* There’s a 1966 play by Tom Stoppard referencing two characters from Hamlet, titled “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.” The titular information is provided, ipso facto, as a plain fact attached to no emotional undulation, such as, hearing, say, in true postmodern fashion, “Jimmy Kimmel is slated to host Sunday’s academy awards.”
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Around the time you hear “The Funeral” playing on cafe rock radio stations with Hozier, you might develop the inclination to find a new favorite Band of Horses song. The choices are, if not aplenty, at least precocious enough to warrant discussion — “Our Swords”; “The Great Salt Lake” and “Weed Party” being particularly worthy constituents.
From the start, on the other hand, “No One’s Gonna Love You” almost seemed like a natural subservient to “The Funeral”; not galaxies behind it in artistic quality, but semantically handicapped with a romantic theme rather than a Nihilistic, apocalyptic one, which, as we know, is a severe disadvantage in indie rock. It was like the aw-shucks little cousin of “The Funeral”; in a sense. It wouldn’t be possible for this song to have dark undertones, could it? I mean, they even throw a playful jab at Interpol with the lyrics “Anything to make you smile / It is a better side of you to admire” [1].
And, I mean, even when Ben Bridwell sings, in the chorus, “Things start splittin’ at the seams now / The whole thing’s tumblin’ down”; it just still doesn’t seem menacing. It’s like a cute, TV sitcom disaster he’s handling, rather than one which would actually administer any sort of lasting mental or emotional discomfort for the people involved.
The central discursive statement prevalent within “No One’s Gonna Love You” seems simple and straight-forward enough, on paper, with Bridwell’s declaration of “No one’s gonna love you more than I do”; although cloaked in a sort of clumsy, titular indie “irony,” appearing on the surface as pretty much lay romanticism.
It’s eerie, then, to think that, in the chorus of this song, which is the “splittin’ at the seams” pairing I mention earlier, the love interest isn’t even mentioned at all. This is because the actual subject of this song is the impending ebb in musical quality and inspiration, as rendered within the era of streaming, or music’s monetary devaluing, if you will. The reason why Bridwell mentions this in confluence with a love interest is that we need music in order to truly love. We need that paradigmatic element of culture, that galvinizing, once-taken-for-granted force in our everyday lives to rekindle our faith in the world around us and get us out of our own Eros and instincts.
“No One’s Gonna Love You” is a B+ song, the “The Funeral”’s A+. And it’s not accidental. It’s not a phenomenological disaster but it’s adjacent to one, Band of Horses and Interpol are dead, and, in other news, schools will be delayed tomorrow for two hours on account of a developing winter storm.
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[1] This, of course, stems from Interpol’s release Our Love to Admire, which preceded Cease to Begin in release date by a couple of months and featured animals copulating, facing the same direction, in the cover.
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