REVIEW: BY THE END OF TONIGHT / TERA MELOS - COMPLEX FULL OF PHANTOMS

All of us, every one that has ever played in a band where we were not the lyricist has experienced it. It’s a whips Sunday afternoon, and we’re sitting enjoying the day – outside perhaps – strumming the strings or plucking a few notes here and there. Daydreaming about a person or a memory or a thing or a history yet to be written; and out of it emerges a riff. And from the riff, a progression, and from the progression, an entire song. My lord, how hilarious, just the thought of Robin or the love you had to hide away or the time you went tubing down the Guadalupe and you met the fair Brazilian you would never cross lines with again turns itself from daydream into song. No words, of course – that’s the job of other men, but it’s the source, the hot spring from the mountain as it were. And in the end, they guy with the microphone and the pen and the pad ends up writing a song about someone called Lola. Lo Lo Lo Lo Loooolah. How discouraging.

The power of the voiced word is immutable. A picture may be worth a so many thousands, but a single sentence caption can change the entire meaning. Similarly, the dreaded context that the voice brings can utterly destroy the original meaning of a chord progression. I once sang a song that others wrote the meaning for. I do not think they meant for it to be all love spirited away and holding out hope for divorce paperwork to be signed. Atrocious. Let us never speak of it again.

Similar then, the power of the instrumental composition, be it rock or jazz or classic or electronic – how it gives us so few words, just the title, and lets our own hearts and ears connect the dots between the notes and the stated intent. Riding the A train. A watermelon man. A higher state of consciousness. Kings of snakes. Delaware is Depressing. Phil Collins is a filthy man. Perhaps that is what is so liberating about By The End of Tonight’s best recording to date, their split with Tera Melos, Complex Full of Phantoms. That, ironically much in the same way text-driven Sierra adventure games once did, so much imagination in required when we elevate it from potential film score to scripted narrative.

Its true too that we, the listeners, bring so much of our own baggage to these compositions to derive meaning. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the closing seconds of Ghost Boat, where this dialog, lifted from somewhere, unfolds between a man and a child:

Stories? Tell me.
They’re not the kind of stories you can really tell.
Too Dirty?
I suppose they’re dirty too, but only incidentally. Mainly, they’re angry, sensitive intensely felt, and the dirties of dirty words –

And then BAM!, into the closing track of BTEOT’s half of the record with no indication of what the dirtiest of words might be. Is it love? hate? Hope? Fear? With so many of their engaging songs having ignorable goofball titles, the Alvin foursome (er, trio right now), forces us to ignore their stated meaning and find one of our own. They hold a mirror up to us polished so sharply, that we cannot even pretend that we aren’t making our own fables for their works. Every one of this compositions has a different meaning to every single one of us. Whips.

Much in the same way a photographer might have evolved from disc film to 35mm to digital to polariod, this record is a next level achievement by the band. No doubt this is due in no small part to the production values of the record itself. It was recorded by Chris Ryan at Dead City Sound earlier in the year, and even the limited sneak peak listen we were granted of it when visiting there oh so many months ago, it was obvious that By The End of Tonight had fantastically come into their own. Those of us that have never personally recorded with him, nor heard legend of his laid-back style behind the glass and levers, certainly like to imagine Mr Ryan an angry Viking in the most anti-Christopher Walken as Bruce Dickenson sort of way – storming out of the control room into the studio’s live room screaming such ultimatums as “I SAID LESS DISTORTION AND MORE GAIN, DANGIT” and “WHEN I SAY TRY IT IN 7/4 TIME I DON’T MEAN 14/8!! TRY IT AGAIN” But in reality he is just good at what he does, and has produced the best sounding BTEOT release to date. Mad Props.

We could go into detail here about how emblematic of the actual BTEOT this release is in contrast to the solo EPs we have spent the week reviewing. We could talk about how great a pairing they are with Tera Melos. We could make up something about the sound of a hulking space freighter trying desperately to run the blockade or whatever else these songs make us think of. But we won’t. This is a record you really need to hear. This is a record you need to put your own narratives in. We know it seems like we're always recommend every record we review, but that’s because we like them to the point we’re at home writing about them when we should be out trying to meet a nice girl. We don’t waste our time on things that aren’t worth it. And conversely, we spent our entire week listening to, thinking about, and spouting out our thought on one of the city’s serious treasures. Think about it. Recommended.

MP3: By the End of Tonight - Philty Collins