My Acolyte Journey: 2014.13

Strong.
London Grammar. My apologies for the almost month-long delay between posts. I banged out 2013's post in . . . what was that, two months? This is shameful. And you know what else is shameful? Reading Strong, I couldn't help but have flashbacks to reading the lyrics to some of my own favorite songs. Nonce lyrics are alright, I guess, but when you abandon meaning you should also abandon the pretense to meaning. All I can gather from Strong is a two-person relationship ("I've excused you for a while") in which the singer seems strong but feels weak ("Yeah, I might seem so strong/I might speak so long/But I've never been so wrong") and the (interesting might be a bit generous) interesting parallel of lion roar/strength and child cry/weakness. But essentially, what I garner here is only emotional intimacy and openness. That's good, especially in relationships between friends and lovers, but I don't know you, London Grammar. For a first experience to be so intimate and otherwise meaningless, I'm not sure I've made the proper connection.
Sadly for me, the first time I listened to this song I was in the immediate glow of the much more insidious Hymn of Acxiom, and I may have underestimated it. But this time, I'm giving you as much advantage as I can. I've left the distraction of the dog and whatever enormous task the neighbor is doing with his interminable chainsaw. I've left the blinding sunlight and the wind chimes. I've waited a month for Teng to wear off. I'll give you a chance to see how you impress.

Eh.

The song is just as I remember (I could have sung along with the lyrics--there aren't that many words to the whole song). It's touching, but I don't feel any connection with London Grammar and I don't have a similar experience in my own life. The video doesn't help draw out the connection between words and meaning, either. It's beautiful, but not as gripping as some others I've seen in this top 40 alone.
A man who's driving a car that I swore had a body in the trunk pulls up in an abandoned industrial district of what looked like a major European city. He gazes meaningfully at a young girl asleep (dead?) in the backseat. I don't know. He opens the trunk and (I expected a lot of other things) pulls out a tarp and a couple bags of equipment. He wastes maybe a half hour dragging everything out and placing it all in neat rows on a tarp. When he supposedly finishes, he pulls his daughter (?) from the car and carries her (body) to a drainage oddly reminiscent of the Los Angeles river. She wakes up, which is a huge relief, and lights a fuse that sets off a hundred roman candles he has strapped to his body. It's surreal and beautiful and meaningless. And--maybe it's too obvious to say this now--but that's exactly how I feel about this song. It's strange and gripping. "So down caught" has such a ring to it. It's beautiful! Sight and sound rich enough to stare at and forget your surroundings. It's meaningless, and that's where I just cannot.
I will listen to this on the forty and I would crank it on the radio, but I wouldn't buy it. Perhaps more tellingly, I wouldn't put it above Hymn of Acxiom. I understand it suffers for the comparison, but that's exactly why it doesn't deserve such a place of honor.