What’s comparable? Is national tragedy fair? Too much or not enough? How do you express it? Cooly? Or with melodrama, too bright, blown out? Some love creates two tidally locked bodies. When one of the bodies fails, or changes, you would fall out of orbit too. And the world spins.
Dedicated to their mother, Gabriel Brenner’s performance of grief on “Moon Landing” rises like a mountain in a moat. It is quiet before it’s loud, and when it’s quiet again, it can’t touch down. I hear No-Man, Perfume Genius, heaviness. The guitar from Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction picks at the face of this pain. The words are plain, “Waking, writhing, she murmurs/ ‘Trapped in this body’/ Cells doubling,” they sing of their mother’s illness pluralizing the walls within her body, a prison. Some vulnerability is unsellable, but it doesn’t need to be unsent or unsung. We’ve seen the image on this cover, now we listen again to what the world feels like in the wake of a loss that cheats, as regular as a new moon, as vanished. It hangs in the sky, never turning from the pain.
And then Pastel sings again. It takes bravery.
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