Review Summary: "There's a road leading into Darkness..."
It is another cold night.
I call my girlfriend. She is unusually late home. It is midnight and forty-five. Something is wrong, her shift ended an hour ago. “I am just a bit late, I am with a colleague”.
Something is wrong.
My mind goes back to when my former lover used to do this. To when the “rusty sword” was pressed into my back, forever altering the way I react to these situations. “I was late at work”, she used to say, while dancing away in lust and broken promises.
I fall asleep in the only way I know. The loudest words pouring down, pen to paper, the heaviest sounds from my headphones. Pills in, lights out. My thoughts finally die down.
I feel like I am dreaming.
"We’re Daltonians in deep talks, about colors we love.”
I am somewhere back in time, just a couple weeks ago. It's another day somewhere else. I turn my phone off, I am about to get out of my body again. I don't want to hear anybody. I just want to let go. She calls me. I am unsure from where.
“I had a seizure at work.” Long, cold shivers. “It is getting too much, stress, lack of sleep - I don't know how I can do it. My body is letting me go. I am afraid this dance will break me.”
I am somewhere else. My mind is there and not there. I try to find comfort in the only therapeutic way I know. The loudest noise, I must look like a mad man for others, in these dark Autumn streets, dancing to a beat nobody else is tuned to. I really need to scream my pain out. I really need to let it go.
"There's a road leading into Darkness..."
Queue "Noah". It is the new Birds in Row. It starts and I am unsure again, as only this band can do, if the words of despair I hear are mine, or Ours - the power of repetition, its bridge hypnotizing me, I am one of the voices in unison now singing.
"Sheltered bodies, sheltered bodies.."
I feel connected with the thumping of this new renewed spirit. The melancholic rage that was before, is still there, lingering in the crescendo. I wait for the explosion. I want to let it go.
"..You think you'll fix it with money?"
I recognize the monsters around me. They are greed, they are lust, they are brutal power. They are the deep obscure shadows of everyone's soul. They are in front of me. I dance with a renewed sense of rage, of defiance for the immoral rules someone has laid on us, of all the stupid cards we are dealt. I am constantly sick, and nobody knows, yet I dance. I live.
"Cathedrals" starts. I am in the middle of a lost square. There is only graffiti and art around me. I faintly hear a party somewhere. I see a burning fire now creeping up from one of the back alleys. It melts all the colors from the wall, turning into bright charcoal black. The song swings, and rises, and all I can envision is the power of creativity, now brimming from the burnt structures that the powers that be never wanted for it to appear. It all comes crashing down in furious swings. The melody leading reality, or vice versa? I don't know.
"I Know I ain´t the easiest one to live with, yet I try.”
I wake up. Her body is shivering and lingers for contact. She missed me. She missed home. I am not in the shape to accept this burning energy. I am defeated by the ghosts of the past. I am so depressed. Pitch black. I am now on my balcony, and as so many times before, I wonder what it would feel like to let it go.
Yet I don´t.
I wait.
I stare at the sun. I feel somewhat blessed I made it through another night. We made it through another night. Renewed energy. I feel jumping in the crowd below, but my body can only peek from the frame imposed by the metal cage surrounding my window.
I look inward, and where there was rage, there is now stillness. “Trompe l´Oeil” – Deceiving the eye. The melody now soothes in its imperfect, punk, raw style. Birds in Row were surely not aiming for an X-Factor single here. I laugh. Yet, I reconnect to the voice within. The one that, with the same feeble strength, laughs that the storm is gone. That she is at home, she is fine, she has not died. I have not died. We can fight another day.
"There´s nothing left of me, but you know I´m gonna come back."
I feel the energy burning. I am ready to enter the scenes of fights that dance into my mind. I draw my sword and the dissonant swing mid-track sends me in another universe. I am ready. I know the dance. I survived it once, twice, each day of my life. I know how it goes. I swing and sinfully move my own body to the beating of the most dissonant recording Birds in Row have ever released. The track ends. I feel catharsis. Art personified.
Thank you.
