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Keep The Aspidistra Flying
It's a rare and unusual thing for an EP to achieve the kind of consummate perfection that resonates from a truly wonderful full-length album.
Of course, hardly anyone even makes EPs anymore. The CD single packed with irrelevant remixes (or else nothing at all save a radio edit) is de rigueur these days.
Still, there are those rare EPs that reach lofty heights that exceed the brilliance of all but the best albums. Cocteau Twins' Love's Easy Tears is one...completely floored me when I first heard it in a record store, stood perfectly still to hear every last note of it, thinking this must be the way that angels sing, this must be what the reflection of me who stars in all of my dreams sings as he falls to another inexorable end...
Today I'm listening to another one: the rather deceptively-named The Comeback EP by the indie electronica band Stars (on the Le Grand Magistery label, home also to Momus and Baxendale).
Anyone who heard their marvelous debut album Nightsongs is sure to be asking "Comeback? Comeback from what, precisely?"
The gentle, accomplished bittersweetness of Nightsongs made for a remarkable debut. Consequently, one might think the title merely a tongue-in-cheek joke, but as band member Torquil Campbell writes: "Nightsongs was a loving pastiche, but a pastiche nonetheless; The Comeback e.p. is easily the best, most original music we've ever made."
Indeed, this EP, in the course of 5 brief songs, propels the band to a new level of personal expression, savvy hooks, and gently-applied electronic and acoustic musical textures. More a progression than a comeback, it is in any event a brave step forward, an expansion of the New Order and Smiths influences of their debut into a wider, somewhat more sinister world.
And I could tell you in depth about each of the songs, but I won't, because I find myself returning repeatedly to "The Aspidistra Flies", the waltz-time love song that is the centerpiece of the album.
Its title an apparent homage to the George Orwell novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, the song is an unabashedly sincere love song, declaring
All the umbrellas in London couldn't hide my love for you, All the rain on Thames-side couldn't stop it shining through...as a sparse piano waltz twirls beneath it all like an umbrella spinning on end.
I wonder a lot about the apparent homage. The Orwell novel is a depressing tale of a young man's frustrated rebellion against money and station, and includes episodes of equally frustrated desire.
Into the midst of this reverie spins the twirling, sunny sincerity of "The Aspidistra Flies", its only hint of frustration a tendency toward the minor key.
What does it mean? I'm not entirely sure it means anything at all, except that the band really likes the book.
Or perhaps their reaction to this song is the same as mine: once they have played it once, they feel compelled to return eagerly to the beginning and play it again.
As I do, when "The Aspidistra Flies", and I feel I must, at any cost, keep it flying, keep it flying, keep it flying...
