My dearest Apollo, I’ll be burning Star IV

I’ve not been finding any time, let alone any will, to write here as often as I would want to, but now, and as the move to the new place finally winds down, and the dust is beginning to settle, I can see some sort of hope that things will get better, sometime soon, somewhere down the line. These first few weeks though, have really run me ragged. Between packing stuff, and then unpacking it, and still put in my work hours, has left me feeling completely drained. Invariably, I turn to my old demons at the end of the day, just so I can unwind and turn off the brain for a few hours. How did that old song go? ‘Problems with the booze, nothing left to lose’.

When I first decided to embark on this challenge, I knew that sooner or later I’d delve into the discography of a certain band - Coheed and Cambria. I’d known of them for at least twenty years or thereabouts, and I’d even had their whole discography - up to a certain point in time - in one of my defunct external hard drives. But I never listened to a single second from one of their songs. Never, ever. But for some reason… the fascination was always there. Most of their records revolve around a si-ci concept created by the band’s leader, Claudio Sanchez. That concept - dubbed ‘The Amory Wars’ - is a multimedia venture that encompasses not only the music itself, but comics as well. And on that respect, I also had a bunch, though not all, of the comics that were published, though I never did read them. So why did it stick with me all these years? And why now? The answer to the first question is a simple and weird one - I was afraid I’d like them. And you may wonder why that would be a bad thing - it’s not necessarily bad, per se, but with me… when I’m really into something, I don’t stop until I have EVERYTHING in my collection. So I resisted going down this particular rabbit hole for all these years. It had to be now - now, when I don’t want anything anymore, when I don’t need to have anything anymore - now it finally makes sense. And that answers question two.

But I didn’t start the week with them, no. I had a band in mind, and I wanted to say I’d be revisiting it, but not really - I’ve only known the one song by them.
Day 12 - Psychotic Waltz - 'A Social Grace'
We have to go back many many years, back to the time when music TV channels not only still played music, but they had individual shows for music genres. Way back in the 90’s, if you -wanted to watch a metal video, then it had to be either MTV’s ‘Headbangers Ball’ - which I found too commercial, but still had a pretty decent selection of videos - or VIVA’s ‘Metalla’, hosted by Markus Kavka. It was here that one day I chanced upon a song by this band - Psychotic Waltz - called ‘I Remember’. And for some reason I’ve always thought that this song was about Terminator 2, but I guess I was wrong. Now, I’ve always really liked that song, it even has some neat flute parts, but I never felt the urge to listen to more. And now I did. And I kinda regret it, because it just wasn’t that great. By the time the record finished, it had outstayed its welcome by half an hour. Nah, this is dull, I’m sorry. 3/10

Day 13 - Coheed and Cambria - 'The Second Stage Turbine Blade'
Day 14 - Coheed and Cambria - 'In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth : 3'
Day 15 - Coheed and Cambria - 'Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness'
Day 16 - Coheed and Cambria - 'Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow'

Day 17 - Coheed and Cambria - 'Year of the Black Rainbow'

Day 18 - Coheed and Cambria - ‘The Afterman : Ascension’ + ‘The Afterman : Descension’

And so my descent down the Coheed And Cambria began, and let me tell you - I’ve been absolutely loving it so far. They’ve been, by far, the very best I listened to this year, at least for this challenge. They’re billed as being Progressive Rock / Progressive Metal / Alternative Rock - and I can see why, although to my ears they have much more in common with European Power Metal - though not that sort of happy happy joy joy Power Metal, but the absurdly technical Power Metal. It’s hard for me to explain in words. Because I also hear a lot of classic rock here, and that’s a good thing, because it’s pulled off expertly.

I give TTSTB and IKSSE:3 a very strong 8/10. 

‘Good Apollo’, both of them, I liked even more - that’s a 9/10 for both. 

‘YOTBR’ was the first real disappointment, and from what I’ve read online, I’m not alone in this. I don’t want to say I loathed the first half of the album, but I really didn’t like it one bit. And then about halfway through, it gets really, really good. That first half, for some reason it didn’t even feel like I was listening to the same band. Then they return with a vengeance on that second half. And if that first half had been just as strong, I might have had a clear favourite. As it is… I give it a 6/10.

