scrotum phillips

Sing the title to yourself. M-Y-L-O..... X-Y-L-O... T-O... T-O like a grandfather clock chiming. its a word that forces its participant to sing it, engendering an experience to match the immediate intellectual ideation of the word upon hearing it. The tracks are meant to be manipulated- to be slowed down and sped up, to be layered and mixed, for at the soul of each song is the same simple melody: M-Y-L-O... X-Y-L-O...T-O. Each letter is an upwards-facing triangle followed by a downward-facing triangle- as with the end of Up With the Birds. The CD is not only about love, its about the process of thought- its an epistemological critique as much as a romantic or existential one; its about information, complexity, logic, and psyche. In this sense its the most mature and fecund thing our culture has produced in a while, mired as we seem to be in this effete, myopically critical, and utterly pretentious post-modernism.

listen to them all at once. Under one roof. Get it? merge the intros into the tracks they precede and listen to the songs in combination with one another. its a symphony. I hate being like this.

It's worth noting that I think the band's ordering of the songs makes the second half of the album feel incomplete to me. I've put MMIX and ETIAW after UWTB and put MTM after MM. It flows much better and we all know MTM feels right in there somewhere, even if it is mostly Bowie's.

MX The album is lush and brilliant but also teeming with fear, self-pity and egoistic nihilism. It expands and contracts; it is associative while also diffuse; it breathes like life. It instructs in the way of self-love by imagining a romance that whethers the implacable impression of a surveilling, domineering, and not necessarily exterior force having mastery over our actions. The beguiling violence of self-hatred is ultimately subsumed into a timid but unspeakably true expression of self- and so is the world annihilated in a self-less oblivion. The band understands the ironic prevalence of symbolism in the post-symbolic world, the effeteness of culture where truth is admitted as pretext, and the only verifiable foundations of reality: impermanence and structure. This is the world we have made for ourselves, the band says. These walls are our walls; these hatreds are our hatreds; and these flaws are our flaws. In everything small is the imprint of everything big, and everything big is likewise the product of everything small- in time as well as space. Why this is the case must owe itself to the qualities of circulars and the nature of Euclidean triangulation, but that's not worth getting into. And anyways, there is an extent to which 'why' is a compensation for defeat of ego. Listen to the way they highlight 'para-' in paradise: a nonexistent, illusory figment of want more than a real destination. Notice the incongruous isolation of the character in ETIAW; the feelings of both internal and external paranoia in Major Minus, manifest in the in-collapsibility of polar opposites; the quiet violence of Up in Flames; the sonic backdrop of DLBYH; and, the incontestable satisfaction of expectation in Up With the Birds. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38srxvt6qE&feature=youtube_gdata_player]Lucy Analyzes Charlie Brown - YouTube[/ame] Reactions need to stop reaching for the one-to-one allegory and get comfortable with the metaphorical metaphor. The cd is about Analytical reductionism set against the post-modern basics: oppressive and depressive symbolism; circles; resisting the vacuity of classicism and pure logic; and the deconstruction of masculinity from an inductive and material actor to a passive participant in what French Historians have termed the double helix of sexuality. Is this all absolutely evidenced within the record? No. And neither is there anything explicit to indicate that the record is anything other than intrinsic genius disassociated from external artistic stimulate. But we know from experience that the world is not like this. We know that our selves and self-images are less dependent upon our own efforts at protecting them and more visibly precarious than the tomnage of civilization has hitherto indicated. We know that our actions might reveal some superficial effort, but that they may also be hindered- in the ever-larger picture- by some self-imposed limitation. Regarding the video, we do not know that Lucy ever intended to take the ball away. Charlie's emotional failure is his emotional clairvoyance: he plants the seeds of his own mistakes because he knows on a deeper level that everything has already been experienced as pain. In reality it's people like Charlie who grow up to be geniuses. They seem to have their fingers fixed on the tremulous pulse of civilization however layered a structure it becomes. When I imagine these songs I see different analytical viewpoints wedded by tenuous homages to the widened gyre. I see male and female, and not the fetid stereotypes with which we are often bombarded but the true definitions: feminity as something insuperably, spectacularly cosmic but also inherently conflicted about spacial inequities; masculinity as something ineluctably driven towards its goal- though it no doubt loses some of its variety in the process. And this too: that femininity and masculinity are together constitutive of process- duality, polarity, a fomenting, aggressive rubric for knowlEdge and experience not a little like distortive oculars amidst an inconstant and over-used linearity. The record is brighter and more fervid than those of the past, but it is also ironically smaller. The word schitzhremic has been used, and it is not Inapposite. I would hazard another descriptive label, at the risk of producing the kind of induction I and Coldplay together abhor: the album is epistolary. It does not concern Viva's turbid existentialism or XY's luminiferous metaphysic. rather, this album is illimitably more mature. Each song is in itself another attempt at some demonstration, as was the whole of their previous effort, and in each song is the imprint of something grand and at once grievously inaccessible. Listen to the songs, the choruses, the suffixed beginnings that serve to introduce you to the momentary perceptions of dissonance and congruity within the pattern. You are looking through a world distorted by halves in Charlie Brown, but you are also looking AT something- and because the domain of science is not so far removed as we pretentiously suggest, we might say that the band is noting how you can find position but not movement, and movement but not position. This is the central affair of history, no? This is man and woman: man the teleological strain of purpose through time; woman the tonnage of all incollapsible space within the present. Look at the types of songs that characterize the actors in this play. Look at how similar are major minus and CB and how paradise seems to fill a box like voluminous, gaseous want. Notice how the album seems to carry familiar notes and sequences, each requiring the mind to fill the utter void where it expected a note it did not receive. These songs' meanings are not in the lyrics alone: the notes impress in the mind freudian symbols of want, images of protrusions and lacunae. Notice how the last note on the album is the one for which the band has made us passively yearn throughout. this is sophisticated beyond sophisticated. Whatever your particular feelings about the album, you must understand as I do that it is as important a work as any that have been made. If we could look thirty years in the future we would see that Mylo Xyloto is appreciated like Sgt. Pepper and Kid A and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Dark Side of the Moon. It is sexual and unsettling when viewed in the right way. You may be scoffing, but it's statistically certain that I'm smarter than you and anyways I could give a shit. Categories are temporary. I apologize for that last part, but I feel strongly about the band and I feel I'm right in my assessments (the band needn't be aware of their efforts to render them). I suppose that statement was more preemptive defense mechanism than desire to harm you, reader. But what isn't? I have never wished you harm, on the Internet where I can get away with it or otherwise. Your pain at my insult is my pain as well; the world is felt everywhere and at once through mimicry.

