Tilting At Landfills - This Blasted Heath
This Blasted Heath release another record. What can we deduce from this peculiar document, this strange news from a distant star?
Well, it's not so very distant, is it? The cover is a drawing of an elderly man in wincyette pajamas, eating a cooked breakfast in bed. His chest is concave, his cheeks hollow and unshaven, his hair thin and lacquered, a pale parting scored through it. He reeks of austerity and neglect, like the Health Service that has clothed him and fed him. His bed is reduced to a few details: a wooden headboard, stiff sheets, the rest is a void. He's already in the ground, the grave goods he's buried with: a tin tray and bubble and squeak.
The drawing is rendered in gangrene green, and this stench of corruption is mirrored in the E.P.'s punning title. Cervantes had Don Quixote "tilting at windmills", believing he was jousting with giants. Windmills are a source of green energy, they are functional and productive, grinding flour, producing food. A worthwhile adversary. This Blasted Heath can only flail at their diametric opposite: the poison of industry, the imperishable by-products of our synthetic existence, the supreme irony of hiding the unnatural within the bosom of nature. "Quixotic" has come to mean idealistic, unrealistic and impractical. Are This Blasted Heath even that? Raking over the dying embers of a broken society, slapping a plaster on the infected wound, boarding up the funeral home after the hearse has bolted.
The music, though...The Map is Not the Territory, is a furious death rattle, the lyrics specifically impenetrable, their meaning clear. While it's tiresome and unprofitable screaming into the abyss, after all, what else is there to do with an abyss? You can't make friends with it. You can't go inter-railing with an abyss. It's there to be screamed at, like cold calls from internet providers. There's never been a better time to feel helpless, to feel hopeless. Sitting, watching a couple of goggle-eyed sock puppets battle it out for primacy of the country, knowing that you have no purchase on any of the decision making- once again-as the country is in the hands of the sort of puce, arms folded ragers who punish their hemorrhoids on the Question Time benches. What can a poor boy do, 'cept to sing for a rock'n'roll band?
Some direct action, perhaps.
The Gods in Color is a message from a God, wanting you to touch up his statue. He's not placid and plaster of Paris pale. He's vivid, lively, carnivalesque, and he wants people to know. At least paint in some eyeballs. The song touches on Nietzsche's famous aphorism "I would never believe in a God who couldn't dance." Because of course it does. And there's also reference to Byron's Don Juan ( "I've seen much finer women, ripe and real, than all the nonsense of their stone ideal"), if you were being completest about it. Why would anyone write a song like this? Who is it for? It is for everybody.
(Love me) More Than You (Already Do) is a riot of parentheses, and sees the needy, needling protagonist, wringing a bottle of the milk of human kindness to the last drop. It seems like a classic love song, but it's another song of powerlessness in the face of enormity. Love like a monolith. No foothold, no hand-hold, no purchase, necessarily. It's a song from a toddler needing to be scooped up and held, an admission of weakness in the face the sublime. It is a Romantic song, then, with a capital R. And we're back to the void, but this this time we're hoping the void strokes our hair, and tells us we've been good. I guess they call it puppy love.
The closing song, the final song, might be the final song, the last word, the bum note, as we traipse through a wasteland, waist deep in shit. Shit is everywhere, and we see the blight inherent in Blighty. And yet there is the sound of a storm, the chatter of corvids, a natural world just below the worm caste surface. Perhaps, one day, a real rain will come and sweep away these turbulent politicians, these wreckers and freebooters, these animal men. Joseph of Arimathea, the Grail still in his back-pack, turned back crossing the channel, and seeing no footfall in England's brown, unpleasant land. Holy Blood and Holy Jail. It doesn't have to be like this. This is a beautiful island, an isle of apples, a Summer Isle. But there are too many grey, narrow gate-keepers monitoring the perimeter. Cerebus with three arseholes. We need to clear away the old wood of the old guard. This Blasted Heath would like to show you -.jpg)
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