¤ milky moon ¤

Steve wrote:
We came by the boatload,
and were immobilized:
worshipping volcanoes,
charting the loping skies.
The tides of the earth
left us bound, and calcified,
and made as obstinate as obsidian,
unmoving, save our eyes:*
just mooning and blinking

* ..................... I'd always heard this as 'Unmoving sable eyes' and am a bit disappointed to find it thus in the lyrics, to the extent that I even checked it in the booklet!

I used to think it was 'sable' too, but I prefer the actual lyrics. The image of a person encased in ash, the only sign they're still alive being their eyes, 'charting the loping skies'. I think it's so beautiful.

Yes I thought it was sable too. I thiink I prefer sable! I'm keeping sable.

Zonodon wrote:

Would either of y'all be willing to elaborate? I am very very curious about Iceland and have never been there at all! From what I've read it sounds like the best place in the world, almost too good to be true--it seems like it must have its problems.

I also went to Iceland once, and thought it absolutely magical. I had always wanted to go there, from when I was a kid, and once I started work, I saved up and booked a holiday there, taking my little brother with me for company. Neither of us had ever been in a plane before, but we booked a trip with 9 flights. We'd not even really been abroad, either, if you discount Wales and a school day-trip across the English Channel. The place was great, the landscape breathtaking, and the people made it even more special. If I ever go again, I'd travel about on land, though, to be more 'in touch'; but the closest I have been since is a couple of visits to Faroe...

One day ..............

This song was actually the last song I really got into and really loved on the album (I mean, except maybe 'Occident' - I got into it, then decided I didn't particularly like it).

I love the cataclysmic ending. The flutelike and eerie Oo-oo-ooh's, like a foreboding and prophetic song of the apocalypse; the hot ash and destructive 'tides of the earth', calcifying people alive; the narrator's blood 'soaking and felling' everything like 'an atom bomb'; the 'kingfisher lying with the lion', like in an Isaian prophecy: the end of her love is the end of the narrator's world, and she dies in its destruction. The ending of this song makes the realism and earthliness of Does Not Suffice so much more stark and affecting.

This song is full of amazing little phrases and images. I love all the existentialist themes. the lesson she fits in at the end, 'It is too short, the day we are born / We commence with our dying', reminds me of Ys and Emily, but with a much darker edge; the idea that life is just a 'slow death'.

^ it's indeed a very sad thing to say..

It's devastating. The whole song is. It's just horribly sad in this beautiful, mythic, catastrophic, fantastic and dreamlike way. Then you have the clash with the subsequent Does Not Suffice, which covers similar ground but is much more humanly, realistically sad.

I'm in the minority, I don't like Kingfisher. The lyrics are great, but I think it's a bit overdone. It would have been better without the violins and with a little less percussion. Does Not Suffice sets a more gloomy tone with less instruments going on at once, and that may have been for effect as it's right after Kingfisher, but I don't think it works.

I don't know if she's religious or not. I watched an interview where she talked about the legend of Ys, about how it had been Christianised (in an almost derogatory tone), but this is the only mention she has made outside of singing in relation to religion as far as I know.

I don't find myself listening to Kingfisher too often, I guess I find the instrumentation a little heavy-handed, but I also think it contains some of her most poetic and beautiful lyrical sequences. Obviously it would be impossible to go into everything I love in the song so I'll just go with a few sections:

Just some absolutely beautiful bits of poetry showing how good she is with words;

'beneath the sheeting banks of air'
'Hung from the underbelly of the earth / while the stars skid away below'

And my favourite verse:

'Stand here and name the one you loved
Beneath the drifting ashes
And in naming, rise above time
As it, flashing, passes'

I think to anyone who has loved and lost someone these words are so phenomenally beautiful. The idea that in proclaiming your love, in stating fiercely that it did exist, you 'rise above time', transcend the past-ness of your relationship and bring the reality of that feeling infinitely into the present with you. I guess for me it's an infinitely more subtle and beautiful version of the old idea that if you love and lose someone, you carry them with you everywhere; both in a spiritual way and in a physical way; in the form of the marks and changes that made to who you are.

EDIT - I forgot to mention the gorgeous way the strings rise over the word 'time' to represent it's ephemerality, a similar technique to the instrumental rest mid-line in Emily; 'the whole world stopped to hear your hollering'.

Andrew that's a great reading of the end of the song, I entirely agree. As a side note, I love the imagery like 'you evicted my life / from its little lighthouse on the seashore' and her blood 'welling in my head like a birdbath'; so bathetic.

(on a slightly different note Tom, have you written your thoughts on the lyrics of Ys down yet?)

I've been listening a lot but haven't written anything yet. I'm actually about to listen to Only Skin now and make some notes It might take a while, but it shall be done

(Unfortunately?) I have not yet lost anyone I've loved, so the full emotional impact of a lot of these songs does seem to escape me a bit. Perhaps I won't be able to fully appreciate HOOM until I'm miserable?

I just can't get over Joanna's lyrics sometimes. The whole 'Hung from the underbelly of the earth' verse makes me fall down, slack-jawed and marveling, every time.

Andrew wrote:(Unfortunately?) I have not yet lost anyone I've loved, so the full emotional impact of a lot of these songs does seem to escape me a bit. Perhaps I won't be able to fully appreciate HOOM until I'm miserable?

In my case, that isn't necessary. I've lost people I love and been rather miserable (although not because of it), and it doesn't help me appreciate/understand the emotional impact. It could be the same for you, maybe?

Andrew wrote:(Unfortunately?) I have not yet lost anyone I've loved, so the full emotional impact of a lot of these songs does seem to escape me a bit. Perhaps I won't be able to fully appreciate HOOM until I'm miserable?

