Adherent of the repeated meme

Seen around:

Pick any passage of 1,000 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

You can also request a vid. If it's a long one, I reserve the right to only do the most interesting part. ;)

inchlines on door frames and thumbprints on windowpanes

Yay! I have managed to legally acquire a copy of Karine Polwart's new album! Some thoughts on it:

- She needs to retain whoever played the vibraphone (or whatever bell-like instrument appears on most songs), because it adds a lot. It's a perfect accompaniment to her voice.

- "Tinsel Show" is probably my favorite. Polwart always does such a fantastic job of writing these lovely songs about inanimate objects, making things like (in this one) a petrochemical plant belching fire and smoke strangely beautiful. Plus there's bonus political commentary here and there. The best part, IMO, is the second chorus(? the "minarets of industry, spinnerets of alchemy" section), which introduces a kind of clanky mechanical percussion reminiscent of (presumably) said petrochemical plant in operation. It gives me chills when I get to that part of the song.

- "Half a Mile" might just be the creepiest song I've ever heard.

- I love what she did to "Salter's Road," a couple different live versions of which have been floating around YouTube for a while. The lushness of the ending makes a song I was kind of meh about into one I really like.

- This is the third version of "We're All Leaving" I've bought over the years (it's been on several CDs she's released), and...I don't know if it's my favorite, because I love the other two for various reasons, but I really like the flute line in the last third of this one.

- "King of Birds" is still so pretty.

- I was poking through the reviews she's put up on her website, and...huh, I had been totally mishearing the chorus of "Cover Your Eyes" for some months now. Apparently the haar, or fog, "will stumble in / to cover your eyes," rather than the heart. Wow, now it's an entirely different song!

- The subject matter of "Sticks and Stones" has admittedly been done before, and I'm not in love with the tune, but I really like the chorus, especially the way Polwart's singing of "our dreams in the rafters and / our hopes in the plasterboard" contrasts with the backing vocalists' line that the house is "just sticks and stones."

- Oddly, the same contradictory style to the lyrics turns me off of "Tears for Lot's Wife." Something about the secondary line is just...I don't know. It annoys me.

- Aside from that, the one criticism I would level at the album as a whole is that it may be just a tiiiiny bit overproduced. And I say this as someone who usually loves so-called "overproduced" music, because hell, I think the first CD I bought with my own money was by Enya, and God knows her stuff couldn't exist without technological trickery of the highest order. But the songs here go to the well of "repeat the last two lines over and over against a noisy background until your listener has to skip to the next track or DIE OF BOREDOM" a few too many times. It totally works on "Salter's Road" and "Sticks and Stones," but less so on "Half a Mile" (it could be cut in, well, half) and not at all on "Strange News" and "Lot's Wife." (Although I might like them better if they were the only two to use that technique, and not two of six, you know? It got a little expected after a while.) In general, I very much like the richness of the new direction this album went in, but retaining a bit more of the spareness of her earlier wouldn't have gone amiss.