I found a bridge. Or built one. I'm not sure. In two ways. The first is pretty restrained, and if I don't put it here the only other place it will languish is stuck between thing newsprint lying in a stack down the beige corridors of a sinking institution:
{...}
It would do to try build a bridge, then, lest the gap widen to the point where Wolf Parade becomes two bands with the same name. You might find it in musical cohesion – unlike the more ragged and disjointed debut, At Mount Zoomer gathers itself into a colourful tapestry of what might be called indie-prog, ornate arrangements, barbed and ringing, but all more lush and defined. Or maybe you pick up the lyric-sheet, noticing that, they’re both tired, preoccupied with radio wires and looking at the same sea. They might have gotten there from different places – Boeckner from within the decaying spires of the modern urban core, Krug, who long since gave up the city, riding horseback from a fantastic forest where he tried searching for some ritual, fantastic place to return to. They reach the edge of the cliff and pick up their tools (the rest of the band pitches in), building a giant, teetering helter skelter on the edge of the waves. It might topple, but we’re on it, and we gotta stay on it. It’s the modern world, baby, and whichever place you might sing and search from, don’t you know that you’re trapped in here. Or maybe not, maybe we can yell “fire in the hole” against this fucked up structure and jump as we sing with Wolf Parade: “Oh follow me / Allow me to play the voyager / Oh take a dive / Take a dive”.
That's pretty restrained I guess. It's not too held in, like it's probably not suitable for the channel it's going to, but whatever. So that's all good, then, but I'd much rather, much rather, build the bridge another way. Oh no, actually, this bridge I found, I didn't have to do anything here, make tenuous connections and mythologise rings around it all.That bridge is Animal In Your Care. Penultimate track. I love how it's actually lyrically written backwards. It's just the sweetest kind of melancholy, because you never really know whether this will actually happen as he sings at the start:
Time after time
You will forgive me
Like an animal in your care
But give it time
You will outlive me
And take the bow back you put in my hair
Because he sings the end, oh the end, well the whole song sings the end it is like its own undeniable chorus the most amazing first-to-second half song transition I've probably ever experienced (I though My Latest Novel had the monopoly on that, but no) and it's all built around that ivory, no more meandering it all just comes out like glass punches and then he sings:
You let me hang, hang, hang around
You put your ribbons in my hair
It's in this language that I found
I am an animal in your care
An animal in your care
An animal in your care
An animal in your care
So fuck it, Wolf Parade or Spencer Krug or whoever they're all just tags for the music, this is not about the modern world and all that, well maybe it is if 'you' were some kind of structure, but god that's just sad. So I take back my review and I put this song in it's place. This love song. Twisted one, that's for sure.
It's not like this is all mine. Like I'm hoarding Wolf Parade's magic. (I was on their Myspace and I saw someone had just left a comment with a few lines from I'll Believe in Anything - why not say something, I might of thought. But I knew why, it's like those times you just can't say anything - 'hey guys, I love your music' just doesn't cut it. You've just gotta try and reflect that feeling you get from it. And you can't, but the closest you can try is just stamping those lines there like they speak for themselves.) Though I do get that solipsistic feeling sometimes that I'm the only one that knows them - or maybe it's that feeling like me and the music are the only things left in the world. For this song at least. But someone else must be introduced. Another Beast.
