What’s In A Word ? #2: Glass Cloud ‘All Along’

Glass Cloud ‘The Royal Thousand’ (Basick Records 2012)

Glass Cloud ‘All Along’ – Lyrics by Travis Skyes

I am no lover

I am no faultless man

Carry me closer

To where we once began

Because the days now burn

Like fresh lit cigarettes

You pull me closer

With perfect spinerettes

I feel the seams about to split

But you’re wide-eyed and bushy-tailed

I won’t be here forever

And I can feel it

Your eyes like rapid rivers

Move over me

Searching me

Like I can deal with it

Like I can take it

And lose you too

(I know you can)

I am no fucking lover

I am just a burning bridge

These holy rollers

They just don’t stand a chance

Because you speak so slow

In secret alphabets

You walk so tall now

On slender minarets

I am just a ghost

‘All Along’ isn’t that remarkable a song musically. It has a straight ahead structure and groove and does the modern metalcore aesthetic of heavy section into melodic section. That said given the incredible caliber of the musicians involved it is executed with a damn sight more flare than other modern metal band with similar aesthetics could manage.  Even vocally the song is somewhat unremarkable. The screams sound angry and the melodic parts are suitably plaintive.  What makes ‘All Along’ a track that I’ve come back to time and time again then? Currently the track is starting to close in on one hundred plays on my iTunes because those factors I’ve previously mentioned all of a sudden light up because of the song’s lyrics.

Not to say that these lyrics are ground breaking. The subject matter certainly smacks of something resembling a relationship struggle, be that friendship or something less platonic is somewhat more vague. So far, so metalcore. The amount of middle class white kids in the western world who seem to relate to and write about the subject of relationships falling apart, whatever the relationship is, as if it was the collapse of their entire world is seemingly limitless. The subject isn’t ground breaking, and admittedly at one point or another it is painfully relevant to all of us. This easy accessibility of ‘All Along’ is given an edgier twist by the way in which it’s presented.

‘Because the days now burn

Like fresh lit cigarettes’

Those two lines are where for me the lyrics really start to come to life. The idea of burning days is somewhat dramatic but the idea of a burn also perfectly describes the fallout from any kind of relationship collapse. That this metaphor is further explored with reference to the cigarette is a beautiful twist. The dark romance and drama that still to an extent surrounds smoking from years of film, music, art and celebrity culture is undeniable.You could even argue given modern views on smoking, that it is a)dangerous and b) entirely disgusting the image becomes all the more effective. It adds something unique as an image that the lyrics that tend to follow this kind of music doesn’t: a romantic (in a literary sense that is)  sense of tragedy.  That is a far more frightening and mature subject to explore than anger.

The allusions towards grace throughout the lyrics further this more convincing lyrical content. The references to ‘perfect spinerettes‘ and then later ‘slender minerettes’ lend an air of grace, femininity and smooth sensuality to the imagery throughout the song. When those particular lyrics are combined with the caustic vocal delivery it makes for an incredibly effective contrast of delivery and meaning. The mirroring of the first line of the first verse in the second line of the second verse as well, but with the addition of some wonderful gratuitous swearing, serves to first mirror and then escalate the idea. Albeit in a very obvious way.  This sense of repetition and reinforcement is exactly what makes the song so effective however. As I’m about to demonstrate with the real beauty at the heart of this song. These lines:

‘Your eyes like rapid rivers move over me

Searching me

Like I can deal with it

Like I can take it’

If I need to explain to you quite why that’s almost heart wrenching then I can’t help you. But trust me it is. It’s somewhat dark and certainly powerfully emotive. When you combine that kind of plaintive and entirely genuine sentiment with the aforementioned dark tragedy of the rest of the song you’re left with something that has so much more impact as the sum than as any of its individual parts. The snide sense of self-awareness in ‘Like I can deal with it’ and ‘Like I can take it’ provide a further underpinning of maturity that helps to stop the whole thing from falling into over dramatic teenage angst, like so many songs of this ilk do.

‘All Along’ really is something special. It’s probably a shame that a lot of people won’t pay attention to its literary and emotional impact and will instead to chose to focus on its more muscular and knuckle-headed musical moments. Don’t get me wrong, I think Glass Cloud are great and they execute those moments with such ferocity and conviction, but to the kind of pretentious and artistic soul that I am, the music isn’t half as heavy as the sentiment here.

Click here to ‘like’ Glass Cloud on Facebook to be kept up to date on future releases and shows.

C.McMillan

What’s In A Word? #1 Converge ‘Jane Doe’

Converge ‘Jane Doe’

Here runs the first in what will hopefully be a continuing series taking a closer look at the lyrics of some of the key tracks by our favorite artists here at Post-Blog As…We’ll examine them from an academic angle, an emotional angle, a musical angel and any other angle that is appropriate, or indeed inappropriate. Where we can we hope to bring others into the mix as well to comment. 

We should make it clear, that any all of these features we speak only of our own interpretations of the artists work. We’re not saying what we get from the lyrics is what the song is actually about or that the techniques used were used for the reasons we think they were. If you’ve other ideas please feel free to share them. Just don’t attack us for ‘getting it wrong’ when we never claimed to ‘get it right’ in the first place.

