I CANNOT RETRACT, I AM APATHETIC AT BEST: A TRACK BY TRACK ANALYSIS
PART 1: I CANNOT RETRACT
The moment I wrote this song, I knew it would be the opener. It . wasn't the first song I wrote after Love Over Mind And Body, but it was the first to really send me down a rabbit hole of sound and ideas. It had a certain reserved energy to it that just felt like something big was about to happen. Little did I know it wouldn't be another year and a half before the project was ready to be released, yet it persisted in my mind as the only logical intro to the album. The song itself is more or less a mission statement to everything the album sets out to be, and hopefully... is. Originally I wanted it to be this near melodramatic piece about apathy and death, ya know typical 16 year old existential pretentious incoherence, and while it does retain some of these characteristics the final product is something a little bit darker; however the melody itself, especially in the second half, contradicts this feeling of unease and fuzz with the most "epic" or "glorious" sounding chord progression I could come up with in my tiny brain. The end result is something between bedroom pop "woe is me" and a triumphant march towards victory. While this makes for a shocking shift in tone I think this works towards the songs benefit. It doesn't just sulk, it finds a solution. Something of a light to grasp onto at the end of a long tunnel interspersed with red herrings. I don't want to ramble on for too long about each track so I'll end it here.
25 DAYS
|