And then I cheated - I listened to two records in one day. And I’m so glad I did - the double offering of ‘The Afterman’ was a true delight to listen to. They’re quite likely just as good as the ‘Good Apollo’ records were. And I give them the same score : 9/10.

That’s it for this week. I’m hopeful that from now on I’ll be able to write more often - we’ll see.

Dag sem nótt ég geng nú einn

And then, when you’re settled, you look at all the boxes that you neatly stacked on one side of this cubicle that you now call your room, and you start unpacking them, one by one. You sift carefully through all the contents, looking for something - anything - that would remind you of all the time spent with her. Oh, you have all the memories, but now, right now, right now in this very moment of time and space, you want - nay, you need - something tangible that you could hold or look at, but in the deepest pits of your stomach, you start to feel this sinking feeling - it’s not there. There’s nothing left. 

Boxes filled with clothes that don’t fit you, boxes filled with records you’ll never play, boxes filled with books you no longer want. And yet you continue, hoping against hope, that somewhere in the smaller boxes inside the bigger boxes you find proof that something escaped your culling. 

There are boxes filled with random assortments now, and in one you find a smaller orange box, and in it there’s a bunch of your pictures. You sit down on the floor, and you look at the pictures. There are pictures of your son’s mother, and of you when you were together. There are pictures of your son when he was a baby, and of when he was very young. Pictures of past loves, from almost twenty-five years ago, from twenty years ago, but nothing… not a thing of your time with her. And you question yourself, had the both of you even taken a single photo together? Maybe,  maybe not. Memory’s playing tricks with you. You could swear you did, but you can’t pinpoint a single moment in time where that might have happened. There were those photos of her she gave you, but you know full well where they ended up. And if you knew, then why the pretense? Why the need to feed your soul with hope you knew wasn’t there?

Because, and though reality, abject reality, will hit you in the face a thousand times over, you still cling to that elusive hope that maybe, maybe, something slipped through.

And it didn’t. It didn’t. All the boxes have been emptied, and you pick each one up, and you turn them upside down, empty them onto the floor, but the only things that fall are the tears that stream down your cheeks. Crying in the dark, in the sweet silence of the dark, is no stranger to you, and nor is feeling the biting cold in your naked flesh : still, you seek to punish yourself for what once was, still you think that you deserve the pain. You hope it numbs you, you hope it supersedes other aches. 

It’s time, now. The time has arrived, the ritual’s done. Nothing will ever change. Things are as they were meant to be - you are where you said you’d be - and against the chill of the closed window where you pressed your head to… you say her name. A sacred word, still, to this day. It escapes as a whisper, one no-one but you can hear. And you remember. You remember that which you never forgot. That which you will never forget. It is eternal, this feeling. And though you endeavour to ball it up and contain it deep inside you, you struggle to contain it. You place your fingers against the window, and in your mind, they reach out to hets, touching from a distance,

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start

Oh boy, what a week this was, filled with great and complicated new beginnings, and a whole lot of saying goodbye to a whole bunch of things. Houses, acquaintances, friends - I sang them all a song to say gooodbye. Unwavering in my resolve, I kept on listening to an album a day. And right of the bat I can say that this was a week filled mostly with duds… for me at least.

Let’s get right into it, then.

Day Five - Gentle Giant - ‘Gentle Giant’.

This one begins a theme for this week. Albums with covers I have always hated. And this one has always been so high up there, that for decades I swore I’d never ever listen to it. I mean, the cover is so monumentally ugly and stupid that it’s always drained me of my desire to listen to a single song by this band. This exercise being in motion, I somehow knew that I’d listen to it sooner or later. And you know what? It’s actually pretty great. I loved it and might listen to something else by them in the near future. I’d give this one a good 8/10.

