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Last Active 12-23-19 9:27 pm
Joined 09-16-14
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| A PRIVATE UNDERSTANDING
This is what I submitted to wtferrothorn's Share Some Singles thread, but it seems to be a little too long for that, so I'll just throw my "review" here. What this is is my attempt at making oyu listen to the new Protomartyr song titled 'A Private Understanding', if you haven't already. | | 1 |  | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
I've talked to death about this song, but there is a good reason why. It is fantastic. There's something you need to know about me, and that is that I adore Post-Punk. It's the first genre I've ever been a "-head" of. It's what I grew up on, being brought up in the golden age of the genre I pretty much lived for any new experience and variation of the thing. Now, keeping this in mind, you can see that it might be a little harder to impress me beyond "Yes, it was good." within the genre's borders. So this song must be something outstanding for me to have to praise it as much and as often as I do. I've heard it to death at this point and you better believe that I loved every second of it. This song is not just probably the greatest song of this year or of recent years, it immediately sprung up to become one of my all time (Top 10 easily) favourite Post-Punk and not only songs. That's how incredible it is. | | 2 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
For starters, let's look back at Protomartyr's discography. They have never been something I would personally adore above a simple admiration for their craft. The band just never managed to strike me as something outstanding, although the clashing of styles they attempted to conduct was certainly intriguing. They had their phases, from everyone's first Joy Division-esque mixed with the Smiths' glamour, through the more upfront and raw aggression with influences from the likes of This Heat, Swell Maps and such underground menaces, to a much more lush and polished delvings into a somewhat New Wave-ish territories. But if their newest record is going to be anything like this song, I think they might have just stumbled upon the one true sound, one pure to them, one that is theirs. | | 3 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
Now, let's dissect the tricks and tropes of Post-Punk, ones in particular that evoke the biggest joy in me. That is the dysrhythmic and irregular instrumentation all set together to create a certain atmosphere of disrupt and chaos, while still mainatining cohesive and compelling sound. That is hard to pull off. A labyrinth of instruments all flowing together at the same time into one obscure hodgepodge of ideas, all of that needs to sound structured, otherwise it'll just be a disorganised noise (sidenote: That's actually how Noise Rock was created).
The next, more often used trope, is a deep nonchalant voice displaying all cascade of emotions that you as a listener need to decipher; all the torment and pain within, hidden behind the wall of cynicism and apathy. It's a particular kind of performance that really needs a patient and careful ear. | | 4 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
Moving on, another peculiarity I enjoy to hear, but one that is not all that popular (unfortunately), is a sound shift. That's when an already established pattern of sound is suddenly interrupted for a whole different soundscape. It might turn into a completely new melody or it might continue what it had, but with different arrangement. It's a little odd and severely underused technique that is usually deemed as an atmosphere-breaker. People usually think "Why would you build up an already well-crafted sound, in order to completely dismiss it afterwards?" And that's an understandible concern. This sound is not exactly easy to pull off either. But the harder the technique, the better the music is for it, once it is done right. And why take the easy way, if you can have the hard one, right? | | 5 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
And finally, my favourite of them all: The Repetiton. Now, this has only two possible ways it can go. It'll either be completely dull, tedious and excruciatingly boring, OR it can turn everything around and enthrall you with sound you cannot experience anywhere else in any other genre. If you have a good hook, you put it on loop and wait until it deteriorates, dissolves into atmosphere, gradually adding, replacing and highering the volumes of instruments surrounding the hook, which ultimately sucks you as a listener in more and more. It's like a limbo, a coma you can all but escape. You feel the despair, the weight of the world and the chagrin all crushing down upon you as you drown in the sound engulfing you like water from all sides, cold and relentless. | | 6 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
So now that we know all that, let's see what this song does. It starts off with the irregular and right after that menacingly distressed instrumentation. Check. The vocals are deep and almost distrurbingly senseless. Check. The chorus that is defined by a sudden switch from threateningly disrhytmic guitarwork to saddeningly dramatic acoustics and then back into hard-hitting straight-forward musical spectacle. Check. And finally, the crown jewel, the repetition. And normally I'd be happy as is, but here it flows so perfectly with the lyrics that you can't help but notice the symbolism, patterns and the interconnected moods. As if the last cry for help in lyrics is intensified by the ultimate desperation in musical form, the Post-Punk hook repetition (as mentioned above). | | 7 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
And of course those lyrics. I already poured my soul on the virtual table, explaining what I believe the themes and messages to be and just why it resonates with me as much as it does, in combination with the near-perfect musical arrangement. If you want to know what I think about it, go find pretty much any thread about songs in 2017 that has anything to do with Post-Punk. In short, I feel like it's about a general disconnection from the outside world, the inability to find common grounds, the raging inescapable feeling of isolation that comes with age (also known as mid-life crisis), the dizzying feeling of obsoleteness of one self as he comes of age. It's an immaculate piece worthy of all the attention in the world. | | 8 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
It's clear at this point that Protomartyr have learned from their past mistakes and on their journey to find the one true original sound they ventured into all sorts of edges, and now finally they have embraced their selves and become what they were always striving to become. This song is nothing you can just dream up in your head. It doesn't have a particular melody or a refrain you can simply think of one day. This song was not born in the way tha someone just played a tune on a demo and then they added instruments to it to make it sound full. These lads did their homework, attributed all of their musical knowledge into one and created a masterpiece. | | 9 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
I can liken it to the masterpieces of cinema, in which you observe a scene and upon further inspection realise just how brilliantly it is constructed and wonder just how did the director think of this sort of solution. Exactly like this. It's a process that takes time and knowledge. Summing up a myriad of different influences and analyse what makes them special, submitting your work to countless tests and finding the best way of transmiting the idea onscreen or on the record. This is not something you can create with your friends in the garage. This is made by Musicians with a capital M. These people have acquired all they needed from years of experience, successes and failures and are now ready to put it all into one, professionally and masterfully constructed work.