I think you're spot on, but I’d go further. Coldplay has always attempted to bring something unique to their music that is afforded them by the combination of Chris's searingly personal vocals and the band's supremely cavernous sound. Most Coldplay songs aspire to impel the listener into the starry vault while simultaneously picking the lock of his soul. For Martin especially the disparity between the large and the small has always been of fundamental importance, and much of the band's music seems determined to collapse this distinction which must seem, to its members, as an arbitrary and illusory invention of perception. Therefore, it is useful to think of ETIAW not as inspirational but rather as an immensely personal struggle- made moreso by the juxtaposition of this insularity against a vibrant soundscape. The implicit thematic conclusion of the song is that revolutions happen within as well as without, and very often the revolutions going on around us are only mirror images of the revolutions going on inside, the sirens and the flashes of reality mimicking some extant doubt about the makeup of one’s own conscious. This is evident, too, in Major Minus and Moving to Mars. Major Minus is as much about the pair of eyes that watch you from without- government, corporations or whatever other large and impersonal forces one can conjure- as it is about the pair of eyes that watch you from within, convincing fear to wrest you from your precarious calm and upset a balance which you had a sneaking suspicion was untenable in the first place. The pervasiveness of the ideal of distinctions is manifest in the main character, who even in defending himself against metaphysical threats must still guard himself against the internal and existential doubts which plague and pervert his thoughts. Finally, Moving to Mars speaks of a world so immeasurably far in the future, not in terms of years but in terms of progress, that one can scarcely understand it. What thread of human nature will survive then, asks Martin implicitly? What of our humanity will endure the precipitous fall into the void? We imagine a lonely freedom-fighter sitting up at night listening to the radio, hoping in vain for some figment of hope to reveal itself and subsisting, in its absence, on the dregs of a progressive ideal heralded by some men in some country who already possess the liberty he desires. He is impressed by the closeness of the future, but at the same time discouraged by its distance. And this is his world- at all times governed by some inner incommensurability for which he must scream and rebel (or wash his hands over and over if anyone gets the point). Because, and this is a key element in Coldplay’s psyche, rebellion for freedom is laudatory, but in the end it is not a universal expression of that freedom but rather a personal expression of our yearning for it. Truly, freedom is wholeness, some undivided sum in which the individual and the world in which he resides are united into a commensurate transcendence. But freedom is therefore necessarily illusory. It is a logical, platonic necessity but an existential non-reality- not unlike God, as we discovered in Cemeteries of London. Thus while we must praise freedom fighters, we must also understand that their rebellion is internal as well as external. It takes place in the domain of the real as well as the domain of the self, and in this sense it is a perfect metaphor for the difficulties of living with a mind which, like Martin’s, is zealously self-critical. Also, a note about Major Minus: look at the name. Its an oxymoron, a manifestation of polar opposites working within a whole. And, if we are to assume that it is villainous, then we should also assume that the band called the antagonist Major Minus because it chose to comment on the damning feature of social progress, a theory whose hyper-idealized variants included the fascistic and communist regimes against which our protagonists are ostensibly rebelling. This flaw is that it attempts to add to humanity by subtracting from it that which is human in the first place. Its supporters are not aware of this subtraction for, if they were, their own esteemed dialectical logic would account for it. Rather, Major Minus perverts and distorts humanity by falling prey to that most ironically pivotal human tendency to think of things in terms of categories instead of particulars. The ultimate truth is that Major Minus is not different from the protagonist- they both struggle with defining the world against two insufferably incollapsible polarities- large and small, this and that, me and the other. Where they do differ is the protagonist is unflinchingly honest with himself about this struggle while Major Minus remains ignorant and effete.