#27: JANE WEAVER
“Stages Of Phases”
from the album Flock
Released: March 2021
Of course I imagined this came out a year before it did. Nobody apart from know-it-all bores can really pinpoint what music happened in 2020 or in 2021. It’s all melted into this bright blue nylon screen of a pudding. 2019 and early 2020 seem like a millennium ago and also about five minutes past. That era when the world was – not perfect, but “normal,” and normal human beings could still go about their unglamorous but vital normal lives doing their normal things.
Then we couldn’t. A world ended and nobody has yet worked out the paradigm of a new one. Hence we stumble in quarter-blindness, not really understanding that most of the things we thought we loved about the world were no longer there, had been eliminated or at minimum banished. We grasp at twigs of seeming benevolence, hopeful remnants of what we previously identified as “the world.”
So this record appeared in the early spring of 2021 although it is indented in my mind that it was released one year earlier, just before the world was imprisoned. The song is high in this list because I listened to it a lot, for the reason that I found it attractive, catchy and reassuring. It possesses elements of things the world has lost, including the Glitter beat – well, that was his fault anyway, but we cannot keep denying its immense influence – humanist leagues of dreaming clouds of pink resolution and slyly stalwart usage of Picardy thirds. I don’t really know what the words are about except this is a way to get somebody back, to retrieve them, perhaps from Dantean hell. The “long way round” twirls like sixties girl pop toffee and would confuse people today. Bugger people today and leave lyrical interpretation to Ph.D. theses. The song still clings to the glove of hope.
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