Big Fall: The unctuous late capitalist soundscape of Everything Everything's RE-ANIMATOR
So enter the first contender. A month ago today, Everything Everything released their fifth studio album, Re-Animator. It was beautifully composed: a maelstrom of gentle, whirling melodies sat among stadium sing-alongs and odd time signatures. Above all, though, it's bursting with lyrical master strokes - and it's those that I'm going to dig into today, track by gorgeous track.
1. Lost Powers
"Come on, you only lost your mind..."
An opening ode to the hardship of our times; our minds slowly drifting away from us. The chorus refrain: "you only lost your mind". "I get smaller every day"; in the context of a globalised world, filter bubbles, communities turning ever inward, who doesn't? The song ends, naturally, with conspiracy theorising: "because I don't sleep, death will never come for me". It's easier to see the world simply, in conspiracies and misdeeds, if you are someone who feels increasingly powerless. Understanding implies control, and maybe even agency. So you "only lost your mind" - but you kept control, a degree of relevance in our wired-up world, by denying the truth.
2. Big Climb
"We are one thing... led to another"
A lot has been said about this one - the video tells half the story, littered with stock footage of burning forests and rubbish dumps. But Big Climb isn’t as simple as a climate change allegory. I think it can be read as a more complex expression: every time the people rein in the power of capitalists, capitalists find ways to rein in the power of the people. When the industrial revolution brought about huge increases in production across the economy with the potential to massively increase welfare, it was followed by mass commodification, bringing huge swathes of human life into the capitalist economy so that scarcity might persist. When the working class became increasingly unionised in the first half of the 20th century, corporate interests collected to encourage the growth of an individualised, freedom-led politics that would make the unions less relevant. Now we live in age of increasingly precarious jobs against a backdrop of immense productivity. So the “big climb” is the people’s progress, while the “big fall” is the capitalist retort. Each attempt at reform has been met with a fresh attempt to remould the world so that it remains within the capitalist paradigm.
In this context, the line “not afraid that it’ll kill us yet, we’re afraid that it won’t” seems to refer to how, if capitalism can persist through the climate crisis, it can persist through anything. If it can find a way to turn this final revocation of itself into another way to rein in the lives of the people, it will hardly be a world worth living in. This is understood by the latest generation, expressed in the bridge, those who "seem to get it" and bring the "light on the horizon", held up against the characters in the verses who "weigh a whole tonne" and have "a champagne cork in (their) windpipe". But those characters, ostensibly the capitalist class, are still just a "slave to the big time", doomed to "dancing on the ocean floor" while the latest generation aim to enact change. The agency of all the characters is disputed, especially in the refrain noted above: "we are one thing... led to another" - as if we ourselves are walking down a path from which we can hardly divert, because "this is the prophecy" - a big climb will necessitate another big fall. I don't think this song is optimist in the least.
3. It Was a Monstering
"I would rather have a friend than a good memory"
This is the first place on the record where we hear serious signs of isolation. This comes up again later, where Jon sings about the monstering "at nearly ninety thousand feet". Up in the clouds, likely in a spacecraft of some kind, but outside the craft there is nothing, only air. On Genius, commenters have wondered if this is a reference to Perlan 2, an unmanned craft reporting on atmospheric pollution from 90,000 feet up. Equally, it could be a reference to the immense pressure at this altitude; perhaps the "monstering" is a metaphor for stress, bearing down on Jon. He spends the bridge comparing himself to various monsters, from Slender Man to Sandman. He feels isolated and alienated and he wants these horrifying creatures in his head, because he'd rather have a friend there than use the very same space for memory. The chorus refrain here - "I don't like the feeling" - closes onto "that's the cherry on my coffin". It's this stress, this pressure, combined with an emptiness inside, that brings one's life, and indeed this song, to a close.
4. Planets
"Can you love me?"
It's probably the most direct motif on the entire album, this. Jon said it himself: 'Planets is about calling out to be loved, feeling unworthy'. At the beginning of this one, he shouts that "some of you are permanently off my Christmas list". Jon wants ways to express his discontent and be seen by the people that don't seem to care. For my sake, I think the planetary analogy is a way of showing how we tend to 'orbit' social circles in one way or another. When Jon asks "what's beastly" about his behaviour, he's asking why this means he's been ostracised from a particular group. He looks to the planets as if they can show him love, in lieu of the people. Another sign that the world has become so vast, so incomprehensible, that we forgo its interest and look to (Jon's words) 'finding the love of the universe instead.'
