur's doomed sister, Morgana Le Faye, but if you get me started on Cornish legends and the world of the fae, we'll be here all night) the band sound like they're having such fun. The energy is incredible, it all comes out in a tumbling rush, like you can't help but get caught up in the excitement and carried along with the adventure.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 46: Love Play

No! No! Oh god, see, stuff like this is why I try not to read reviews or watch interviews with the band, because Benjamin kinda spoilered this song for me. It's odd, for a band I love this much, and say that they are my favourite band - probably as much an identity thing as an aesthetic thing, i.e. this is the music that most represents me, who I am and what I love - I have resisted finding out too much about them, and how they work, the details of their personal lives, interviews about what their songs mean and how they are constructed. It's funny how there are artists that I will scour the internet for every single interview since the dawn of time, because I want to know every tiny obscure fact about them (I don't think there has ever been a word written about the Aphex Twin that I haven't read) and then there are artists where I feel like I'm trespassing even looking at their instagrams, because maybe I need the mystery? There are some crushes where you want to know everything, and there are some crushes where it hurts to know anything?

OK, no, Benjamin didn't really spoiler the song for me - if anything, it made me marvel at their craft, at how simple the component parts were, and the magic that happened when he put them together. Yeah, there's just this whoosy, reverbed-out MBV soundscape in the back, and then these high, echoey Cocteau Twins grace notes on top, and then the big, rolling distorto-bass underneath, and somehow it works, and this huge sound comes out of these elementary bits. Simples! But what made up for the spoilering was the kind of cherubic enthusiasm with which he was just so clearly into the sounds on an audio level. It's one quality that seemingly all of the people who make music I truly love share - the gleeful attraction to the sonic textures of music, and wanting to play with them the way you'd want to rub a piece of velvet against your cheek, just a joyful sensual pleasure. (And perhaps it's something I truly miss, in my own life.)

The sheer fucking weight of sound that bursts through the air at 1:20 as the chorus rolls around, massive avalanches of distortion and heavy gated reverb - and yet it still somehow sounds as light and spangly as the reflections from a disco ball splayed across a darkened ceiling. I love the interplay between Alley's high breathy singing, rising ever higher and higher, spiralling up above the weighty bass, and the whispered asides ("A bitter play... out of fear") like those to-camera voice-overs on pop records ("Miz Jackson, if you're nasty.") This is the love affair where you know too much to carry on loving. You've seen too much deceit to carry on believing, and yet you're in too deep, too complicit to just walk away. It's the world-weary heaviness of the betrayal, even amidst the penetrating shards of pain, it costs too much to walk away, wading through chest-high layers of dragging quicksand as thick as that guitar, but it would cost you more to stay.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 45: The Night

From the opening bell-like chimes, and that driving bass riff, riding up high through the waves like a swaggering Hook-shaped Viking, this song is a declaration of intent. Come on, my friend, you might as well be wearing a T-shirt that declares "My name is Benjamin Curtis and I am a New Order fanatic." It's OK, I understand, you are after all, reading notes from a woman who survived a stretch in rehab with a cut-out magazine photo I used to take out of my wallet to show meddling 12-steppers and tell them "Bernard Sumner is my higher power."

But at the same time, this is a song that captures what was brilliant about that early 80s aesthetic, instead of the silly kitschy nostalgia motifs. It's the bigness, the monumental-ness of the sound, which was accomplished not by throwing in loads of unnecessary bleeps and bloops, but by an elegant sparseness. As Alley's voice urgently asks "Does the space breathe?" the chiming guitar echoes away to nothing, in a cavernous great empty space made more huge by the emptiness of the sound. It's the things you can't see that give you the sense of truly epic hugeness - ceilings so high they fade away into invisibility, walls so remote you catch only a glint of the echoes of distance light.

