the blunt pain of pseudo redemption! (2013)

Less about just strictly the bummed out/predetermined/fixed match held between love and our era of ephemerality(movement but constant loss)/superficial connections(post...)/information than it is an observation of the former under the latter's conditions- the picture is just how we're doomed to hurt, how we've always been doomed to hurt, and what that means now, experientially. Less insights like "Thank god for mum and dad for sticking through together 'cause we don't know how," (from the undisputed masterpiece of modern-romance-is-a-joke pop concept albums), and more specific thoughts and phrases, repeated in places where they can take on new meanings- something someone said to our narrator burns itself into his head and haunts him, or when he says it it's a memory and when she says it it's a cry for help. It works because the specificity of its scope actually makes for a generalized or universalized vision of hurt, not a thesis. In fact, the state of not knowing rather than saying anything real clear is recurrent and assists in its affective impact. Last year's 'scariest of the album of the year' was the initial hurt, its rage exaggerated, its structure broken and tangential. This one's the nausea- the pain subsides and is replaced by a confusion and longing, the danger of hope, improvement, and redemption. Its joys, epiphanies, and sadnesses are not lost (in a 'surprisingly musical' blur), but undercut by this confusion- we're never fully sold on any of it because we're constantly distracted. That one's the breakup, this one's the (never really) getting over it.

A-

alt / (:)/:0) / make it real