So since this is a test drive we went for an easy one…Only kidding. We went for one of the fucking big daddys of lyrical prowess and impact: ‘Jane Doe’ taken from the album of the same name by Converge. 

Converge ‘Jane Doe’- Lyrics by Jacbon Bannon

These floods of you are unforgiving
Pushing passed me spilling through the banks
And I fall
Faster than light and faster than time
That’s how memory works
At least in the dark where I’m searching for meaning
When I’m just searching for something
I want out
Out of every awkward day
Out of every tongue-tied loss
I want out
Out of the burdening night sweats
Out of the rising seas of blood
Lost in you like saturday nights
Searching the streets with bedroom eyes
Just dying to be saved
Run on girl, run on

‘The album’s lyrical themes were born out of a dissolving relationship and the emotional fallout from that experience’ – J. Bannon

At the risk of this feature becoming incredibly self involved at the very first juncture I’ll just cover this is quickly and clearly as I can: I can entirely relate to that above quote and I used ‘Jane Doe’ as a very cathartic crutch during those times. Which is part of the wonderful nature or lyrics, poetry, music or any art really.

The sentiment of the song could almost be summed up by the first line:

‘These floods of you are unforgiving’

You don’t need any kind of grounding in English from an academic standpoint to grasp the symbolism here. Floods are as we are all aware a dangerous, terrible and powerful thing. I imagine most of us would agree that relationships, or just the idea of ‘love’ is equally as capable of being those things, in particular when it is warped by the strains of reality. The reference to forgiving I tend to look at as an acknowledgement of the kind of intimacy that love provides. Very little is more intimate than true for forgiveness from those you love. To have that love be unforgiving and to have it be so with all the power of a flood is a dark and crushing idea. Exactly the kind of idea I imagine Bannon is referencing when he uses the phrase ’emotional fall out’.

Despite its darkly poetic star, musically much of the first verse of the song is lost in Bannon’s caustic vocal delivery. It’s a genuine example of someone delivering a performance that truly matches the sentiment of the lyrics. It’s near indecipherable nature makes the lyrics difficult to understand from listening to the song, and yet somehow upon reading them they seem enhanced by this lack of distinction. Or at least that is the effect they have for me. I can well imagine for many this isn’t the case, but presumably given the critical acclaim this album and song have won over the years at least a few agree with me.

However, the song does break into more melodic moments. The repeatedly sung refrain of  ‘I want out’  is wonderfully simple. From a musical stand point there it can obviously be argued that Bannon is the not the strongest melodic vocalist, but again his voice rings true with utter conviction. Sometimes the best vocalists are the ones you can feel and not the ones you can hear. If that makes sense. It quite probably doesn’t. But that repeating howl of Bannon’s throughout the song surely does. If you’ve locked into the vibe of the song, or indeed the album, by this stage its a beautifully direct statement that stands in direct contrast to the complex rage of the verse lyrics.

The idea of freedom from the crippling nature of the emotional remains of a dying relationship are explored in the latter part of the song’s verses. We’re presented with:

‘Out of every awkward day
Out of every tongue-tied loss
I want out
Out of the burdening night sweats
Out of the rising seas of blood’

I’m sure I don’t need to further clarify my freedom point here, ‘Out of every…’ repeatedly spells that out for you. What I do love is  the dichotomy of the simple and almost day-to-day use of ‘awkward’ combined with the more poetic imagery of ‘tongue tied loss’. It’s those little dynamic touches that make the lyrics to this song so compelling to me. It evokes the images of those awkward moments and the loss of words as much as it evokes the feelings of those terrible moments. That on the second run of ‘out of…’ lines we get more the violent and abstract imagery of night sweats and seas of blood shows a certain amount of escalation in feeling. That kind of intensified and exaggerated escalation so perfectly mirrors how all-consuming the collapse of a relationship can be. And that can then become an incredibly self-destructive thing. It’s not angst, its genuinely frightening and intense stuff. Individually the images here are striking, but its their combination of this section of the song that is truly compelling upon reflection.

‘Lost in you like saturday nights
Searching the streets with bedroom eyes
Just dying to be saved
Run on girl, run on’

The final lyrical sections of the song ring almost philosophical to my ears. There’s a sense of understanding and a certain amount of acceptance to the reflections here. There’s also clearly a whole world of pain hanging like a shadow over those ideas. The obvious sexual and intimate connotations of ‘bedroom eyes’ and ‘lost in you’  ring with a certain sense of melancholic memory but the reference to ‘Saturday nights’ and obviously ‘dying to be saved’ present a sense of present. Saturday is always coming, much like death.Not necessarily like salvation. Whether you want to view the Saturday night reference combined with bedroom eyes as reference to weekend flirtation and promiscuity and then by extension an idea of cheating and trivialisation is entirely up to yourself. That I tend to speaks volumes of my own experiences and speaks even more as to the impact of this song upon me.

Hopefully through this someone can take something even remotely close to what I’ve taken from this song. That would be a special thing.

‘Jane Doe’ is taken from the album of the same name by Converge released in 2001 on Equal Vision/DeathWishInc

Click here to ‘like’ Converge on Facebook to be kept up to date on future shows and releases.

C.McMillan