Album Rating: 4.0 | Sound Off
OK Sowing, just gave this record my third listen focusing mainly on narrative, and on where the fable of where the Boy That Cried Wolf comes in, here's what I got. All very premature, of course.
So, I find the end of Inaudible pretty striking. "Are you clean but finally forsaken? Are you washing it out with your hands?" This record begins in the aftermath of some sin, where the narrator is cleansed by the fallout. As we can gleam from the title of the record, this is a record that centers around hard-earned revelation and recompense. Also significant to the concept is that there is a lot of mirroring in Inaudible, which has already been roundly made fun of by Rowan. But, paying attention to meaning and not quality, this line strikes me as relevant "I jump you like an animal. You bite back like an animal." Notice, of course, the comparison of him and his wife(?) to animals, and that Hull is the one who initiates the action, causing the other to mirror him.
The 'all I do is repeat myself' segment is evidently quite crucially important as it is repeated very prominently in the record, and it shows Hull very self-centered, a pit of bottomless need. Those lyrics shift in an intriguing way at the end of dinosaur though: "So love me now, cause I just can't redeem myself...From all my faults I blame on someone else." Building on from that, in the internet, Hull has a line comparing himself to an autograph, and comparing the subject to the internet, again re-affirming that he's wrapped in ego, while what he's encountering is literally the container of all knowledge, revelation itself. Naturally, the track ends with Hull gaining clarity from the encounter. "Unframe my mess. Untrain my eyes. Untame my head."
In the final seconds, the fable is repeated again, with perhaps his actual daughter speaking, stating that the boy who cried wolf was lying about the wolf, but that there actually was a wolf an it ate all the sheep. And, I think it's apparent that the boy who cried Wolf is Andy himself, who, as stated in Dinosaur, placed the burden of his faults on others, blaming them for his own mistakes, making them the wolf, as the mirroring of the intro track suggests, while he himself is the one responsible for damaging his loved ones. "All the time I thought I was right" is the final line, stating Andy was delusional and truly thought that others were the wolf, and not himself. It's in that state of heavy revelation that rebuilding or fresh starts can begin, which may be the concept a lot of the lightness within this record is reflecting.
Record is starting to grow on me, despite my gripes.
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Album Rating: 3.0
On closer inspection the one-two punch of Bed Head / Annie is the clear highlight here. Inaudible is solid. Much of the remainder struggles to strike a balance, it’s either overly bright and sanitised, veering far to close to stadium rock, or completely uninteresting.
Black Mile continues to be a conundrum I’ll never quite understand, because I love that album and many of the ingredients here are the same.
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