5. Moonlight
"20 more seconds and it could've been me"
This song's in 7/8! Woah! I think it's going for a point about cultish ideologies: there are references to "chaos", "red blood", a sacrificial lamb, and a minotaur with the hair of a snake (that's two mythical beasts smashed together. Jon says the red blood is all he needs to "get it" - to pull his life back together. He spends the rest of the song trying to get other people "caught on the horns (of the spliced minotaur) after he's been set there himself. He is a missionary, suddenly radicalised by the realisation that he could die at any moment: "20 more seconds and it could have been me". Near-death experiences cause many to turn over a new leaf, but it's in 2020 where this new leaf is more likely than ever to lead to QAnon or Scientology instead of, say, a Marie Kondo phase. Before, he was "lilly-livered living in a holocene way". Now he's out for blood. Twice. Moonlight also feels like an allusion to ideology; a political party is an organisation, just the same as a cult. Fill it with enough mythos and populism and ritual and it may as well be one. So maybe Jon's leader only has metaphorical horns to speak of.
6. Arch Enemy
"Now I'm lonely without you"
I'm really not sure what this is about. Jon is imagining this horrifying creature, a fatberg, unthinkably unpleasant, that harangues him in his dreams. He is enthralled by this "blubber mount, sewage moon", and responds by bowing before the fatberg, willing to do its bidding: "I am your knife". Jon has spoken about how this is one example of many across the album of the bicameral mind: the notion that your mind can be split down the middle, a lá master & slave, or ego & id. Here, the fatberg is drawing in some ways from both, clearly experiencing the veneration of the ego and exercising the control of the master.
Jon "was lonely without you"; he needs the fatberg to cleanse the surface world, which, it's implied, has shunned him. He would rather this "king of oil" rose up ("now it's time to show your face") than live under the status quo. However, Jon admits to being "poisoned" by this toxic mass. Maybe he once truly saw the fatberg as an enemy, but has now reconciled, he has made peace with the seamy underbelly of society as it bursts forth and consumes us. Which is exactly what the capitalist class will do to the remainder of society in the event of another "big climb".
7. Lord of the Trapdoor
"This is an island for right-handed men"
'It's about 4chan! And it's in 5/4!' I told my dad of an afternoon. All the allegories here - an island, only for "right" "men", where they're "bringing back hanging" and "suits of armour" (renaissance mythos) in addition to eggs (a reference to the wobbling men of No Reptiles). And it's in 5/4! It's existing apart from the regular discourse of 4/4.
"Can you believe you were nearly a dog?" The speaker seems to believe that they - in the mindset of many downtrodden white men - almost fell foul of the democratic party line, but they were eventually pulled to the right (and, presumably, felt that the moral right came with it, where anything else is "a whistle for only the dog". And then comes the beautiful chorus refrain: "I need it, I need her, armageddon". The entire world order has to be swept away and a new one crafted on top; our society is so inherently flawed in the eyes of these alt-righters that we must start afresh - which is the kind of logic that might lead to a lone gunman going on a shooting.
Who is the Lord of the Trapdoor? Well, we know that "Life isn't good for the underground man". This is an alt-righter who leads the brigade of right-handed men, but hardly gets well renumerated for his efforts. Look to the tops of organisations like Info Wars: Alex Jones makes pennies from his actual broadcasting, and he fuels his increasingly madcap ravings with faux-nutritious vitamin supplements and overpriced merchandise. The trapdoor is not a profitable enterprise, precisely because it exists so far apart from the status quo and has this insistence on "bringing back" things that appear to have been lost, retrograde desires.
When Jon sings, "am I getting warmer yet?" he is referring to the closet admission of the alt-righter; that their idols are increasingly incoherent, desperate to fit every eventuality into their worldview even when things are falling apart. Carl Benjamin's catastrophic loss in the 2018 European elections. Alex Jones' ever-precarious finances. I won't let that one go, sorry. Suffice to say that the only solution, increasingly, appears to be "armageddon" - or perhaps the armageddon is some 'great replacement', another conspiracy to be affirmed, a necessary part of the alt-right narrative.
