Some Days Are Darker eulogize gothic romance on incendiary 'TV-MA'
2024 has been a transformative year for Some Days Are Darker, marked by a steady string of singles that built upon the gothic foundations of their texturally umbral debut with a sweeping air of expanded theatricality. TV-MA represents the culmination of these efforts, a tightly focused conceptual narrative that intimately chronicles the rise and fall of romance with the unmitigated grandeur and tragic splendor of cosmic creation itself.
TV-MA tells its story across five movements, interspersed with a series of haunting interludes that channel lyrical musings from the ghostly representation of a romantic ideal, blurring the lines between reality and fiction that shimmers like a silver screen fever dream condensed to play out across the static surface of a lonely cathode ray tube. The tracks are presented as individual vignettes illustrating with vivid potency the all-consuming infatuation and incendiary passions of a new love, and the bleak fatalism and crushing despair that remains in the fallout of loss. Some Days Are Darker weaves each together into a tapestry of emotion luxurious with crystalline melodies and pummeling rhythms densely layered into a tidal wave of darkwave atmospherics, imbued with the white-hot intensity of a heart aflame and wild with the chemical thrill of unbridled amorism.
“Obsession” juxtaposes tempestuous carnality with the purity of chivalrous devotion, yearning to satiate lustful desires from the willing confinement of velvet shackles, but haunted by a shadowy spectre of lingering doubt that seeds sabotage among the blossoms of affection. Swept up in whirlwind of hard driving guitars and motorik percussion, “Downpour” drenches the landscape in torrents of gasoline, igniting a conflagration of blazing souls entwined among flames, raging toward their mutual immolation on the altar of eternity. The intensity of the rising action conveyed across this opening diptych sets the stage for a spectacular fall from grace, fingertips reaching out for a Sistine ceiling of perfect immortality only to brush ever so briefly upon the alabaster face of salvation.
Rendered in exquisite slow motion, “Dead Romance” flashes memories of intimacy like flickering celluloid replayed in the moments before death, a funeral for a friend reflected in the wavering eyes of one left standing alone at the foot of a symbolic grave, lilies drooping towards the yawning ground. Some Days Are Darker adds nuance to the eulogy with a stinging sensation of ironic inevitability that seeks to justify the dissolution with a reactionary revelation that in any circumstance a love, no matter how intense and pure, ends like all things.
In the aftermath of total collapse, Some Days Are Darker find cause to celebrate, to embrace the cold solitude with a dance into the arms of destiny itself, a destiny in which love is forever pursued, tantalizingly experienced, but never possessed for longer than the briefest of moments. “Oblivion” represents the core thesis of TV-MA, a rejoicing in the thrill of the hunt and the solidarity held between disparate souls ensnared in the rapturous gravity of cosmic attraction that erupts with the nuclear fury and divine beauty of a supernova, only to fold in upon themselves once again when the fires have been quenched. We are all stardust, and love is the eternal force that both pulls us together and drives us apart again in spectacular fashion.
Rounding out TV-MA with an epilogue of sorts, Some Days Are Darker reinterprets the casual sarcasm and frank nihilism of the iconic Placebo anti-ballad “Protect Me From What I Want” into a melancholy dirge pregnant with regret and crushed under the weight of abject loneliness. While the original track aggressively closes the distance between predator and prey, Some Days Are Darker seeks self-preservation within the insulating blackness of emotional isolation, the wounded vampyre retreating to become one with the formless ether. It’s a fitting homage to the band’s influences while also lending credence to Some Days Are Darker’s unique ability to tap directly into the core of the human psyche and imbue new levels of meaning within an existing conceptual construct amplified by their own experience and brilliant compositional skill.
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