Day Six - King Crimson - ‘In The Court Of The Crimson King’

Speaking of records with terrible covers, this is one such record. I’ve always detested the cover illustration. But I quite like King Crimson, something that up until a few years ago I thought I’d never say. This all came about when I was listening to whatever on YouTube, and after that video had finished, it started playing something I didn’t recognize. After a few minutes of actually enjoying what I was listening to, I switch tabs and lo and behold1, it’s King Crimson that I’m listening to. It was a live gig in Montreux, and I’d come to learn that this was in fact the 80’a incarnation of the band - which is by leaps and bounds my favourite of them all. All three records from that era are really, really good. I loved those records so much that I went back and listened to another one of their older records - ‘Red’ - which I found just mostly not bad. And it’s exactly what I think about this album - mostly not bad, though there’s a truly awful improv bit that becomes an unbearable piece of Muzak. 5/10.

Day Seven - Rush - ‘2112’

The only song I think I ever knew from Rush was ‘Tom Sawyer’, a song I downloaded by mistake twenty-something years ago. Found it ok, but at that time I was listening to completely different things and never felt the urge to go find out. A few years ago I did, when I started getting into Yes, I was of a mind to go down the Rush rabbit hole, though I never did. I decided to begin with ‘2112’, I guess their most famous record. And again- it was ok, just ok. A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest. 5/10.

Day Eight - Van Der Graaf Generator - ‘Still Life’

I’d heard things about this band. Some people love them, some people loathe them. Apparently, Peter Hammill had one of those voices that you either were a huge fan of or you’d find it maybe too over the top. So I wasn’t really keen on listening to them. I dug around a bit and took a look at their discography. None of the album names rang any bell. On their name alone, I chose this one right here. And you know what? Perfectly fine with the voice. Quite liked it. Instrumentally, too, it was pretty damn good. Maybe the strongest listen of the week. 8/10.

Day Nine - Jethro Tull - ‘Aqualung’

There’s something about most of these records that, to me, just screams 80’s record store. I vividly recall seeing this album for sale in a few of the record stores we went to as a kid. I never liked the cover. And all I ever knew about this band was that they had a it who played the flute. Never sparked my interest. This one wasn’t bad. More along the lines of rock and roll than prog. Five is too low, and I’m not sure it fully deserves a six. I’ll give it anyway - 6/10.

Day Ten - Uriah Heep - ‘Demons and Wizards’

I can’t remember a single song out of this one. Nothing. But I know I didn’t dislike it. Let’s be diplomatic and give it a 5/10.

Day Eleven - Emerson, Lake & Palmer - ‘Brain Salad Surgery’

Oh man, am I going to piss people off with this one. I mean, it starts really well - ‘Jerusalem’ is a rocking tune, setting to music a poem by William Blake. And then… then it just gets so meh. I hated ‘Benny the Bouncer’ with a passion, and found the ‘epic’ called ‘Karn Evil 9’ to be a boring, meandering indulgence in almost everything I hate about music. Now, the shocker is that I really enjoyed ‘Love Beach’ when I listened to it for the first time, and I know it’s their most universally panned record. But I expected more from this. And because it just isn’t there for me… jeez, 3/10.

The year of Iast times

And then the day came when the key was turned one last time, and the door was locked one last time, and from that moment on, my house - which was never ‘my house’, but only ‘mine for a given value of ‘mine’ - wasn’t my house anymore. There’s a moment of perfect stillness just before the door’s locked, and I take a deep breath : it reverberates through the entire building, a dirge building upon itself, reaching ever higher, the sound of my sigh. I find myself apologising to my grandmother. I want to cry, but can’t, I can’t, I can’t I can’t I can’t. Though as the key turns the house where I grew up ceases to be, though as the key turns, the room where me and the love of my life fucked each other’s brain out is no more, though as the key turns, that very room, the room where I asked her to marry me and she said yes is burnt to a cinder, in every level but the most real and palpable one, though as the key turns, the house where I saw my beloved grandmother turn from a human being to a living corpse, collapses in on itself and becomes something else - someone else’s home - I can’t cry.

My heart heaves a big heavy sigh. Inside I am weeping. Outside, the door locks for the last time. It’s all memories now, and a lifetime is reduced to a number of badly organised storage boxes. Already it feels like a lifetime ago since I closed that door for the final time. One day, perhaps, years and years hence, I’ll walk down that street again - and no soul there will ever know just how lonesome I feel - and I’ll look up and know peace again. But not today. Not today. Not now. Now I sleep, and clutch close to my heart a handful of memories. Memories of me. Memories of you. Memories of us. Memories of things that no longer exist. 