I really identify with her sentiments in so many of the songs. I'm actually cautious about listening to Does Not Suffice because of the way it makes me feel; I cried on the first or second listen to Have One On Me and In California. There are lines that encapsulate the emotion of the situation when you abstract it from the actual events, like:

"Helpless as a child, when you held me in your arms, and I knew that no other could ever love me as you loved." (The frightening vulnerability of being in love with someone that's only made better by the knowledge that they love you, too; the feeling that you'll never know love again like the love you lost.)

"I remember everything, down to the sound of you shaving—the scrape of your razor, the dully-abraiding black hair that remained when you clutched at me" (The little things you loved about someone that held great emotional significance for you that you know you'll never experience again.)

"and I am no longer afraid of anything, save the life that, here, awaits." (Having retreated home to escape something and, after a while, feeling like you're stuck there, like your life is on hiatus, and you'd face anything to resume it.)

"I don't belong to anyone. My heart is heavy as an oil drum. And I don't want to be alone. My heart is yellow as an ear of corn, and I have torn my soul apart from pulling artlessly with fool commands." (The blunt acknowledgement of your situation; chastising yourself for skirting around it, deluding yourself, the damage you're doing yourself by trying to 'be strong'.)

"Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, and I stand, shaking in my doorway, like a sentinel, all alone" (I've actually done this - holding a sort of vigil when everyone else is sleeping, pining and longing to be with someone you're separated from, trembling with the ache of being away from them.)

"I can bear a lot, but not that pall!" (The way I read it, the pall symbolises the end of a relationship: the cloth laid over its coffin. So, the feeling that you were able to take the death throes of a dying relationship, but the death itself is too much to bear. It's odd; I use almost the same imagery as a lot of what Joanna uses in Kingfisher in a poem I wrote about the end of a relationship before HOOM was released.)

"It does not suffice for you to say I am a sweet girl, or to say you hate to see me sad because of you. It does not suffice, to merely lie beside each other, as those who love each other do." (The meaninglessness of the platitudes offered by a lover who's spurned you because they can't repair that rejection; the feeling that something's missing that ought to be there in all your future interactions with them, that your relationship's emotionally empty, now.)

"I picture you, rising up in the morning: stretching out on your boundless bed, beating a clear path to the shower, scouring yourself red." (Imagining a former lover complete without you, able to fill the space you occupied; the feeling that you've been easily replaced with nothing, you weren't needed.)

"everywhere I tried to love you is yours again, and only yours." (The feeling that you've been banished from your 'spaces'; you don't just have to live without love, you have to live without the comfort of the routine in which the love happened; the feeling that your efforts to be a good lover were an irritant that's been gotten rid of.)

I'm totally in agreement Jordan, especially with the 'some nights...' verse in In California which always absolutely kills me. The way she sings 'Sometimes I can almost feel the power' has the intense emotional weight of her very best lines, just like 'scrape your knee, it is only skin'.

Pretty much every line in Does Not Suffice makes me wanna tear up.

Hmm yeah a lot of those basic conclusions I'd already drawn, but it's really interesting to see all these little extra emotions that the lines evoke for someone more experienced

Oddly I'd never really though of the 'boundless bed' and 'clear path to the shower' in quite the same way you did. The way you put it, 'the feeling that you've been easily replaced with nothing', or the heart breaking idea that in some respects you were 'irritant' makes the ending seem even more affecting. How horrible to have loved someone so much more than they ever loved you.

I still think In California and maybe Autumn are the most heartbreaking songs on the album for me, because I can relate more to a lot of the themes - growing older, leaving home, extended separation from the one you love. Lines like 'Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, and I stand, shaking in my doorway, like a sentinel, all alone' or 'And I don't want to be alone. My heart is yellow as an ear of corn' that you mentioned, 'bracing like the bow upon a ship, and fully abandoning any thought of anywhere but home', 'Time won't account for how I've aged', and 'But time marches along. You can't always stick around' destroy me every time.

You know, I have a really hard time listening to Have One on Me. It's very ... tied to a specific time and feeling. And what's so strange is that Ys isn't. Ys always feels strangely new and familiar, and it doesn't bog me down with loss and memories. HOOM does. I haven't listened in so long, it just makes me sad. I listened to Go Long the other day but I cried too much so I just put it all away. Does Not Suffice would've killed me. I wonder why it tied itself so firmly to a specific time, when neither Ys nor MEM did so painfully. Hrm.

I have often avoided talking about my musical tastes, in case someone says something that might adversely change my perception of that music, whether carelessly or maliciously. It is unfortunate that in order to really enjoy something, I have to be comfortable with it on pretty much every level. It sounds, Ann, as though it's the same with you, although your evident discomfort with (all or most of?) HOOM clearly is a lot more visceral than just an adverse comment from a friend. That's a real shame, because HOOM is a wonderful piece of work, and I'd suggest you're missing a lot by avoiding it. I don't know what the answer is, but maybe you could try gradually introducing it, track by track, when you are feeling uplifted and in a good mood. Perhaps you could re-imprint good mental associations onto the songs. I hope so, Ann, it would be such a pity to have one of MM's most respected and insightful users no longer feeling that she can fully engage with the subject of this site...

Not to speak out of turn Ann, but do you not think the specific events occurring in your life over and after the release period of HOOM make it quite obvious why any music you heard in that time would result in such an extreme emotional trigger? In periods of intense emotion I think we really cling to things like books and music and from then on they are always associated with that time. It's fairly Proustian, just as with smell and taste, music can literally transport you to something or someone if what you were feeling at the time was important. I find it happening to myself the whole time, to varying degrees.

Yeah, everyone's got songs they can't stand to listen to because that's what was playing when they were broken up with or when a relative passed away, etc.; maybe that's what it is?