[ad_1]
Gothic, haunting, disorienting and featuring the sort of sound that makes it feel like it could be right at home on David Bowie’s Blackstar, Charli XCX’s first post-Brat offering is as divergent from that album as she said it would be. Indeed, no one can say that Charli didn’t already warn, “I think whatever I do next will just inherently be different to Brat because that’s what feels natural.” Though, to some, the “vibe” of “House” will feel markedly unnatural. Not to mention unsettling, unnerving and generally unlike anything she’s ever released before. In other words, if Brat was “embracing the public” (intentionally or not), “House” (and presumably many of the other songs that will join it for the Wuthering Heights Soundtrack) is willfully trying to send it screaming into the woods—just to see who might actually stick around to prove they’re still worthy.
The song begins with John Cale’s ominous talking vocals, “Can I speak to you privately for a moment? I just want to explain. Explain the circumstances I find myself in. What and who I really am. I’m a prisoner. To live for eternity. I was thinking, ‘What is this place?’ I thought it would be perfect. I thought, ‘I want it to be perfect.’ Please. Let it be perfect. Am I living in another world? Another world I created. For what? If it’s beauty. Do you see beauty? If there’s beauty. Say it’s enough.”
As Cale is delivering these lines with his eerie timbre, the string-oriented music (courtesy of longtime XCX collaborator and producer Finn Keane) begins to crest, bursting forth around the one-minute-fifty-three-second mark. And it’s at this moment when Charli’s vocals finally chime in to repeat the chorus like a hex (or “a plague upon just this house”), declaring, “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” Said in a manner that suggests this is no longer the “brat” persona that’s experiencing the high of her coke binge, but rather, the severe comedown in the early morning hours.
In the equally as brutal and arresting video, Mitch Ryan (who worked recently with XCX on the video for “party 4 u,” not to mention his visuals for XCX’s mentee, Addison Rae, including “High Fashion” and “Headphones On”) mirrors the macabre, existential tone with the help of Ben Carey’s cinematography, awash in dark tones that rarely stray from a palette of black, gray or dark blue. And, of course, what would a brooding track be without the presence of a crow? A bird that naturally appears inside this house of horrors. The main horror being one’s own mind. That is to say, to be “locked inside” the mind (a.k.a. solipsism). Trapped in perennial isolation, it’s no wonder that Cale breaks up the monotony of the song with his final deviating aphorism, “In every room, I hear silence.”
Just as Charli seems to. Either lying on the floor, putting her hand in the flame of her candle or pouring wax from that candle onto her legs (and no, this isn’t “Body of Evidence sexy”). All activities that suit the moodiness of the story that “House” is meant to soundtrack: Wuthering Heights. What’s more, the sentiment of “I think I’m gonna die in this house” can apply to Catherine, Heathcliff and, later, Cathy (Catherine’s daughter). Though trying to apply XCX’s music for Emerald Fennell’s film to the original Emily Brontë novel would be a mistake. For it’s apparent that Fennell is doing her own take on the material (hence, putting the title in quotation marks on the poster—which is something that Guillermo Del Toro also should have done for Frankenstein). And, in turn, XCX participated in the early “world building” of this particular cinematic universe, stating of how she came to be working on an entire “soundtrack album” for the movie (sort of like Madonna with I’m Breathless), “I got a call from Emerald Fennell last Christmas asking whether I would consider working on a song for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I read the script and immediately felt inspired so Finn Keane and I began working on not just one but many songs that we felt connected to the world she was creating.”
From there, her inspiration for the sound expanded into some decided The Velvet Underground territory, with XCX also explaining, “A few years ago I watched Todd Haynes’ documentary about The Velvet Underground… One thing that stuck with me was how John Cale described a key sonic requirement of [the band]. That any song had to be both ‘elegant and brutal.’ I got really stuck on that phrase. I wrote it down in my notes app and would pull it up from time to time and think about what he meant.” And what it means has been both keenly and poignantly achieved here (complete with getting none other than Cale himself to collaborate). For the song sounds like the lovechild of The Velvet Underground, Massive Attack, David Bowie’s Blackstar (as mentioned) and something out of an A24 folk horror movie.
XCX also shared, “When I think of Wuthering Heights I think of many things. I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the moors, I think of the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit.” The “House” video encapsulates all of these things, radiating—both sonically and visually—the kind of post-punk/gothic rock severity that originated in the UK.
Croaking out her final utterance of “I think I’m gonna die in this house,” Charli makes it sound as though she really did. Though the concluding scene of her running through the darkened woods (the same scene shown at the beginning) indicates she got a second wind, so to speak. Still finding it somewhere within herself to frolic about even though she’s definitely seen and heard it all before by now. Granted, certainly not more than John Cale, who is fifty years Charli’s senior. And yet, despite being the older one between them, Cale is the one to stand over Charli during a certain scene as though he is the reaper, waiting to take this strung-out, depressed dolly away from the harsh realm of the living. And yes, in this regard, one might say he is the Heathcliff to her Catherine.
[ad_2]
Genna Rivieccio
Source link