#this wilderness

Listen/purchase: This Wilderness by Midday Veil

While I love the music and lyrics of each song on this record and find them catchy and intriguingly allusive in ways I have yet to exhaust, I consider the final song on This Wilderness, “Universes”—a revisioning of a tale from the Upanishads, “Indra and the Ants”—the strongest and most compelling. The song is accompanied by the tick-tock rhythm of a synthesized marimba that morphs into an ominously out-of-tune toy piano accompanied by occasional digital artifacts of cacophonous noise. The four verses begin “Once upon a time” and each portrays a character who suffers a fall. In the first verse, the figure resembles the “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” who was “the envy of the town.” His “shirts were always ironed,” his “shoes always brown.” “Back in those days,” his mind was “filled with high designs.” His “charts were full of boxes;” his “graphs were full of lines.” The second and third verses tell of princely or perhaps godly figures who were envied by common people and monarchs, rich men whose names “inspired reverence,” who were respected by their fellows, ogled by women, and whose effigies filled the imaginations of children at play. Whatever awe these figures had inspired in us, they are now “wearing one too many diamonds to enforce the golden rule.”