Rooted in the eternal

This song gives me chills. I’m trying to think why.

There are some artists who provide a sort of ‘commentary from the streets” which strikes me as cringingly awkward and unconvincing. I just can’t listen to them because their stuff is so rooted in the present. Rooted, as in stuck. The Streets, to provide a counterexample, did not seem to me rooted in their present. Their stuff spoke to a side of London that will always exist; plastic sparkwheel lighters, those flimsy blue newsagent bags…Even though he had that fashionable London street strut, Mike Skinner seemed like a smart dude who was onto something, something more significant than the details of what he was singing about.

Some choose to avoid the problem of rootedness by disappearing into surrealism or stream of consciousness. One of the most haunting stories in pop, for me, is how Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins was so wounded by early criticism of her lyrics that she decided thereafter to sing in an unintelligible language of her own.

‘The Leanover’ too seems to hide, a little bit, and yet there’s something about it that has the urgency of agitprop. It sounds like a surrealistic call to arms, a manifesto. But it doesn’t list its demands, it simply presents itself as a living embodiment of them.

Life Without Buildings released a single album that continues to confound or delight anyone who happens upon it. There’s something touching and thrilling about singer Sue Tompkins’ insistence on being heard. It feels like she is using this band to say everything she has ever wanted to say, and as we all know, women are not supposed to say too much.

What I find even more moving is the support she’s provided by the band, who create a solid and consistent space for her within the music. She is working without a tightrope, but they’re there to catch her if she falls. They amplify her, they protect her, they ensure that she is heard.

As a result, she’s not hiding within her stream of consciousness. Quite the contrary, she confronts us with it. And because there will always be women like Sue Tompkins, fighting to be heard and understood, I hope there will always be those who raise their voices, and this why I think Life Without Buildings are rooted in the eternal.