samedi 7 Aoû 2010, 5h53m

Commercial Suicide by Colin Newman.

Track 1, "Their Terrain":

This starts simply enough–with a gently swirling synth in the background, framed by a couple tinkling notes and the world’s simplest rhythm track. But the traditional pop song structure collapses in its second half, which simply repeats the chorus as the song builds, adding new synth tracks to the mix until it swells into an impossibly booming, cluttered conclusion. Newman’s sings gently throughout, holding notes and pausing long enough for us to puzzle out the baffling lyrics; but, by the end, his voice is just another instrument in the mix, and the content of the lyrics is less important than their repetition. Yet, for all the sonic and lyrical repetition, we're heading somewhere: along with Newman‘s voice, we‘re drawn into another world, a carefully designed world of aesthetic bliss. There’s intense emotion here, but it’s not a reaction to relationships or real-world events; it is, instead, wholly embodied in sounds possessing a seemingly impossible beauty and grandeur.

Track 4, "But I...":
A song in two halves, each a different take on the same material. The opener is a charming piece of chamber pop, the closer a staggering reprise played in a different key. The song of the opening three minutes is fetching, defined by an undeniable melody and Newman's soft, pleasing singing. There's something off in the vague, repetitive lyrics, though: they seem incomplete, as if they're only snippets of a narrative, and even those snippets are cliches illuminating nothing–though the song seems to be about ignorance frustrating action. Newman seems frustrated, too, and he starts repeating himself. And then, out of the blue, there's a breakthrough, and the music beings to articulate the force and depth of the underlying feelings in a way the lyrics can't. The song's now grandiose, and the music renders the cliches irrelevant. As he repeats "I have waited for so long" ad infinitum against a now-epic musical backdrop, we know what Newman's feeling, even if his words fail him.

Track 5, "Commercial Suicide":
Tantalizingly incomplete, a prelude to a song that never materializes. The song's lack of forward momentum–most evident in Newman's singing, which draws out every other syllable–leads us to anticipate an eventual and fundamental change, a change portended with each swelling of the brass and strings. Throughout, the music struggles to reach Newman's unusually deep and rich vocal track, as though the song would achieve its transformation, and would be made whole, if only the music rose and met his voice. But the music never quite reaches such heights, and therefore we're pointedly denied the culmination of what we're hearing. Between the background singing (yo-oh-uh-oh-uh …) and Newman's vocals, which sound like an incantation reverberating off marbled walls in a deserted cathedral, there's a sense that we're witnessing the beginning of some secret ritual, and that the song fades away because we're forced to slip out a side entrance before our eavesdropping is discovered.

Track 7, "Feigned Hearing":
We start with what at first seems to be a false alarm. For there’s a fetching woodwind melody playing us along the course of the song, leading us to expect another bit of lovely orchestral pop. That melodic anchor soon disappears, though, and the heavy lifting is taken over taken over by a panoply of synths tracks. The arrangement gets more cluttered, with new sounds intruding on each new iteration of the song. Before long, we're inundated with sounds and overwhelmed; it's hard to tell exactly what we’re hearing. Clear hooks and melodies can't be teased out any longer, and instead the song now seems to be built up of a patchwork of sound effects–of alarms, birdcalls, bells ringing, and random tones from electronic devices. Through some subtle magic, these simple, non-musical sounds–sounds utterly divorced from normal instrumental sounds–are now the music. No melody, no rhythm track, just a voice and a hodgepodge of noises crafted into something musical, something beautiful.

Track 8, "Can I Explain the Delay?":
Hypnotic, minimalist synth pop that keeps circling back on itself. Instruments float in and out of the spacious mix independently of one another, and we drift through the void with them. Its minimalism is a sort of emptiness, both pretty and lonely–which is fitting for a song about the space between people and the longing to fill that space with understanding (or what other people think and feel). But that longing can't be fulfilled: the instruments never support one another and the song never builds to anything, even if the arrangement does become ever-so-slightly more lush, because some gaps are unbridgeable. Access to another person's subjective experience is forever closed off to you. You'll never look into another person and see what's they're feeling, feel what they're feeling ("Emotions, emotions / What do you feel now?"). All that's left to fill the space between people (and between the sounds here) is mystery, and that's fine: some things are best left hidden.