This is inspired by the goodbye Sleater-Kinney thread.
This is the thread where you tell everyone about your favourite band. Not the coldly analysed, musicoligists 'greatest band of all time' or the band you want to say you rank the highest for cred in whatever scene you hold allegiance to. No, this is the thread where you talk about the band, or maybe bands, that slice right into the core of your fucking being. The bands who speak in your words, where every song sounds just like it was written for you. The band which delivers lines and riffs and solos the impact of which upon you no mere words could ever properly describe. Wax lyrical about them. Extol them. For you know, in your heart, no matter how many charts and arguments and statistics and critical opinions any spotty-faced music geek could ever bring out, that these bands are the best bands in the history of anything. Though the voices compel you to mention The Beatles, or The Clash, or The Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan, or goodness knows who, you secretly know that these bands are better than all of them rolled together, because they are YOURS. They are the bands that sustain you, speak to you, move you, keep you alive.
Well, I suppose I'm a pretty lucky guy in that I have two bands like this, namely Skyclad and Sol Invictus.
I don't know how to seperate them really, or to say anything about them I have not implied above...shit, I dunno. I am as you might guess somewhat drunk and more than somewhat stoned, but...Gods. Both these bands...well Ok.
I guess the difference between them would be that both cut straight to the heart of my beliefs, my thoughts, and have maybe helped shape them, but both do it in different ways. Skyclad is something subtle, joyous even in the depths of misery. It works through the juxtaposition of the sometimes jaunty, sometimes heavy folk and metal instrumentation and the multi-layered lyrical complexity of Walkyiers...well, I must call it poetry, for to call it anything else would be to demean it utterly. You have to think about Skyclad lyrics, and as you think about them you get more and more out of them. You decode almost impossible subtleties of emotion that draw you utterly into the music...it's the personal nature. The same for Sol Invictus, and if I have to chose another band, Current 93. It is basically like reading a diary, like having a soul bared to you. The difference with Sol Invictus, of course, is the incredible, unbelievable bluntness. Where Martin wraps terrible, heart-rending tales of death and poverty and despair, interspersed with joyous paganism and sheer defiance at the world, all into complex extended metaphors and puns and wordplay of the most enjoyable kind, Tony Wakeford just comes out and smashes you in the face with it. For example, compare the two most emotionally affecting songs from both for me. We are talking about 'Here Am I' by Sol Invictus, and 'Something to Cling To' by Skyclad. They are opposite songs. One of hope, one of incontravertable despair. The bit in the Skyclad where, if I am not 100% contented or maybe a bit drunk, I will invariably start crying is when, after Martin after telling us how 'Sometimes life is like an Ocean, cruel and far too cold to mention', and describing how you are cast adrift by your fair-weather friends and you sometimes wonder, maybe I should just stop treading water, and the music lulls into this amazing, melancholy violin piece, then suddenly, WHAM, fiddle and guitar back on the upbeat and:
"Then as if from out of nowhere.
(and just when you least expected).
floats a single piece of driftwood - by some unseen force directed
It's a gift life often brings you.
when you thought all hope long gone.
sometimes a single dream to cling to.
gives you strength to carry on.
It seems the wisest words that I know,
(three which some dead scholar wrote)
are simply these: - "Dum spiro spero"
meaning; "WHILE I BREATHE I HOPE"."
And like, all the subtle intonations, all the meaning it's invested with for me, and for Martin that I understand from reading interviews and listening to every Skyclad and Sabbat and The Clan Destined song ever written or recorded far, far too much, is just...incredible. This song actually saved me from suicide once, no fucking lie.
However, if I had listened to Here Am I, I would be dead now. This song fully hit me once after a completely shit night out, sitting in the bus, depressed and drunk, and then suddenly, the simple, brutal words.
"And here you are, drunk and scared,
You've finally figured out: Life's not fair."
Fuck. Just fuck.
EDIT: Oh, and shit, in 'Kneel to the Cross', when he sings, with that almost unbearable agony 'AND IT'S EEEEEEVEEEEEER SO WROOOOONG, TO DAAAAARE TO BE STROOOOOOONG..." Yes! YES! SUCH FUCKING POWER!
Shit, what am I rambling on about. Er, you say something guys. Please.
