I'm feeling a little lonely. A little overwhelmed by work to be done. Hayfever is giving me watery eyes and brain fog and I'm tired for no good reason.

And this song.

It's like a thousand different moments in my life orchestrated into six minutes. It's like bobbing in the ocean, lying on your back with the sun prickling your salty skin, and then being swept up by a colossal wave and being whipped about in the mess beneath (the album cover obviously planted this in my head, but my god, does it make sense!).

I can probably at this point in my life - post-adolescent but not so old and jaded that I don't get the occasional charge of romance for a song - I can say that it's probably one of my AllTimeFavourite™ pieces of music. It never, ever fails to get under my skin. From the opening drums to the trailing distorted guitar it is six minutes and six seconds of transformative musical energy.

On a bus this morning it came on amongst the random shuffling of my entire collection and even in spite of the public space I found myself in, it still did that thing and I realised that I had my eyes closed and I was probably making disturbing gestures of sonic reverie (involuntary muscle movements, mouthing silent sounds). Oh my.

The use of contrast in this song, between the dreamy guitar and echoing drums of the verse, and the ordered cacophony which regularly interrupts it, is so much the source of the rapturous pleasure I get from it. These sections of noise remind me of the way My Bloody Valentine would describe their own similar exercises as 'sonic holocaust' - so thick, and pulsing and loud, but with an internal rhythm which induces a kind of collective hypnosis. Less about the technical dexterity or melodic complexity, and more about bodies being worked on, organs pulsing with the distorted swell of the sound. It is often the movement in and out of this kind of sound which is the source of many of my own magical, transformative musical listening experiences.

This, I suppose, is why I am willingly stuck in 1991.

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