I just found this band a week ago and they have already
become a staple of my music library. I find Of Monsters and Men very interesting.
Their vocal harmonies, calls-and-responses and acoustic instruments give off
the new-folk vibe that seems to be all the rage these days, but they’re not as
toned down and stripped out as their contemporaries. A trumpet blares and a
full drum kit is put to good use throughout many of the songs on their first
album, My Head is an Animal. And Of
Monsters and Men can really blare out some great upbeat, heart-inflating,
dance-worthy tunes. Take their lead single “Little Talks” as an example.
But they can also slow it down. That’s what I love about “Love
Love Love.” I have a near masochistic preference for songs like this: sad, soft
and mournful; the ones that lift you up by gently setting you down on the
ground; the ones that slowly trace a scalpel across your heart, making you feel
the prickling unpleasantness of a certain kind of life; the ones that hurt, but
only in the happiest way. Sure, whining love songs are nothing new, they may
actually have a well-deserved place among the “cheesy,” but I can’t get enough
of them. I don’t think many people can.
The greatest moments of this song, I think, occur when the
music stops. We try to forget, we try not to dwell on it. We not only try, we
make grand pronouncements of our efforts to forget, our efforts not to dwell. “I’m
done with her,” “I’m done with him,” “I’m done with this” we shout, as much to
the empty universe as to ourselves. We give the guitar one last strum and then
we drop it, with the intention of never picking it up again. The song is over.
And then it starts again. The memories come flooding back
just as though they never stopped. Are they just a distraction from our
loneliness, these memories? Are they an indulgence into an impossible kind of
happiness, one mixed with equal parts reality and fantasy? Maybe the pain that
comes with nostalgia is the easiest way to feel alive, without, you know,
actually having to risk living.
And then just as everything you once swore off came back
again, it easily is washed away by the flow of time. And then you forget.
“Well maybe I’m a bad, bad, bad, bad person.”
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