| Planes Mistaken for Stars – Leaning The Room Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Impressionist lyrics at their best. Super obvious, yet still packing a huge emotional punch. | |
| The Weakerthans – The Prescience of Dawn Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I love how literary this song is. > "The sirens woke me up again. I know they're coming for me someday, just a matter of when." Sure, life is finite and someday when you die those sirens might be coming for you. But police also have sirens, and life has a way of catching up to you when you've done something 'wrong'. The author realizes that the choices he's made have consequences that are yet to be realized. > "Count to twenty-five and yawn. Touch the clock and turn my back against the dawn, and hope for that one dream of hardware stores with checkered floors, and buckets full of nails. Or floating, effortless, over the apartment in a boat, and rowing past the office windows." Yet no matter what doom lies ahead, life still occurs in real-time and there are distractions to be had. Who cares if what hopes and dreams we create for ourselves do not match reality? We must remain sane somehow. > "Mother, mother may I cry. Father will you teach me how to die the right way someday." As a reference to a childhood game, mother may I signifies a longing for a time when you didn't have to rely on yourself and could count on another to protect you from the world. In contrast, the father speaks to adulthood, and the desire to cultivate the only bastion against life: one's own dignity in the face of suffering. > "I don't want a second chance to turn my stuttering reluctance into romance, with these documents and kindergarten anthems, with my drunken liturgies." The life we envision for ourselves is very romantic, not solely in the love/sex sort of way - although that's a part of it - but in the philosophical, ethical sense of doing great and heroic things. To live a life in stuttering reluctance is to deny your core agency, and to deny a second chance is to slip into defeated resignation about what chance you could have ever had for your life in the first place. The most distressing extension of existential absurdism possible. Is the author unable to take the lesson of his father? Does he abjure his own dignity? Deceptively, this could perhaps be the most dark and depressing line Samson has ever written. > "Tune the FM in to static, and pretend that it's the sea." Yet still we dream. Classic literary Samson of transposing common everyday objects of our technology for our existential dilemmas. This pops up in so many Weakerthan's songs. > "But four words fumble for the microphone: you should have known." Yet still we know they're coming for us. It's just a matter of time. |
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| Mgła – Exercises in Futility VI Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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There's some killer references to Norse mythology in here: / Self crucified - missed the right tree / /Tore the wrong eye out / Odin hanged himself on a tree with a spear in his side to gain knowledge. He also gave up an eye to drink from the well of Mimir, also to gain knowledge. The writer here is using this image to say that he tried to gain knowledge and wisdom about the world/his existence, but that he learned all the wrong things - hanged from the wrong tree, tore the wrong eye out. He is saying that the things he learned are meaningless, or disturbing, or that like Pandora's Box, once opened cannot be restored. / For this I have gained a victory I burn as I ought to / Now with this knowledge of stones better left unturned, he will suffer until the end of his life about the world, existence, and the futility of humankind. Very fitting as the closer to an album about exercises in futility. |
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