Considering all that's happened in the past year, that seems a decent lesson for us all. By closing track We a Famly, Miley herself appears for a duet of such simplicity and warmth that you almost forget the despondency buried in their wide-eyed lullabies, quite possibly illuminating the point that the band have been trying to make for all these years: amidst all the chaos and misery that transcends time, technology and the mythologies we build around (or in spite of) them, comfort is valuable and should be taken wherever you can find it. How? marries Rundgren-esque tenderness to an implication that words may be the most inadequate means of communication, suggesting that Coyne’s true intentions may not necessarily be detected by lyrics alone. Your heart breaks for him – almost as much as when he tries to find positivity amidst memories of a friend lost to suicide on The Castle. ‘You’re showing me the truth / But I don’t want to believe you,’ he sings over a cascade of Wilson-esque melody and restrained techno-psych. Penultimate track Almost Home (Bliksko Domu) offers the biggest clue as to the dissatisfaction at the heart of the record: ‘Burning up my fragile dream / Of how the world is full of love / It’s not what I thought it was.’ The gentle Sunrise (Eyes of the Young) – a reprise of a song originally written for Miley Cyrus’ Dead Petz project – also finds Coyne admonishing the sun as he ponders the problem of happiness when we know that death exists. Fragile balladry hangs neatly among proggily expansive cuts that explore their territory while leaving you anxiously hanging between movements – nature, violence, mythology and mortality are all crumpled up into a fast-unravelling ball of tangled questions.
That’s where we find ourselves musically too: although it’s easy to detect the noted influences of Syd Barrett and A$AP Rocky among their folky psychedelicisms and woozy approach to electronic grooves, the music here often feels like a throwback to their 1999 breakthrough LP The Soft Bulletin. Simultaneously a homonym of the garbled phrase ‘oxy melody’ and Polish for ‘eyes of the young’, the title is typical of Wayne Coyne’s ability to meld a sense of druggy darkness with borderline-hokey optimism.
0 kommentar(er)
