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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Love Gone Wrong & Love Gone Right

LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (finale) Cut is a jagged sort of number, a lament for a dying relationship.

Sometimes it’s like that and there’s nothing you can do – Sensate Focus won’t fix this and psychotherapy doesn’t look good here either; along with other tools they’re better at preventing this kind of disconnection that trying to fix something that’s broken into two separate pieces.  Sometimes something is just dead, and all you can do is write a dirge.  The sad thing here is that the death of the thing is so lopsided, as it so often is – with one party checked out, and the other wishing it wasn’t so.  All that you can do then is to remember that there’s lots of other people you can connect with – and that thinking you’re never going to feel again like you felt about the person who checked out is a bit of a grass-is-greener thing, and a bit like when you’ve had a big lunch and you can’t imagine ever feeling hungry again – because you will.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Toxic Families & Mass Communication Bards

LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (continued) End was one of our personal favourites on Show, which we had for yonks before Wish.  I guess we’re not particularly into shiny music most of the time, so a song like this appeals to us way more than Friday I’m In Love, musically but also lyrically.  Let me hasten to add though that if you were to go the other side of End into deliberately wallowing, wrist-slitting, let’s-lie-down-in-this-and-do-nothing-like-we-have-no-agency music, I’d be off the train as well, because I find that seriously annoying – the idea of deliberate victimhood, fashionable with some.  There’s a huge difference between that, and healthy confrontation of dark things about life.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Triggers & Ye Olde Venerated Man-Baby Philosophers

I’m really enjoying our new acquisition Wish, on multiple levels – musically there’s so much on there that’s lovely, and even the stuff that’s not I think is the way it is to reinforce the story told by the lyrics – e.g. Wendy Time isn’t exactly a beautiful song, but the quacking Donald-Duck type guitars and the dissonance and ner-ner-ness of the thing just goes with the portrait of an insufferable attempt at manipulation, which the narrator is wise to, which in turn makes me go, “Hooray!” because how many people fall for that, not just once but repeatedly…

It’s mostly like aromatherapy for your ears (not roses or geranium, and nothing fake with phthalates from the chemistry lab either, more like sandalwood and boronia), while the lyrics to most of the songs are written with great care, go well as stand-alone poetry, and make you think. If there’s a main theme, I think it’s interpersonal relationships and the human condition…but I would think that – it’s like, “What do you see?”

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: KMKMKM Fine Lens

Note: Post in early development and needed as spaceholder to keep things chronological!

Today I’m going to start a fine-lens look at Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, including the lyrics, which I forgot to get around to on the original forum thread because Wish arrived in our remote rural mailbox and I got highly enthused from the first listen. So, there will be a few well-deserved extra entries on that in this curation of my open journal Exploring the Back Catalogue, before I return to the “reprints” and additional commentary on Wish, and then continue with the in my view excellent self-titled album, which was next in the mailbox and which I got partly through before transferring the whole shebang onto my blog!

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD Wrap-Up

JAWS If you want to know what the musical theme was about, read the previous instalment. With this present instalment, I’m wrapping up my look at The Head On The Door.

What’s that doing here??? That’s not The Cure!

Today, the microscope is back out and we’re looking at the lyrics for Push.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD & Powderkegs

ONCE UPON A POWDERKEG It’s so much more pleasant to write about music you love than about music that leaves you lukewarm or that you have issues with, but when you’re going through anyone’s back catalogue, unless you have extremely wide tastes and don’t get analytical with lyrics, you’re likely to find a mix of both. This is just like the Smorgasbord Analogy I wrote about on Exploring “Join the Dots”. No one person can or should be expected to eat and enjoy every dish that’s on offer at a buffet.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD & Tealeaves

THE CROWD AND THE TEA-LEAVES We may get some more tangents to delight in on this scenic road, but meanwhile I’m just going to link to a web page where a crowd was asked what In Between Days was all about.  I usually avoid such places like the plague, especially if I’m going to write about music that’s new to me – I want to just start with what I can see from cold, and work out from first principles myself, before consulting others for their interpretations – and said web pages are not usually renowned for high-quality comments – which is why I prefer to talk to my husband, friends and other music nutters about it.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD & PMI Lens

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HEAD ON THE DOOR I’m on a slightly early teabreak, owing to The Head On The Door being barely over 35 minutes long. I’ve listened again after putting it away for six weeks, and today’s impression was a bit more favourable than my earlier impressions of this album.

Frame of mind and whether you’re giving something your complete attention are just two of the things that can change the way we respond to something – and this morning, I was in “go with the flow” mode, and I was not giving the album my total attention – I was doing some weeding, a necessary chore during spring flush even if you’re doing weed-avoidant permaculture stuff. Of course, weeding isn’t all-bad; it yielded a couple of tubs of livestock fodder, and quite a few tubs of organic material for the compost heap – bringing carbon back to the ground and getting nutrients recycled, while making oodles of compost worms happy.