We have recently reviewed Psych Fuck, that’s the newest album for Singapore Sling, but as has been told many times the two albums come from same writing and recordings sessions, and were initially planned to be a double album, or Part 1 and Part 2. So this is Part 1, but could also have been Part 5 of 16, or Part 155 of 1035. Because basically any Singapore Sling album tells the same story, every time a very good story, well written, with wits, heart, surprising sounds and very good songs. But it’s always the same thing, throwing up every unaddressed “you” and every emotion not dealt with in the form of songs. Beautiful songs indeed: sensual, angry, energetic, mysterious, ironic, rock’n’roll, but mostly offering the same self-cheating “I don’t need” content, just differently arranged (and this is actually why a song written almost 20 years ago like Tired can fit well into an album released in 2014). Life can be horrible at times yes, for sure, and difficult and unpredictable and disappointing, but it’s still life and it is never still, ’cause people do mistakes but can learn from them, ’cause circumstances and point of views change. Life just flows up and down and we have to swim with it and in it. Instead, many Singapore Sling’s songs are shaped by the look of Medusa, turning the pulse of the flesh and the running of the blood into statues whose gestures and feelings and characters cannot be affected – nevermore – by no time, no weather, no touch. Recently I heard a musician from another band asking to his friends: “Why Singapore Sling keep writing the same song since 15 years?” And what I thought is that there is no other way if you’re repeating your deeds and your negative thoughts over and over in same circles, like that point in the book Neverending Story when the Empress of Phantásien and the Old Man of Wandering Mountain are fated to read the same story over and over again from the beginning to the end, and the end is the beginning and so on and on and there’s no way out of this until and unless Bastian shouts the New Name of the Empress, jumping into an act of real creativity. To be creative and do something new is the only way out from neverending repetition. And to do this implies to let die what was before and to distrust the old, hopeless and unable yourself too and most of all (“Use your imagination!”), exactly like the solution here would be to actually kill Singapore Sling, the poor little man who had sex with a corpse. And it wouldn’t be a cruel act but something similar to the end of Little Red Ridinghood tale, when the hunter abruptly opens the belly of the wolf to reveal – finally free – the child trapped inside of it.
PS – These thoughts are about a record that was written partly almost two years ago, and partly even earlier.
The use of present tense must so be considered a kind of “poetic license“.
What if it was an exorcism?
“You won’t believe what happens next.”
Ask The Sky 