MOLLUSCS ARE HEROES

The Blue Nile

one) You won’t like them. A Walk Across The Rooftops contains slap bass, trite lyrics on the debris of relationships, pans from (yawn) Coppola’s One From the Heart into (yawn) Paris, Texas, sung by Springsteen impersonating Sinatra. Hats has two white reggae tracks, gated snares, repeated use of the word ‘baby’ (yes), is ‘lush’, ‘cinematic’ and MOR. Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart have covered their songs. Phil Collins endorses them.


two) I don’t like American Music Club, John Cale, Talking Heads, Rickie Lee Jones or The Cars either.


three) Men in American books tend to wear hats.


four) Katy (my girlfriend) was in a philosophy class and, as the hush of young students began to stifle and choke, the teacher, by way of gesture, mentioned the best class he ever had occurred when Paul Buchanan, ‘you probably haven’t heard of him’, suggested they talk about love.


five) No-one has registered the scientific unproveability of ‘love’ in song more heart-rendingly than Paul Buchanan singing “how do I know you feel it?”, just moments from loss, or the frustrated ‘I can only tell you’ of “do I love you? YES I love you!”


six) What do you say when three years into a relationship the only thing holding you together is the fear of breaking the ties you’ve built in the outside world as a unit? When an offer of tea is the only lull in the silence? “Let’s go out tonight”, one last time, meet up with the ghost of your happiness, it can be the same again, you will dance, for one night, oh to bed the same different woman every night, and leave the relationship strafed with cigarette burns and headaches in, alone.


seven) Such compassionate pop. During Hats, the band’s lives were fragmenting and none of them felt they had any support around them, it would have been so easy to become insular and dismissive of others in such a situation.


eight) She was always beautiful. Her hair is scraped through with coral orange and grey. Scotland’s inability to say Carl teased a last laugh out from under her frown. Though the aftertaste of other men placed her lips.


nine) The closest modern pop equivalent aesthetically and emotionally, rather than musically say, is Daniel Bedingfield. I get the feeling that he’s an equally strident perfectionist, in thrall to nothing but his standards, which are steeped in values like integrity and honesty. Couple this with him writing songs that are scary & weird in their over-bearing emotional investment, sounding like pages of his diary set to music.


ten) You will like them. A Walk Across the Rooftops is a deeply emotional water, Buchanan a child lost in the weave of a Frank O’Hara poem. Hats refuses Don Paterson’s cycnicism of romance and insists on the transcendental of the ordinary and of the journey, the pressure difference.


!) I think romanticism suggests this sense of wilfully not having it all, leaving that one bit back, the whole, the mysterious ‘last’ that can never be reached, romanticism is the journey to try and attain that that you’re purposefully denying yourself. I have never listened to their third record, I most probably never will.

SMOKE, POLING INTO THE SKY

Tara Jane O'Neill - "In the Sun Lines"

"When the little kid is sitting at the table in Ratcatcher and he has the well of salt in front of him, he's just running his finger through it, round, up, left, right, in, out. All the while, his mum's flitting around him, talking to him, he's answering on auto-pilot, totally consumed by the salt on the table. His whole world, lots of little grains for him to play with, and he's just making these really beautiful sweeping movements of his little fingers. His friends just died, because he pushed him in the canal, and outside the world is full of the dirt and dregs Glasgow's binmen have left to him. In a couple of weeks his dad will hit his mum after getting slashed looking after a kitten, and the whole world has dissolved into the cusp of these grains. And always with the fingers: in and out, through and round. And then! One movement, he wipes the whole beautiful mess onto the floor, without a thought for who'll clean it, because we all know, from being kids, that if you hit salt hard enough, it'll spread out over a distance and no-one will see it, maybe little trace elements as you look down guiding the hoover round its course, but nothing to get you into trouble, no blame. One swoop, and his whole world disappears. And where's he? He's off. Can you believe it? He's off!

(That'd make me so happy.)" - Me, 'Happiness'

So there’s a war on; people reporting about the feelings of overwhelming immensity of widescale actions often conclude that they’re retreating into a world where ‘small things’ ‘matter’. The weight, and the gravity, and all the things that are pulling at them: they release these tethers and channel the feelings of helplessness into the small, the particular, crossed t’s on a shopping list, the controllable. And though, I’m in this place where the war doesn’t exist, where there’s no Dialektiks im Stillstand, where there is no wait for the messianic ‘moment of war’, I can’t help but feeling that its with inexorable momentum my world is changing itself, so I choose the small, the things I can ‘deal’ with, the static. And Tara Jane O’Neill comes out.

Tara’s music is really subtle. When she’s boring you it’s normally with cyclical patterns of guitar, played once, repeated on warm analogue delay: vanilla notes swirling forever. With those scuzzy sawing wheezeboxes choking their last breaths over the patterns, wheezewheezewheeze. These aren’t vicious circles, circles for the sake of circles, ‘cos every time she goes round the loop she gets closer to the center of the thing. Spiralling in towards the moment she’ll never reach, the asymptotal centre of meaning in the world, which she can’t ever break through, which if she could, she still probably wouldn’t, because then she’d have no journey left to carry through. I don’t know why I’m saying this. Neither do you. The immensity of something that big? Coming at the centre of something so small. (“The situation of the post-Communist state seems ideal for literature.”)

Her music is really beautiful, slow rinse cycle guitars, that are just... beach blond, or something. I saw her here in Glasgow when she toured, hiding behind her hat, with a pall of smoke permanently obscuring us from her. She seemed really coy. The room was skin-loosingly hot and I regret not enjoying it as much as I should have. It's not really music for a live setting. It's music to be listened to alone, when you feel a little crushed, I think.

Really, really beautiful music.

Her cover of Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" is the greatest song ever. That weird, familiar cooing at the end. The circular guitar motif. The tongue-click, steady drum. Really, really beautiful.

So yeah. Take a little time to think about listening to Tara Jane O’Neill and, with your face pressed hard into the words on your screen, think about the things that you’re doing to make your life seem a little more stable. And take care.