It's the sense of movement on the track that gets me every time, the urgency. The one-note Morse Code bassline like the insistent rhythm of a train at speed, those chiming guitar chords receding into the distance like passing street-lamps. And the secret weapon of those live drums - the way that the hi-hat kicks into double-time at about 1:02, moving the pace of the song from urgent to imperative, as the bass finally slides off the single note it's held since the opening chords of the song, down through the chord progression of the chorus. A tangle of noise that signals another gear-change, as the bass drops out for that cavernously open and huge "Does the space breathe?" moment - so you can hear every lovingly EQ'd *whump!* of the kick drum in the gap. Sorry, the sound nerd in me just wants to geek out at the production values in isolated sounds. If this song were a meal, I would pick up the speaker at this point and just start licking it as if it were a plate, forgetting all my table manners entirely.

This track was released ahead of the album, for a crowdsourced video-making competition, which I dutifully tried to come up with an entry for. Since I was at the time unemployed, I decided to try my hand at animation - the old fashioned way, with tracing paper and hand-inked cells. Big mistake - after about a month, I had only 30 seconds of film. I found the song so wide-screen, so cinematic, that the images came easily to me - and so it was kind of eye-opening to see how it translated in other visual artists' visions.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Ghostory

Is there anything more simultaneously nerve-wracking and exciting than waiting to listen to the new album by your favourite band? Especially when you follow loads of music journalists who receive promo copies or advance streams a month or more before you do, and have to boast about it in that rush to be "first!"? I used to be part of an online music community where it was a kind of game, watching, reading and responding to early listeners as albums got promoed, leaked or released. Ghostory was one of those records where I almost wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and go "la la la la laa" and not even click on the SVIIB thread to avoid reading anything about it before I heard it.

There was a lot to be worried about. Claudia had apparently walked out of the band, halfway through the previous tour. I don't have Facebook, so I missed the announcement, and heard only rumours and gossip and wild allegations whispered in the booths of Sonic Cathedral. One gig she was there, the usual serene presence on the left side of the stage, the next she was gone, leaving a hole in the band. (My favourite absurd rumour about her disappearance was that she'd done a runner to start a solo project with erstwhile tourmate Carlos D, who had pulled a somewhat less unexpected disappearing act only a few month earlier.)

But from the reactions of my friends as they listened to Ghostory, responding one after another with some variant on "Oh. My. God!" I gathered it was going to be something incredibly special. Lots of people noted the heightened production values, how the fuzzy murk and haze of their earlier shoegazing tendencies had been pared back to reveal razor-sharp riffs. Spoiler: when I finally got the record and read the liner notes, it turned out it had been mixed by the sympathetic ears of big brother Brandon, who seems to have since abandonned Secret Machines to be keyboard and bass-bitch for Interpol and their various solo projects. (Meow!) He'd heard SVIIB every night, while they were touring with Interpol, and knew exactly what they should sound like, live. (Seriously, those three bands are like some kind of intensely reactive chemical agents, leave them alone in a room together and they just exchange members like alkali metals exchange ions. I mean, as I was writing this, I read on Tumblr that EmptyMansions, Brandon's side project with Sam Interpol, had just poached Chris Colley, SVIIB's drummer on this album and at their live shows. Talk about incestuous!) 

There's a reason I like Brandon's mixing and production work so much - I talked about it in the TSM portion of this blog. When Brandon wants something to sound big, it doesn't just sound big, it sounds Japanese Monster Movie colossal. Now instead of making a prog record sound that big, imagine making a hyperreal, perfectly crafted pop record sound that big. Early SVIIB songs were glittering, intricate, clockwork things, headphone music for small, intimate spaces, but Ghostory is a big, bright, bold pop record on a monumental scale, on the epic scale of cathedrals and canyons. (Sonic ones, of course.)

