Cults – “You Know What I Mean”
Cults
Halfway between Saturday Looks Good To Me and Connie Stevens, this song hits its tone just right. The album is full of these catchy little nuggets of song-singing, now more synthy, now more grungy. Thoroughly entertaining, even if it won’t live forever. (insound)
The people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of the word); but they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution.
antonomasia: substituting an epithet for a proper name or v.v. (e.g. your lordship or Judas)
kislar-aga: a high-ranking eunuch (under sultan and grand vizier) in the Ottoman Empire
guimpe: a type of garment covering the neck and shoulders, often part of a nun’s habit
sutler: a merchant who accompanies an army and sells the soldiers provisions
colback: also calpac. A black hat of felt or sheepskin common to Asia Minor
reimbushment: reversing one’s course along previous tracks (e.g. in snow)
dolman: a Turkish woman’s cloak or mantle with capelike sleeves
quotidian: commonplace, or recurring daily (comp. “quartan”)
adust: dry or burnt, esp. in the humoral system of medicine
impassible: variant of impassive – incapable of suffering
solecism: a violation of etiquette in manner of grammar
incondite: crudely or poorly constructed or composed
hippanthrope: one who believes himself a horse
pullulate: to teem or swarm, or to breed or bud
Manual – “Confluence”
Confluence
This rather long track (13:10) migrates through a few distinct phases, all of them gauzy and ambient, and all pleasant and multi-layered. The slow-motion wash of distortion and soft noise gives way to a piano-pierced stillness of real craft and poignancy. The rest of this album moves along similar paths, and while it isn’t exciting, it’s beautiful and calming. (insound)
Sape homo de vanae gloriae contemptu vanius gloriatur.
A man can be most boastful in expressing his contempt of fame.
Vivere nolunt, mori nesciunt.
They will not die; they dare not live.
Let us not carry flame where light alone will suffice.
Fennesz – “Glide”
Black Summer
This shimmery, noisy blanket is one of Fennesz’s most understated and beautiful tracks. It takes a while to get going, and the song really only takes up about seven minutes of the nine and a half it runs for. (insound)
‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
The light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.
Holy Fuck – Lovely Allen
LP
These guys sound a bit like The Boredoms minus their occasionally out-sized insanity. Building semi-improvised songs around themes on guitar, keyboard, or sample, and blowing it up now and then, much of this album is anthemic and thumping, yet never overbearing or hardcore. (insound)
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,
Colosso’s statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leave they any little memorie,
The Passenger may warned be to say,
They had their being here, another day.But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweet to runne,
Preserved by the living Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
Ere Homer die, thou shalt be fired first.
Ulterius durabit, Henry Peacham (Minerva Brittana, 1612)
(transcript)
If a man be wealthy, no matter how he gets it, of what parentage, how qualified, how virtuously endowed or villainously inclined; let him be a bawd, a gripe, a usurer, a villain, a pagan, a barbarian, a wretch, Lucian’s tyrant, “on whom you may look with less security than on the sun”; so that he be rich (and liberal withal) he shall be honoured, admired, adored, reverenced, and highly magnified.
