Robert Wyatt – Alifib

I said goodbye this past weekend, an experience any human can eloquently tell you totally sucks. I stood at the airport and blinked and watched her walk away. I thought about how long of a year it would be until I got to say, “Hello, it’s nice to see you again. I’d missed the way your hair smells.” Later, listening to the new Yo La Tengo on the drive home, I realized just how poorly I’d prepared myself for the necessary musical consolation I’ve come to expect from my cherished collection of whispered sorrows.

Initially habit caused me to flip to the Elliott Smiths of the lot. I made a new playlist and added the occasional Aimee Mann, the obligatory Nina Simone, some Sparklehorse, and Baxter Dury. Nothing helped until I realized lyrical solace would be insufficient this time around. I desperately needed sounds. Not words. I wanted timbre for tears.

And then there was Robert Wyatt. I have never watched Arthur Johns’ Wyatt-scored experimental film Solar Flares Burn for You a fact I’m somewhat proud of, but if there’s any song that can describe how people in my position feel it’s “Alifib.” His tone is one of pure anguish and unintelligible desolation. The piano, when it jumps, does so from whimper to outright bawl. For Wyatt repetition doesn’t mean minimalism; it means defeat; it means acutely focused gloom.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Hotel Huntington Sign

There’s something familiar about “Hotel Huntington’s” opening drone. It’s faintly reminiscent of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” and for some reason that leaves me hopeful. This could partially be thanks to its use towards the end of Lost in Translation, but, all-in-all, hope isn’t exactly a terrible thing to have a glimmer of at this early stage.

There’s no Hotel Huntington in Gainesville; she and I never sat on swings. Then again, this song isn’t dependent on my correlating sentiment associated with a physical location so much as an emotional one. I only have to hear Owen Ashworth swallow the last ‘o’ in “Ohio” as though he’s out of breath, as though the three syllables that comprise the new location of his lost love are enough to make him choke, to know why he’s staring at signs in the chapped darkness of the morning.

Pram - Goodbye

It’s funny to think Rosie Cuckston, lead singer of the band Pram, taught me how to say goodbye. This is, of course, considering that the most coherent and poignant lyric from the band’s song “Goodbye” is “No one teaches you how to say goodbye.” It’s a haunting song, Theremin notwithstanding. There’s ambivalence in the ambience. In a world where inertia is frowned upon, Cuckston’s vocals are in the rain without an umbrella on the side of a busy Manhattan intersection; they are motionless, watching the world cascade past them, keyboards and bass, keyboards and bass, and they’re trying to remember what it meant to have a destination, to care enough to keep dry.

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