Skip to main content

The Fall - The Coliseum

Perhaps the most intense and beautiful feeling of struggle comes about midway through. Isolde believes she hears a melody coming from Tristan, and sings, Are they waves of refreshing breezes? Are they billows of heavenly fragrances? As they swell and roar around me, shall I breathe them, shall I listen to them? Accompanying this, the violins begin a chromatic melody, a slow upward climb in tight half steps, struggling to reach something, which again and again falls back and then climbs higher. As it does, the chromatic line is often dissonant to the harmony below and to Isolde’s melody. Yet, because these dissonances by their very nature seek to resolve themselves, they push and pull the melody along. The opposition makes for the advance. Throughout, along with struggle, there is a feeling of unrelenting, inevitable progress, and it is thrilling and deeply satisfying.

What can this music teach us about love, especially in relation to difficulty and ease? I once thought love should be easy. I’d meet the right girl, we’d fall in love, and everything would be great, that is, I would be approved of completely, and there would be no questions. Not surprisingly, I had a lot of difficulty in love, and by my mid twenties, I felt despairing on the subject. The greatest good fortune of my life was meeting Aesthetic Realism, because I heard criticism of the thing that stopped me from caring truly for a person, my conceit.


The Fall - The Coliseum
  • Released on: The Light User Syndrome album
  • Released in: 1996
  • Duration: 8:08

"The band started in Manchester in 1976 after Mark E Smith, the lead vocalist, saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Smith’s abstract lyrics resulted in a group both influential and infamous."

See previous Song of the Day 

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day 
Post a Comment
Read more

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...
Post a Comment
Read more