Song of the Day #295 - Dean Blunt - Papi

You bring out the best in me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKO4tym4yPg

In preparation for listening to BBF, I've been on a bit of a Dean Blunt kick lately. To be fair, that can happen at any time for any reason. One second you're going about your daily life and the next, boom, three hours in to a loop of The Redeemer. I'm not sure how exactly this album is so addictive... There's no description I can give of it that doesn't make it seem like some brutal, exhausting thing that you'd only turn to in times of despair.

I think it has a lot to do with the track-to-track transitions and the greater arc of the album, which is uh, not something I can cover easily in this post about a specific track. At this point on the album, we're about half an hour in, and we've just been hit with a triple beatdown: the delirium of "Need 2 Let U Go", the human tragedy of "Dread" (some of the best answering machine-core this side of Set Fire to Flames' "Mouths Trapped in Static"... wait shit nevermind that's phone conversation-core whoops... well, it gives me the same sort of feeling, so I'm gonna leave this), and the transcendent emptiness of "Y3".

Moreover, we haven't heard a proper beat in quite awhile, like, drums and such. And then boom, that tight piano/drum/synth loop (expertly lifted from Pink Floyd's "Echoes"), and immediately you know that no matter how far along you thought you were, both in the emotional spectrum of the album, and your associated listening habits, you're refreshed again, you're right back at the start. The album is full of moments like this.

And man like... the idea of this guy sadly singing "you bring out the best in me" after the last few songs have made it painfully obvious that his relationship is over, oh man, it just gets sadder the more you think of it. But for some reason that isn't the part that really sticks with me from this song... it's the countdown at the end. I get an almost painfully nostalgic feeling from it... something about the mixing makes it seem so fake, so affected, and yet also so real? Such a standard performance that it must be happening possibly a billion times every year, like some sort of averaged version of it, one that pulls at you from the collective gravity. It seems like some relic of another life you could have lived, a "default" one, where you strip away all the unorthodox choices you made, anything that you might consider a mistake or an extravagance. I dunno. This is the 666th post on this blog, by the way lol. I should have chose an eviler song, maybe.