ALBUM REVIEW- The 1975 - 'I Love It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It'

ALBUM REVIEW: The 1975 – ‘I Love It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It’

by • February 29, 2016

5:25pm February 26, 2016 Orlando, FL

// Apatetic  (adj.) — assuming colors and forms that effect deceptive camouflage. //

I listened to the latest 1975 record just like everyone else. I drove to my local record shop, Park Ave CDs, and was warm inside to find they had it in stock. I wound my way through College Park, back and around Ivanhoe breaking in my newest plastic music toy. I pulled into my parking garage structure, found myself at the top, rolled down the windows, leaving the car idling as I lay on the hood, feeling every new sound through the vibration of my 2006 silver Hyundai.

The sun still had some spunk. Cars whirled down below and I found myself looking around. I’ve always said, “Orlando is the smallest city” but it felt small in this moment for a different reason. It was as if all I could see was all that existed — that everything in this small fisheye view and the happenings inside of it were the only things I would ever know because it’s here. It’s real. I can physically hear the soundtrack to these new moments coming together in front of me.

 

//  “That part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.” — Tajfel ‘Social Identity Theory’ //

The 1975 went radio silent from spring to summer 2015, and we were left to wonder what this meant for our beloved Manchester four.  When they returned we were treated to a new visual orgy. A pristine fluorescent pink disposition replaced the drab noir backdrops we had come to know. They were the same yet, somehow unintelligibly changed. No longer interested in just being flippant adolescents, they knew they had an audience waiting and intended on giving them exactly what they wanted — POP but on their terms.

                                                              

“Love Me”

“I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too? 

Then there’s a pair of us-don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog …”

— Emily Dickinson

                                                              

“UGH!”

As if!”

— Cher Horowitz

                                                              

“If I Believe You”

“… After the last scene of my life flashed before me,
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
I noticed that at many times along the path of my life,
especially at the very lowest and saddest times,
there was only one set of footprints.

This really troubled me, so I asked the Lord about it.
“Lord, you said once I decided to follow you,
You’d walk with me all the way.
But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life,
there was only one set of footprints.
I don’t understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me.”

— excerpt from “Footprints in the Sand”

                                                              

“The Sound”

“you p*ssy, you scared

I can  hear your heartbeat

Why the f^ck would you come around here?

I can hear your heartbeat.”

— “Irregular Heartbeat,” 50 cent

                                                              

“She Lays Down”

“Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things:

Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:

For never was a story of more woe

Than this, of Juliet and her Romeo.”

— Act V Scene iii, Romeo and Juliet

                                                              

At times, ILIWYSFYASBYSUOI feels triumphant and winningly sad, like the time our 7th grade boyfriend said we were pretty — a mother’s love not enough. We crave the compliments, lap them up, telling ourselves we don’t need it but we always sleep better. I’ve spent the past day and a half with my windows down feeling like I’m in a music video as Healy’s twatty vibrato guides me around the city. If I take away all the elements of the Coppala film I’m pretending to be in then what we have does not astonish. “Somebody Else” is so subtle it sounds like an apology on the album as if they needed to fill a space and had no other options. Its soft innuendo echoes a sentiment devoid of the actual pangs that would come with the intention behind the song. “Robbers,” a Bonnie and Clyde-esque ode from their last album, still makes me twist my sheets, sweating out truths that only come in the night. So much of their new sound is lauded simply for being out there now. Has their absence made us deaf to the creation we have in front of us?

We don’t want pop music, but we’re okay with this because we know this.  We’ve already lived out lifetimes in the words for each verse. This is no accident. The 1975 have made sure we are cozy in our irony; forced to face the truths of our subconscious bubblegum lust.

//

My mom gave me a five
She told me to stay alive
But I didn’t stay alive

Instead, I choked on …

 //

ALBUM REVIEW: The 1975 — I Love It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It by Sarah Schumaker, edited by Douglass Dresher.


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