Make it wail
Jan.15, 2007, filed under Miscellany
Over the past few days I’ve been listening almost incessantly to the album Lullabies to Paralyze by Queens of the Stone Age. Since Chuffy introduced them to me several years ago I have been enamoured both of Joshua Homme’s angelic voice and Nick Soltieri’s looks (although the latter and the band parted company after Songs For The Deaf). Homme’s singing reminds me of the Hollow Man: its angelic perfection used so demoniacally.
Lullabies is another of those albums that I didn’t like much at first and yet now I can’t get enough of it. It’s Van Leeuwen’s lap steel that does it. I’ve never heard such a mournful wail. The exquisite, pure cry — put to especially good use on the tracks Long Slow Goodbye and The Blood Is Love — is a beautiful counterpoint to Homme’s choirboy vocals. It’s an aching note that slices through the structure of the background: a cold wind searing through a landscape of dense, blocky architecture.
The synaesthesia has become more complex and intense over the years, perhaps because I’ve learned to pay more attention to it and appreciate the vast realms of sensory possibility it provides. Every so often I come across a sensory stimulus that does more than add an extra dimension to sight and sound: it engenders entire worlds. The first time this happened I was about 8 years old, and the track was The Whale by ELO. I didn’t see a whale: I saw an entire futuristic city with town planning and infrastructure and airships and monorails. I was much, much older and had come to realise how much of my perception arises from the complex interaction of synaesthesia with overactive imagination and parallel processors when I recognised that early evocation as a synaesthetic response to musical structure. Back then it was mainly architecture and climate, bizarrely. Now it’s not just architecture and climate but culture and people.
Lullabies has become particularly special to me because the album as a whole is evocative of Ben, just as Fakevox, by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, is evocative of Frood.
And, of course, Joshua’s Homme’s voice is the essence of the Hollow Man: spawned in Heaven, blossomed in Hell.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