Une vie à t'aimer

Here I sit, re-reading the last post before I stopped writing here back in 2013. In so, so many ways - I’m still the same person. After all… the feelings still remain. I know exactly how I felt when I wrote those words, I know how ardent the love I carried within me, I know how bleak the despair of her absence. And the love burns still, and the absence grows increasingly so. I’m not the same person who wrote those words : I remember him as an echo, a distant mirage of myself, that is at once far from me and incredibly close. I make promises to myself : I won’t think of her. I won’t write her name. I won’t remember what once was. This, all this, and more, I promise, I promise, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die. 

Promises are lies. I can no more do any of that than the sun can stop shining. When I lie, I say the truth. When I make a promise, at least one unto myself , or at least one such as these, I know I’m fully intending to break it, even if at the moment I do it, I may not be intending to do so. But what can I do other than smile a silly smile, curse myself ever so slightly, ah you stupid old so and so, you should really know better by now… but really : I haven’t had a choice in many years. I may have, in fact, stopped believing in it. 

Arrête de m’aimer, je t’aimerai toujours.

Toujours.

I need you so much closer

There’s a challenge that I’ve been meaning to put myself through for a few years now, and I don’t think I ever even attempted it once. Said challenge is to listen to an album a day for the whole year, and that - in and of itself - doesn’t seem like a hard or unreasonable thing to accomplish. After all, I do spend a large chunk of my day listening to day. Invariably, though, I always end up listening to the same songs. Not even albums as a whole, but playlists or the odd song here and there that’ll pop in my mind and I’ll rush to listen to it.

And that’s very telling of me - I’ve always been someone who has always preferred the singles to the full albums. That’s not to say that some of my favourite songs from an album weren’t deep cuts, or that some of my top picks were necessarily the hit singles. No, whenever I could, I’d just make my own compilations of the songs I knew I’d love to hear all the time, without the need to force myself through a whole album that I might not fully enjoy. So that took the form of mixtapes, then later I’d burn from my computer to a CD, and now it’s all digital for me. I always preferred it this way, to cull what I really gravitated to, instead of wasting my time listening to songs I didn’t like.

So… to put myself through this exercise has been interesting. Though I’m sure I’ll not always succeed in doing this, the first selections of this year kinda sorta maybe had somewhat of a theme, but not really. I mean, it makes sense in my mind, maybe less so to others. 

Every Sunday I’ll write about what I listened to that week. My goal with this is to try to listen to an album I’ve never listened to before, or, failing that, revisit an album I’ve not listened to in a long while. Occasionally, I might just play an album that’s of particular significance to me.

Here’s what’s been played so far : 

Day One - Porcupine Tree - ‘Deadwing’

It’s a tricky one, this. Because, and as far as I know, I only know the one song from this band (Arriving somewhere but not here), but the sheer hype and legacy surrounding this record has always sort of kept me away from it. I never heard of the band until the early 00’s, when I was working in a music store, and we had these guys stocked in the pop-rock section. I remember looking at their records and thinking ‘jeez, what a stupid name for a band’. Many, many years later - my last relationship, in fact - I dated a girl who was so massively into both the band as well as the guy behind it, Steven Wilson, that the band became something to me that I’ll always be unable to dissociate from the girl itself. But that’s beside the point, the question is : did I like it?

Well, hum, sort of? I mean, it was OK, but I didn’t find it extraordinary or revolutionary in any sense. In the immortal words of Richmond Avenal : ‘Turning on my television set, I noticed the reception wasn't great. Not terrible, just not great.’, which is mostly how I felt about this record. I really liked ONE song on the record (‘Lazarus’) and the rest was pretty much forgettable. It’s good, I won’t deny it, but maybe my own expectations of it were for something… more. Good, but not great. Maybe a 6/10

Day Two - Anathema - ‘Weather Systems’

