‘One for you, one for me’ is a bizarrely structured but beautiful song which keeps balancing between two opposite ideas ‘one for.., one for…’ like a swirling, never ending melody, heavy on drums, unfolding itself slowly, sprinkled with these weird high-pitched synth notes reminding me something from an old Flaming Lips song, and finally reaching some point just after the line ‘One for you, and one for me’.
There are some strange lines, like this one: ‘One for Führer, one for his child bride/One for the wedding, one for the suicide’
Could all these oppositions and divisions ineluctably be leading to the sad confession of the end:
‘Now that we’ve come so far away from us/Now that we’ve come too far to say/You and me, you and me that is an awful lie’
A Machine Spiritual reminds me of a typical Bright Eyes’ song (from ‘Digital Ash’?) as it starts with a hiccupping guitar, several false departures and continues with heights and lows and a nice melody, which floats like the body he is talking about. There are some brief accelerations and during one of them he is talking once again about Hitler!!!
‘Eva Braun went to dye her hair/Little Hitler sigh in his giant chair’
I suppose he is referring to the body as the spiritual machine, which ‘float and form some kind of code’, but the rest of the lyrics venture into some kind of esoteric meaning, and with ‘We’re starting over’, I’m not sure if he is talking about reincarnation, something he was mentioning in the interview.
Both songs end up with a monologue by Denny Brewer, a brief discourse of New Age-y nonsense, full of good intentions and positive words but still, what does all this mean?? I’m sorry Conor, but declarations like ‘There are lots of orchestration in this world/Creation is rolling/if you’re here it’s cosmic’ make me cringe like a Deepak Chopra’s Tweet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ilOoU3Imz8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeI5w2AUegg