“No more sunny days for me. I’m going somewhere.”
I Am Alive and You Are Dead is sewn with bright light. “I am here,” announces the narrator in Strays. “I am ignited.” When light is dull, brighter light is longed for: “It’s raining tonight in Newcross ... It’s cold in Euston. I wish it was not. I wish I was somewhere it was hot.”
When I think of Orphans & Vandals’ only album, I remember the summer sun over the harbors of Aomen, the little island city in which my take on the album went from “intriguing one-off, with a few stellar standouts” to “one of the best albums ever, period.” When the Aomen light fades, there rise various daylit scenes from the songs: the whale harpooned and chopped up in Christopher. The cottage by the sea. The morning rain and golden light in Terra Firma. Mysterious Skin’s morning train. Its narrator “walking through the Metro station, dusty shafts of sunlight on the platform where it falls through a grate in the pavement by the fountain at Pigalle.” I think of Argyle Square: “I wake up every morning to a cuckoo clock / I wake up every morning to its tick-tock.”
Night scenes take place under streetlights, at house parties, on night buses, in bars: “I used to play jazz on a Saturday night with the drums and horns / The Navy boys all in a frenzy.” Or under starlight, moonlight: “Christopher, the moon is up.” “...chasing that star.” “Constellations without number.” “I see the stars from my window.” Even total darkness is something that can be read, interpreted. “At night I watch the ceiling for the faces of dead friends.”
Out of the Blue is a dimmer affair, shrouded by rain, obscured by clouds, “under inky-dark skies,” in the “half light,” in the “lavender, electric mist,” “in a haze.” The weather is welcomed: “I like the rainy black railings of London, four o’clock, / the street where everything has stopped.” But, now and then, there are cracks in the edifices of weather and the city, and when the light does get in, the effect is that much more striking. In Judd Street, there are “bright stripes of crimson / across this humming / city’s horizon.” In Love You Madly, “lighted windows in the buildings.” London on the Moon’s “pale blue afternoon” is a recurring motif. In Spring Is Here, “the summer sun rises behind the buildings, fiery red.” In Good Times, “the skyline begins to tilt and slide / into an early morning cup of coffee.” An important moment in Souvenirs is soaked “in the pink light of the harbor.” In centerpiece Skinned Alive, there are vivid, psychedelic colors on the dream-shoreline, and later, awake, the narrator “survey[s] the city and the stars,” which last reappear in exquisite beauty in the closing stanza of the closing track, Peacocks: “See the twilight’s early stars.”
In Anomalous Events, the light of heavenly bodies is rubbed away, erased, polluted, confused, spent. “Angels and angels,” My Queer Heaven begins: “the rotten corpses of angels.” The brightest lights are hellish, “the furnace streets where the pale blues flames lick at my feet” (Skipping Rope) and, in The Kings and Queens of England, the “burnt ember skies,” grim witnesses.
On the rare occasions the sun is mentioned, it is “sinking” (When We Broke Into the Garden), “setting,” and catching “the drops on my windowpane” (The Killing of a Swan). More often, we are in the dusk. Vague hours before sunrise, after sunset. “Was it the moment before full dark or full light?” “Every dawn and every dusk, when the sky is the color of rust...” In Anomalous Events, the sun never breaks over the horizon, not once. We move in half dark, rather than Out of the Blue’s half light. Figures appear in clouded glass, or beckon to you from the indistinctness of mist. “Well, it happened in a school in Kenya, was it...? / England? or Spain? / Some of the kids saw something out past the fence in the rain, / and one of those kids was never seen again, / and even when he was, he wasn’t the same.”
Outside witching hours, what light there is, is strange. It does not seem to encounter the characters of Anomalous Events head on. Even in the landscapes of the relatively pastoral Green Valley, light is lodged close to the ground, in “golden stalks,” or on the surface of the sea in seaside towns; the narrator never seems to lift his head altogether skyward. In The Boy with the Pigeon Chest, stars keep a watch on the narrator and the boy, but only through the barriers of smoke, staircases, and snow.
Ah, yes, speaking of snow. It is as central an image in Anomalous Events as rain is in Out of the Blue.
If you’ve ever immersed yourself in the preternatural quiet of a forest covered in freshly falling snow, you will recognize the uncanny atmosphere of Anomalous Events’ snow scenes. Snow blanks out distractions, redirecting focus at once inwards and outwards (“They say snow makes you forget, but I forget nothing”). It turns everything around you unfamiliar, off-kilter. It transforms the world, the way you move in it, and the sense you make of what you find: “The snowflakes are falling ... far down below, onto the statues, and covering their eyes.” It creates a temporary pause, an ethereal state, a spell; and though the spell may be temporary, it is not easily broken.
In my teens, when snow fell on my district of New York, I would tiptoe out of the apartment around 2 or 3AM, when my parents were fast asleep, and walk forty minutes to Juniper Park. I would meet no one. I would walk around the park, or go stand in the middle of the baseball field, which by then no longer looked like a baseball field, staring up into the sky and the falling flakes. I discovered that my favorite color is that of the night sky when snow is falling. It is not black, and not white; not violet, granite, blue, or gray. It is a color that exists only in deep night and heavy snow. Even in daytime, the white of a snowy sky is not quite that of an ordinary overcast sky, nor quite the gray of a rainy day.
How often characters find themselves in the midst of those colors, that quiet, that strangeness, that snow. The Boy with the Pigeon Chest begins with stars and ends with stars, but in the meantime the smoke emanating from the narrator’s mouth turns into snow that the sky sets falling towards him. In The Killing of a Swan, a boy’s injured, bloody head and the uproar of a crowd are “like a fountain of snow.” It sets the scene in two songs, Father of Flies (“I met him one snowy evening among the crowds in the bus station. He seemed very nice, and we got coffee and, you know, we talked, and when I asked him where he was staying, we left together without paying, through the snow and the ice”) and The Killing of a Swan (“Through streets of white winter, I pursued the boy”). It covers the scene in My Queer Heaven: “The flower in the park sticks up through the snow.”
The pallor of snow (completely different from the pristine, diamond-pure kind found in some of I Am Alive and You Are Dead’s most luminous moments) is so profound that it infiltrates scenes that do not take place in wintertime. In When We Broke Into the Garden, on a spring night, the narrator turns “white as a sheet,” spectral white. And near the end of A Bird Flew In—near the end of the album as a whole—the thighs of the narrator’s lover, exposed by and to the eerie figure the narrator takes for a witch, are “milky white.”
It’s amazing to me, given all this, that Anomalous Events should have room for something as familiar, and as cozily and serenely lit, as Christmas, and in the opening song, no less. “No more Cleopatra’s needle, / no more British museum, or beetles in a matchbox, / no more clementines at Christmas, or days of mismatched socks.” You see, though: only in a negative formulation, and only in memory.