It wasn't just the production we boggled at - it was the leap in songwriting. The tracks on the previous albums had been written in a cut-up collaborative collage method, which produced strange and beautiful genetically modified beasts, though sometimes you got the feeling the fuzzy shoegaze murk was there to hide the joins. On Ghostory, they tried the Classic Songwriting approach of writing straightforward pop songs live, as a duo. Which was a slightly worrying thing to read - often people who are used to a collage method of writing fail when forced to write in a more traditional method. (I shan't name names of certain ~Chillwave~ acts who followed up bonkers chopped-up pop breakthrough singles with completely pedestrian Proper Songs, it would be too boring.) Usually, if something works, don't fuck with the formula. But the sharpening of focus suited them. They proved themselves to have the work ethic of a pair of Brill Building songwriters, who could just lock themselves in a room from nine to five and spit out pop gems by the yard.

And the lyrics... holy fucking shit, the lyrics. Give a woman a mask, and she will tell you the truth. I have grown to love the words on the first two albums, especially re-listening to them closely. but they were often buried, either in waves of texture or layers of metaphor. Don't get me wrong, I love the poetry of Alley's lyrics, the actual sounds of the words, the way syllables string together. And I love the metaphorical layering, especially the Biblical allusions and mystical imagery of Disconnect From Desire. But that album - with perhaps the very specific exception of I L U - is often obscured, opaque, open to interpretation and double, even triple meanings, and sometimes the emotional context gets a bit lost. On Alpinisms, the lyrics are so clearly incredibly personal and specific to the band member's individual situations, but the words seemed secondary to the harmonies and the emotional palette locked behind musical textures. On Ghostory, which was reputedly a concept album, written from the point of view of a range of characters and ghosts, the emotional meat of each track is clear, direct, and utterly unmistakable. I don't know, and I'm not going to project who the stories might be about, but what they are about comes through as clear as a bell. And it's not just that distantly pretty ~Ethereal Girl~ archetype at play. What struck me was the accusatory anger and righteous rage that Lafaye let loose on this record, not just calming and soothing, but sometimes full of fury like an avenging Kali figure.

I needed the anger, I needed the bite. My life got weird around the time this record was released. (Reading back through this blog, though, has my life ever not been weird?) There wasn't much left of me except anger, betrayal and fear. As I said earlier, I had been trapped working in a hugely corrupt industry for some time. Finally, the scandal that had been brewing for several years broke, in January 2012. I've never blogged about any of this stuff, because it was too real, at the time, and seemed so unreal afterwards. My colleagues were getting doorstepped by tabloids outside the head office. There were placard-waving demonstrators protesting my employer in the street. My boss was going on television and saying things that made my skin crawl with shame and disgust. I shot my mouth off a few too many times contradicting ~official press statements~ on Twitter, and attracted the attention of an editor of a major UK broadsheet, who put together the insider-y things I was saying, to figure out where I worked. When they approached me, I made the gut-wrenching decision to turn whistleblower.

There is nothing more lonely, and more paranoid-making than whistleblowing. I stayed on for another month at the job, gathering information and leaking useful documents to the press when I could. I became a paranoid wreck online, locking my twitter account, changing usernames and deleting identifying information anywhere on the internet I'd mentioned my occupation - after all, if one journalist could find me, anyone could. (My first name is not uncommon. My occupation is not uncommon. But the combination of the two, in a male-dominated field, left me very easily identifiable and exposed.) It's amazing, the suspicion and outright hostility one encounters when one tells people hell-bent on outing your identity: "I have a good reason for obscuring my name right now, but I cannot tell you what it is." Just at the moment of my life when I most needed support, people turned on me. This record came out exactly four weeks after I resigned, reeling into the empty space, feeling like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, though the sense of freedom - deliberately making myself unemployed during the worst recession since the 1930s - was terrifying but also exhilarating.

A lot of the themes of this record - betrayal, anger, righteous fury - ended up being incredible healing for me. Once again, SVIIB had made the music that I most needed to hear, at the time I most needed to hear it. Luckily for me, I found a new job almost as soon as I started looking. I was listening to SVIIB B-sides when I got the news, and I can remember racing up the path from Sennen to Land's End as quick as the wind, with When She Was Me blaring in my headphones. It was a new beginning for me, as well.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 44: The Wait

Album openers, and album closers. It's funny how the former is usually considered the great statement of intent, but for me it's the album closer that makes it or breaks a record. I mean, what song is truly more evocative of the Velvet Underground, Sunday Morning or European Son? It's not how you start, so full of good intentions and bright hopes, but how you end, how you finish, where you find yourself at the end of the journey that says the most. A great album closer sends you off into the night filled with strength, or peace, or goodwill, and it is the message that you will carry away with you about the album.

