To this day, it’s astonishing to me how much meaning I’m meeting and greeting with this band, how much inspiration they seem to have procured, whether in the bar, or the back alley behind it, or wherever. I mean, they’re the very definition of controlled popular rock, like Semisonic on prozac, if that’s possible. “Everything You Want” was pretty much the epitome of bland, with the emotion coming across as cheap and flaccid.
I’ve just made, anyway, a very interesting observation concerning “You’re a God”; a fellow single from the Everything You Want album. Let’s start with the band’s name: “vertical horizon.” It’s an oxymoron containing two opposites. In fashion, then, “You’re a God” and the title track are opposites in pretty much every way, excepting of couse, style itself. First of all, I can stand “You’re a God.” Next, the latter is a breakup song, the former, of course, being a paean of hopelessness to an ulterior love interest who’s apparently flown the coop.
So why would the emotion be more fierce, more present and more meaningful in the case of “You’re a God” than with the title track, wherein singer Matt Scannell is apparently actually dealing with a swatch of heartbreak inflicted directly on to him? The whole thing is incredibly interesting, and amazing, dispatching from the band’s own “vertical horizon” of skewed reality, and bespeaking volumes of the phenomenon of integrity which obliterates convention. I mean, the best pop song of all time, “Walk on the Wild Side”; is about a drag queen. Sitting down and “writing a song about your honey bunny” doesn’t usually work. It sounds like you sat down and tried to write a song about your honey bunny. It sounds like The Lumineers. And yes, I suppose, Sarah Bareilles “works,” in the spirit of a good chlorophyl lecture at Sarah Lawrence.
In the case of “You’re a God”; Matt Scannell was confronted with a situation for which he wasn’t prepared, which he didn’t expect. He had a new vision of his life and it involved detachment from his present boo. The emotional strife he then incurred, as a way of having to hurt his other, manifested like a horror, to him, hence, perhaps, ingratiating the whole operation to the paradigmatic definition of post-punk whereby the singer might be inclined to “sail… away / On a wave of mutilation” to some bright, Beach-Boys-inspired chords.
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