Way back in the early 90’s I loved Anathema to death, they - together with Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride - were the undisputed kings of doom-y/gothic-y metal. But then something happened : the main driving force behind the band - one Darren White - and after a trinity of wonderfully releases (2 EPs and 1 album), Anathema changed… a LOT. And I was never a huge fan of that iteration of the band. I have them a chance - I even bought some four or five albums, but only really listened to a couple of them. It’s just not the same thing, none of the magic was there anymore. And maybe that’s not so bad - I think the ideal thing to have happened was for that band to continue under a different name, but alas… that’s not what happened. And so I found myself listening to an album I thought had only recently come out, but as it turns out, it was released in 2012. And I still think that this is a perfectly fine album for the wrong band, or at least for the wrong band name. I dunno, slightly above meh, but much more enjoyable than ‘Deadwing. 7/10? Why not.

Day Three - Chick Corea ‘Return to Forever’

I gotta hand it to the ‘Sea of Tranquility’ YouTube channel, which I chanced upon a number of years ago, and which has contributed highly to me listening - if not maybe actually really enjoying - to a lot of different things that were way out of my wheelhouse. Including something that I have always truly disliked, which is Jazz. Now, there is a reason for this : when I was very young, my mother always made sure that we watched the Montreux Jazz Festival on TV, and I fucking loathed it. Especially when the free jazz gibberish would happen, it would drive me up the walls in a jiffy. So I’ve always considered Jazz to be no more than overrated muzak, and I could never tell one song from the other. Oh, I’ve tried to come back to it, here and there, even if it was just to impress a girl, but the end result is I just don’t get it. It’s dull, it’s drab, I find it lifeless, all things that most everyone will disagree with, right? That said, I didn’t really dislike what jazz-fusion I’ve listened to. It didn’t move me to tears, but I didn’t despise it either. My first one was by a band also called ‘Return to Forever’, pretty much the same ensemble that recorded this one with Chick. It was all right, I guess. Which is my exact assertion of this one - it’s all right. This is most definitely not my cup of tea, but I’ll give it a few more shots. I don’t even know how to rate this one. Part of me wants to give like a one or two, but I know that’s unfair. They really can play and do their things. So maybe a 5/10 will do.

Day Four - Star One - 'Revel in Time'

I have no idea why I landed on this one. This is one of the many projects spearheaded by Arjen Anthony Lucassen, maybe more famous for his Ayreon project. I once worked with a guy who swore by him, but then again he wore by many other acts that I never really got. I confess I've had somewhat of an urge to one day eventually get to know his body of work, but it never was a priority. So why now? No particular reason. I was looking for something to listen to, ideally something prog-y, and a number of candidates popped up, about 99% of which had (at least) this in common : I'd never listened to anything by them. Some of these may be future listens, maybe not. And if I'm honest... I didn't really like this that much. I got the feeling that I'd heard these songs before, and many times at that. The riffs seemed like they could have been taken from any number of 80's hard rock songs, and so too the vocal lines. Don't get me wrong, there's good stuff here, and they all play extremely well. It just sounds too 'been there, done that' for me. Just like the previous record, tempted to go low, but that would also be unfair. Maybe a 5/10 too.

Ah well, only 361 more records to go!

To all that ever mattered, to all I ever loved

To say that this day turned out to be completely different than what I was expecting, nay, intending it to be, would be an understatement. I wasn't supposed to be here still, but then, as fates would have it, a small hitch in the road kept me here for a little while longer. The hard part begins tomorrow - saying one final goodbye to this house where I've lived for so many years of my life. It just might that ultimately I come to consider the greatest failure of my life the fact that I wasn't capable to keep this house. After all, it wasn't just the house where I (mostly) grew up in, it was my grandparent's place, and more than that, so much more than that, it was my grandmother's place, and parts of all of us will always remain here.

It's not now, but soon enough, that I'll be closing that door for the last time, turning the key and locking it for the last time, and sometime soon it will be as if we never lived here at all. New stories will be told here, new tragedies, new triumphs, and maybe one day, maybe years and years hence, I shall be in the neighbourhood again, and find myself walking down the street, and from across the street, I'll look up and see this house brimming with life.  

Time to sleep, perhaps for the last time here. Time to recollect the memories of a lifetime spent here. And then, to store them somewhere sacred, so that one day they may provide solace. 

Tomorrow, we continue.