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.
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.