There is a lonely man in a room.
The room is a kitchen.
The kitchen is a mess. He cleared up quickly and without much care.
He’s probably been clearing up quickly and without much care for months.
Around him the companies of a lifetime: books, music, poetry.
But tonight they do not serve to soothe the restlessness that wraps this man.
He is close to middle age. It is time for balances and loneliness weighs more and more, while he finds himself alone in his flat.
And yet…
Yet he only feels safe at home .
This is the story of “Vague”, the opening track of Laish‘s third album entitled “Pendulum Swing”. Look for it: it is one of the many hidden treasures from the English undergrowth.
The song is about time fleeing and leaving marks on the skin of those who, in order to defend themselves, no longer have the weapon of youth or the immaculate range of possibilities.
All the weight of culture that has watered you for years now seems useless and for the first time you find ourselves thinking that, if you had dedicated yourself to something else, perhaps today you would not be so needlessly “vague and full of pathos”, surmounted by grey stone statues and the words of dead men.
From Morrissey on (musically, we’re near Neil Hannon or Stuart Murdock), several generations of artists have taken refuge in their bedrooms, wearing that flan sweater that hadn’t yet become the official uniform of certain hipsters.
That bedroom has given refuge to the pains of adolescence and the doubts of youth, but the mature age, precisely that one, leaves no escape: now basking in sadness begins to lose its dose of pleasure leaving only the part of the pain. From the room you moved to the kitchen, where you had a solitary dinner. That teenager who was self-contained in his own space – well delimited by the world of grown-ups – then earned his entire house, but paid for it at the cost of adulthood.
That little room of shelter from the world became the world.
The only thing you have.
The prison, but also the shelter.
The melody is beautiful and elusive. It proceeds by small melodic scraps: clusters of notes that climb on an open structure; a flow where there is no real singable refrain, but rather phrases that come back to reiterate the concept.
The voice is gentle, refined and simple at the same time. It avoids swirls and superstructures, so that everything remains on the surface, light and light.
A guitar arpeggio leads the track, at first supporting it with notes of acoustic guitar, then just saturating itself in the tones of an electric guitar that, in the middle of the piece, takes the scene for a moment. But it does so with gentleness and a resigned lyricism that doesn’t make a spectacle of itself: it only serves to inflate the piece and reach again the last sentences of the song.
To the acceptance, somehow serene, of feeling safe at home.
By Dixon
Originally published on April, 25 2018
