Moments long gone have a tendency to split us in half. The funny thing is that it’s more the best moments from our pasts that have this kind of power of providing aching pains that resonate profoundly throughout our insides. Most likely, it’s because these moments are the ones that we yearn to have back again, and for the most part, these are the moments that we won’t ever get back. It isn’t that we won’t have comparable moments in our present or futures, or even better ones, but at those instances when we are reminiscing about them none of that seems to really matter.
Familiar chords, familiar chord progressions and familiar synths have a way of pulling us back into the past the way only a well designed time machine from a sci-fi film or book can. Familiarity, is found to be the key component of mostly every single music hit to date, so it’s no coincidence that when we listen to this H A R T E B E E S T production: Death, we are pulled into places where acute nostalgia takes over, and where slideshows from our pasts become the only things we can see.
Death begins with an eery wind lightly howling right into a sonic space where familiar analog synths begin a ride that nostalgics will gladly embrace. The track is gingerly interlaced with a beautiful medley of falsetto harmonies and vocals that soothe the ears, and only help to pull us deeper into the rabbit hole we refer to as the past. It is a beautiful production that won’t interrupt your day or workload, instead it will only provide a much welcomed rhythm that will leave you feeling refreshed and happy inside despite its dark title.
I’ll clutch your hand when you feel like death is coming for you.”
Aside from the wonderful mixing job these UK bandidos have done on this track, something else resonated within me, and that was the line in the song that says:
Hold you in my hands when we cross over to the other side.”
Every song and every lyric reach out differently to most people, and here at EMPT it’s always about how the track being written about reaches out to us individually. This reached out to me in particular because of two friends of mine that are at a crossroad. In both corners, you have two people who are coming from past relationships that have left them wounded and scared to dive into the murky waters of love again. They have very reluctantly fallen in love with one another, but even more reluctantly find themselves afraid to crossover into the side of the lake where love is the only constant, and where compromise is the only guaranteed method of survival. Each of them feels as if they have found within them what they once lost, and each of them, equally, is afraid to lose that again only to find themselves lost once more within the compromises of unity. The fear that makes them powerless is the loss of one another, yet they falsely believe it is the loss of their own selves that they are ultimately afraid of.
To my dearest friends, hold hands and crossover already, because what’s waiting for you on the other side are more moments of beautiful nostalgia that have not yet happened, and those are the most exciting kind. Think of a time when you experienced the greatest love affair that you know about in your life to date, and then picture an angel having come down from heaven to tell you and show you what was about to happen to you, before it happened. As a matter of fact, the only death that is waiting for you on that other side of that lake is the death of self, because together, if you allow it, will only bear a truer form of love than you have ever known.
Good luck.
