Things are starting to escape me that otherwise shouldn’t unless I give myself some kind of stimulus. It’d worry me if I weren’t expecting it. The reflex would be to say it’s because I’m getting older, that the decline I try to delay in my body is now starting to reach my brain, but I think it’s more because I’m filling myself up with things. I’m into so much–I love so much, even when I think I don’t. It’s…reassuring.
There’s the part in the bridge of Queen Adreena’s “Siamese Almeida” that catches me in its perfection. The entire song is constructed around a two-note bass figure–E to C, if my ear serves me correct–that just grinds and moves forward in a chugging, gritting, too-ugly-to-be-entirely-pretty-yet-sexy-as-fuck way that just feels like it needs to be there, and the bridge–if you can call it that–is just a breakdown in which all it is is kick and bass, and Katie Jane Garside’s voice, of course, until the guitars chime in with that buzzsawing Crispin Gray tone on hammered E chords. The exact lyrics escape me–if I am to say I am declining mentally, I’d cite that as exhibit A–but they are something to the extent of “I will not change what’s in you, I will not change for you,” and there’s that part where she goes from a hiccuped “I will not-” and then, as the guitars sear, she abruptly goes to a throat-searing “change what I hate in you” and the compression kicks in to the point at which the volume of the shriek and the volume of the coo are exactly the same. I don’t always like that kind of processed vocal, but it’s beautiful in that instant, perfect, catching the emotions I feel so often and re-encoding them into music before spitting them out, into my ears.
It’s one of those moments I have to stop and rewind and listen to over and over every time I hear it. Beautiful.
Time’s up.
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