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Another Love Lost in a Hail of Gunfire

Have you ever listened to a song and asked yourself, what the hell is he talking about? Why is this artist almost crying or swearing so much? What led him to behave like that? Well, I was listening to Tom Odell’s “Another Love” on the radio, and I might as well add here that I really like that song, but, man, was it annoying! I literally started wondering why he is singing with this tone in his voice like a crying baby. Seriously, just think about it, isn’t he? Well, all that got me thinking, so I thought of paying more attention to the next songs and spot the differences or “investigate” the matter anyway.

Another song that caught my attention was the exact opposite. Really. It was called “Love Lost in a Hail of Gunfire” by the band Bleeding Through. At first sight, or should I say at first hearing, it made no sense. It was not of the heavy metal genre, but of the metal core or the gothic metal, so needless to say that all I could hear was just noise. The lyrics were impossible to understand and it was just not a song. That’s not a song. Period. But I decided to look it up. And guess what. It had the same theme as “Another Love”. They both talk about lost love and through these songs the artists express themselves in two completely different ways and attitudes, but around a common theme. Well, that’s interesting. So I had two songs, from two different genres, talking about the exact same thing. One was left to do: Deconstruct them.

“Another Love” is the singer-songwriter’s song from his debut extended play Songs from Another Love released in 2012. The song peaked at number 10 on the UK Singles Chart and became Odell’s first top 10 hit in June 2013. Odell is a British artist and he is quite young, born in the 1990s. His song talks about a love he had when he was young and, according to The Mail On Sunday, when he was a teen he fell in love with someone and she broke his heart; that's what “Another Love” is about. Reading the lyrics one can feel his frustration about not being able to love, because he is still caught up with his previous relationship. It is a sad song, where Odell feels like he cannot love another person again, because of the negative feeling created by the other relationship. “On another love, another love, All [his] tears have been used up” and thus he cannot move on with his new relationship, maybe because he has trust issues and definitely sadness, since “Words they always win, but [he] know[s] [he]'ll lose”. “But [he] sang 'em all [songs] to another heart”, which indicates he is struggling to let the past go and he feels tired about the whole being in a relationship thing being “so tired to share [his] nights”. I believe it becomes pretty evident that “[he] wanna cry, [he] wanna fall in love, But all [his] tears have been used up” so he is just grumbling about feeling emotionally weak, defeated and unable to love and fight for someone again. The fact that Odell had this incident as a teen led him to construct his song that way. If he had not been in England, where people are mostly serious, polite and reserved, his song would probably have been completely different. The language could be more aggressive and the meaning of the song we love would change in an instant, as his frustration and sadness could be anger or even hatred. To see what I mean, let’s consider the next song.

“Lost love in a Hail of Gunfire” was released in 2003 as a part of the album This Is Love, This Is Murderous in California, USA. In this song, whose members are a decade older than Odell, one understands the anger and the hatred towards someone from the very first musical note or noise, whatever. The war imagery implied by the first verse “This was a f***ing bomb, For a few seconds, this place was Armageddon”, “You are the f***ing disease”, reflect on that general misanthropic attitude of having enough and being tired of constantly being hurt from a relationship. The singer’s feelings are hatred and disgust towards the person he is referring to; “Sickness still fills the air, Another life that you wish you could fake” and he feels he is being told lies: “I want to see your face, Show me your true face”. The antithesis between this song and Odell’s is really evident, as Odell is mostly crying over the lost love, while the lead of Bleeding Through expresses feelings of anger, by swearing more than enough. The whole song creates a negative feeling to the listener. However, the last verses sum up most of the song, and there is this idea of being in an ambivalent state of mind, where you love what you hate and hate what you love. The fact that it is by an American band, whose place of living seems to be more carefree and liberated in terms of rudeness let’s say, creates a completely different meaning of the song and feeling to those who listen to it. However, I believe most people would identify more with this one, if they had a love disappointment rather than with Odell’s, since let’s face it, anger is one of the characteristics that makes humans beautiful in some way.