Let’s start at the end here. The last minute of the song, The Surface, by Sidewave, a band based in Denver, Colorado, is that last push to get to the other side. The percussion speeds up. The guitars sound jerky and breathless. And this change of pace is so subtle that it is almost imperceptible. It sneaks up on you. It wants to be discreet. It wants you to miss it until you cannot anymore. And then when you come to and realize that you, too, want to be on the other side of this fervor, you find that you are already trying to do it.
Let’s talk about the embedded ideology of the song. The world that is spun in this song is as replete and as raw as the world you live in. It is not a reflection of it, but it could be classified as a reaction to it. To counteract the confines of the world and to overcome its obstacles, you have to replicate in your mind and work out a plan. That is what this song is. A plan. And what is a plan if not a blueprint of a wish? What is the wish here? To reach for and touch something that is beyond the ordinary, the tangible, the imaginable. So, the song expands and contracts accordingly. The reverberant guitars fill up all the space, as gravelly as granules of rust, and then deflate rhythmically to a springy but resonant melody. And the percussion does the heavy lifting when that happens, sounding like crackles of a fire burning low. “to hold you again is to be on fire,” he even says, and it makes the aforementioned percussion sound like the expectant anticipation of this. On Big Whisper, the other single off of the new album, he goes, “if you wait for nothing and you need for no one / you can find yourself again,” and on this song, he admits, “I’ve waited enough for you to arrive / all my life, run in circles on the ground,” and since Big Whisper comes before The Surface on the track-list, you can surmise that the conviction to “wait for nothing and need for no one” is one that is born out of dejection. He still wants somebody to take his hand and show him the way to the impossible, but it keeps on refusing to happen, so what is a man to do besides renounce the foundation of wanting something?
Let’s address the logistical problem here. The fact that he has not been able to enter into the impossible is the only thing that keeps him trying to do it. The plummet back down every time is not failure; it is fuel. It is not perdition; it is a prelude. As long as he keeps failing, he will keep trying. But… if he ever succeeds at spanning the possible to reach the impossible… That will just make the previously impossible a new possibility. And that opens the door to a new set of impossibilities. And so on. And this might be why he ends the song with: “it’s so far that i can’t reach…” Because it is impossible to reach the impossible. It defeats the point. And so the impossible must stay impossible. And that is the actual ending. Not the one we started with. At least for now.
We’ll talk again later when the album comes out. October 23rd.
Written by Leo August
