Song of the Day #346 - world's end girlfriend - in Silence / in Siren

Hello again

https://virginbabylonrecords.bandcamp.com/track/in-silence-in-siren

I dunno if the above link actually lets you play the track or what but uhhh... here we are again doing Song of the Day! After like a month and a half, sheesh. It was a very eventful time. Lots and lots of things happened. Some were bad, like what.cd shutting down, and losing my mp3 player, and school becoming very busy, also pretty much everything in the news. But some were good too, like apollo/pth growing very quickly, and getting a new mp3 player, and passing all my classes. And then I went to New York for a bit and it was good and I took these pictures and I just got home and I am very tired.

But I wanted to write a bit about this song, it is a fantastic song, it made me feel very fantastic whenever I listened to it. No matter if I was stressed or sad or happy or excited or what, I could listen to this album, and when I got to this song, it was as if all my emotions were crystallized and fell away from me, and I saw them from a distance, and they seemed perfect and beautiful but distinct from me, not controlling me, something else.

And something else filled me up, something completely new, as soon as the vocals started. They're so tender, so beautiful, and so simple... I'm really loving this style of a singular, straightforward, totally "clean" vocal line wrapped in so much complexity, drums and strings and synths, I loved it a lot in weg/Have a Nice Day!'s NEW ROMANCE, and here I love it for basically entirely different reasons lol. There it seemed like an avenue into the song, a way for the song and your hypothetical karaoke performance of the song to be merged. Here, it makes the song into something entirely Other, but a recognizable Other, an Other I associate with everything tender and beautiful and unreachable, e.g. or possibly i.e. yuri. I haven't bothered to try to transcribe and then shoddily translate the lyrics, outside of the few, very evocative, words that I know and can catch - "ai", "sayonara", "wakata", etc. - because I'm worried the real meaning of the song will conflict with this image that I find so immediate and understandable.

The way all the other sounds, besides that introductory piano, which is sort of like a between-meals sorbet, emerge from the vocals is really stunning to me. I mean first off just because this is a polysymphony of world's end girlfriend in his prime, which is basically the prime of anyone in this mode. There's gorgeous strings and chimes like ice and chords that feel like they're coming from your gut and sharp jazzy drums and apocalyptic howls and the pure electricity from an electric guitar and remnants from the territory only he can enter, like the sound at 3:43, what the hell is that? And it's all suspended across this swelling and shifting world, reflecting both the boldness and maturity he's shown in his structuring on this album... It feels like the entire soundtrack of some JRPG rushing up to meet you.

But again, the truly stunning part is the way that all of this seems to not be the setting for the vocals, but an expression of it, the manifestation of just the facet that can be reflected in audio. It is her vocals that command the tempest, her feelings. And it makes me really feel like everything else in the song, all this complexity and violence and completeness, all of it exists in the feelings of just this one girl. Of course it does, where else could these concepts exist? They must be in the feelings. And thus feelings must be the most important thing. As soon as I start to really believe that, which happens every time I listen to this song, it feels like the rest of the album, and the rest of my feelings that are orbiting around me, and everything happening in the world, and space and even stars, is cast again relative to the heart and mind of this one person, this vocalist: every single thing is just one facet of her emotions. It is dizzying, it is beautiful. And eventually, when I sort of regain myself, everything makes a little more sense, everything is in proportion, and my own little feelings of love or fear or loneliness or happiness feel like they have galaxies within them, but not in an overwhelming way, in a way that if I just sang some simple lines or said a few things I think it would be fine.

I'm off school now and all I want to do is write write write. Magomiutsuken is still coming "soon" although I'm falling into the trap of just adding more and more half-finished things YET AGAIN hahahaha. There's a lot of other song of the day posts I wanna do but tbh they're gonna be lower priority than other things. Like 2016 posts, I have to start working on those soon, I'm really excited to do them, anime and music were both really wonderful this year. Oh and the blog just hit 100k views!! So that's pretty great too!