Some Days Are Darker fall beyond love's precipitous apex on shadowy "Dead Romance"
Some Days Are Darker fall beyond love's precipitous apex on shadowy "Dead Romance"
Summiting the lofty peak of love often seems like a Sisyphean effort, a interminable exertion of laborious intent to form a romantic connection repeatedly slipping from one’s grasp to tumble, cascading with avalanche force back to the base. The human condition yearns for companionship, and in the face of such cyclical defeat we unceasingly rise again and again to the challenge in the hope that the next advance will be the one that finally proves fruitful. But what lies beyond love's precipitous apex? It is here that a path diverges. One route extends upwards in a glitteringly limitless stairway to heaven promising perpetual and exponential bliss ensconced in the adorations of a perfect love, while the other is a frigid plunge into a bottomless abyss of solitude and desperation.
Some Days Are Darker has built a catalog chronicling this ceaseless pursuit in its many shades, from the virtuous to the carnal and the countless permutations that exist between, with a gaze resolutely fixed on achieving the endgame of a more perfect union. On their latest single, the band explores the uncharted territory that comes in the wake of an uncoupling, diving headlong into the black for an emotionally charged journey deep into the recesses of a “Dead Romance.”
Gothic, post-punk tapestries of sound drape the composition in a sensual blackness at once both alluring and foreboding in their textural substantiality, framing the driving, rhythmic structure within dramatic aplomb. Swelling synths set the entire scene in billowing slow motion, haunted by crooning vocals that radiate and flicker like the glow of so many receding taper candles summoning spectral shadows to dance across the cold marble of the mausoleum floor.
“Was it easy to leave me after all I’ve done?” asks the romantically wounded, a barb delivered with a beguiling tenderness that still cracks whiplike amid the gloom to take possession of transgressions while pushing away one’s lover. Spoken in hushed tones across the bridge’s cavernous span the monologue continues. “I’m not the man you thought I was” rises from the aether with vampiric fatalism, evoking the shade of romantic antihero Peter Steele at some of his most self-depreciating. In a final act of performative chivalry, the fallen boldly steps in front of their own bullet to preserve the virtue of their former lover, a voluntary sacrifice in a doomed romance sabotaged by the one who perhaps needs companionship the most but is unable, or unwilling, to submit completely to love’s velvet shackles.
Despite the lamentations of a heart relentlessly shattered, “Dead Romance” is permeated with a very real sense of liberation, drawing a sort of morbid strength from the depths of agony that recognizes the inevitability of a love’s demise. “Another time, another place we’d still make the same mistakes” rings with irony, a gothic “que sera, sera” that draws power from solitude and takes one final glace over the shoulder before pressing once more against the weight of loneliness to resume the upward endeavor to bask in the rapture of a love not yet attained.
Stream “Dead Romance” on Spotify and follow Some Days Are Darker on Instagram.
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