8. Black Hyena
"Caught in the twist of delight, between this world and the night"
The titular Black Hyena is the product of a splicing, a joining of organic and synthetic. In the process of this creation, which bears allusions to Frankenstein, the ostensibly animal element is "chased off a cliff" as "an eyelid (is) starting to twitch". The alligator - usually a fearsome creature - "is as dead as your remote control". The remote control is a placid creation, but one that keeps technology in check. So the danger of the organic element has been subdued, but so has our ability to control it, as our eyelids twitch and we stretch ever further into god complexes: "I made the gravity mine".
We think we can control our modern creations, but they are increasingly beyond our comprehension, our understanding, our power: as the creator "breaks his brain" on a banana peel, "the master cracks into life". This comic ending for the creator of the Black Hyena indicates just how easy it is for us to sleepwalk into a world of technological primacy. However, the song ends with a refrain, looping in a motif that gives its name to the album: "at last: hello re-animator". After the creator's brain splits in two and his position of power is usurped by the Hyena, he can be re-animated. But the implication of the song so far is that he will be reanimated in the model of the Hyena: he will be a synthesis of man and machine, a cyborg. He will be a product of twitching eyes, god complexes, and uncertain faiths in technological progress. At last! He's eager, he looks forward to it. But if the Hyena is anything to go by, these chimeras, black, unknowable hyenas, will "bite the idiot", he who sleepwalks into cyborg life.
9. In Birdsong
"I look into the Godmouth - the energy in us"
This song is layered with religious imagery. Jon sings repeatedly of hearing song, multiple voices - "them" - ostensibly a choir. He sees "someone in a white matter", claiming there's "something in the white matter" (our brains) that aligns with this image. He sees "energy in us", a uniting force, and is turned to "vapour in your blood". The song gently builds, repeatedly claiming that he hears "birdsong in reverse", that he is facing a revelation, before it all peters out gently. Was the association ill-founded? Was the person in a white matter nothing at all? Can a "Godmouth" really appear in the same song as a "zombie" and all this talk of "rendering"? Everything Everything made a habit of creating videos for their latest album in Blender, while filming music videos in situ was impossible during lockdown. The video for In Birdsong is indeed unreal, rendered simply, like a child did it, almost (Jon did it). But equally, the lighting does have a certain flare, a whitened edge, such that all the characters - even those that are only partially formed - have something of a white matter about them. Jon says the song loops back to the bicameral mind again, and how the first honest-to-goodness human being must have felt bearing witness to all these new feelings in their white matter. Maybe it would have felt like some kind of divine intervention?
10. The Actor
"Fit my clothes and has a face like mine"
This song is about impostor syndrome, or dissociation from the self . In the final chorus, Jon seems to make peace with the dissociation, following the above with "If we act the same then I don't mind at all", where the previous verses used "he" instead of "we". It becomes unified, the bicameral mind made one, a synthesis of sorts. Unfortunately this song is also the sonic equivalent of throwing up your pancreas, so I'm not going to bother trying to analyse this one any further.
11. Violent Sun
"And you know this will be gone in the morning"
This piece has an increased pace compared with the previous sonic vomit, and it appeals to a huge range of insecurities: "I'm too old"; "you don't have to be a lunatic... or an error... or a prisoner... of your terror"; feeling like you have a "ventriloquist mouth" and can't express yourself; feeling like you'll be "swept away... when the wild wave comes". Jon's spoken about how this song is supposed to be the last one that gets played, to clear the dance floor at the end of the night. It fits that bill perfectly, describing the gleam that strikes the final hour, how everyone appears slightly more beautiful, gently ebbing as the night fades out. Even if your "words are wrong", they can still be "in the right order", and even if the sun and the arms of your loved one are violent (is it the end of the night that makes them so?) there is respite.
Regardless of the "problem that you're having in your mind" and how everything seems to be collapsing in, the end of the night assigns a fleeting romanticism to it all. But maybe this is actually a frightening paean to how we forget the horrors of the world in the moment we begin to feel that they are inevitable: that we can't switch off and look into the violent sun. There is no "gone in the morning" for the climate crisis. There is only another big climb.
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