Archive?

So, I have been listening to Archive tracks a lot since I last posted and I have been enjoying them and I appear to have created a review of some of their stuff, some of which I only found while putting this together. I wish I could have been more productive, I wish there was a more interesting blog post here about something that mattered or relating the whisper stories that have been filling the time with the children, so are relevant to this blog. But there isn't. There is only music. and so I shall just have to do with what I can create. If you haven't listened to any of these tracks before then I can recommend them and advise you to take the time to listen. It's worth it.

Oh, I'll warn you straight out, there's swearing, so listen with caution!

Would you like to know more?

This track is a good one to use simply because it ticks so many of my preferences in music that it's hard to count them all. There's a long track, of the kind that I used to hate when I was younger and listening to Introspective by the Pet Shop Boys but that I seem to be drawn to as I get older. Then there's the violins that are tweaked electronically and left alone too so that there's layers of stuff. And it keeps changing whilst staying reassuringly similar throughout - because I am autistic enough at least that I like my music predictable.

Then there's tracks like this that seem to accurately sum up my own annoying feelings. The fact that in the face of one thing going well I get stressed and start looking for what is going to go wrong. In the process I start dropping balls that I am juggling and things do go wrong and the stuff that was going right ends up getting subsumed by the pressure I place on it. This track puts all that into words and music in a way that self-perpetuates but also helps. I have a complicated relationship with music where I use it to feed the emotions I can recognise. This track sounds at once like the 70s but also like right now. If you liked ELO and the concept album Time then it is impossible not to find something that you enjoy in this.

To take something to the next level, if you have anger in you, then there is rather anthemic homage to all that makes blood boil and righteous fury bleed out. It is catchy, it is clever and it still manages to be raw and powerful like the other tracks that I have posted. I love the mantra and I love the way that the video uses text to achieve the same effect as the close up of the woman repeating it. The tortured bassline is very good for those heavy brows and the pressure in the veins that you get when the adrenaline is flowing, which leads us to the equally clever video for...

Violently. There's something just not quite right about dubbing the lyrics to the child in the video but at the same time compelling and entirely realistic. For some reason I get a strong sense of part of the walk to my school when I was in my teens from this. It's the sort of thing I would have ended up singing under my breath with my eyes closed while playing in my head over and over. The sort of music that I used to play on my long walks in the oh my God it's too early morning walks to school, that started at 6.45 and to which I would arrive around 7.15. It is the soundtrack to defiance, pointless but nevertheless satisfying defiance. It's the swearing and the bleepy beat that manages this one. At once happy and silly but also dark and brooding.

Silent has the advantage of a woman going "ooo ooo ooo" as an opening set of sounds, something I always feel drawn to. Just check out Enya's Boudicea on her the Celts album to see what I mean. She just hums and there's not a lot else to it, but I always wanted to write an alternative history piece to it where a woman leads the resistance in Britain to a Nazi invasion in late 1940 to it. Well, something like that. Maybe also a woman terrorist fighting for a political cause in any given state. Something in which a woman is angry and powerful and measured and everything that women aren't supposed to be in books and fiction, but not a man, still very much a woman. And this evokes that in a way that I can't adequately describe.