This weeks ‘song of the week’ is a LGHTNNG double bill-Sharks/ Run:
Sharks.
Sharks:
A washed out arpeggio synth falling upwards like gravity in reverse, simultaneously pulling you further into the song as it tries to escape. A muted guitar riff is layered on top of the arp, the two parts are at war with one another creating the friction that propels the song forwards. A voice enters to negotiate the space with a fifty-fifty give and take, push and pull. It appears, oddly, beautifully, cutting its way through the centre of the track. The voice is vague-familiar-alien, romantic, tragic. Deliberately moody. A voice you’re sure you’ve heard before.
This is how it sounds to walk straight through the evening, hoping not to be spotted, on the edge of something, circling the room. Sharks features four different melody sections, all chorus worthy and equally compelling so that there is always something new, always movement. ‘We move like sharks.’
Run:
Giving a vivid warm saturated unrelenting background to contend with the female voice seems to be escaping from a fog, a false mist pumping from a nightclub machine, creating an invisible oblivion. Run is intrigued by the possibility of deliberately capturing a frozen moment in time, a couple of decades behind us. A wonderful nostalgia is created, a vivid anticipation, then some startled reality followed by the illusion of loss, a melancholia hangs over the haunted voice. Once more the melody seems into your mind and will cast a shadow over it for the days to come. For a second there is a resemblance of something, a long time ago now, like everything else. Where’ve you been all your life? A girl’s voice as insubstantial as condensation that sits on the window ledge. Scraping across the edges of the song. Taken to the point of near-ecstasy and unconsciousness abstraction that is a wipe out.
LGHTNNG – Sharks/ Run
