Cubicle Tunes - Week of November 12, 2007

There wasn't much on the new release front this week (at least that I've heard yet) so I am going retro in this week's offering of pain and suffering. Hey - if you are depending on me for the freshest content, than you are just an idiot beyond explanation.

1. Dido - Life for Rent (2003)

I wasn't much on the "White Flag" single at first, but the title track is mesmerizing, and the creepy love song "Don't Leave Home" smacks of unhealthy co-dependency with such heartwarming lines like "So close the blinds and shut the door, you won't need other friends anymore" and "So you won't be leaving, will you?".

Yes, that was all one sentence.

2. Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach - Painted From Memory (1998)

How about lyrical gems like "but now I fill my life up with all that I can to deaden this sensation" from the song "This House is Empty Now"? Or "those eyes I tried to capture, they are lost to me now forever, they smile for someone else" from the title track?

Such sadness. Such misery. Such bliss. (Yep - a paradox. You had better recognize.)

3. Patty Larkin - Red = Luck (2003)

One of the more vivid folk albums I've heard. Lyrical imagery adds a visual aspect to the aural, and the result is amazing. Larkin sings "Inside your painting, I'm cadmium yellow, I'm walking across the green" on the track "Inside Your Painting", and I imagine a canvas. Uncanny. But you know I can't abide an album without lament, so I proffer the following from the song "Italian Shoes", where she crushes you with "You could tell me 'I love you', like that's supposed to mean something. I mean, I could always say 'I love you' too, and it wouldn't mean a thing to me."

Damn.

4. Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism (2003)

As if the idea of love as an illusion needed reinforcement, "Tiny Vessels" brings such pain as "this is the moment that you know, that you told her that you loved her but you don't" and "so one last touch and then you'll go, and we'll pretend that it meant something so much more".

The song "Title & Registration" takes an automobile-laden motif journey to the same conclusion: "there's no blame for how our love did slowly fade, and now that it's gone it's like it wasn't there at all, and here i rest where disappointment and regret collide".

5. The Cure - Disintegration (1989)

Aside from the fact that this is among the most essential albums of all-time, you must also remember that Robert Smith is the unprecedented Uber Moper. Nothing will cheer you up like the opening track "Plainsong" and this light-hearted line: "and it's so cold, it's like the cold if you were dead, and then you smiled for a second".

And I leave with you this from the song "Untitled" - "another time undone, hopelessly fighting the devil, futility, feeling the monster climb deeper inside of me, feeling him gnawing my heart away hungrily, i'll never lose this pain . . ."

And you thought YOU had it rough.

I'm out-
KWass