| Wild Beasts – Thankless Thing Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Hayden Thorpe is just an incredibly gifted singer and lyricist. At my age it takes a lot for me to appreciate rock music of the angsty/grandiose variety. (Not a knock on emotionally ambitious music, it's a knock on me for mellowing with age and losing my edge as a consumer of music.) Thorpe's verses are just so beautifully constructed, and play so cleverly and movingly with expectation. The tension in the first four lines is in the steady curdling: can he keep twisting the pictures he's painting into steadily worsening images of atrophy and decay and despair. So even as he's taking you down into hell--traveling up rotten branches to a sinister bird, to a wasted, burned tract of dead land (and place of cold judgement), to a dead-eyed stare... perfectly capped with a disgusted "rotten." The way the song then flirts with a weak, fragile hopefulness--through those chiming aching guitars, through Thorpe's acknowledgment that things may only seem as bad as he's describing them because he is "curmudgeonly"--is incredibly moving to me. Then of course his canvas opens up to a less pointed but somehow even more despairing vision than the first verse: a land and a nomadic, hopeless way of life where people who can't "keep up" (the singer's lover?) are left behind to die. It's breathtaking. Apologies for all my high-flown language, but this song is a masterpiece of a kind: it's hard to use ordinary language to describe it. | |
| Atlas Sound – Quick Canal Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Thanks for posting these lyrics, I've been dying to know exactly what she was singing. To claim brain-shattering profundity for rock music lyrics is probably a fool's project but I'm with aytchohelelwhy: GOOD GOD. What this song evokes to me--and it evokes it so hard it has brought me to joyful tears on more than one occasion--is the painful process whereby we outgrow our most childish notions of morality, some morally innocent (and incorrect) idea of our own innate, untried goodness...this storybook idea that living a good life, being good, is and will continue to be as simple for us as following the straightest line. L. Sadier thought "saints were born saints", that she was worthy of living like a "prince" from childhood, but comes to "look in the dirt" (go through life and experience and contemplation) to reach the awareness that "wisdom is learnt." "Wisdom is learnt" is a gloriously simple idea: it's almost more of a mantra than an idea. But it's an important, consoling, and inspiring notion because it forgives us our missteps. There is no straight line we should've followed, only a constant, "costly" process of "success and failure." Attaining wisdom requires our mistakes as much as our achievements. I think Sadier is saying this is true for each individual and their life's path, and true in a bigger, macro way, regarding the development of what is good or worthy of surviving about civilization, mankind, etc. So yeah basically this is the heaviest and most brilliant song ever written. |
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