“If You Believe in Me, I Can Do Anything”: Beware of Darkness and Pop Phenomenology

I’ve been listening to the debut album, Orthodox, from Beware of Darkness (they’re a band from L.A. that are simultaneously reminiscent of The Beatles, Jet, Oasis, White Stripes, and, at times, Coldplay). I’ve been lying in bed in the dark listening, I’ve been walking around Miraflores listening, I’ve been in the cab on the way to work listening, and I’ve been sitting at my desk at work listening. Needless to say, I’ve been listening the shit out of this album. The only other person I know who has this album is Walter, and he’s who told me about them in the first place (If you’re reading this Walter, thank you again, by the way).

So I’m here trying to get other people to listen to this album because it’s great. Listen and read…

Upon multiple listenings of new albums, my favorites will often shift; so far, though, that hasn’t happened with Orthodox. From the first time through, one song jumped out at me, and that song was “Amen Amen”; after I don’t know how many subsequent listenings, it’s still may favorite on the album. The song makes me feel that familiar pang of something I can never quite name.

God, it’s so frustrating that I can’t name the pang exactly! But I suppose I write Pop Phenomenology because there is that unnameable something. If I can describe it, or at least describe around it, then maybe it is a real, sharable thing.

Orthodox revolves heavily around the motifs of death and loss. There are songs about heartbreak, romantic or otherwise, but heartbreak isn’t all there is; regardless, I’m pretty sure suffering underlies every song on the album. “Amen Amen” is a love song; it is a celebration of how absolutely fantastic it is to  have someone you love love you back. That’s some kind of insane miracle, isn’t it? Being in love with someone and having that someone love you back is an insane, wonderful, perfect miracle. When you fall out of love, or someone falls out of love with you, you lose that miracle. That’s why we struggle so much with heartbreak, isn’t  it? I mean, losing a miracle is a big damn deal.

So while the song is about how awesome loving someone is, it’s also about the paralyzing fear of loss that accompanies the miracle. How many times have we been so afraid of losing someone we have managed to push them away completely? That’s not just something stupid I’ve done, right? Right? Anyone else? I’ll take your silence as tacit agreement that you’ve done it, too.

The thing is with the miracle is that it’s addictive. Loving another person is great. It’s so great, in fact, that we sometimes forget everything else. The storyteller of this song tells Elly, his beloved, that there isn’t much of a life without her, there’s no color in the world without her, he isn’t sure he’s really alive unless she’s there to remind him that he is, and that as long as she believes in him, he can do anything. In the grand scheme of romance, that’s some romantic shit right there. It’s a little screwed up, too. Nevertheless, it makes me sigh dreamily (Let’s not go into what that says about me, okay?)

The lyrics communicate love, fear, passion, and pleading. I think one of the things I love about this song is that in the span of 4:10, it conveys a major cross-section of the emotional ups and downs of being in love. That’s good songwriting. And while the song’s dominant impression is that the joy of having the miracle of love is inextricably tied up with the anxiety of losing that miracle, I can’t help but feel happy when I listen to this song. Happy and hopeful. I mean, we often have selective hearing when it comes to certain lyrics, right? “Every Breath You Take” by the Police is a pretty creepy song when you listen to the lyrics, but people have used that as their wedding song. So, I choose to be a little selective with how I hear and interpret this song.

I acknowledge that being so wrapped up in another person is not always the best thing. But my stupidly romantic and sentimental heart can’t help but hope that someday I will inspire in someone not a fear of losing me, but a surge of love and happiness because I believe in them.