Come on, lads, show us what else are you hiding on that album of yours. | | 10 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
BONUS)
The music video in in of itself deserves attention. At first it seems quite standard music video nonsense that only serves as an companion and a mood-setter to the music it revolves around. But it is so much more than that. For the purposes of explaining as to what exactly this pairing of song and video represents, I'll refer to a list I posted some time ago, titled Film Adaptations Classification Theory, in which one of the entries was about what I call Pure Adaptation. That is when you reinterpret the source material and create a whole new experience that on one hand doesn't rely on the viewer's knowledge of the source material, but if one does know, the two vastly different experiences enrich one another. That's what a good adaptation should do. | | 11 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
And in a similar vein, a good music video should not just be an aesthetical pleaser and an atmospheric copy of the music it follows, but rather continue the message, the story, the idea, transmit all of the music's depth into an according visual scopes. And A Private Understanding does about exactly that.
The video features an old man siting amidst disinterested, unenthusiastic yougr people (not youths, just people obviously younger than him), as he speaks and narrates and expects others to pay attention and listen, but nobody does, at least not with enthusiasm. That's the disconnection, the loss of commons with the rest of the world. And the enrichment of one another comes in the following form: in the lyrics, it isn't clear as to who is the subject of observation, but the music video makes it very clear. It's the old man and the disconnection comes from age. It's a hautning image and one particularly unsettling to me.
But a great song deserves a great visual representation. | | 12 | | Protomartyr
Relatives In Descent
Probably better if I also throw the release date out there:
29th of September | |
Papa Universe
08.19.17 | In short, check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWdLpIITqsQ | yanquiuxo
08.19.17 | well well... i guess you gave me something to listen to for the next few months | Papa Universe
08.19.17 | It's just one song though...but I can see myself listening to ony this song for the duration of a few months. | yanquiuxo
08.20.17 | could work for me too.. i'm one of the ones that can repeatedly listen to a single song until obsession, and only a few times i get tired of it.. mostly, it happens that i abandon it for a little time, but when it comes the moment to hear it again, it's still fresh as shit.. | Papa Universe
08.20.17 | I feel ya, brotha.. | bgillesp
08.20.17 | When does this album come out? | Papa Universe
08.20.17 | 29th of September | McMegaMountain
09.29.17 | New album might be my favorite of theirs, and this track is one of many highlights, but probably my favorite off it. | butcherboy
09.29.17 | Uni, have you been listening to it? because i've got 75% of what I want to say down now.. my review will be ready by tomorrow or tonight.. | Papa Universe
09.29.17 | I am currently RIGHT NOW listening to it. | Papa Universe
09.29.17 | currently finished The Chuckler. | butcherboy
09.29.17 | i wish we could rate in .1 increments.. this is a 4.7-4.8 right now at only two full listens.. and my top 3 albums of the year! | Papa Universe
09.29.17 | It actually surpasses After the Party and maybe even Brutalism for the AOTY for me so far, maybe will be higher than In Spades even. | Papa Universe
09.29.17 | second spit, here we go. | Conmaniac
07.13.18 | ooh yeah I dig this explanation, also adored the lyrics on this one and even tho it's the first song there's just something about it instrumentally that makes it the best one which I think you explained brilliantly here |
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