A Week With Winterpills' "The Light Divides": Day 4
23 April 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Rick Baker
You use words like “pilloried,” “arthrospore,” and “scrim” when you either want to confound your audience, talk down to them, or if you’re simply trying too hard to create something BIG and hope against hope that some arcane verbiage can carry you the rest of the way.
You use words like “bloodsheets” and “nervesweets” when you get a kick out of compound words and you’ve made the conscious decision that it may be easier to find the perfect rhyme if you simply start making words up.
You use words like “fauve” because you’ve found a thesaurus sitting nearby.
In a way, this works. This nonsensical approach, creating words and fitting them into a lullabye or a nursery rhyme where there’s no need to question the teacher because if we are listening to the sing-songy melody, then we have become the audience. The audience is composed of children. And truly, we know no better.
But this is what happens when you listen too closely. The clips of lyrics you’d made sense of previously now begin to dissolve into a pile of words which hold no promise for even a loose interpretation.
The stronger tracks are the songs which don’t require that your eyes glaze over in order to enjoy them. “Broken Arm” is a single. It is self-contained, it is honest, and moreover it makes some kind of sense. It falls along the same lines as most of the other songs in its sense of hopelessness, anger (of the sedate sort), and futility. From my listening, the song is consistent with the sentiment that a train is only as fast as its slowest car. A necessary part of you has gone dead, however it remains attached. First instinct is to assume that this is a response to a dead weight in the band. But then maybe it’s familial.
Honestly, who knows?
And didn’t we already talk about this? Quit paying attention and just hum along. Glaze over with the vacant look of someone in a trance from some long-droning music. Now hum. See? You’re enjoying it.
no no no…it’s neither trying to be BIG, nor trying to be condescending (what would that be about, really?), but it is wordplay sure. In ‘Shameful’. Which I’m liking as much as anything more ‘sensible’ on the disc, if not more. Poems do that sometimes, just evoke. That said, I hit on this site via searching on ‘nervesweets’ and it did piss me off just a little that it was made up. still, I think I know what Shameful’s about. And I’m not telling ;-) It’s pretty, isn’t it?
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i’ve had this album about a month and its one of the best albums i’ve heard this year, and i agree with you about the lyrics to a point — but thats the only song (“Shameful”) that seems to indulge in that kind of (debatably) empty wordplay. most of the other songs have, i feel, very direct (and poignant) lyrics. i think its a bit cheap to zero in on that one song and assume there is some kind of blanket condescension going on.
its possible with songs like that (which i still love) that one brings meaning to it that might reflect more on the listener than the songwriter.