And this is the perfect ending to a perfect album. From the opening atmospherics and low, twangy riff, it reminds me of nothing so much as the theme from Twin Peaks, especially with the breathy, haunting vocals coming in with an ethereal Julee Cruise vibe. Again, that's what I love about SVIIB, that unexpected twist of Lynchian weirdness that moves it from the merely pretty to the truly beautiful. When the vocal harmonies start, weaving in and out of each other like early morning rising mist, the song takes off, but it's the gently insistent, elegiac early New Order drums (a lot like those that drove the stately elegance of tracks like Joviann) that kick in halfway through and give it the lift of true flight. In keeping with all the Old Testament Biblical imagery of the album's lyrics, this is the moment that SVIIB finally ascend to heaven, amidst choirs of angels and peeling Sunday morning bells.

I misheard the lyrics - The Wait is a cradle in which you're lulled from time to time, though I always heard it as loved from time to time. I suppose we hear what we want to hear. Though I suppose it makes more sense being lulled into an insensate lie than being loved into one. That beautiful oblivion that comes from forgetting, to regress to a childish innocence, forgetting everything but the comforting womb. I don't think that kind of blissful disconnection is always a lie, I think sometimes it's necessary for self preservation, for repairing one's tattered soul, so that one can face life and love again.

And the key for me is that almost throwaway line tacked on at the end of the second chorus, so beautiful and so devastating in its simplicity: I know that the truth can withstand any change in point of view. I want to respond to this with physics again, a quote from Niels Bohr: The opposite of a trivial truth is merely false. The opposite of a profound truth is also true. Maybe in the old, Newtonian physics, scientific truth is that which can be confirmed through all experiments, and survives all changes in points of view. In Einsteinian physics, there is no single point of view, there is no absolute time - and perhaps no absolute truth at all (except maybe the speed of light.) In quantum physics, where the Observer Effect states that you cannot ever observe an event without changing it, the point of view is itself inherent within any truth.

But still, though I digress, with all these differing notions of what "the truth" is, I love that line. I love the idea of retreating into a cocoon of beauty to recover one's own centre of balance. It's how I spent the past week and a half, curled up in the beloved bus-house in Cornwall, in splendid isolation, sometimes blissful, sometimes bereft, but still very necessary. If I were to draw a Tarot for this song, it would be The Hermit: Look within. A time for reflection, quietness and solitude. Stand apart from your everyday life to assess your goals. You will find the answers you seek there.

[lightandloveforbenjamin]

Day 43: Bye Bye Bye

It’s not an *NSYNC cover.

It's one of those beautifully devastating songs, like only SVIIB know how to write. It's probably the most image-heavy track on the album and very reminiscent of Alpinisms. Somehow it sounds even dreamier live (aided by swaying from Alley that could actually rival Hayden and Tom from Wild Beasts).

The harmonies on Bye Bye Bye are exquisite; if there was a song where I missed Claudia the most, it’s probably this one. The song just seems to have dreams wrapped around it, all gauzy, tinged with a soft blue, the soft light that wakes you up when you’ve got a day off work and you can sleep in as long as you like.

In the narrator’s case, they’ve been paralysed after nearly drowning. Their lover/partner/friend (I like how it's ambiguous) left them for dead. Now the narrator can’t shut their eyes, and they’re having to witness everything around them — good and bad. What seems to keep them going is the knowledge that one day this person who left them behind will get their just desserts. They’ll get a healthy dose of karma for what they did. When the time comes, they’ll be a pillar of salt, scattered into the wind, a standing pile of stones to be skipped across an ocean. And what better revenge is there than that, being sunk down to the depths, so far below that you’ll never be found?